An imaginative introduction to a new dimension of the natural world.
Krause (Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World, 2002, etc.) chronicles his experiences with “[n]atural soundscapes…the voices of whole ecological systems.”
A professional musician since 1964, the author became fascinated with the possibilities created by modular synthesizers. He moved to California where he conducted workshops in electronic music and worked as a sound engineer for film studies, providing sound background for Rosemary's Baby, Apocalypse Now and other films. He also recorded In a Wild Sanctuary, “the earliest musical piece to use long segments of wild sound as components of orchestration, and also the first to feature ecology as its theme.” Krause learned to use stereo headphones, microphones and a portable recording system to record natural scenes, and he often recorded scenes at varying distances, tuning to different acoustic levels and frequencies to re-create an auditory image of a scene without the aid of visual cues, which ordinarily assist our hearing by screening out certain sounds while focusing on others. In this way he created a “soundscape” of a particular location. He captured the organ-like sounds of reeds and wind in northern Oregon, and his first scientific commission, after he received a doctorate in bio-acoustics, was the sound background for an exhibit of a waterhole in Kenya. In the years since, Krause’s study of different habitats has led him to conclude that “creatures vocalize in distinctive kinship with another,” each establishing its own sound niche and creating the rhythms of “the natural world.”
An imaginative introduction to a new dimension of the natural world.Pub Date: March 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-08687-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
A delightful book about a serious topic.
A chronicle of the author’s world travels savoring local honey and learning the intricacies of its production.
Tasmania-based journalist Pundyk unblushingly compares a taste of honey to having “an orgasm in your mouth.” Hyperbole perhaps, but her travels to Yemen, Russia, Italy, Turkey, China and elsewhere make it easy to give her the benefit of the doubt. As an experienced travel writer who has helped write the Welcome to My Country Series, the author has knack for discovering out-of-the-way destinations and interesting people, and a stalwart sense of adventure. She traveled alone through Yemen in search of one of the most expensive honeys in the world (five liters of sidr honey costs $150); tramped through a 3,700-acre forest on the outskirts of Moscow in search of a bee house; visited Wewahitchka in the Florida panhandle to look for Tupelo honey, remembering along the way the Van Morrison song of the same name, and the Elvis songs (“Queen Bee,” “Wild Mountain Honey”) she first heard in the 1970s as a young Australian woman. Pundyk includes countless bits of knowledge gathered during her many journeys—bees have been the “pollinators of the plant world” for at least 100 million years; “1.2 million metric tons of honey is produced worldwide each year,” yet in an entire lifetime one bee produces only a teaspoon of honey—but her main purpose is to explore the effects of globalization on honey. China, the largest honey producer and exporter in the world, has had numerous problems establishing quality controls, exporting “poor-quality, adulterated, and contaminated honey.” Pundyk also looks at the still-unanswered question of “colony collapse disorder,” which is decimating hives around the world, not only threatening honey production but the pollination of other major crops.
A delightful book about a serious topic.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-62981-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
Aging parents and a troubled, ne'er-do-well brother draw Brox home to the family farm in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, where she confronts an age-old dilemma: the conflict between familial duty and the need to live one's own life. Farming in contemporary New England is primarily an act of faith, much like the insistence of Brox's 83-year-old father on planting orchard saplings he'll never see bear fruit. Shunted to the margins of society, hemmed in by second-growth forest and sprawling suburbia, the family farm is further hamstrung by Sam, the surly, undependable scion whose cocaine abuse and erratic behavior jeopardize the operation's future. Into this generational vacuum steps Brox. With a poet's facility with language and an essayist's talent for finding significance in the quotidian, she forges compelling narrative from the workaday: short passages, rarely longer than five or six paragraphs, read like self-contained prose poems and create a cyclical, almost timeless chronology (it's unclear if she spends one season or more on the farm). Her lithe, lyrical descriptions of the seasonal variation of land and work- -demanding and bone-tiring in summer; insular and quietly contemplative in winter—pay gratifying tribute to a vanishing way of life. Though she perceptively and eloquently observes the natural and the man-made worlds (``Pollen clots the hand-dug pone''), she avoids examining closely the conflicts that divide her family. The subtext of their strained dinner conversation is the suppressed anger of arguments carefully avoided but unresolved. It comes as no shock when Brox decides she's not her brother's keeper, that her life lies beyond the farm. This slim book's surprising strength accrues line by line in Brox's keen observation and spare, poetic prose.
Pub Date: June 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-6200-6
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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