Fascinating companion to Mary Roach’s ‘Fuzz.’ While Roach focuses on how humans try to control nature—animals, in particular—Cal Flynn’s book explores the ways in which nature gets along just fine without humans, thank you very much, no matter how badly we screw up their habitats. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, because the abandoned places Flynn describes have mostly been decimated by our carelessness and nature is certainly not the same as before we got there. But in visiting rejected places as different as Chernobyl, the Marshall Islands, Detroit, and Paterson, NJ, she discovers the remarkable adaptability and diversity of plant and animals species. The book is simultaneously disturbing and comforting: it is depressing to understand how many places we have made ugly or spoiled or downright toxic, but eye-opening to realize that perhaps the planet will go on without us after we’re gone.