THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A Personal and Pyronatural History, by Manjula MartinEven after evacuating her home in Sonoma County, Calif., as wildfires burned nearby, Manjula Martin reflected on her stubborn longing to exempt herself from what was happening. “I wanted to continue to be an exception to the consequences of climate change,” she writes in “The Last Fire Season,” her powerful account of the dry lightning storms of 2020, which ignited an increasingly parched landscape throughout much of Northern California. “But my desire to remain an observer of history instead of its victim was banal,” Martin admits. “The Last Fire Season” includes a moving record of her life as well as a repudiation of all kinds of exceptionalism, not just her own or her country’s. “Humans are not the main characters in the great drama of Earth,” she notes — an inconvenient truth that the extreme weather effects of climate change have made painfully clear.

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Persons: Manjula Martin, “, —, ” Martin, ” Locations: Sonoma County, Calif, Northern California