books

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these three recent books about wasps were all written by entomologists. The business of science journalism, non-scientists interpreting the often obtuse communiques in scientific journals, is roaring, but wasps really need some loving professional attention by people who’ve spent their lives among them. Wasps, after all, are the…

While reading this, I heard it was nominated for a Pulitzer. Great news, because this book about the evolution of sound needs its profile raised. It’s an utterly fascinating and necessary read. Life and sound are intimately wrapped together over millions of years. This is a book covering the soundscape from syrinx to larynx, from…

In one sense, this is a rather depressing book. Nancy Lawson is the author of two books on the wilds of the backyard. This doesn’t seem to have had much effect on her neighbors. She’s surrounded by killers. Her neighbors are constantly felling trees, mowing and whacking, leaf-blowing, and, periodically, madly stomping on 17-year cicadas.…

Highly recommended. Jared Farmer’s Elderflora is unexpectedly dedicated “To the caretakers, living and dead, of Green-Wood Cemetery.” He notes elsewhere in the book that he began to outline the book in Brooklyn, so one has to assume he wandered among Green-Wood’s vales and dales when he lived here. There’s another Brooklyn connection: Edmund Schulman, of…

Princeton Nature is going strong these days. Eaton‘s book is a slim compendium of insect lore. Just a few of the entries: Amber, Delusory Parasitosis, Killer Bees, Seed Dispersal, Snow Insects, Xerces Society. I could, frankly, handle a lot more of it. Two things really jumped out at me. On the subject of insect decline,…

Before Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote three books about the sea, which have now been brought together in a single Library of America volume. Some of the science is dated, but these are still delightful and worthy books, and any beach-comber, actual or metaphorical, would do well to have this volume in hand. Catchy title,…

The cover of this book grabbed me like a raptor’s talons. This is Georg(e) Forster’s watercolor of a Striated Caracara, a species confined to the Falklands, made during Cook’s second voyage (1772-1775) in search of the southern continent. There are nine other species of caracaras, birds found almost exclusively in South America. There are also…

Chris Alice Kratzer’s guide to The Social Wasps of North America is out and about. If you’re interested in the social wasps, and I know you are, you should really look this one up. Kratzer uses an interesting digital graphic style of illustration: it’s generic, or should I say platonic, packing a lot of information…

Sumer is icumen in,/ Lhude sing cucu, begins one of the oldest songs in English. The distinctive call of the male Common Cuckoo, just returned from winter in sub-Saharan Africa, has long marked the return of spring to Europe. People used to write to the Times to report the date they first heard it for…