David Byrne is just a few years older than me, and from his early days with the band Talking Heads to his later work as an international musicologist and producer, he's been a presence in my cultural life. His new book is a personal, thoughtful odyssey across a dozen cities, places that his busy career has taken him, and places that he in turn has taken his bicycle.

Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 (1950) offers intimate insight into the thinking of many of the twentieth century’s pioneering American abstract artists. The slim volume documents the salon sessions at 35 East Eighth Street in Greenwich Village on April 21–23, 1950, where the goal, as defined by sculptor Richard Lippold, was simply “to learn from conversation with my confreres.” As the book reveals, the discussions that took place predicated on obvious shared respect, curiosity, and exploration.

The book’s editor, Robert Goodnough, was studying for a master’s degree in art education at New York

Seven-week old Nathaniel Byng doesn't seem to mind the long, bony finger poking his tummy. In fact, he's fascinated by the finger (covered almost to the knuckle with a gold and red-stone ring) and the tall, sepulchral figure leaning over him. Anyone over the age of seven weeks might wisely look at the pale face and curtain of black hair, and think: “Death! Get me the hell out of here!” But there are benefits to being blissfully preliterate, and having Nick Cave give you a cuddle is one of them.

It started with the busted tie-rods of a Humvee. It continued with the ill-advised order to split an Army Ranger platoon as the Afghan night was coming on. And it finished, on April 22, 2004, with the death by friendly fire of an exemplary young American. But there it did not really end, because of who this fine man happened to be — Pat Tillman, promising NFL star — and because a virtuosic author decided to write a political firecracker of a book about the “cynical cover-up sanctioned at the highest levels of government” that ensued after his death.

It is impossible to talk about books, nowadays; to talk about books without nostalgia creeping into the discourse; though perhaps, to speak the lingo, perhaps ‘twas always so. Whether the specific tone is wistful, elegiac, defensive, hostile, or whether the talk is of an imminent and lamented end, or of a bitter and defiant survival, or of some type of triumphalist victory in another world, it is difficult to find a discussion of books that does not view the past as some better place. The title alone of the book under discussion, The Late Age of Print, offers all sorts of elegiac vapors —

Despite their ever-present flora, it’s somewhat false to call the poems in Micrographia “nature poems.” While their topic may be the natural world—sumac and juniper, sparrows, lilacs, jots of fir—the book revolves on a much more ontological axis. An appreciation of nature is present throughout the book, but not the same kind of stillness found in Mary Oliver or Gary Snyder’s quieter verse. Here, nature stands to people as they relate to it (”The butterfly is pinned through its thorax . . . The name affixes to earth.”), not as something set aside elsewhere to be appreciated.

“My life seems like a stranger’s house to me,” writes Werner Herzog late in Conquest of the Useless, less a straightforward diary of 1979-81, when he was working on Fitzcarraldo, than a series of “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.” The film tells the story of the title character (played by Herzog’s frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski), a man who dreams of opening an opera house in a remote corner of Peru; to avoid treacherous rapids and natives alike, Fitzcarraldo opts to drag all of his equipment, including an enormous steamship, over a mountain rather than sail around it.