Some books for the holidays

Ah, the codex! What a marvelous piece of technology the book is: simple, durable, potentially capable of lasting centuries (presuming it’s not a piece of paperback crap), and free from toxic batteries.

Books are all I want for the winter festive giving season — I mean, besides peace, love, and understanding. If you know somebody similar, then you may want to consider these B&B approved titles as gift ideas.

If you’ve ever paged unsuccessfully through a field guide and not found your target because it turns out to be an non-native species, then Peter Del Tredici’s Wild Urban Planets of the Northeast: A Field Guide is for you. The introduction is tonic. (I’ll be reviewing it in more detail soon).

For the anthropomorphic types on your list (and really, who isn’t?), the always stellar New York Review Books has just come out with an edition of Jules Renard’s Nature Stories, with lovely drawings by Pierre Bonnard. I’ve only seen some previews of it so far, but it looks delicious.
One of NYRB’s older volumes is the completely non-anthropomorphic The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker. Writing during the nightfall of DDT-ravaged birdlife, Baker’s slim book is as fierce, cold, and brilliant as a sharp jewel. Whether Baker succeeds in becoming animalmorphic — seeing the world through the eyes of the falcons — is besides the point, since the attempt is one of such bravado. (The first edition had an inexplicable image of a red-tailed hawk on the cover, but that faux talon has been rectified, the offending designer banished to the salt mines.)

Mapping New York, put out by Black Dog Publishing, joins their Mapping London and Mapping America. I haven’t seen the latter two, but if New York is any indication, these are a trio of juicy coffee table books. Collected in these pages are historic maps and new visions of geographic space, making for cartographic porn for the likes of an old geographer like me, who loathes the sheer ugliness of internet maps. A caveat: although a large volume, it’s still too damn small. Perhaps Paris will next be on their list?

If I had but bank and time enough… some other things I haven’t seen but am curious about: E.O. Wilson’s Anthill, Allen J. Coombes’ The Book of Leaves, and John Bevis’ Aaaw to Zzzzd: The words of birds.

And now, what books in the natural history realm are you looking at this season?