Book Recommendations: Fresh Pond Reading Group March 19, 2008

Chet and Maureen Raymo : Written in Stone
The story translates the slow motion of geologic time into a gripping account of the forces that shaped our familiar landscape from Maine to New Jersey. In vivid, non-technical prose, Written in Stone traces the geologic changes in the Northeast since North America perched on the equator and dinosaurs were young. Grand events unfold as continents collide, oceans disappear, mountain ranges rise and fall, and mass extinctions decimate entire species. Discover how the Northeast fits into a dramatic picture of global change, how geologic evolution controls climate and life, what events precipitated the last ice age, what sculpted New England's drumlins, eskers, and kettle holes.

Books by Sue Hubbell:
A Country Year
When her thirty-year marriage broke up, Sue Hubbell found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world. She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about. The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age.

Waiting For Aphrodite
In this wonderful new book Sue Hubbell takes us into the remarkable lives of the little-known creatures that really run the world: earthworms, corals, lightning bugs, pill bugs, millipedes, crickets, spiders, sea urchins, horseshoe crabs, and, most elusive and enigmatic of all, Aphrodite, the sea mouse. She also leads us on a journey through the mysteries of time -- geological, biological, and personal -- as she writes of the evolution of life on this planet and the evolution of her own life, from childhood next to a Michigan graveyard to beekeeping in the Ozarks and finally to a tower by the sea in Maine, where she waits and watches for Aphrodite.

Richard Louv: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder
(No reviews were available)

Nichols and Chesney: Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy
John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, founders of the national media reform group FREE PRESS, have put together a book of solid, fact-based information that reveals our so-called "liberal" free media to be little more than statist/corporate propaganda.

Rachael Carson: Silent Spring
Rachel Carson sent tremors through American society with the publication of her 1962 book "Silent Spring." Carson, a marine biologist who died two years after publication of the book, wrote "Silent Spring" when she received a letter from a concerned citizen lamenting the mass death of birds after a DDT spraying. Carson continues to serve as a touchstone for both mainline and radical environmental groups, from the Sierra Club to Earth First!.

Books by John Hay: The Way to the Salt Marsh, The Great Beach, The Immortal Wilderness, The Run
The Way to the Salt Marsh: This sampler contains essays from nine of his books, from _The Run_ (1959) to _In the Company of Light_ (1998), as well as several of Hay's poems and his John Burroughs Medal acceptance address. Here you will follow and see along with him as if on the same trail, gleaning tidbits of natural science in the process. Shorelines and wetlands are the main areas featured -- mostly in New England, and often in Cape Cod -- though a few forays take us to Florida and to the rainforest of Costa Rica. Read Hay's insights into the intricacies of salt-water habitats, and you're apt to see more the next time you go beach-combing yourself -- from the smallest creatures in the water to the larger ones winging above you. Here you will also run across Hay's astute environmental observations and admonishments:

Books by David Gessner: The Prophet of Dry Hill, Return of the Osprey, a Wild, Rank Place
Lyrical and stylish in writing, Gessner is able to create vivid pictures with his words. This gift allows us to be transported to Cape Cod beaches to share with him in his observations on the Osprey's, nature in general, and life, as it can and should be., Gessner writes in the best traditions of Thoreau or Emerson. Gessner talks about the life history and behavior of the Osprey, its near extinction and it's recent comeback on the Cape. He does this while exploring the world around him and uses the story of the Osprey as a way of looking at man's role in nature.

Sy Montgomery: The Wild Out Your Window: Exploring Nature Near At Hand
The Wild Out Your Window: Exploring Nature Near At Hand is a wonderful and highly recommended collection of fifty essays by naturalist and Sy Montgomery, most of which originally appeared in the Boston Globe column "Nature Journal," in which Sy invites the reader to share in a season-by-season exploration of the wonders of nature. Insightful, poignant, filled with reverence and wonder for the splendor of the world, The Wild Out Your Window is a "must read" for both armchair travelers and active nature enthusiasts.

Books by Robert Finch: Common Ground: A Naturalist's Cape Cod (also, The Primal Place)
Robert Finch's first book, is a collection of essays about the wildlife, ecology, and "nature" of Cape Cod. It is pure delight -- the kind of book you might want to read at the end of a perfect day, with a glass of sherry following a good meal. The essays are short and conversational, always literate and almost always insightful. This is not specialized nature-lore, but intelligent musing on the world of Cape Cod -- ants, foxes, broken-down houses, getting lost at night.