A naturalist, teacher, and guide shares his appreciation for his home province in this debut collection of gorgeous photographs and watercolors.
This book offers everything you ever wanted to know about the flora and fauna of British Columbia but didn’t know enough to ask. Townsley was born in Vancouver, and when he was 7 years old, his father gave him a camera. His lovely book is a collection gathered from a lifetime of taking nature photographs, punctuated by the occasional watercolor (he’s a painter as well). Roaming through a half dozen geographical regions, he takes readers from British Columbia’s jaw-dropping rocky shores to its breathtaking mountains, with stops in between to gaze at whatever catches his eye. A lot does: an unexpected rainbow, a pussy willow in close-up, and the frostbit Lillooet River, which is like something out of a perfectly realized winter wonderland. Many of his images are so stunning one can only recommend viewing them, in its e-book format, on the largest screen available. In his introduction, Townsley says, “another comment I get on occasion is, ‘You must have a really good camera.’ I laugh and relate an analogy I heard years ago whereby someone really admired the work of a writer and stated, ‘You must have a really good typewriter.’ ” He is a fine photographer, but as a writer, his chapter introductions are little more than serviceable and sometimes borderline drab; his description of Victoria, for example, sounds like something straight from a tourist guide: “Known as the City of Gardens, Victoria is an attractive city and a popular tourist destination with a thriving technology sector.” And yet, once one realizes where Townsley’s true genius lies, one may come to enjoy the random factoids scattered among the photo captions. For example, he tips readers as to what’s edible and what’s not—Sagebrush buttercup, no; Crowberry, yes. The singularity of whatever he decides to point out becomes captivating in itself; for example, he notes that a raven is considered about as smart as most 7-year-old humans, and that harbor seals detect their prey by using nerves in their whiskers. Nature lovers will find much here to enjoy, as will Canada-philes.
A perfect gift for a friend with a mountain cabin and a coffee table.Pub Date: March 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7771-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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