From the Confederacy to Ground Zero to the ruins of urban sprawl, this book is a monument to collapse—itself a terrible art: “Gen. Sherman painted landscapes.” Sometimes, in the breakage of the human, nature returns: a loving catalog of trees and birds as well as shuttered franchise restaurants. Sometimes, when human relations break down, they create terrible yearning. Each type of war, in public space and private interaction, is given a new, evidentiary lament: “O Sunglass Hut, we hardly knew you!”