Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.)
by Barbara Kingsolver
from Harper Perennial
Author Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to live a rural life—vowing that, for one year, they'd only buy food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an enthralling narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
by Robert M. Sapolsky
from Scribner
Robert Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers and other popular books on animal and human behavior, decided early in life to become a primatologist, volunteering at the American Museum of Natural History and badgering his high school principal to let him study Swahili to prepare for travel in Africa. When he set out to conduct fieldwork as a young graduate student, though, Sapolsky found that life among a Kenyan baboon troop was markedly different from his earlier bookish studies. Among other things, he confesses, he had to become a master of shooting anesthetic darts into his subjects with a blowgun to take blood samples, a mastery that required him to become "a leering slinky silent quicksilver baboon terror." He also had to learn how to negotiate the complexities of baboon politics, endure the difficulties of life in the bush, and subsist on cases of canned mackerel and beans.
His memoir is, in the main, quite humorous, although Sapolsky flings a few darts along the way at the late activist Dian Fossey--who, he hints, may have indirectly caused the deaths of her beloved mountain gorillas by her unstable, irrational dealings with local people--and at local bureaucrats whose interests did not often coincide with those of Sapolsky's wild charges. It is also full of good information on primates and primatology, a subject whose practitioners, it seems, are constantly fighting to save species and ecosystems. "Every primatologist I know is losing that battle," he writes. "They make me think of someone whose unlikely job would be to collect snowflakes, to rush into a warm room and observe the unique pattern under a microscope before it melts and is never seen again." --Gregory McNamee
"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming-of-age in remote Africa.
An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate's Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti -- for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects -- unique and compelling characters in their own right -- and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him.
By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate's Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.
The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild
by Craig Childs
from Little, Brown and Company
From one of the finest nature writers at work in
Whether recalling the experience of being chased through the Grand Canyon by a bighorn sheep, swimming with sharks off the coast of British Columbia, watching a peregrine falcon perform acrobatic stunts at 200 miles per hour, or engaging in a tense face-off with a mountain lion near a desert waterhole, Craig Childs captures the moment so vividly that he puts the reader in his boots.
Each of the forty brief, compelling narratives in THE ANIMAL DIALOGUES focuses on the author's own encounter with a particular species and is replete with astonishing facts about the species' behavior, habitat, breeding, and lifespan. But the glory of each essay lies in Childs's ability to portray the sometimes brutal beauty of the wilderness, to capture the individual essence of wild creatures, to transport the reader beyond the human realm and deep inside the animal kingdom
Training People: How to Bring Out the Best in Your Human
by Tess of Helena
from Chronicle Books
For centuries, dogs have known that they, not humans, run the show. But not all dogs know how to get the best from their people. Finally, from the leading expert in the field comes a straightforward, easy-to-use manual that's written for dogs by a dog. This indispensable reference provides foolproof advice on obtaining everything a dog deserves, from the best food and exercise to grooming and chauffeur services. Here are all the tools a dog needs for selecting, training, and living with a well-behaved human.
The Egg and I
by Betty Macdonald
from Harper Paperbacks
When Betty MacDonald married a marine and moved to a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she was largely unprepared for the rigors of life in the wild. With no running water, no electricity, a house in need of constant repair, and days that ran from four in the morning to nine at night, the MacDonalds had barely a moment to put their feet up and relax. And then came the children. Yet through every trial and pitfall—through chaos and catastrophe—this indomitable family somehow, mercifully, never lost its sense of humor.
A beloved literary treasure for more than half a century, Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I is a heartwarming and uproarious account of adventure and survival on an American frontier.
Dogs I Have Met: And the People They Found
by Ken Foster
from The Lyons Press
As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial
by Derrick Jensen
from Seven Stories Press
Two of America's most talented activists team up to deliver a bold and hilarious satire of modern environmental policy in this fully illustrated graphic novel. The US government gives robot machines from space permission to eat the earth in exchange for bricks of gold. A one-eyed bunny rescues his friends from a corporate animal testing laboratory. And two little girls figure out the secret to saving the world from both of its enemies (and it isn't by using energy-efficient light bulbs or biodiesel fuel). As the World Burns will inspire you to do whatever it takes to stop ecocide before it's too late.
Derrick Jensen, activist, author, and philosopher, is the author of Endgame, volumes one and two; A Language Older Than Words; and The Culture of Make Believe (a finalist for the 2003 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize), among other books. Jensen's writing has been described as "breaking and mending the reader's heart" (Publishers Weekly).
Activist and artist Stephanie McMillan began syndicating her daring political cartoons in 1999. Since then her work has appeared in dozens of publications and has been exhibited in museums across the country. A book based on her comic strip, Minimum Security, was published in 2005.
A Naturalist and Other Beasts: Tales from a Life in the Field
by George B. Schaller
from Sierra Club Books
Chapters describe stalking tigers in India and jaguars in Brazil’s Pantanal swamps, studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda and predator-prey relations in the Serengeti, tracking new species on the wild border of Vietnam and Laos, seaching for snow leopards in the Hindu Kush, and Schaller’s groundbreaking work with giant pandas in Sichuan.
Schaller’s new introductions set the scene for each chapter, and a new overall introduction looks back on his career. His own photographs appear throughout: of animals and their behavior, of fieldwork, of the author and his family “on location” in temporary homes from a hut in the African highlands to a tent in the snowy mountains of China.
It's a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life
by Keith Stewart
from Da Capo Press
A Cat Abroad
by Peter Gethers
from Ballantine Books
"Charming, witty, and winning...[A] delightful sequel."
SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
Norton charmed even the most avowed cat haters in the bestselling THE CAT WHO WENT TO PARIS. Now, in Peter Gethers' and Norton's further adventures, the extraordinary feline with the great Scottish Fold ears, is hightailing it to the south of France--and making pit stops all over the globe (with his favorite human, of course). Along the way, Norton and his human companion face change and learn to understand the problems and the pleasure that come with growing up and growing older together. Like its predecessor, A CAT ABROAD is funny, touching, and wise.
AN ALTERNATE SELECTION OF THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB
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