For some reason this summer, I was weirdly drawn to ocean and/or whale-related nonfiction. Topics that I always appreciate learning something about, but I'm not sure why I felt such a pull now. Maybe the yearning to be elsewhere and if that elsewhere is as far-feeling as possible from the world as we know it,... Continue Reading →
Nature Writing on the Elusive Owl of Eastern Russia
Book review: Owls of the Eastern Ice, by Jonathan C. Slaght Jonathan C. Slaght is a wildlife conservationist dedicated to preserving and documenting the Blakiston fish owl, a rare species found primarily in Siberia. In Owls of the Eastern Ice, he documents his time in the Russian Far East, and the unique challenges of trying to research... Continue Reading →
A Primer on the “Spillover” of Zoonotic Infections
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen (Amazon) The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart. I bought this book as soon as COVID-19 appeared in the US for the above reason. I completely understand why... Continue Reading →
Rachel Carson’s Nature Writing On the Sea
Under the Sea Wind and The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson The island lay in shadows only a little deeper than those that were swiftly stealing across the sound from the east. On its western shore the wet sand of the narrow beach caught the same reflection of palely gleaming sky that laid a... Continue Reading →
Into the Underworlds
Book review: Underland, by Robert Macfarlane (Amazon / Book Depository) What happened here? The mouth of the chasm says nothing. The trees say nothing. Leaning over the edge of the sinkhole, I can see only darkness beneath me. British author Robert Macfarlane's Underland is a difficult book to describe or do justice to. It's more of a... Continue Reading →
A Forensic Ecologist on Life, Death, and Crime-Solving
Book review: The Nature of Life and Death, by Patricia Wiltshire (Amazon / Book Depository) Patricia Wiltshire is a botanist, forensic ecologist, and palynologist -- what she defines as "one who studies pollen and other palynomorphs." She works with the police in the United Kingdom, drawing on decades of experience and meticulous microscopic examinations to... Continue Reading →
The Man-Made Disaster of “The Deadliest Animal in History”
Book review: No Beast So Fierce, by Dane Huckelbridge (Amazon / Book Depository) Around 1900 in India and Nepal, a Royal Bengal tiger had gone "cannibal". That's the term author John Vaillant attributes to Russians in The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, used for describing when a tiger preys on humans as its primary... Continue Reading →
Nonfiction Classic: A “Young Writer’s Book” on the Natural World
Book review: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (Amazon / Book Depository) I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest ... And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my... Continue Reading →
How a World Meets Its End
Book review: At the End of the World, by Lawrence Millman (Amazon / Book Depository) In the winter of 1941, when most of the world was concerned with the Second World War raging in Europe, a different drama was unfolding on the remote Belcher Islands of Canada's Hudson Bay. In a religious frenzy, three Inuit... Continue Reading →