I’m a bird-watching addict, and I’m not alone. Birds have fascinated humans since ancient times—as omens for generals and kings, weathervanes for farmers, a source of food for all and sundry, and as symbols throughout classical Greek literature.
Aristophanes’ Birds turns up the dial, by having birds as the central characters in this comic masterpiece, which won second prize at the City Dionysia festival in 414 BCE.
I love this play because it remains accessible two-and-a-half millennia later. The jokes remain fresh, sometimes bawdy, and so relevant it’s almost scary. Also, the conception is daring, as the birds intercept the savory sacrificial offerings that humans are sending heavenward and, thus, are able to replace the Olympian gods as rulers of the world.
Aristophanes's satirical masterpieces, immensely popular with the Athenian public, were frequently crude, even obscene. His plays revealed to his contemporaries, and now teach us today, that when those in power act obscenely, patriotic obscenity is a fitting response. Until now English translations have failed to capture Aristophanes's poetic genius. Aaron Poochigian, the first poet-classicist to tackle these plays in a generation, offers "effortlessly readable and genuinely theatrical" (Simon Armitage) versions of four of Aristophanes's most entertaining, provocative and lyrically ingenious comedies, finally giving twenty-first-century readers a sense of the subversive pleasure audiences felt when these works were first performed on…
Inheritors of the Earth is the best book on biodiversity and conservation I’ve read. That’s because Chris Thomas takes a balanced approach to the survival of the world’s species. He finds reasons for optimism, without ignoring the serious challenges ahead.
Why do I love this book? I discovered it on Shepherd.com and soon found it provided invaluable background for my novel in progress.
But most of all Chris’s writing is so engaging, passionate, and funny. His hands-on research has taken him to far corners of the world and, while his currency is scientific, his views are grounded in a philosophy that humanity is part of nature, and that changes in the environment are both inevitable and not necessarily bad.
THE TIMES, ECONOMIST AND GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017
It is accepted wisdom today that human beings have irrevocably damaged the natural world. Yet what if this narrative obscures a more hopeful truth?
In Inheritors of the Earth, renowned ecologist and environmentalist Chris D. Thomas overturns the accepted story, revealing how nature is fighting back.
Many animals and plants actually benefit from our presence, raising biological diversity in most parts of the world and increasing the rate at which new species are formed, perhaps to the highest level in Earth's history. From Costa Rican tropical forests to the thoroughly…
For anyone who loves birds and nature like I do, seeing a wild California Condor soaring over a jagged rock face is a peak experience. Reading John Nielsen’s Condor makes this all the more meaningful as he chronicles the species’ decline over the last ten thousand years, as well as the equally dramatic story of its recovery.
It’s hard to believe there was controversy as recently as the 1980s over the need to save the Condor. Nielsen describes the competing interests, with detailed profiles of the key players.
For me, the most emotionally gripping part of the book was Nielsen’s description of the epic struggle of “Igor,” the last condor not in captivity, to remain free. It’s true that the scientists’ plan to increase the condors’ numbers by allowing them to breed safely in zoos ultimately succeeded. But I couldn’t help rooting for Igor as, time and again, he evaded the humans’ schemes to remove him from his natural home.
The California condor has been described as a bird "with one wing in the grave."
Flying on wings nearly ten feet wide from tip to tip, these birds thrived on the carcasses of animals like woolly mammoths. Then, as humans began dramatically reshaping North America, the continent's largest flying land bird started disappearing. By the beginning of the twentieth century, extinction seemed inevitable.
But small groups of passionate individuals refused to allow the condor to fade away, even as they fought over how and why the bird was to be saved. Scientists, farmers, developers, bird lovers, and government bureaucrats argued…
A senseless murder stuns a quiet South Jersey suburb. No grieving parents come forward to claim the unknown girl’s body, and there’s no physical evidence. The local media are casting blame. A mini-culture war is brewing...
So what do the civic leaders do? They hire Bruno X, Psychic Detective. His psychic shtick is totally unorthodox, yet, somehow he gets results. Now, can he solve the mysteries locked inside the old Quaker meeting house?
And what about the violet crow? Is it a maltese-falcon-like thing of value, or something else entirely? Here’s a clue: the word for “bird” in ancient Greek also means omen. And sages say this reappearance of The Violet Crow portends a new novel by Michael Sheldon, Reveille in Birdland, landing in 2024.
