Laurie Zaleski’s Funny Farm: My Unexpected Life with 600 Rescue Animals is not only a memoir of a hardscrabble life but a lovely tribute to the woman who taught Laurie all she needed to create and run an animal sanctuary. Laurie’s mother, Annie McNulty, gave her the skills — hard work, determination, and a love …
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 …
Justin Barker is an American animal activist, producer, and author of Bear Boy: The True Story of a Boy, Two Bears, and the Fight to Be Free. He recently chatted with EcoLit Books about the experience of writing his animal rights memoir and his advice for young activists. You can read the EcoLit Books review …
In 1995, thirteen-year-old Justin Barker was begrudgingly browsing a used bookstore with his dad when he came across PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk’s Kids Can Save the Animals: 101 Easy Things to Do. Within days, young Justin learned about animal abuse on factory farms, went vegetarian, practiced his newfound phone advocacy skills, and started his own …
No one sees nature quite like a poet and Aimee Nezhukumatathil proves that in World of Wonders, her first book of prose. This collection of essays centers around Nezhukumatathil’s lifelong interactions with and observations of the natural world. Born to a Filipina mother and a father from South India, Nezhukumatathil grew up all over the United States due to the demands of her mother’s job as a psychiatrist, and was immersed in landscapes from New York to Arizona. She writes from both the poet’s perspective and as a person of color in a white-privileged world.
I approached Hope Jahren’s memoir, Lab Girl, with a bit of trepidation. You see, Jahren is an award-winning geobiologist who studies plants, making her area of expertise one in which I’ve never had much interest. (Confession: I can’t tell an oak from a maple or a peony from a petunia.) So when The New York …
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is a meditative, thought-provoking book about one of our most underestimated and underappreciated animals—the wild snail—and the ways in which the natural world can illuminate our own. When Elisabeth Bailey, normally an active person, is bedridden with a debilitating illness, she must cope not only with the …
