Beyond Words: The more we study animals, the smarter they get
In Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Carl Safina sets out on a global journey to listen to and understand animals on their terms and not ours. By the end …
Book Reviews
Book Review: Among Wolves by Gordon Haber and Marybeth Holleman
Among Wolves begins with tragic news of Gordon Haber’s death. Haber, the legendary biologist who spent over four decades in Alaska, died the way he lived, studying wolves in the …
Book Review: Veganomics by Nick Cooney
If you are looking for a ray of hope, it can be found in the effective altruism movement. Effective altruists are people who are thinking about not just doing good, …
Orion book award winners: The Bees and Feral
Orion Magazine has announced its 2015 Book Award winners: Non-fiction winner: Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, by George Monbiot (University of Chicago Press), Finalists: A Country Called Childhood, …
Insects and the people who love them: A review of “A Buzz in the Meadow”
In A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm by Dave Goulson, insects are given the respect they are due. For it is insects, in all …
Book Review: The Soul of All Living Creatures by Vint Virga
Vint Virga’s The Soul of All Living Creatures: What Animals Can Teach Us About Being Human opens with a quote from Hippocrates: “The soul is the same in all living …
The Best American Science and Nature Writing, 2014
Once a year, courtesy of Houghton Mifflin, we get to be wowed, disgusted, depressed, amazed, revolted, terrified, and sometimes even amused with the publication of The Best American Science and …
Book Review: The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim by E.K. Johnston
Imagine a world that is just like our own—same countries, same technologies, same history—but with one major difference: dragons. The dragons in The Story of Owen don’t limit themselves to …
Review of The Eye of the Whale by Jennifer O’Connell
A humpback whale is tangled in hundreds of yards of crab-trap lines. She can’t get free. She can barely keep her blowhole above water to breathe. The whale has been …
Book Review: Mikis and the Donkey by Bibi Dumon Tak
“Mikis stroked the donkey’s ears. It was six feet from the bottom of the ears to their very tip…and then six feet all the way back down again. Well, that’s …