Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, _The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist's Guide to the Climate Crisis_

 YOU LIKELY ALREADY know about the climate crisis and may even feel you are not in the market for another book about it, but this one does offer an unusual perspective. 

Figueres is "former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change," co-author Rivett-Carnac "her political strategist" (I quote from the paperback's author bio), and both were deeply involved in bringing about the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. Accordingly, they are  able  to provide not only a crisp explanation of what the crisis is, but also an insider's view of what an international agreement to address it might look like and how it could be brought about.

The ability of Figueres and Rivett-Carnac to envision effective international cooperation allows them to dial down the apocalyptic tone usually adopted by writers on this subject. They seem downright hopeful, in fact. How justified that hopefulness is, I can only guess, but encountering it in a book on the climate crisis was certainly a change of pace.

Nathalie Léger, _Suite for Barbara Loden_, trans. Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon

 I PICKED THIS up because I liked Léger's Exposition, the first installment of a trilogy of which this book is the second. I had not at that time seen Wanda, the 1970 film Loden wrote and directed, nor even heard of Loden, though I had seen pictures of her as Maggie, the Marilyn Monroe-like character in Arthur Miller's After the Fall. Once I read the book, though, I got hold of Wanda as soon as I could, and it is as remarkable as Léger says it is. 

The book's French title, Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden, does a somewhat better job of suggesting its nature than the English one does. Like Exposition, it orbits a scholarly/curatorial project, the writing of a film encyclopedia article on Loden; the book comes on like the article's more lyrical, more reckless twin, airborne and kaleidoscopic. This is not a biography of Loden, but a swirl of imagery and speculation that coalesces around that biography like a halo.

Also like Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden answers the old question "why are there no great women artists?" by pointing out that we tend not to look in the right places. Wanda got scant attention in 1970, and Loden died in 1980, at the relatively young age of 48, without having finished another film. Seeing it will convince you that Loden was a great woman artist, however, and Suite for Barbara Loden convinced me that Léger is no slouch herself.