There’s good news and bad news on this week’s list of recommended books. Well, almost exclusively bad news, at least in terms of subject matter. These picks cover the devastation of tsunamis, earthquakes and wildfires; the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918; mass extinctions; the potential for nuclear annihilation. Even the work of fiction included here is a fantasy about imminent catastrophe. The good news is the eloquent and haunting way in which these books are written.

John Williams

Daily Books Editor and Staff Writer

GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone, by Richard Lloyd Parry. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A British journalist, long resident in Tokyo, probes the emotional and spiritual effects of the catastrophe that killed thousands of men, women and children in 2011.

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg. (Bloomsbury, $30.) When the Cold War ended in 1991, nuclear weapons vanished from the minds of most Americans. But Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, sounds an impassioned alarm, warning that the dangers of nuclear conflict remain.

MEGAFIRE: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame, by Michael Kodas. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) An account of the misguided history and dire results of America’s wildfire management policy that also captures the Sisyphean struggles of the men and women who battle blazes for a living.