Long ago, my children and I celebrated at the library whenever we came across a favorite picture book by Arnold Lobel. No matter how many times we read it, The Ice-cream Cone Coot and Other Rare Birds reliably induced giggle fits. We loved the ridiculous names, cantering rhymes, and cleverly bizarre illustrations. “I do not trust the Jackknife Niffy./ He could swoop down and cut off your nose in a jiffy.” Lobel’s illustration of a stunned child watching a winged pocket knife with tiny feet swoop across the page expanded our delight.

I found myself experiencing similarly gleeful moments while reading Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. Odd names and extraordinary behaviors surprised me throughout, frequently causing me to laugh aloud. Social, playful, curious keas, found only in alpine areas of New Zealand, unscrew car antennae and destroy satellite dishes, untie shoelaces and collaborate to solve hard puzzles for food rewards. Brilliant, mistrustful ravens, who hate anything new, take one another down, just for fun, by yanking each other’s legs. These same ravens actually “sled” down hills covered in fresh snowfall and enjoy snowball fights with humans. “It looks absolutely crazy,” a researcher remarked to Ackerman.

In The Bird Way, Ackerman’s follow-up to The Genius of Birds, she focuses on what, at first glance, does seem crazy — examples in bird life that fall on the extreme ends of a variety of spectrums. With these choices, Ackerman explains that she hopes to “push the edges of, well, birdness.” The mind-bendingly wide range of feathers, abilities, and behaviors forces researchers to reconsider what they think they know about birds. The examples also force readers to reexamine what we think we know about people. Humans aren’t the only species, for example, to start fires, pass down cultural practices, mimic, or collaboratively solve problems. Researchers are increasingly reevaluating what scientists have considered evidence, at times appreciating more fully indigenous peoples’ reports and creation stories. Central to Ackerman’s mission is to demonstrate that those considered to be human “outliers” — in same-sex relationships, for instance, or co-parenting beyond the bounds of nuclear family units — have cross-species validations around the globe. “Clearly,” Ackerman writes, “there is no one way to be a bird, just as there is no one way to be a human.”

As for the humans Ackerman describes in the book, their behaviors and strategies are, at times, as inventive and funny as the birds they study. To figure out how geese fly at heights greater than 16,000 feet in the Himalayas, researchers in Austin, Texas, fitted the birds with tiny backpacks and masks and trained them to fly through a wind tunnel. Wanting to understand how birds perceive color, scientists deployed a spectrophotometer to measure ultraviolent light reflected from a forest, then ran the data through a computer to align it with bird perception. Perhaps not surprisingly, as more women have conducted studies to earn Ph.D.s, they have challenged fundamental assumptions about birds, most of which men generalized from observations of males, just half of any given population.

Because Ackerman has an excellent sense of humor, she keeps readers engaged even when explaining dry or technical information. Sometimes, she throws in good stories or exchanges simply because they intrigue. A researcher observes that ravens seem to have an affinity for old university towns — Lund, Oxford, Cambridge, Uppsala — and he theorizes that ravens are themselves academic. “ ‘But difficult to work with,’ I say. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘true of many academics.’ ”

Ackerman is as comfortable tossing off references to Jar Jar Binks as she is to English literature or Latin etymology. She is “learned” in the best possible way. She shares her excitement about what her capacious mind is capable of learning about extraordinary creatures. She explains that these creatures also often have capacious minds and are capable of remarkable learning.

Ackerman is a wonderful writer, but words alone aren’t always sufficient to help readers fully imagine her subjects. She writes poetically about her trip through an Australian eucalyptus forest in search of the elusive lyrebird: “The lyrebird sings like no other bird, a fantastic blend of its own calls and songs of dozens of perfectly mimicked sounds, brilliant imitations of other bird voices in the forest, from the explosive ‘whipcrack’ of the eastern whipbird to the ringing pee-o of the grey shrike thrush, from the stuttered creaks of gang-gang cockatoos to the silvery sweet chant of the pilotbird.”

As is true at each chapter’s beginning, she includes a lovely black-and-white line drawing of the lyrebird. These static images do not move or sing, fight or play. Short of photographs, how much better would have been Arnold Lobel’s color illustrations. (Think: coot with sugar cone beak and body.) It’s a testament to Ackerman’s gifts as a thinker, writer, and teacher that I found myself typing “lyrebird mimic song” into the search function of YouTube.

Sylvia A. Harvey, in her book The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family, offers a crash course on the gruesome realities of American prisons. Beginning with her own family history, Harvey humanizes her overview by showing how those in contact with the criminal justice system are affected by its unjust policies. She focuses largely on the immediate families of inmates, arguing that “structural inequality, biased legislation, and racism ensure parental incarceration continues to hit poor and racial minorities the hardest,” and that “all families, in different ways, are ripped apart at the seams.”

Through the lives and loved ones of three incarcerated parents — Randall, William, and Dawn — Harvey tackles a broad range of issues, from rural opioid use to the school-to-prison pipeline. The book includes intimate scenes of William and his wife, Ruth, on their weekly Saturday visits, and a compassionate account of Dawn’s childhood struggles and her oscillations, as an adult, between being a hardworking single mother and an erratic drug user. But Harvey never rests on these personal accounts too long, constantly forcing readers to imagine the stories of her sympathetic subjects played out countless times throughout the country. Woven into the three family narratives are hundreds more examples of the prison system’s expansion and inequity.

A decade after the publication of Michelle Alexander’s groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, many Americans have become familiar with the injustices of the prison system, and clear-eyed about its unequal treatment of people of color. But even at a time of widespread support for Black Lives Matter following George Floyd’s murder on May 25 by Minneapolis police, the statistics that describe the prison industrial complex bear repeating.

In the U.S. in 2010, 1.8 percent of white children, 3.5 percent of Hispanic children, and a shocking 11.4 percent of black children had at least one incarcerated parent. Incarceration rates for women increased from 1980 to 2017 by 700 percent. Since 1984, the number of inmates serving sentences of 50 years or longer has more than quadrupled, and it continues to grow, despite the dramatic decline in serious violent crime over the past 20 years. More than half of all people serving these harshest sentences are black, and in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, and South Carolina, two thirds are.

Throughout her book, Harvey compellingly argues that the U.S. criminal justice system is broken and bloated, and that it has not always been this way. The relatively recent growth of the prison population, the evils of for-profit prisons, and staggering recidivism rates all lead to the conclusion that the system we have made can and should be unmade. But Harvey will not be the one drawing the blueprint.

Published in April, just weeks before “defund the police” became fodder for bumper stickers, The Shadow System’s conclusion does not reimagine American law enforcement. Instead, it makes such commonsense suggestions as reducing cash bail, lowering maximum and blind minimum sentences, and eliminating “three strikes” and “truth in sentencing” laws, which have greatly extended the length of prison terms.

Harvey, who is too close to step away from the immediate needs of those affected, advocates “government-funded policies, programs and practices that help mitigate the collateral effects of mass incarceration. These families need support in maintaining their connections with their incarcerated family member. They need visitation policies that are child friendly and offer sufficient time for bonding. The trend for cutting in-person visits in favor of video visits should be curtailed. Families should not have to travel eight hours to see their family member, and they shouldn’t have to choose between dinner and two collect phone calls.”

Like the author, I was once the child of a prisoner. If you had asked my 13-year-old self what “prison reform” should look like, I’d have told you that the dress code for visitors could use some work. I desperately wanted to wear sweatpants on those three-hour commutes. By the time I was 15, I was concerned about the amount of money it required to stay in touch with my mother and angered by stories of other inmates whose families simply could not make it work. My mother and I wrote letters to policy makers about work release programs and community college classes. She had to fight for a spot in a substance abuse course, fight for the dentist to treat her gnarly case of gingivitis. Even from a place of relative privilege, we were so consumed by the system we had that we couldn’t imagine the one we wanted.

Harvey acknowledges this tradeoff between evaluating the situation and fixing it. Speaking of her formerly incarcerated father, she writes that he “reminded me that my job was to report what I found and to share those accounts, not internalize them, and definitely not to carry the burden of finding the solutions.”

Harvey’s reporting may, at times, lack subtlety. But there is often no other way to describe gross injustice: in the harsh sentencing of William’s son Naeem, and Randall’s careless transfer to an institution eight hours away from his young daughter, the reader is reminded that America’s criminal justice system always lacks subtlety. As expressed by her father, the author’s role here is not to break ground. Her mission is to pick up the gravel bits smashed before her and put them on display. Again, and again.

This book is not an abolitionist introduction to the current moment. Read your Angela Davis for that. But if you’re playing catch up, looking for some background on the conversations happening throughout the country right now, The Shadow System is a moving portrait of three families and the chains that hold them to a broken system.

Olivia Weeks’s summer fellowship with the Independent is supported by the Harvard Alumni Association and the Harvard Club of Cape Cod.

Lulu Miller calls David Starr Jordan, the protagonist of her book Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, “David.” Born in the middle of the 19th century, Jordan learned to channel his love for the natural world into biological nomenclature — Linnaean classification. He developed a passion for fish. He traveled the world to study sea creatures, eventually identifying and naming more of them than any other researcher before or since. Given that Miller’s gorgeous nonfiction essay is, in part, a footnoted history of scientific taxonomy, her choice is telling: why does she call her subject by his first name?

Part of the answer to this question is that Miller, emotionally and epistemologically at sea, identifies Jordan as a personal anchor. She explains that, on vacation in Wellfleet at the age of seven, standing in a marsh, she asked the scientist father she adored the meaning of life: “My dad paused, raising one black eyebrow behind the binoculars. Then he turned to me grinning and announced, ‘Nothing!’ ” He explained that “there is no meaning of life. There is no point. There is no God. No one watching you or caring in any way. There is no afterlife. No destiny. No plan … the truth is, none of this matters, and you don’t matter.”

Though her kind and quirky father’s vision inspired a “voracious hedonism” in him, for Miller it led to depression and a sense of futility. In high school, she began cutting herself and eventually attempted suicide in her family’s basement.

Miller emerged into adulthood as an accomplished science writer with a failed relationship and a broken heart. She latched onto an incident in the life of the scientist she chooses to call “David” to help her find her way. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake sent thousands of jars of specimens in formaldehyde in Jordan’s Stanford University lab crashing to the ground, separating fish bodies from fish name tags. The entirety of David Starr Jordan’s life’s work lay in disarray.

“It is now that I would have given up,” Miller writes, alluding to her previous attempts at self-harm. “So what does David do? What does our careful man of science, who wants above all else to see the world for what it is, do? Does he hear what seems to be the obvious message of the earthquake? That entropy is the way of the world and no human can ever stop it? Nope. This is when the bastard, the wonderful bastard, takes out his sewing needle and plunges it straight into our ruler’s throat.”

Jordan stitched tags onto named fish, re-imposing order on the God of Chaos. Miller wants to internalize this scene, to let it serve as a life-shaping parable. But her relationship with her subject is unstable. As she follows the twists and turns of Jordan’s relentlessly optimistic if misguided life — and chronicles her own pilgrim’s progress along the way — Miller struggles to admire, let alone respect, the man she calls David or the science he espoused.

Miller may also have been inclined to refer to her subject by his first name because of the substantial body of work she has created with Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich for Radiolab, the program produced at New York City public radio station WNYC that describes itself as “investigating a strange world.” Radiolab’s narrators adopt a jovial, casual tone as they tackle what can be esoteric subjects. Echoes of the show’s forced jokiness and distracting, rhetorical repetitions show up in Miller’s writing and might have made her partial to dubbing Jordan “David.” But in the book, Miller cannot incorporate the cheap audio editing tricks Radiolab uses to interrupt and disjoint. She makes the best of her training as a master storyteller and embraces her well-honed sense of the ridiculous as she gallops through the ideas of Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz, eugenics, the pitfalls of positivity, cladistics, and accounts of exploring archives, climbing mountains, visiting former asylums, and swimming in the Caribbean. At no point does her narrative ever descend into pointless digression.

Miller’s father’s worldview may have given her too much power too early in her life to doubt herself into depression. But it is possible that her father’s admonition to keep going in the face of chaos — even though nothing matters — may also have unshackled Miller from a need to ask permission or seek approval. It is her birthright to unleash her curiosity wherever she pleases. That she is brave enough to write so beautifully as she works to identify answers she finds satisfying, logical, and affirming is an accomplishment she must claim as her very own.

In his moving and beautiful collection of essays, I’ve Been Wrong Before, Evan James reflects on the time he spent in a myriad of places around the world — San Francisco, Barcelona, Sydney, and Provincetown, among them — in pursuit of adventure, intimate connections, and his writing career.

James’s insights into the complexity of human relationships arise from his encounters as a gay man. Some of the essays are deeply philosophical, while others display James’s wit and sense of the absurd. They are very relatable, and readers will be able to see themselves in the experiences he recalls.

James’s writing career began in San Francisco, where he had a day job working in the San Francisco Ballet’s ticket office while he wrote freelance for magazines. Then, when a seasonal layoff occurred at the ballet, he started writing fiction.

“That was my first foray into writing seriously and writing a novel,” he says. “I fell in love with comedic fiction.” He was inspired by James Thurber and Dorothy Parker. “I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and they offered me a spot, so I moved across the country and spent two years there. It was a turning point for me.”

From there, James was offered fellowships at Yaddo and the Carson McCullers Center, and at the latter he began to write personal essays. “The primary gift of these residencies is the ample time, half free from the expectations of the world,” James says. “And the unexpected gift is to reciprocate the favor, relaxing one’s expectation of the world in turn.”

The fellowships also enabled James to travel. His trips became the fodder for many of the essays in I’ve Been Wrong Before. “They were written over a period of seven years, at a time in my life when I was changing, moving, having a lot of new relationships and growing into my 30s,” he says. “At some point, I sat down with these essays and read them end to end, and I could see recurring themes running through them — ghosts, haunting, or romantic relationships, and how you establish intimacy with someone.”

The theme of ghosts comes partly from James’s mother, who is an active telephone psychic and believes that James was Lord Byron in another life.

One of the essays is about James’s adventures in Barcelona, where he is mistaken for a male prostitute. The story revolves around the conflict he was experiencing between staying in Spain and searching for his independence or returning to the States to finish school. “I don’t say that I regret returning home, but I look back and wonder what might have been,” James says. “It was a surprising and illuminating essay for me to write.”

In another essay, he writes of riding a mountain bike in Southeast Asia and falling in love with his riding partner. It captures the emotions of being drawn into someone’s orbit, though nothing comes to fruition. “It was profound and powerful for me how we can have that experience with people who we are close to or just passing by,” he says.

James grew up on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle, a place that Provincetown reminds him of, in that they have the same robust feel of nature, art, and sexuality. In his essay on Provincetown in I’ve Been Wrong Before, James explains that he became curious about the gay haven at the end of Cape Cod when he moved to New York City.

“I had very little experience with the East Coast and I wanted to see many of the places that were interesting and places of gay note,” James says. “Around that time, I saw that Bear Week was happening. Part of it was happenstance and part of it was the allure of the bears. I found the town to be very festive and freewheeling and had a sense of wonderful. I felt really comfortable in a place where there was so much gayness. I found it to be a very special experience.”

James still lives in New York and teaches creative writing at the Pierrepont School in Westport, Conn. After the success of his farcical first novel, Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe, published by Simon & Schuster last year, he’s working on a new book of comedic fiction.