Reviews
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The Genius of Birds
Birds can see more of the light spectrum than we can; they can re-generate their hearing while we lose ours as we age; some of them have acute senses of smell that helps them find food, and home. Jennifer Ackerman’s new book is a synopsis of recent scientific discoveries about birds. If you are not…
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Many Forests Gone
Eric Rutkow’s American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation is a history of America’s woodlands. It is therefore a history of loss: the great forests that once stretched from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi were certainly touched in part by native Americans, who burned for deer parks and plots for seasonal…
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Whalers, Ho!
During the First World War, whale oil was used to make glycerin for explosives. The irony here is leviathan: huge numbers of whales were killed so that parts of them could be used to slaughter huge numbers of humans. Other fats could be used for glycerin, but the British didn’t want to use these other…
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Humboldt
Across the street from the southeastern corner of the Museum of Natural History is the Naturalists’ Gate to Central Park. Besides it is this massive bust of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the great German explorer, naturalist, and geographer. The bronze was unveiled on the 100th anniversary of his birth as part of the world-wide celebrations of his…
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The Narrowest Edge
“We so easily settle for the diminished world around us, a world that, in terms of the richness and abundance of plant and animal life, may be a mere 10 percent of what once was. Unaware of what we have lost, we can’t imagine what we might restore, and instead, we argue over how many…
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Owls In Culture
Did you know Florence Nightingale had a pet Little Owl? She rescued it and named it Athena, after the Greek goddess, who was ssociated with owls (so much so that the binomial for this European species is Athene noctua). When Nightingale — the first person named after the English version of Firenza, by the way,…
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Turf and Owl
I’ve been reading Neil MacGregor’s Germany: Memories of a Nation, a deeply thought-provocking work even with its sprawling and superficial, in the best sense, scope. I wanted to make a note of Dürer’s famous rhinoceros, highlighted in a chapter on the master, in these pages of blog, but a pebble dropped into the mines of…
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Last Ocean
The Last Ocean by John Weller, published by Rizzoli. This year, I’m going to try to be systematic with my natural history reviews. I begin with a remarkable book of photography. Darwin knows, there’s a lot of nature photography out there on-line, in print, and on TV (and DVD etc.). A lot of it is…
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Be Thankful
Enjoy this Liriodendron arching up towards the sun, and be thankful that I am not reviewing David Waltner-Toews’s The Origin of Feces today, although it should be on everyone’s reading list. After all, “farm-to-table” is not nearly the complete cycle…. Happy Thanksgiving!
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White’s Selborne
Have you read Richard Mabey’s rousing defense of nature writing? You should. I’ll wait here until you return. Mabey quite rightly marks the beginnings of nature writing in English with Gilbert White (1720-1793), the British country parson whose Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne I’ve finally come around to reading. Mostly: I picked up a…
Backyard and Beyond 