I was first a biologist, working with endangered species. Then I switched and spent fifteen years making nature documentaries with people like Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough. Then a humpback whale breached onto me when I was kayaking, this led to a life-changing adventure culminating in my becoming involved in efforts to use AI to translate the communications of whales! I wrote about this for my first book. My great passion was always reading and in becoming a writer I get to go deeper and more playfully into my favorite parts of filmmaking – following heroic and fascinating people on their adventures, reading hundreds of complicated scientific papers, and finding ways to connect these.
I wrote
How to Speak Whale: The Power and Wonder of Listening to Animals
This is a tiny little book and nowhere near as famous as her Silent Spring, but it doesn't need long to work its magic.
The Sense of Wonder helps you lay aside the habit you've developed of ignoring things you think you know, the familiar. To head into the woods with a child and hold back from telling them what things are and instead to see things with them and through those eyes.
I've done this with my daughters and have seen worlds I would have missed with them. As Carson writes: “Exploring nature with your child is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies all around you."
First published a half-century ago, Rachel Carson's award-winning The Sense of Wonder remains the classic guide to introducing children to the marvels of nature In 1955, acclaimed conservationist Rachel Carson-author of Silent Spring-began work on an essay that she would come to consider one of her life's most important projects. Her grandnephew, Roger Christie, had visited Carson that summer at her cottage in Maine, and together they had wandered the surrounding woods and tide pools. Teaching Roger about the natural wonders around them, Carson began to see them anew herself, and wanted to relate that same magical feeling to others…
I read this book thinking I'd learn about a speedy little 40g bird that never stops flying and that people used to think flew to the moon in winter.
But the book is a non-fiction love song to all life on earth that spins outward weaving together everything it has taken to make a world that could have swifts in it. It is literally wonder-ful and a masterpiece.
It takes a whole universe to make one small black bird
The bestselling author of Crow Country and writer of The Guardian's Country Diary tells the story of all life on Earth through a single day spent in the company of swifts.
'A jewel of a book' Caroline Lucas MP
Swifts are among the most extraordinary of all birds. Their migrations span continents and their twelve-week stopover, when they pause to breed in European rooftops, is the very definition of summer. They may nest in our homes but much about their lives passes over our heads. No birds are more…
In the first century, Rome’s celebrated love poet Ovid finds himself in exile, courtesy of an irate Emperor, in the far-flung town of Tomis. Appalled at being banished to a barbarous region at the very edge of the Empire, Ovid soon discovers that he has a far more urgent -…
This was one of those books that as I got past the halfway point I became sad as I realised I was heading towards the ending.
Set in prehistory, this book follows a young apprentice shaman making his way in a small hunter-gatherer band. I've never read a book that does such a good job of helping me live in my mind outside of our modern civilsation and with something approaching the view of the rest of the living world that our ancestors may have had.
'Vivid and beautiful . . . Astonishing' - Guardian
'A thrilling journey through an age of ice and stone - one of Kim Stanley Robinson's best!' - Greg Bear
An award-winning and bestselling SF writer, Kim Stanley Robinson is widely acknowledged as one of the most exciting and visionary writers in the field. His latest novel, 2312, imagined how we would be living 300 years from now.
Now, with his new novel, he turns from our future to our past - to the Palaeolithic era, and an extraordinary moment in humanity's development. An emotionally powerful and richly detailed portrayal of…
I read this book at Cambridge University over 20 years ago when this was already 50 years old, and I can still remember the corner of the library I was in when I read the essay in it called Odyssey where he imagines the history of two atoms.
Starting from their beginnings in rocks and then as they move through ecological systems and different life forms – oak roots, buffalo, native peoples, settler wheat and cattle, and down with their muck out to sea. It was like a hallucination of nature writing and afterwards I saw what he described whenever I went into living systems. Vivid and crisp still, after all these years.
Few books have had a greater impact than A Sand County Almanac, which many credit with launching a revolution in land management. Written as a series of sketches based principally upon the flora and fauna in a rural part of Wisconsin, the book, originally published by Oxford in 1949, gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa, Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; a final section addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. Beloved for its description and evocation of the natural world, Leopold's book, which has sold…
Creativity, Teaching, and Natural Inspiration
By
Mark Doherty,
I have woven numerous delightful and descriptive true life stories, many from my adventures as an outdoorsman and singer songwriter, into my life as a high school English teacher. I think you'll find this work both entertaining as well as informative, and I hope you enjoy the often lighthearted repartee…
I'm recommending this entire lovely collection of stories for the one called "The Great Silence". It is told from the perspective of an endangered parrot discussing the Arecibo telescope.
It was written as an installation to be played on the telescope. It's a short story but also an astonishingly punchy compressed non-fiction primer on animal communication, but most importantly it will make you cry and you will read it again and again and again.
'Lean, relentless, and incandescent.' Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys
This much-anticipated second collection of stories is signature Ted Chiang, full of revelatory ideas and deeply sympathetic characters. In 'The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate,' a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and the temptation of second chances. In the epistolary 'Exhalation,' an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality. And in 'The Lifecycle of Software Objects,' a woman cares for…
I'm a wildlife filmmaker and had always been fascinated by whales, but when one breached onto my kayak, someone filmed my near death and it went viral, and then scientists used AI to identify the whale and tell me its life story I became obsessed with where this was leading.
I discovered a revolution taking place in biology as machines help us see other species lives as they really are. This book traces my investigation into the deep ocean and the cutting-edge science of animal translation. What would it take to speak with a whale? Are we ready for what they might say?
Four years old and homeless, William Walters boarded one of the last American Orphan Trains in 1930 and embarked on an astonishing quest through nine decades of U.S. and world history.
For 75 years, the Orphan Trains had transported 250,000 children from the streets and orphanages of the East Coast…
In the harrowing aftermath of Chornobyl's meltdown in 1986, the fate of Eastern Europe hangs by a thread.
From Beijing, American radiation scientist Lara, once a thorn in the Russian mob's side, is drawn back into the shadows of the Soviet Union on the Trans-Mongolian Express. She isn't alone. Anton,…
