In my everyday world of responsibilities, I’m a writer, retired veterinarian, and freelance English editor for academic writing. But in my inner world of curiosity and obsessions, I’m forever a child with a profound longing to understand what the world is and how it works. Always searching on behalf of this forever child, I’ve read many a dull book about science, history, and writing. Despite having fascinating content, authors often flatten these subjects into featureless recitations. Happily, I’ve also found authors who express enthusiasm, expertise, or concern for their topic in prose that is as interesting in voice as it is in content.
This collection of poems addresses science, the history of science, philosophy, and religion. Arranged to mirror academic writing (introduction, methodologies,…
When I wanted to learn more about particles and particle physics, I found the number of books on the market overwhelming. But here’s a familiar name: Isaac Asimov. The cover looks like a recurring fever dream from my childhood, but the content is real and solid.
I read and re-read because it helped me understand atomic physics. And because it’s Asimov, who somehow manages to turn the periodic table into prose poetry.
“Amazing… If you’ve been searching for a basic text on how the atom works, this is it.” —Booklist
“A masterpiece.”—Omni
The legendary Isaac Asimov starts what is perhaps the most fascinating of all his books with a simple query: how finely can a piece of matter be divided? But like many simple questions, this one leads us on a far-flung quest for a final answer, a search that becomes a series of beautifully structured building blocks of knowledge.
It begins with the earliest speculations and investigations by the Greeks and Romans, and then, step by step and century by century,…
I love swamps and streams and rivers (and I’m learning to love the ocean), and I especially love the miniature ecosystems that Kimmerer studies and describes with such gentle care in this book. Sure, everyone’s read Braiding Sweetgrass. (Wait, you haven’t? What are you doing here?! Go! Read!) But have you read the one about moss?
Both books reminded me of why I am drawn to science, of how structured observation and research can illuminate complex and dynamic processes. But I found the science in this one more compelling. It’s a collection of graceful retellings focused on the intricacies of the exact kinds of watery habitats I love best.
Living at the limits of our ordinary perception, mosses are a common but largely unnoticed element of the natural world. Gathering Moss is a beautifully written mix of science and personal reflection that invites readers to explore and learn from the elegantly simple lives of mosses.
In this series of linked personal essays, Robin Kimmerer leads general readers and scientists alike to an understanding of how mosses live and how their lives are intertwined with the lives of countless other beings. Kimmerer explains the biology of mosses clearly and artfully, while at the same time reflecting on what these fascinating…
Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”
As the author chases the obscure Western red-bellied tiger beetle across New…
I can’t describe this book better than the author describes it: “While the American Revolution may have defined the era for history, epidemic smallpox nevertheless defined it for many of the Americans who lived and died in that time” (p. 273, 275).
Most of what I thought I knew about the Revolutionary War period ended up adjusted after reading this book. In straightforward prose that still manages to be poetic, Pox Americana forced me to examine both my educational history and the ways I had ingested and processed my education.
The astonishing, hitherto unknown truths about a disease that transformed the United States at its birth
A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.
By 1776, when military action and political ferment increased the movement of people and microbes, the epidemic worsened. Fenn's remarkable research shows us how smallpox devastated the American troops at Québec and…
This book is a guided tour through poetry’s potential and its cliches. At its heart, this book is a toolbox (that’s not my metaphor; it’s literally on the book’s cover).
I once harbored an ambition to support myself solely through writing (secretly, I still do), so I encountered Kooser’s opening advice with a combination of humor and denial: “You’ll never be able to make a living writing poems.” But once I accepted this very pragmatic and practical mindset, I began writing better. (And, oddly, writing more.)
This book helped me become a happier, more relaxed writer. As a bonus, I’ve found that the tools readily adapt to prose.
"No other poet seems better suited to represent the United States as its Laureate in this era than Ted Kooser, and The Poetry Home Repair Manual should enhance his grip on our slumbering Republic."-Larry Woiwode, Poet Laureate of North Dakota, in North Dakota Quarterly
Much more than a guidebook to writing and revising poems, this manual has all the comforts and merits of a long and enlightening conversation with a wise and patient old friend-a friend who is willing to share everything he's learned about the art he's spent a lifetime learning to execute so well.
Meet Lev Gleason, a real-life comics superhero! Gleason was a titan among Golden Age comics publishers who fought back against the censorship campaigns and paranoia of the Red Scare. After dropping out of Harvard to fight in World War I in France, Gleason moved to New York City and eventually…
Each chapter is a deep exploration of a single poem, highlighting sounds and words in ways the poems’ authors may or may not have intended. When I met this book, I had been writing poetry for years—unfocused drafts distilled from raw experience and emotion that I later revised into purposeful communication.
Then I read The End of the Poem. Suddenly, I wanted my poems filled with riddles and echoes, delicate Easter eggs for my readers. This book taught me there is an uncontrollable synergy between writers, words, and readers. Each reader will encounter a writer’s intentional (and unintentional) choices in a unique framework built on their own unique experiences in this world.
The End of the Poem contains the fifteen lectures delivered by Paul Muldoon as Oxford Professor of Poetry, from 1999 to 2004. Rather than individual and discrete performances, these lectures form a dazzling set of variations around the sustained theme of 'the end of the poem'. Each lecture explores a different sense of an ending: whether a poem can ever be a free-standing structure, read and written in isolation from other poems; whether a poem's line-endings are forms of closure (and where this might leave the poem in prose); whether the poem is completed only with the reader's act of…
This collection of poems addresses science, the history of science, philosophy, and religion. Arranged to mirror academic writing (introduction, methodologies, results, discussion, and conclusion), it presents an argument in poetry for bridging the divide between the sciences and the humanities.
Rooted in biology but branching into chemistry, physics, and cosmology, the poems express my deep longing to transform knowledge into knowing.
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto…
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd…
