I’ve been passionate about the natural world since I was a child. This passion took me to many remote corners of the globe, and I always returned with a desire to share what I observed. As a science writer and journalist, I’ve been fortunate to tell multidisciplinary stories from the tops of the Andes to the reefs of Papua New Guinea and many places in between. As a writer, I know the importance of reading, and I’m constantly seeking out books by journalists and authors obsessed with topics that are often obscure but always fascinating—topics that have led them on journeys of exploration they share through their books.
I wrote
Chasing Shadows: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Great White Shark
I love how journalist Susan Casey takes us inside this story and ultimately becomes part of it while revealing remarkable facts about white sharks and the scientists who study them. As a journalist, I can relate to how her obsession almost drew her too deep into a largely unknown and dangerous place inhabited by an animal that was as much myth as reality to her before she came face to face with it.
There is a lot to like about this book, but for me, ultimately, the immediacy, honesty, and vividness of her writing made me unable to put it down.
Since "Jaws" scared a nation of moviegoers out of the water three decades ago, great white sharks have attained a mythical status as the most frightening and mysterious monsters to still live among us. Each fall, just twenty-seven miles off the San Francisco coast, in the waters surrounding a desolate rocky island chain, the world's largest congregation of these fearsome predators gathers to feed. Journalist Susan Casey first saw the great whites of the Farallones in a television documentary. Within months, she was sitting with the program's two scientists in a small motorboat as the sharks - some as long…
I love a book that reads like a novel but is outrageously well-researched and transports me to another time. I love vivid characters who provide me with new lenses to better understand better historical events I thought I already understood.
This fast-paced nonfiction book about the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks that gripped the nation and inspired Jaws kept me on the edge of my seat. It also provides a look at the shark science of the day and the perceptions that informed it. It's definitely a beach read!
Combining rich historical detail and a harrowing, pulse-pounding narrative, Close to Shore brilliantly re-creates the summer of 1916, when a rogue Great White shark attacked swimmers along the New Jersey shore, triggering mass hysteria and launching the most extensive shark hunt in history.
In July 1916 a lone Great White left its usual deep-ocean habitat and headed in the direction of the New Jersey shoreline. There, near the towns of Beach Haven and Spring Lake--and, incredibly, a farming community eleven miles inland--the most ferocious and unpredictable of predators began a deadly rampage: the first shark attacks on swimmers in U.S.…
When we're children, we're asked what we want to be when we grow up. But what if there isn't just one career for us in our lifetime? What if we can have a squiggly line career that spans professions and industries?
When a journalist becomes so obsessed with a story that she embarks on a global and often dangerous quest to uncover truths that many wish would remain hidden, I know the book she produces will be at the top of my “to read” pile the day it is released.
As someone who has reported extensively on wildlife crime and the ornamental fish trade, I could not put this book down. In the final equation, however, it was the bigger question that the book asked that has kept it front of mind for me all these years later: What is our relationship with wild things, and what dark places can we go if we allow our desire to own these things outweigh our respect for them.
A riveting journey into the bizarre world of the Asian arowana or "dragon fish" the world's most expensive aquarium fish-reveals a surprising history with profound implications for the future of wild animals and human beings alike. The Dragon Behind the Glass tells the story of a fish like none other: a powerful predator dating to the age of the dinosaurs. Treasured as a status symbol believed to bring good luck, the Asian arowana is bred on high-security farms in Southeast Asia and sold by the hundreds of thousands each year. In the United States, however, it's protected by the Endangered…
I love books about obsession, and when they are told through the mind of a thoughtful and intelligent journalist, all the better in my book! As a journalist who has covered fisheries at the intersection of science and sustainability, I knew I had to read this book. I knew it would be important, but I had no idea I would love it so much.
Like the best nonfiction books on my shelf, this one is multidisciplinary and includes science, history, crime, environmental justice, and more. I moved seamlessly through the narrative, which carried me from dock to boat, science to policy, history to global dilemma. When a book leaves me reconsidering my place in the world, as this one did, I know it’s one to which I will return.
This is a tale of human obsession, one intrepid tuna, the dedicated fisherman who caught and set her free, the promises and limits of ocean science and the big truth of how our insatiable appetite for bluefin transformed a cottage industry into a global dilemma.
In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and marked one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England's coast with a plastic fish tag. Fourteen years later that fish - dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys - died in a Mediterranean fish trap, sparking Karen Pinchin's riveting investigation into the marvels, struggles, and prehistoric…
Desperate to honor his father’s dying wish, Layken Martin vows to do whatever it takes to save the family farm. Once the Army discharges him following World War II, Layken returns to Missouri to find his legacy in shambles and…
As someone who has written extensively about one of the world’s most misunderstood fishes (the white shark), I knew I needed to read a book about what this author argues is the world’s most misunderstood waterfowl—the cormorant. I love books that draw you into the world of one thing only to teach you something about yourself.
I learned more than I ever expected about the cormorant, from its place in culture to cuisine, but ultimately, the book asks a much bigger question about our place in the world. Compassionately told, meticulously researched, and beautifully written, this book gave me a new lens through which to see not only this species but all species that have been maligned by humans throughout time.
Behold the cormorant: silent, still, cruciform, and brooding; flashing, soaring, quick as a snake. Evolution has crafted the only creature on Earth that can migrate the length of a continent, dive and hunt deep underwater, perch comfortably on a branch or a wire, walk on land, climb up cliff faces, feed on thousands of different species, and live beside both fresh and salt water in a vast global range of temperatures and altitudes, often in close proximity to man. Long a symbol of gluttony, greed, bad luck, and evil, the cormorant has led a troubled existence in human history, myth,…
Chasing Shadows is the remarkable conservation success story of the return of the white shark to the western North Atlantic as seen through the eyes of the shark biologist who (quite unexpectedly) found himself in the middle of it.
Artemis Sparke has had it with humans. She heads to the nearby salt marsh to hang out with the birds, plants, and mollusks who don't make a big deal of her stutter. The shoreline sanctuary is predictable, unlike her family and friends, and the data in her science journal proves…
Everybody knows that all animals—bats, bears, sharks, ponies, and people—start out as a single cell: the fertilized egg. But how does something no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence give rise to the remarkable complexity of each of these creatures?
