books
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Thoreau Thursday
All biographies end. And, of course, the ending is always the same. Nearing the literal and figurative end of Laura Dassow Walls’s magisterial life of Henry David Thoreau, I suddenly found myself not wanting to go on. I didn’t want him to die. Not right now. Not during our political upheaval. I started reading “Wild Apples” to…
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Thoreau Thursday
Orwell is our go-to guy for the political perversion of language, but I discover that Ralph Waldo Emerson was on a similar track a century earlier. Corruption of character leads to “the corruption of language,” he wrote in “Nature.” “In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding…
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Facing the Wind
Have you ever noticed how gulls, like these Ring-billed (Larus delawarensis) hunkered down at Bush Terminal, always face the wind? The better to take off into, of course, the better to fly. The specimen to the rear is a first winter bird, the one in front an adult. * “Thoreau’s quest for the “bottom” of…
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We Are Petroleum Junkies
Hydrocarbons are a dog-damned miracle. The things we get out of crude oil, from fuel to explosives, from fertilizers to clothing, from pharmaceuticals to candle wax, from pesticides to plastics, from asphalt to inks… it’s just mind-boggling. Mostly we think of gasoline, but that’s not the half of it. The stuff both powers and rules…
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Gotham Unwatered
Ted Steinberg’s Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York is a history of the de-watering of the region. From the Dutch on, but particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we have have pushed out the borders of the archipelago with landfill. The interior wet places have been drained, filled in, and covered…
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More Book Gifts
Richard Fortey‘s book about his four acres of Chiltern beechwood is just out in the U.S. This is a natural history in every sense, a kind of archeology of an ancient forest whose trees are barely a hundred years old. Sound paradoxical? Read on! “I believe that all organisms are as interesting as human beings,…
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Book Gifts
There’s nothing quite like a book. Erasmus had his priorities right: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” Alas, it’s now impossible to send the old boy a gift of a book, but I think you and yours might appreciate the following…
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City of Roosts
Rebecca Solnit is a writer I’ll follow anywhere. A few years ago, she produced an atlas of San Francisco that just called to my old geographer’s heart. Infinite City was followed by Unfathomable City, in which she teamed up with Rebecca Snedeker for an atlas of New Orleans. Now she and the wonderfully named Joshua…
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McCarthy on the Roof, With Wildflowers
Tomorrow night, Michael McCarthy will be speaking at Kingsland Wildflower Roof in Greenpoint, right next to the egg-shaped digesters of the sewer facility. McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy is just out from NYRB. I intend to write further about the book soon, but suffice for now to say that it is a most…
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The Trouble With Tibbles
Tibbles is right up there in the roll of famous cats, along with Hodge, who has a statue in Gough Square; Mrs. Chippy; and Unsinkable Sam, originally Oskar, who abruptly abandoned the Kriegsmarine for the Royal Navy and then proceeded to survive two more ships going down. Tibbles was the pet of Lyall the lighthouse keeper…
Backyard and Beyond 