On Animals by Susan Orlean
Guest book review by Gene Helfman. “. . . are such rare, extraordinary kinships valuable because they remind us of a continuity with living creatures that we easily forget?” Susan …
Birds
The Creative Lives of Animals: Understanding the artists around us
Creativity is something that is easier to identify than to explain. And one person’s definition of creativity may vary from your definition. For proof, you need only enter the modern …
Fuzz, When Nature Breaks the Law
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 …
Book Review: BITCH by Lucy Cooke
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 …
Book Review: FELLOWSHIP POINT by Alice Elliott Dark
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 …
A new environmental journal Springs to life
As a fan of the Rachel Carson Center I was excited to see the recent launch of the first edition of Springs, their new environmental journal: The Rachel Carson Center (RCC) is …
Halcyon Journey: Searching for Kingfishers
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 …
One Long River of Song
Notes on Wonder By Brian Doyle Little, Brown and Co, 2019 During that small window of time this year when it seemed safe enough to travel abroad, this book was …
The best environmental books we’ve read in 2021
In 2016, we began compiling lists of the best books we read that year (new or old, it didn’t matter). And now here we are in 2021, and we’ve got …
Book Review: A Most Remarkable Creature
In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Bird of Prey Jonathan Meiburg has crafted an epic ode to the caracara, a long-overlooked …
How to Be Animal: Lessons in evolution for the human animal
Perhaps it is human nature to rank things. We rank cities and states and countries. We have the best restaurants and best movies; we even have best friends. And when …