Kategoria BISAC: Nature >> Essays

In Insect Poetics, the first book to comprehensively explore the cultural and textual meanings of bugs,...

For years, serious naturalists have treasured their copies of Francis Harper's naturalist's edition of "The Travels of William Bartram" as the definitive version of Bartram's pioneering survey. Complete with notes and commentary, an annotated index, maps, a bibliography, and a general index, this classic is now back in print for the first time in decades. Harper's knowledge of natural history transforms Bartram's accounts of the southern states from a curious record of personal observation from the past into a guidebook useful to modern biologists, historians, ornithologists, and...

"Reading the Roots" is an unprecedented anthology of outstanding early writings about American nature--a rich, influential, yet critically underappreciated body of work. Rather than begin with Henry David Thoreau, who is often identified as the progenitor of American nature writing, editor Michael P. Branch instead surveys the long tradition that prefigures and anticipates Thoreau and his literary descendants.

The selections in "Reading the Roots" describe a diversity of landscapes, wildlife, and natural phenomena, and their authors represent many different nationalities, cultural...

Before the novel and the film Deliverance appeared in the early 1970s, any outsiders one met along the Chattooga River were likely serious canoeists or anglers. In later years, untold numbers and kinds of people have felt the draw of the river s torrents, which pour down the Appalachians along the Georgia-South Carolina border. Because of Deliverance the Chattooga looms enigmatically in our shared imagination, as iconic as Twain s Mississippi--or maybe Conrad s Congo.

This is John Lane s search for the real Chattooga--for the truths that reside somewhere in the river s...

My memory is etched with a clear image of how that bird swung into view and hung over me, suspended like an angel, so starkly black and white, with its wide-scissored split of a tail.

It took just one sighting of a swallow-tailed kite to dispatch Susan Cerulean on a pilgrimage through its fragmented and ever-shrinking habitats. In "Tracking Desire," Cerulean immerses us in the natural history and biology of "Elanoides forficatus." At the same time, she sifts through her past--as a child, student, biologist, parent, and activist--to muse on a lifelong absorption with nature.

Once at...

After he was handed an old broken-down bamboo fly rod, Frank Soos waited several years before he cautiously undertook its restoration. That painstaking enterprise becomes the central metaphor and the unifying theme for the captivating personal essays presented here.

With sly wit and disarming candor, Soos recounts fly-fishing adventures that become points of departure for wide-ranging ruminations on the larger questions that haunt him. Coming to terms with his new rod in On Wanting Everything, Soos casts a skeptical eye on the engines of consumerism and muses on the paradox of how a...

To his legions of readers, Gene Logsdon is best known as the Contrary Farmer. His writings, which blend commonsense advice, curmudgeonly wit, and respect for the earth, are manna to anyone who wants to live, as Logsdon puts it, "at nature's pace."

"The Pond Lovers" is Logsdon's ode to the watery microcosms all around us, from the half-acre farm pond to the suburban garden pool. Readers looking for hands-on experience will find plenty of pond-keeping dos and don'ts. Logsdon's higher purpose, however, is to proclaim the natural, spiritual, and recreational benefits of ponds.

Fed by...

In sixteen stories Steve Daubert pulls the reader into the mystery and immediacy of ecological processes spanning a range from microscopic to tectonic, from microscopic to cosmic forces. Each tale brings the reader into the moment to witness an episode of survival in the wild first-hand. The material is presented on a level of intimacy and detail not usually encountered in other styles of natural history writing.

These creative non-fiction stories provide not just a bird's eye view (though that's true for the owls, warblers,...

"Shoreline: Seasons at the Lake" touches the reader on many levels: as a memoir, a biography, a history and as a study of nature. As the narrative moves forward through a series of beautifully written meditative essays, it explores the intimate details of nature, relationships, structures, and events, which have shaped the author's memory of her family's summer lake home and community. Shultz visits her history and her present, exploring the northern environment of Michigan's lower peninsula, the development of an unusual summer community within that environment, and the growth of an...

In these pages, readers encounter a profusion of natural settings:

-- Larry Glass considers the contrast between urban and rural life from his Allegheny Mountain retreat;

-- Carol Kosarek records a violent encounter between her dog and an...