An eloquent love letter to bees.
A British naturalist offers crisp essays on her relationship with bees.
In her debut book, Howard, a devoted bee advocate, pens a lengthy, knowledgeable, and occasionally poetic tribute to honeybees, bumblebees, and other buzzy creatures. She pays attention to the much-publicized, recent dearth of bees but also focuses much of her attention on bees’ role in nature—to pollinate flowers, plants, and trees. As she notes, the author’s husband is a professional beekeeper, but this book is a personal journey about Howard falling in love with bees while in her 40s. The narrative is frequently eye-opening and profound, marked by the author’s dry wit and graceful writing. “As my interest in bees has grown,” she writes, “so has my awareness of everything that surrounds them or connects them to the web of life they exist within. I feel as though I have embarked on a never-ending journey, a journey that spirals continuously outwards, gathering momentum and taking on a life of its own as it sweeps up all the wondrous, wild things that fly, swim, walk, or crawl in its wake….If I could draw the route of my journey, I suspect it might look a little like a spider’s web, dotted here and there with treasures.” Howard also provides a nice balance between the very real science of studying bees and their function in nature and her cleareyed and eloquent observations about the natural world. Because of that balance, what might have sounded like a dry lecture turns into something far more interesting. Whether she’s explaining how different bee species are classified, describing her mother’s deteriorating health (and eventual death), or simply ruminating on the beauty around her, Howard creates a text that is compelling and worth your time even if you’re not a fellow bee advocate.
An eloquent love letter to bees.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60358-848-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chelsea Green
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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