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The Atlas of Birds: Diversity, Behavior, and Conservation by Mike Unwin
This book review blog has gone to the birds! As any frequent reader must have noticed, I have written many reviews of bird-related books lately. In front of me now is The Atlas of Birds: Diversity,...
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My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
At a time when memoirs are fashionable, Sonia Sotomayor has published an autobiography. My Beloved World is not her full life story, ending the book with becoming a federal judge in 1992 after being...
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This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon by Nancy Plain
I think the first biography that I ever read was John Audubon, Boy Naturalist by Miriam Evangeline Mason, a 1962 publication in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. I think I read it in a single...
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A Practical Illustrated Guide to Attracting and Feeding Backyard Birds: the...
With the title A Practical Illustrated Guide to Attracting and Feeding Backyard Birds: the Complete Book of Bird Feeders, Bird Tables, Bird Baths, Nest Boxes, and Garden Bird-Watching, there is hardly...
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Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the...
I enjoyed its reviews in newspapers and podcasts, and Bonnie and other readers whose opinions I trust recommended this book. I remember the story from 2010 as amazing and compelling. The probability...
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Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a...
Carol Wall and her husband Dick never enhanced their yard. There were not any flowers, the grass was patchy, and the shrubs and trees looked weary, in need of pruning and rejuvenation. The couple was...
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Real Story Sale with Free Reader's Advisory Training
The Annual Conference of the American Library Association opens today in San Francisco with pre-conference sessions and a scattering of group meetings. On Friday, after the Opening General Session, the...
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How About Never - Is Never Good for You?; My Life in Cartoons by Bob Mankoff
I seldom pick up The New Yorker now, but there was a time when once a week I would take the latest copy from the library's magazine room to our lunch room to read the cartoons during lunch. I would...
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A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-town Pastor's Son Ruined an American...
Recently, newspapers and social media splashed the story of actor Ben Affleck trying to hide his descent from a slaveholder from viewers of PBS's Finding Your Roots. Like author Nathaniel Hawthorne who...
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Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great...
What forces shaped the culture, politics, and economy of the American South? The factors were many - it was not one man's doing - but NPR correspondent and author Steve Inskeep suggests that one...
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The Melting World: A Journey Across America's Vanishing Glaciers by...
I had two primary reasons for reading in The Melting World: A Journey Across America's Vanishing Glaciers by Christopher White. The first was my general interest in environmental issues and the...
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The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family by Roger Cohen
In the case of The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family by Roger Cohen, the subtitle is a better indicator of its subject than the title. Cohen's book is not focused on one...
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The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy by Rachel Joyce
In her comments after writing The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, Rachel Joyce said that she resisted writing this companion book to her wildly popular The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. She...
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Fastest Things on Wings: Rescuing Hummingbirds in Hollywood by Terry Maseur
I have read bird rescue stories before, but I never imagined that emergency relief could specialize in just hummingbird rescue. I realize that hummers differ from other birds in some ways and emergency...
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Welcome to the Neighborwood by Shawn Sheehy
As a parent and librarian, I have seen many children's pop-up books in my years, but I can not recall one I like better than Welcome to the Neighborwood by Shawn Sheehy. Its eight pop-up scenes of...
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The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt by David...
Having grown up and stayed in Akron, Ohio, David Giffels tells in The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt of seeing most of his friends move far away. They were not the only...
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Death of a Chimney Sweep: A Hamish MacBeth Mystery by M. C. Beaton
A chimney sweep was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is unclear whether he was the first to die in this entertaining mystery set in Scotland, but he gets top billing on its book cover. The...
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Tooth and Claw: Animal Adventures in the Wild by Ted Lewin
"Close Encounters with Dangerous Animals" is the subtitle I would have given Ted Lewin's book Tooth and Claw: Animal Adventures in the Wild. Perhaps that would have been too sensational, but Lewin...
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Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya by Jamaica Kincaid
Most people go to a garden center or trade cuttings with friends to collect plants for their gardens. In Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, author Jamaica Kincaid recounts how in 2003 she joined...
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Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New...
Living in New Orleans has always been dangerous. Hurricanes, flooding, and tropical diseases were among the natural dangers present even before widespread settlement. As a busy port for French and...
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Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape by Bill...
Bill McKibben is a well-known environmental activist and author. While inventorying our library's travel collection, I came across his 2005 title Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most...
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The Call of the Osprey by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent
I am finding more and more that my favorite books about birds are pitched at kids. Add to the list The Call of the Osprey by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, a title in the Scientists in the Field series from...
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Oh What a Slaughter: Massacres in the American West: 1846-1890 by Larry McMurtry
Americans do not know much about our Indian Wars.Think about it. Many of us know so much about the American Revolution, the Civil War, the world wars, and the Vietnam Conflict (war never being...
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Where Courage is Like a Wild Horse: The World of an Indian Orphanage by...
I have read several good books from the University of Nebraska Press, including the memoirs The Days are Gods by Liz Stephens and Works Cited: An Alphabetical Odyssey of Mayhem and Misbehavior by...
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The Mapping of Love and Death: A Maisie Dobbs Novel by Jacqueline Winspear
I have been slowly and occasionally reading from the collection of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs novels. With the author still writing them and my not binge-reading, I will for some time still...
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