Books of the month: From Be Mine by Richard Ford to I am Homeless If This is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore

Martin Chilton reviews the biggest new books for June in our monthly column

(The Independent)

In retirement, General Carl “Tooey” Spatz became “an avid bird watcher”. The career he left behind included his time as head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, supervising the aeroplanes that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unsurprisingly, afterwards, more than birds were on his mind and he admitted he “had trouble sleeping”. Tooey is one of the central figures in Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II (Elliott &Thompson), Evan Thomas’s engrossing study of one of the darkest moments in human history.

More recently, around one million people have died in battle since 2004, but at least 50 million have perished from infectious diseases. In his impressive yet scary book Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature (Bloomsbury), environmental journalist John Vidal makes a compelling case for humanity to transform its relationship with the natural world.

One of the most chilling chapters is “City Ills”, about how fast-growing cities will shape the world’s health. In 1993, Dhaka was a city of 250,000 people. By 2033, Bangladesh’s capital is expected to have 23 million people, half of them living in dangerous, slum conditions. Vidal says it looks likely to be the world capital of global disease. And, as we know from Covid, it can be a perilously small world when things go wrong.