Author: Jennifer Graham

Counting Miracles, by Nicholas Sparks (Random House, 368 pages)

I love a good Nicholas Sparks book, so much so that I’m on my library’s automatic waitlist for his new releases. I’ve read them all, and usually I know what I’m going to get: romance, a healthy dose of drama, and possibly a few tears. There is always love, and there is sometimes loss.

Sparks’ latest, Counting Miracles, explores love and loss to the extreme. There are two storylines, very loosely woven together at first and uniting in the end, as such stories do. They’re told in chapters that alternate from the points of view of Tanner, Kaitlyn and Jasper. Tanner and Kaitlyn’s storyline is one — that’s the romance — and Jasper’s is a story all his own.

The book starts with Tanner, a middle-aged veteran, stepping up to help a teenage girl, Casey, who appears to be in trouble with a boy. Moments later Tanner helps her again after she crashes into his car. He kindly drives her home, and his good deeds are rewarded as he meets Casey’s single mom, Kaitlyn, and instantly falls in strong like.

Tanner’s purpose for being in town is to potentially find his birth father after getting a cryptic clue from his grandmother when she was on her deathbed. He still works on that goal, though it’s somewhat put on the back burner for a while as he obsesses over Kaitlyn.

Then there’s Jasper, an older man with a host of health problems and a long history of tragedy. He’s connected to Kaitlyn because he is teaching woodcarving to her son Mitch. When he’s not doing that, he’s living alone in a cabin with his dog Arlo and no family or friends to speak of. When the town is abuzz with news that a rare white deer has been seen in the forest, Jasper makes it his new mission to save that deer from poachers.

The premise of Counting Miracles is finding hope in times of despair, of moving forward when there doesn’t seem to be anything to move toward. It’s uplifting in theory, but Counting Miracles is so heavy on despair that it was hard to push through to get to the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. Yes, Sparks can obviously tell a good story if he’s making me feel all the feels, but I found myself skimming the darker chapters because they were uncomfortably depressing.

Plus, the darker chapters were the Jasper chapters, and I wasn’t all that interested in reading about his deer-saving adventures, especially since sitting in the woods for long periods of time led to a lot of reflection on the aforementioned tragic past.

Perhaps most off-putting for me in Jasper’s story is the heavy Bible influence. At one point Jasper recalls a tornado that took out his pear tree farm — his source of livelihood. In the present, he recalls staring at the toppled trees and thinking of the ninth verse in the fourth chapter of Job: “By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of His anger they come to an end.” But then he reminds himself that “the Lord works in mysterious ways and thought about 1 Corinthians 10:13, which promised that ‘God is faithful, and He will not let you be tested beyond your strength.’” He was losing sleep at that time due to financial worries and considered declaring bankruptcy but instead thought about Psalm 37:21, which says “the wicked borrows and does not pay back.”

All three of the above-quoted Bible passages occur in the space of one page. That’s a lot, and it continues throughout his story as he recalls experiencing, and seemingly continues to experience, the worst life has to offer.

Kaitlyn and Tanner, meanwhile, are going through the typical highs and lows of a potential new relationship. Tanner has never settled down and has plans to leave the country again soon; Kaitlyn knows that and tries not to get attached, and he does the same, but of course they just can’t ignore their infatuation.

You kind of have to suspend reality to fall for a Sparks love story, because his romances often happen quickly. Kaitlyn and Tanner can’t wait to spend time together; their first date is a day at the zoo that Kaitlyn had planned with Mitch, and she asks him to join them. As a single mom myself, I was a little surprised by this, and then annoyed because they didn’t pay much attention to Mitch and instead had deep conversations while following him around. But all Tanner has to do is throw the kid a frisbee later in the date and Mitch is as smitten as his mom.

Casey, on the other hand, is a great foil to their relationship. She’s very 16 and has the attitude to prove it, but ultimately she’s a good kid who wants her mom to be happy — even if she doesn’t always show it.

I was rooting for Kaitlyn and Tanner throughout their ups and downs because they’re likable characters. I wish we heard a little more of Kaitlyn’s backstory and a little less of Tanner’s, because he did a lot of the talking in their conversations, and I felt like I never fully got to know her.

And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I was always disappointed to leave Kaitlyn and Tanner behind at the end of a chapter to re-join Jasper. I wanted more of their story and less of his. But I know that’s a personal thing; I prefer light and romantic over sad and tragic. And I think a lot of people will enjoy the duality of this novel and how it comes together in the end. It wasn’t my favorite Sparks novel, but definitely worth the read. B —Meghan Siegler , and wilder than I had a right to ask for.” A

—Jennifer Graham

Playground, by Richard Powers (381 pages, W. W. Norton & Co.)

Richard Powers is one of America’s most distinguished novelists, and also one of the most daunting. His 2018 novel The Overstory won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, despite a complicated narrative entwining nine characters. By comparison, his latest, Playground, gives us just four. It still gives the reader a mental workout.

While The Overstory was about trees, Playground is about the ocean and, surprisingly, AI. Its multiple narratives are linked through four lives intricately knit together.

Evie Beaulieu has been obsessed with water since, when she was 12, her father tossed her in a pool of water to test a device that allows people to breathe underwater. She emerged “another kind of creature,” becoming an expert diver with experience far beyond her years, a woman who would rather be on water than on land. She goes on to write a book called “Clearly It Is Ocean” — the title taken from the real-life quote of the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who said, “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly ocean.”

That book was read in childhood by a boy named Todd Keane, who was born the first child of the new year and carried with him for the rest of his life the pressure to always be first at everything. The marriage of Todd’s parents was a train wreck — “My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden.”

The manic father, who always needed to be doing something resembling work, drilled his son in games, from Chutes and Ladders to backgammon to chess, even though, like Evie, Todd had a deep connection to water, because Lake Michigan was the place he escaped to in his mind when the household got too chaotic: “When my mind raced and the future rushed at me with knives, the only thing that helped was looking out from the castle and seeing myself walking across the bottom of the lake.”

It is an obsession with games that later connects Todd to the brilliant Rafi Young, a bibliomaniac who has been reading light-years beyond his peers since preschool because of an abusive father who was determined that his children have a better education than he did. Todd and Rafi meet in school and bond by playing chess and Go throughout high school and college, becoming so close that it seems that “our brains are synchronized.” But later they suffer a rift that takes them on vastly different paths.

Todd invents a world-changing online platform called Playground and becomes a billionaire diagnosed with Lewy body dementia at age 57. Meanwhile, Rafi goes on to work for an NGO and to marry Ina Aroita, a native of Hawaii whose life comprises the fourth narrative in this story.

Rafi and Ina make their home on Makatea, an island in French Polynesia. For decades the island had been plundered for its copious phosphate, which helped supply the world with fertilizer and thus food. Once the phosphate mines closed, Makatea’s role in the world shrunk and it was just occasionally visited by wealthy tourists looking for a couple of days of climbing adventure.

But it was now faced with a seemingly existential decision: whether to allow an American company to use it as a port for “seasteading” — the launch of modular floating cities. Aided by artificial intelligence called Profunda, the residents of Makatea are preparing to take a vote on whether to allow this venture to begin.

All of this is just the set-up to the deeper complexity of the novel, which wants us to to think deeply about the unintended consequences of the development of AI and human dominance of the planet as we wade through the events of each character’s life, laid out in constantly changing points of view.

It also wants us to love the ocean like Evie does. It succeeds, with sparkling prose and the insistence that the reader become attached to the characters, who make the case for the ocean through their observations, experiences and passion.

In the opening pages of the book, for example, Ina and her daughter, while beachcombing, come across the carcass of a young albatross whose chest cavity was stuffed with small pieces of plastic: “bottle caps, a squirt top, the bottom of a black film canister at least fifteen years old, a disposable cigarette lighter, a few meters of tangled-up monofilament line and a button in the shape of a daisy.”

Toward the end of the book Powers gets in a dig at everyone who has ever dismissed his writing as too cerebral or complex, writing of Evie’s editor, “The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.”

Despite that, Powers effectively applies a technique that is coming dangerously close to overuse in more populist fare: the plot twist, the sort that makes you want to read the book again, despite its heft.

Powers may limit his audience, and thus his influence, by refusing to write for the masses, but for those willing to rise to the challenge Playground is a wholly immersive experience. It offers a refuge from reality much like the ocean offers.

As Todd reflects, when one’s attention is fixed on a hidden world throbbing with primordial life, “Chicago was nothing. Illinois and even the U.S. were a joke. There were insanely different ways of being alive, behaviors from another galaxy dreamed up by an alien God. The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for.” A

Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell (Little, Brown and Co., 368 pages)

Malcolm Gladwell had never written a book when he began, with a mix of “self-doubt and euphoria,” the manuscript that would become The Tipping Point, published in 2000. That book explored the ways in which an idea or a product will languish, until suddenly it doesn’t — ultimately becoming a “social contagion” that spreads rapidly, like contagions of disease.

The Tipping Point itself was something like that. At Gladwell’s first book event, two people showed up, a stranger and the mother of a friend. But after a while, the book “tipped” and went on to spend years on the New York Times bestseller list. At one point Bill Clinton called it “that book everyone has been talking about.”

Six other books and a podcast later, Gladwell is back to revisit the tipping point from a darker place. While The Tipping Point talks about how we can leverage the principles of social contagions to achieve a social good, Revenge of the Tipping Point posits that in this pursuit, there can be unintended negative consequences. We can tip over into something worse. Gladwell’s latest book is a cautionary tale that will appeal mainly to fans of The Tipping Point. As an author,he is something of an acquired taste. People seem to either love him or to doze off before the end of the last chapter. Let’s just say his books require an attention span.

Gladwell began his career as a journalist: first for The Washington Post, then The New Yorker. He still writes as a journalist, weaving together his own interviews and news accounts to tell stories in his own conversational voice and then to link seemingly unrelated events in the service of his own ideas. Along the way, he offers “rules” he invents to describe his views of how the world works.

Revenge of the Tipping Point follows that formula, from the quirky Gladwellian rules to the whiplash-inducing pivots between seemingly unrelated stories.

Take, for example, Gladwell’s treatment of “Poplar Grove,” a pseudonym for an affluent, homogeneous community that experienced a cluster of teen suicides (a focus of the 2024 book Life Under Pressure by Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn). Gladwell took his own tour of the town, finding a real estate agent who took him around and explained the dynamics of the family-oriented community. Then he linked the town’s tragedies to … a fertility crisis among cheetahs.

In this bewildering journey, readers are suddenly thrust from the leafy suburbs of domesticity to a veterinary clinic where scientists are grafting skin samples from domestic cats onto captive cheetahs, trying to figure out why breeding programs fail so spectacularly.

And then, before we even have time to get attached to our new cheetah friends, boom — we’re back in Poplar Grove.

And so it goes, while Gladwell gradually reveals the point he is trying to make, which is that in a monoculture — “a world of uniformity” — there are “no internal defenses against an outside threat.” In the case of both a “perfect” homogeneous community and cheetahs with little genetic diversity, “The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture,” Gladwell writes.

Gladwell then takes us to a community in Palo Alto, where a planned development on what was called the Lawrence Tract was supposed to solve the problem of “white flight” from American cities.

That community was developed with the stipulation that one-third of the homes be owned by whites, one-third by Blacks and one-third by Asians, in order to prevent “tipping” in the neighborhood — one ethnic group taking over the neighborhood. The word “tipping” had begun to be used in this way as neighborhoods changed by ethnicity.

“For a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, if you used the phrase, people knew exactly what you meant,” Gladwell writes. Real estate agents would talk about “tipping a building” or “tipping a neighborhood.” They were demonstrating, as Gladwell maintains, that “tipping points can be deliberately engineered” — especially once you venture beyond “the magic third.” (Which is another Gladwellian rule.)

“People, it is clear, behave very differently in a group above some mysterious point of critical mass than they do in a group just a little below that point,” he writes. And people who know this sometimes act to manipulate the tipping in ways that aren’t in a community’s — or a country’s — best interests.

For the New England reader, there is plenty of regional interest in this book. For instance, in Gladwell’s discussion of what is known as “small-area variation” — bewildering differences in outcomes among otherwise similar areas — he examines research that took place in Middlebury, Vermont, and Randoph, New Hampshire.

Despite both towns having almost identical sociological profiles when it came to insurance, income and levels of chronic illness, there were notable differences in hospitalizations, surgery and Medicare spending, with much higher numbers in Randolph. Similarly, when looking at two Vermont towns — Waterbury and Stowe — the same pattern emerged. “The people were the same — except, that is, that the children of Waterbury tended to keep their tonsils and the children of Stowe did not.”

Gladwell also ventures into Massachusetts with his examination of why Harvard University has a rugby team — when hardly anyone goes to see the games, and the players have to be recruited outside of the U.S. — and, later, the infamous Biogen conference in Boston in February 2020 that turned into a superspreading Covid-19 event.

It is the opioid crisis, however, that Gladwell begins and ends with. He uses the saga of OxyContin and the Sackler family to argue that epidemics, both medical and social, have rules and boundaries but it is human beings who create the stories around them and it is human beings who are ultimately responsible for where epidemics go. “It’s time for a hard conversation about epidemics…. We need to be honest about all the subtle and sometimes hidden ways we try to manipulate them,” he writes.

Gladwell has said that for the 25th anniversary of The Tipping Point, he’d intended to simply update or “refresh” the original book, but decided to do the harder work of taking it into another place. That paid off for the established Gladwell fan, but it’s unclear whether he will win new ones with this complex and meandering collection of stories. B

Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam (Riverhead, 288 pages)

One of the more peculiar aspects of our society is that some of us have so much money that it’s actually a challenge to get rid of it, and some of us have so little that we work multiple jobs just to keep the lights on. In a just world, the former problem would cancel out the latter, but it’s not.

Rumaan Alam tackles this paradox in Entitlement, his fourth novel, which explores the prickly issues of both money and race. It is a compelling storyline: A young Black woman is hired to work for an aging white billionaire who has established a foundation to distribute his money to worthy causes.

The fictional Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation has shades of the real-life “Giving Pledge” that many billionaires have signed. Asher Jaffee made his money with a company that delivered office supplies (“Jaffee … in a Jiffy!” was its brilliant motto). Now 83, he still has the kind of energy in which he bounds, rather than walks, and has no interest in retiring. In fact, he is more comfortable in an office than at home. “The office was the place where things happened, the place where he was necessary, the site of his every victory.”

At the foundation, Asher has a small and fiercely devoted staff that tends to his four-day work week, which is filled with people wanting to talk to him about his money.

Brooke Orr, 33, enters this world after nine years of unsatisfying work as a teacher. She is the adopted daughter of a single mom, an attorney who works in the vaguely defined field of reproductive health and who chose to raise her children with the help of three close female friends, rather than within the confines of marriage. Brooke’s own circle includes the daughter of one of her mother’s friends, Kim, and a gay man, Matthew, that they befriended while all were matriculating at Vassar College. (“As Brooke saw it, she and Kim were continuing what their mothers had started: a most modern little family.”)

When she joins the Jaffee Foundation, Brooke is doing well enough but is also in the vaguely annoying position of watching those around her seem to do even better. Her brother is engaged to be married, and though she loves him and doesn’t herself want to get married, her interactions with the couple give way to sardonic inner dialogue on “the smugness of young people who believe they have invented love.” Meanwhile, her friend Kim has recently come into an enormous inheritance, sum unknown, that has allowed her to pay cash for an apartment worth $2 million.

While Brooke loves her friend and is genuinely glad for her good fortune, the imbalance still puts a quiet strain on their relationship. After seeing the new place for the first time, “She saw Kim’s succession of Sundays in this two-bedroom apartment. She saw coffee-stained cups upside down in the dishwasher, saw flowers bought on impulse slouching on a table, saw an orange peel, dried into brittle shells, left to molder on the marble countertop. The cleaning lady would see to that. She saw comfort and solitude and joy and it looked absolutely thrilling to her. Kim was dear, Kim was good, but Kim had done nothing to deserve any of this earthly comfort. And wasn’t the universe meant to work that way, wasn’t it governed by justice?”

But Brooke is enjoying her own good fortune, in that Asher Jaffee has been impressed by their limited interactions and wants her to have more responsibility. She’s smart, and he sees this, but it’s also possible that he’s wanting to have a fatherly influence on Brooke — with her father out of the picture all of her life, and his own daughter having died in the 9/11 attacks at age 38.

Jaffee is generous with his money, his time and his advice, telling her, “Demand something from the world. Demand the best. Demand it.”

Brooke internalizes the advice and begins to change subtly as she grows into the position and assumes more responsibility. But she also uses Jaffee’s advice as justification for bad choices as she becomes more comfortable in the moneyed world and wants her share.

Alam’s previous novels include 2020’s acclaimed Leave the World Behind (which I loved and awarded a rare A+). That book also explored contemporary themes, including race. Entitlement strives, but never achieves the tension that ripples through Leave the World Behind, making it both a smart cultural critique and an old-fashioned page-turner. Nor does Entitlement convince the reader to care all that much about either Brooke or Asher and what happens to them. Brooke has a narrative arc, to be sure, but at no point in it does she want anyone to love her.

Alam’s voice is fresh and unique, and his cultural observations spot-on. While Entitlement will likely win many accolades and maybe make a short-list or two for a prestigious award, it is, like Brooke’s pre-Asher life, ultimately unsatisfying, even for a cautionary tale. B-

William, by Mason Coile (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 224 pages)

Earlier this year, Ray Kurzwell gave us a cheery picture of the coming world under artificial intelligence in The Singularity is Nearer. A bone-chilling alternate view is offered in Mason Coile’s novel William, a stand-out in the nascent genre of “AI horror.”

You probably won’t want to read it right before you go to bed, but it is a perfect autumn read as the story transpires on a single day: Halloween.

The titular “William” is a half-finished robot that is the project of Henry, a brilliant agoraphobic engineer who can’t leave his home without dissolving into panic — fans of the Breaking Bad universe might think of Chuck McGill in Better Call Saul, just with a different illness and profession.

Henry has built several robotic creatures, including a dog and a creepy little magician riding a small bicycle. But William is to be his ultimate creation — the robot appears to have developed consciousness — and Henry’s preoccupation with the project seems to stem not so much from personal ambition but from distracting himself from his crumbling marriage to Lily, a wealthy computer engineer.

“Things are bad between them, but not too bad,” Henry keeps reassuring himself, even though “he worries that his assessment of the bridgeable distance between himself and his wife is an error of judgment — the same made by millions of husbands right before the end.”

Things have regressed to the point where he is sleeping in the spare room of the couple’s old but cutting-edge Victorian home, a place where windows open, water heats and doors lock via voice command, in a neighborhood where drones “buzzing like honeybees” fly overhead with deliveries all day. Lily wears glasses that are connected to her computer, allowing her to access email by blinking.

It’s the sort of smart house we can envision not too far in the future. Henry created it, like he created William, who spends his time locked in the attic reading books and listening to NPR and Broadway show tunes on a transistor radio. While he can learn and converse with Henry, his body consists only of a torso, arms and head, and he is valiantly trying to make himself mobile, even to the point of attaching wheels to his chair while Henry is away.

It’s clear that Henry’s mental illness — the onset of which is not initially explained — is contributing to the couple’s marital problems, although Lily seems to be trying to help him as best she can. On this day, she has invited two former coworkers, Paige and Davis, to the house for lunch, and as they meet we see that he’s not only agoraphobic but seriously antisocial, the kind of person whose conversation always seems awkward or haughty. (One of the first things he says to Paige, while internally noting “the wasted efforts that have gone into her appearance,” is “your sleeves are too long.”)

After a bit of this uncomfortable interaction, Henry decides the best way to get through the visit is to introduce everyone to William. Even Lily hasn’t seen him, or even been allowed into the attic at this point — she only knows that her husband has been working on conscious AI.

Henry goes up first, to warn William that he is having guests, asking him to behave — the robot has a tendency to make somewhat snarky contents, to try to psychoanalyze Henry, explain his problems. “‘Don’t worry, I’ll be sweet as pie,’ the robot says, drawing a cross over its nonexistent heart’.”

Of course, he is not. And what transpires when the four go up to the lab sets in a motion a cascade of tension that leads to full-blown horror, which is not typically the kind of fare I enjoy, either in literature or in film. But I took one for this team, and was ultimately glad I did, as a series of shocking twists in the story, and the existential questions the novel raises more than made up for the unpleasant scenes.

Mason Coile is a pen name for Canadian author Andrew Pyper, who seems to be channeling Stephen King in this story. He packs a lot to ponder in this short book, which some have described as a one-sitting read. (True only if you tend to sit for long periods.)

Pyper has said that he originally wrote William as a short story, then tried to sell it as a screenplay without success, and only turned it into a novel after the first iterations failed to sell. He seems to have found the perfect length — the novel is tightly coiled, like a snake, with just the right amount of exposition, and a punch-perfect ending. It is the sort of book you have to read twice — the second time to go back and see all the foreshadowing of events that you might have missed the first time.

It’s also the sort of book you’ll want to share and talk about it, as it raises interesting questions about the nature of AI and whether artificial intelligence is something around which human beings can really install guardrails. Even God didn’t seem to do that, as Lily observes at one point — God just created without thought to the consequences, she thinks. “If beauty or discovery was the result — if chaos was the result — it didn’t matter. It only mattered that something astonishing was born.”

I don’t like horror, but I loved this absorbing, disturbing little book. A

Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim (W.W. Norton, 368 pages)

With all the studies and books published on animal intelligence in the past decade, did we really need another one? Well, yes, it turns out we did. Brandon Keim, a science and nature writer who lives in Bangor, Maine, has found a new twist on the subject in Meet the Neighbors.

Culling from copious research, Keim takes a Mr. Rogers approach to animal science, reporting his findings while strolling through “the everyday landscape of a suburban neighborhood” and pointing out the various animals residing there. While this may seem a sophomoric endeavor to some, he argues otherwise, saying that the central question of our time is “How might an awareness of animal minds shape the ways we understand them and, ultimately, how we live with them on this shared, precious planet?” In other words, until we approach animals as compadres in the struggle, we are getting them, and our own moral development, wrong.

Challenge him at your own risk: No less than Charles Darwin was a fan of the lowly earthworm, about which he wrote a surprise bestseller. (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms is not quite as catchy a title as On the Origin of Species.) In this, Darwin’s final book, he wrote of earthworms, “they deserve to be called intelligent.”

Keim’s interest in the topic came from his realization that the birds he watched bathing daily in a local reservoir “were like locals at a coffee shop or the gym. They were my neighbors.” Since most Americans actually know little about their human neighbors, this might not be the best argument for learning more about squirrels and chipmunks.

A better argument comes from the quote by the writer and Whole Earth Catalog co-founder Stewart Brand, who said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” When Keim first came across this quote, he said, it “grated” at him, but he came to accept the hard truth in it: that we all make decisions every day that affect the lives of other creatures, whether it’s something as simple as turning over a stone and disrupting a small colony of insects, or clearing a wooded lot for a house.

“But we could turn the phrase a bit differently than Brand,” Keim writes. “We might as well be good neighbors.” This involves questions with ethical considerations, such as “what do we owe so-called pets, or animals who are sick or injured? How do we live with predators whose presence is not always welcomed?” In attempting to answer these questions, Keim walks us through a brief history of animal rights, from Aristotle to Peter Singer, at times including nauseating detail about animal cruelty, and the challenges that remain. (For example: “the federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act doesn’t apply to chickens or fish, who account for the vast majority of farmed animals.” And protections for wild animals mostly apply to endangered species.) This section feels a bit thin, coming so soon after the masterful treatment of the subject in Our Kindred Creatures by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, earlier this year.

But when Keim resumes his neighborhood walks (which aren’t limited to where he lives now, but include other places he’s lived and traveled), he uses his own experience to explore animals that don’t get as much sympathetic treatment, as, say, dogs or elephants. He takes up the neighborly cause for rats and cormorants, waterbirds that are among the most hated birds in the world, with contempt for them going back to the biblical book of Leviticus. While he once hated the bird, Keim sees a flock and envisions them as “returning home after a day’s work” with family, friends and acquaintances and thinks about what stories they would communicate to each other. He talks to an ecologist studying the effects of pollution who adopted a deformed baby cormorant that he named Cosmos and who later became something of a minor celebrity because of their media appearances.

He also takes up a subject that gets too little attention: the cultural cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals that allows us to be entranced when a raccoon climbs an office building in Minnesota, becoming a social media star, and yet also considers that species a pest to be eradicated. The story Keim tells of a Canada man who raised and released a baby raccoon only to have the raccoon return two years later for a visit will cause you to reconsider hiring a pest control company — or at least any that don’t consider the animals’ welfare as well as the humans’.

Even the most ardent of animal lovers claim the right to kill animals in self-defense, but do we also have the right to kill them when they damage our property, invade our homes or generally fit the definition of “nuisance”? The law usually says so. But even when people try to deal with nuisance animals in a humane way — by trapping and relocating them, for example — that may turn out to be just a slower form of death.

The Canadian man who had raised the raccoon later went on to run his own “pest control” company with humane methods, and told Keim an amazing story about a client who had a raccoon living in a garage with a nest of babies. They couldn’t figure out how the raccoon was getting in or out until he one night watched the raccoon push the button that opened the garage door.

“As best as he could figure, she would go outside at night while the homeowner slept, then close the door when she returned in the morning’s wee hours, leaving her humans none the wiser.” It’s an astonishing story and bolsters Keim’s contention that understanding “the neighbors” makes us less likely to want to kill them, and more likely to want to find ways to live in harmony. B