After the great success of his novel "Freedom," Jonathan Franzen now publishes essays about what continues to occupy his mind: the environment, travel, and human relationships, with literature recurring throughout. He recounts the hunt for songbirds in Mediterranean countries and the danger he faced while accompanying conservationists in their fight against mass killings. He shares experiences from a trip to a small, uninhabited volcanic island off the coast of Chile, where he scattered some of the ashes of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace. Almost always, it is ambivalence, irritation, and unease that drive him to write: a stay in China, where he aimed to denounce environmental destruction, only to be surprised by the admiration he felt for the pace of Chinese economic development; the ongoing discomfort with how radically the use of...