9 New Books We Recommend This Week

METAZOA: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Godfrey-Smith draws upon his vast diving knowledge and field experience to illuminate the ways in which the animal mind works — and the thoughts and experiences that give it shape. He posits, for example, the very real possibility that an octopus is a being with multiple selves. “The book is filled with riveting anecdotes and research, interspersed with charming and informative illustrations of various time periods … so we can imagine just for a moment what a sampling of inhabitants during that period looked like,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes in her review. “The whole book is a rather winning combination of not once ever making readers feel as if they are being lectured to; rather, it is the sensation of joining a wise, ever-patient friend on a time-traveling tour of the cognitive experiences of animals.”

THE NINE LIVES OF PAKISTAN: Dispatches From a Precarious State, by Declan Walsh. (Norton, $30.) Walsh’s richly detailed book intersperses profiles of some of Pakistan’s most controversial public figures with personal history, as he unravels the mystery of why, in 2013, as a correspondent for The Times, he was unceremoniously kicked out of the country. “Walsh functions with the assumption that his lines are tapped, works to avoid intelligence tails and continues to pry into the dark corners that those in power wish he wouldn’t,” Amna Nawaz writes in her review. “That investment on the ground is apparent in his book. Despite the fighting, the uncertainty and the sheer degree of difficulty involved in reporting in Pakistan, his familiarity with and fondness for the people and places he covers is clear.”

THE BLESSING AND THE CURSE: The Jewish People and Their Books in the Twentieth Century, by Adam Kirsch. (Norton, $30.) Kirsch, a poet and critic, seizes upon the conflicted quality of the Jewish experience for this survey of “some of the most significant and compelling Jewish books of the 20th century,” covering literary greats around the world from Franz Kafka to Tony Kushner. “Kirsch’s essays are expertly made, each one deftly including just enough historical context, healthy portions of summary and exposition, and the lightest sprinkling of interpretation and evaluation,” Josh Lambert writes in his review. “He says just enough to make the value of a book clear, without too many spoilers, and he doesn’t go on too long or belabor his points. The essays could serve as models for anyone asked to write the introduction for a new paperback edition of a well-worn text.”

THAT WAS NOW, THIS IS THEN: Poems, by Vijay Seshadri. (Graywolf, $24.) In his first collection since winning the Pulitzer in 2014 (for “3 Sections”), Seshadri applies his coiling, conversational voice to an unusually wide range of forms — from rhymed quatrains to fat blocks of prose — in poems that are typically chatty, probing and self-mocking. “Seshadri’s poems are testily smart, often funny, conceptually intricate and so chock-full of irony that it’s hard to avoid making a pun here involving magnets or multivitamins,” David Orr writes in his review. “He’s a poet who mesmerizes not by stillness but by zigs and zags, and he very much wants to take the reader with him as he island hops from idea to idea.”

WASTE: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, by Catherine Coleman Flowers. (The New Press, $25.99.) Flowers, an environmental activist and MacArthur fellow, spotlights the health toll of a complicated, unpleasant problem — the lack of proper waste sanitation in rural America — even as she describes her own evolution as an advocate. “Flowers brings an invigorating sense of purpose to the page,” our reviewer, Anna Clark, writes. “‘Waste’ is written with warmth, grace and clarity. Its straightforward faith in the possibility of building a better world, from the ground up, is contagious. … Flowers shares the extraordinary story of her own life, in all its detours, leaps of faith, luck, strange turns, hard work and her ever-rising social consciousness.”