By Mary Roach W. W. Norton & Co, 2021 Review by JoeAnn Hart “Like a deer in the headlights,” we say about someone who freezes in the face of impending doom. Why is that? Why don’t deer jump out of the way when they see us coming in our speeding metal machines? Mary Roach will …
Sadly there is not enough time for us here at EcoLit Books to read all the fine works submitted to us. Here are a few titles we’ve received over the past few months that are new (or forthcoming) to the world… Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future Danielle Clode An Australian biologist delves …
DEFENSIBLE SPACES, stories by Alison Turner Torrey House Press February 2023 Fire! It’s everywhere in Alison Turner’s tightly knit collection of stories, from fireworks to a flaming ham, “a pink plastic hunk the size of a baby.” Everyone in the small post-mining community of Clayton, Colorado, elevation 8,236 feet, seems to have a lit cigarette …
As a zoology student, Lucy Cooke was taught that the females of the species are exploited, weak, and passive. As a human animal, Cooke begged to differ. In Bitch: On the Female of the Species, she challenges this sexist mythology across species, from birds to primates to whales, showing that females can be just as sexually …
Katherine Applegate, author of the Newbery Medal-winning The One and Only Ivan and the widely hailed The One and Only Bob, has returned with the story of Odder. Like Applegate’s other works, Odder is a fictional book intended to introduce young readers to the world of wildlife conservation, interspecies friendships, and the plight of captive …
Alice Elliott Dark’s beautiful, sprawling novel Fellowship Point is about land and stewardship, about nature and conservation, but more than that, it is a book of friendship across the decades and about the complexities of women’s lives, told in part by two extraordinary narrators who experienced nearly a century of life in the world. Agnes …
Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem is a powerful collection of ecopoetry that forefronts the interconnectedness of humans, animals, land, and water. Throughout, Diaz also underscores the relationship between the destruction of America’s natural landscapes and resources and the genocide of its indigenous peoples, demonstrating how ecological and …
Kingfishers are birds more often heard than seen. Walk next to Bear Creek here in the Rogue Valley and you will probably hear them, though seeing them is not so easy. Fortunately, we have a new book about the kingfisher by Marina Richie to shed light on this fascinating bird. Marina takes us along with …
Kathryn Savage’s gorgeous lyric essay Groundglass is a poetic reckoning with environmental pollution and its unavoidable connection to human bodies. In the book, available August 2nd from Coffee House Press, Savage blends tough questions about external systems with nuanced reflections on internal harm. Savage chooses the lyric essay, a hybrid form combining poetry and essay, as the conduit …
Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House, inspired by a true story about dolphin research in St. Thomas in the 1960s, is a beautiful, thought-provoking read, at times as heartbreaking as it is fascinating. The novel reveals much about the vast intelligence of dolphins—and, at times, the lack thereof in humans—and offers a look at animals in …
While Jessie Greengrass’s remarkable novel The High House is set primarily in a grim future, this is not purely dystopian fiction—in fact, it feels far more contemporary, like a novel of our imminent reality. The High House doesn’t depict a world completely transformed by climate change as much as it reveals our world—a world slowly and inevitably ravaged as …
