“Predictably—and understandably— more pressing problems than saving dirt usually carry the day,” writes David R. Montgomery. But as his new book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, details, we are losing the brown stuff far, far too quickly. Unlike maritime dead zones and radical climate change, cases in which we have little historical knowledge on which to draw, we do have some sense of what happens to civilizations that abuse and lose their dirt. The book’s conclusion takes little comfort in history: “Unless more immediate disasters do us in, how we address the twin problems of soil degradation and accelerated erosion

Like a guidance counselor who got his teaching certificate in Bayreuth, Mike Kelley has for years labored at his own Ring cycle of sorts—Educational Complex—but with vampiric thespians and peppy spirit leaders as ersatz Wotans and Frickas. In 2005, New York’s Gagosian Gallery mounted the fun-house installation of Day Is Done. The creepy anthropological tour of the perversejust- under-the-surface cultures of donkey-basketball competitions and Youth for Christ nativity plays was ecstatically brought to life in a Gesamtkunstwerk of photography, sculpture, costume, sound, and video based on the faithful reenactment and fanciful reimagination of period yearbook shots. Now, the catalogue documenting

Glaswegian-turned-Londoner Andrew O’Hagan made a name for himself as the deputy editor of the London Review of Books before publishing his nonfiction debut, The Missing, in 1995. In this profound inquiry into the worlds of the vanished— runaways, abductees, murder victims—O’Hagan wove together journalism, family history, and memoir (the project was sparked by curiosity about his grandfather’s disappearance during World War II). Fiction always draws O’Hagan back to Scotland: His first two novels, Our Fathers (1999) and Personality (2003), are multigenerational family sagas. Our Fathers takes the reader to Glasgow and Ayrshire and brings together a dying master builder and