In The Observer yesterday, the climate editor, Jeevan Vasagar, reviewed The Vanishing Earth: A Journey Through the Last Days of Abundance by James Crawford (Scribe, £25). It’s a book, he says, in which the writer and broadcaster “takes readers on a journey around a planet scarred by exploitation, from phosphate mines in Florida to the prospect of harvesting sand in Greenland as glaciers melt and discharge their sediment”. There are a couple of places, he says, where a more rigorous edit would have been beneficial, but “Despite its gritty subject, The Vanishing Earth is poetically written. And it ends in hope.”

In the FTWeekend, John Reed, who has contributed to his paper’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, reviewed Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War by Charlotte Higgins (Jonathan Cape, £22) — one of the books long-listed earlier this month for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Higgins, he says, shows how Ukraine has used language, art and resistance against Russian cultural hegemony. In her travels, she “encounters writers turned soldiers, artists who switched from secular subjects to wartime ones, and writers who struggled with the pointlessness of art in the face of violence… There are valuable stories here that are worth telling and will surely endure.”