“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

It may be an odd thing to do, but whenever I’m in another country, I always go to as many bookstores as I can, even when the language is Greek to me. I love seeing the differences in how books are made and promoted, the variations in cover designs and trim sizes and colors. Although I realize I’m looking through rose-colored glasses, there seems inevitably to be a cheeriness in window displays and a pleasant languor in browsing that, at least on the surface, are lacking at home. In the process of visiting sundry foreign bookstores, some places have become like old friends to drop in on when

The true pleasure of reading any book on rock ’n’ roll comes less in the descriptions of the music—I’ve long felt that rock bios need to be packaged with a CD, to reinforce or introduce the aural ideas presented—than in the personal excesses, the wantonness, the luxury and degradation, for lack of a better phrase. The gold standard of the genre, Peter Guralnick’s magisterial two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1999), fairly wallows in Presley’s enthusiasms for things that aren’t healthy or kind, like a steady stream of amphetamines, and his

“Any mosaic that has survived from the sixth century is treasured,” the authors of Dynamic Splendor aver, in great understatement. What the marvelous two-volume monograph plunders is more than treasure, of course—for it tells in remarkable detail the story of the mosaics in the basilica of Eufrasius at Porecˇ, in the former Yugoslavia. Only Ravenna rivals Porecˇ as an extant example of early–Middle Ages church architecture, and the first volume of Dynamic Splendor wastes no space in describing everything about this two-thousand-year-old Croatian site, from its geographic setting and ecclesiastical

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