On this 40th anniversary year of Earth Day, I can’t think of anything better to read than a biography of Rachel Carson, arguably the founder of the modern environmental movement. Though not necessarily new, Linda Lear’s biography RACHEL CARSON: A WITNESS FOR NATURE is well worth reading. It delves deeply into Carson’s life, loves and motivations, which offers remarkable insights into her career. It’s a scholarly but hardly dry read. I highly recommend this. (Paperback, $17.95) Recommended by Kelly.

Ernst Haeckel’s astonishingly beautiful scientific drawings from ART FORMS IN NATURE (KUNSTFORMEN DER NATUR) take you to another planet, one where strange and delicate Faberge eggs grow naturally; Haeckel drew them and carefully laid them out, arranged so that every aspect of them can be seen and admired. But Haeckel wasn’t just a talented draftsman and scientist — his colors are delicious and unusual, especially considering that he made these pieces in the early 1900s. (Paperback, $14.95) Recommended by John

Obsessions are hard to explain and even harder to justify if you’re a woman and they take you away from your family. Harder still if your obsession is “just” about birds. That’s why Olivia Gentile’s biography of Phoebe Snetsinger LIFE LIST is such an important book. Clearly, one of the world’s greatest birders, Snetsinger didn’t begin her career until she was 34 and had a suburban home, husband and four children. Therein lay the problem. To be the best birder in the world, you must embrace risk, overcome tremendous physical challenge, and you cannot–and Snetsinger would not–stay home. This is a fascinating book. (Hardcover, $26.00; due in paperback March, 2010). Recommended by Kelly.

Imagination & Place: An Anthology, published by Imagination & Place Press, the Committee on Imagination & Place of the Lawrence Arts Center

This eclectic anthology offers poems, essays, and fiction that broaden the conversation about place and its relation to the natural world and human culture. Edited by The Raven’s own Kelly Barth, it features works by Harley Elliott, Benjamin Grossberg, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Linda Rodriguez, and others.


Front cover painting(detail): Josh Adams, Untitled, 17″ x 17.875″, oil on panel, 2008.

The infamous 1967 McKinley climb of 1967 that took the lives of seven promising young mountaineers brought scandal and finger-pointing for years after. A climber himself and former Outside writer, Tabor tries to sift through the details and competing accounts (two of which were made into books of their own) to get to the still-beating heart of the matter. This is a riveting book.  Recommended by Kelly.

Kelly McMasters
author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town
public reading/discussion/signing
Thursday, April 2
7PM @ The Raven

Memoirist shares story of New York town’s environmental hazards.

Check Kelly out at http://www.kellymcmasters.com/

“Welcome to Shirley is an uplifting and disturbing hybrid of the personal and the journalistic.” –Meredith Hall

“This intimate portrait of hardscrabble Shirley, Long Island, shows through individual lives—and deaths—how environmental injustice works.” –Suzannah Lessard

(from book jacket)
“Kelly McMasters grew up loving her blue-collar hometown of Shirley. A service-town to the glittering Hamptons on the ast ent of Long Island, the place, though hardscrabble, was full of strong, hard-working families and an abundance of natural beauty. comforted by the rhythms of small-town life, Kelly and her neighbors were lulled into a sense of safety. But, while they were going to work and school, setting off fireworks at Fourth of July barbecues, or jumping through springklers in summertime, a deadly combination of working-class shame and the environmental catstrophe of a nearby leaking nuclear laboratory began to boil over.
This toxic helix reared its head again and again in the 1980s and ’90s, as Kelly and her family watched neighbors become ill and die….”

Please spread word of this event to anyone who cares about the environment, small towns, health, reading or creative nonfiction.

Social critic and environmental writer, Solnit, wrote this book in 2000 and it is now available in paperback.  The essays explore the way all of us get around in our world, by walking.  The author looks at literature: Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet who’s constant walking is both a part of the plot and a way of delineating her character, and she analyzes how our environment affects the way we are able to walk.  I especially loved Solnit’s essay on walking in Paris. This is a delightful book that would please anybody who loves to walk.

If you’re like me, you feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the environmental crisis and wonder whether small actions really make any difference. There’s healing to be found in a tiny, beautiful little book called FLIGHT OF THE HUMMINGBIRD by Haida native Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. Based on a Haida parable about the enormous potential of one committed to saving what she loves, the book’s contributing editors are Green Belt Movement founder and 2004 Nobel Prize winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It would make a great gift for the beleaguered environmentalist in your life and, appropriately, is printed on paper produced from sustainably harvested trees.  Recommended by Kelly.

ALEX AND ME by Irene Pepperberg is a riveting account of the scientific and unmistakably intimate emotional relationship between this animal behaviorist and her late and now famous African grey parrot Alex. More than anything Pepperberg’s work with Alex dispelled the myth of the “bird brain.” Her research adds to the mounting evidence that primates may not have cornered the market on self-awareness and emotional intelligence.  Recommended by Kelly.

Bethany College English professor Kristin Van Tassel has written a beautiful children’s book about the importance of eating locally and how many people around the world do just that. Not only does TOGETHER WE EAT THIS EARTH add to the dearth of children’s books written about Kansas, it also helps children understand the importance of soils, plants, and seeds and the people who sow them, a subject Van Tassel knows well since her husband David Van Tassel is a plant biologist with Wes Jackson’s Land Institute and a vegetable gardener in Salina. The beautiful illustrations by Priti Gulati Cox make this a perfect gift for a curious young child.  Recommended by Kelly.