A persuasive invitation to get outside and bathe in nature, perfect for tree huggers and fans of the author’s other books.
The bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees returns with another heartfelt collection of essays celebrating the natural world.
In his latest, German forester and nature writer Wohlleben writes that while “there has been renewed interest in ways to immerse ourselves in nature,” many of us have ignored it. We have allowed our lives to become filled with artificial lights, sounds, and scents, all of which have adverse effects on our well-being. Drawing on scientific evidence and his many years of experience, the author extolls the wonders of the forest, including the calming effects of the colors and aromas of nature as well as the growing popularity of “forest bathing” as therapy. Wohlleben also points out the many direct health benefits of plants and trees—e.g., using willow bark to cure headaches, maple leaves to treat insect bites, and spruce resin to make chewing gum, not to mention the nutritional value that can be found in the leaves of a wide variety of plants across the world. The author discredits many of the myths that prevent people from exploring the outdoors, including fear of assault, encounters with dangerous animals, and exposure to allergens. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of conservation. Other topics include the introduction of invasive species to forests through global trade and tourism, the impact of fertilizers, and the link between the destruction of indigenous forests and climate change. In an attempt to raise awareness and protect ancient forests and their communities, Wohlleben describes the measures he has implemented in Germany, including the first burial grounds in which a person can choose the tree under which they will be laid to rest, programs offering leases for plots of forest, seminars for hunters to end fox hunting, and educational tours for children.
A persuasive invitation to get outside and bathe in nature, perfect for tree huggers and fans of the author’s other books.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77164-689-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
A passionate and practical overview of the importance of healthy lighting and how to achieve it.
Moore-Ede, an MD and professor at Harvard Medical School, examines the ways we illuminate our lives in this nonfiction debut.
In these pages, the author takes up a subject that will be relevant to virtually anybody who’s ever shopped for a laptop, smart tablet, or e-reader of any kind: the nature of artificial light, specifically the ways in which conventional fluorescent lighting and LED illumination can be harmful to human health, and what can be done to mitigate that harm or avoid it altogether. Moore-Ede outlines the ubiquity of the problem in our tech-saturated world: “Despite more than 20 years of scientific evidence showing that blue-rich light in the evening disrupts our circadian clocks, sleep, and health,” he writes, “we have created a world where virtually the only illumination you can buy is unchanging blue-rich light.” A good deal of the text is dedicated to explaining the nature of light and the particulars of modern lighting, but the author is also concerned with raising the profile of the problem itself, suggesting that a healthy “light diet” is “as essential for your health as the food you eat, the water you drink and the air you breathe.” Moore-Ede’s tone is clear and urgently pragmatic; readers are coached not only on making better choices about the lighting in every area of their lives, but also on determining what steps to take to guarantee better, more natural lighting. “You must be proactive,” he writes, “in asking for healthy circadian lighting in the spaces where you and your family spend significant time.” The book itself is visually inviting, full of colorful insets illustrating crisply summarized points, and includes copious resources for readers who want to follow up on the topic.
A passionate and practical overview of the importance of healthy lighting and how to achieve it.Pub Date: June 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798990686908
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Circadian Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all...
Science writer Ackerman (Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold, 2010, etc.) looks at the new science surrounding avian intelligence.
The takeaway: calling someone a birdbrain is a compliment. And in any event, as Ackerman observes early on, “intelligence is a slippery concept, even in our own species, tricky to define and tricky to measure.” Is a bird that uses a rock to break open a clamshell the mental equivalent of a tool-using primate? Perhaps that’s the wrong question, for birds are so unlike humans that “it’s difficult for us to fully appreciate their mental capabilities,” given that they’re really just small, feathered dinosaurs who inhabit a wholly different world from our once-arboreal and now terrestrial one. Crows and other corvids have gotten all the good publicity related to bird intelligence in recent years, but Ackerman, who does allow that some birds are brighter than others, points favorably to the much-despised pigeon as an animal that “can remember hundreds of different objects for long periods of time, discriminate between different painting styles, and figure out where it’s going, even when displaced from familiar territory by hundreds of miles.” Not bad for a critter best known for bespattering statues in public parks. Ackerman travels far afield to places such as Barbados and New Caledonia to study such matters as memory, communication, and decision-making, the last largely based on visual cues—though, as she notes, birds also draw ably on other senses, including smell, which in turn opens up insight onto “a weird evolutionary paradox that scientists have puzzled over for more than a decade”—a matter of the geometry of, yes, the bird brain.
Ackerman writes with a light but assured touch, her prose rich in fact but economical in delivering it. Fans of birds in all their diversity will want to read this one.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-521-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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