These are recent releases I am looking forward to reading, but if I don’t get around to reading them immediately, they would make good gifts!
The Hawk's Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty by Sy Montgomery
When Sy Montgomery went to spend a day at falconer Nancy Cowan’s farm, home to a dozen magnificent birds of prey, it was the start of a deep love affair. Nancy allowed her to work with Jazz, a feisty, four-year-old, female Harris’s hawk with a wingspan of more than four feet. Not a pet, Jazz was a fierce predator with talons that could pierce skin and bone and yet, she was willing to work with a human to hunt. From the first moment Jazz swept down from a tree and landed on Sy’s leather gloved fist, Sy fell under the hawk’s magnetic spell.
Over the next few years, Sy spent more time with these magnificent creatures, getting to know their extraordinary abilities and instincts. They are deeply emotional animals, quick to show anger and frustration, and can hold a grudge for years. But they are also loyal and intensely aware of their surroundings. In this mesmerizing account, featuring sixteen pages of gorgeous color photographs, Sy passionately and vividly reveals the wondrous world of hawks and what they can teach us about nature, life, and love.
First Montgomery gave us The Soul of an Octopus now comes a new wildlife love story, this one takes place in the skies above.
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays by Barry Lopez, introduction by Rebecca Solnit
An ardent steward of the land, fearless traveler, and unrivaled observer of nature and culture in all its forms, Lopez lost much of the Oregon property where he had lived for over fifty years when it was consumed by wildfire, likely caused by climate change. Fortunately, some of his papers survived, including five never-before published pieces that are gathered here, along with essays written in the final years of his life; these essays appear now for the first time in book form.
These essays offer an autobiography in pieces that a reader can assemble while journeying with Lopez along his many roads. They uncover memories at once personal and political, including tender, sometimes painful stories from Lopez’s childhood in New York City and California; reports from the field as he accompanies scientists on expeditions to study animals; travels to Antarctica and some of the most remote places on earth; and to life in his own backyard, adjacent to a wild, racing river. He reflects on those who taught him: the Indigenous elders and scientific mentors who sharpened his eye for the natural world--an eye that, as the reader comes to see, missed nothing. And with striking poignancy and candor, he confronts the challenges of his last years as he contends with the knowledge of his mortality, as well as with the dangers the Earth—and all of its people--are facing.
Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris
Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.
But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.
As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son. And back on the road, he discovers a battle-scarred America: people weary, storefronts empty or festooned with Help Wanted signs, walls painted with graffiti reflecting the contradictory messages of our time: Eat the Rich. Trump 2024. Black Lives Matter.
In Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris once again captures what is most unexpected, hilarious, and poignant about these recent upheavals, personal and public, and expresses both the misanthropy and desire for connection that drive us all. If we must live in interesting times, there is no one better to chronicle them than Sedaris.
The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte
In his previous book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, Brusatte, gave readers a definitive history of the dinosaurs. Now, picking up the story in the ashes of the extinction event that doomed T-rex and his kind, he explores the remarkable story of the family of animals that inherited the Earth: mammals.
Beginning with the earliest days of the mammal lineage some 200 million years ago, Brusatte charts how mammals survived the asteroid that claimed the dinosaurs and made the world their own, becoming the furry animals that we know, love, and sometimes fear. The mammals we share the planet with today, though, are simply the few survivors of a once-verdant family tree, which has been pruned by time and mass extinctions. Saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, and bears three times the weight of a grizzly are but a few of the creatures we learn about along the way. The story concludes, of course with us—human beings—a mammal species that has so thoroughly dominated the Earth that we ourselves have triggered an extinction event that has claimed an estimated 80% of wild mammals in the last century.
O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by Mark Clague
Mark Clague weaves together the stories of the song and the nation it represents. Examining the origins of both text and music, alternate lyrics and translations, and the song’s use in sports, at times of war, and for political protest, he argues that the anthem’s meaning reflects—and is reflected by—the nation’s quest to become a more perfect union. From victory song to hymn of sacrifice and vehicle for protest, the story of Key’s song is the story of America itself.
Each chapter in the book explores a different facet of the anthem’s story. In one, we learn the real history behind the singing of the anthem at sporting events; in another, Clague explores Key’s complicated relationship with slavery and its repercussions today. An entire is chapter devoted to some of the most famous performances of the anthem, from Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock to Roseanne Barr at a baseball game to the iconic Whitney Houston version from the 1991 Super Bowl. At every turn, the book goes beyond the events to explore the song’s resonance and meaning.
I grew up close to Fort McHenry, so know the story behind Francis Scott Key’s inspiration for writing his lyrics. But I did not know how it rose to become the nation’s one and only anthem and today’s magnet for controversy. O Say Can You Hear? raises important questions about the banner; what it meant in 1814, what it means to us today, and why it matters.
Shifty's Boys by Chris Offutt
Offutt first introduced us to Mick Hardin in The Killing Hills. Now Army-CID-officer-cum-unofficial-PI Mick Hardin is up against unforeseen forces who will stop at nothing. Once again the clans that populate the hollers and their ways show shades of violence.
Mick Hardin is home on leave, recovering from an IED attack, when a body is found in the center of town. It’s Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see it as an occupational hazard. But when Barney’s mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, it seems there’s more to the killing than it seems. Mick should be rehabbing his leg, signing his divorce papers, and getting out of town—and most of all, staying out of the way of his sister Linda’s reelection as Sheriff—but he keeps on looking, and suddenly he’s getting shot at himself.
HAPPY FATHERS DAY
REMEMBER TO SHOP LOCAL
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