“I’m not afraid of snakes any more,” six-year-old Morgan declared. After spending a rainy day indoors with adults glued to computers and/or movies, she was ready to go outside. Remembering previous visits when I had taken her on walks, she knew that I was the adult she needed to impress. And I was impressed. She […]
Category: Books
New sales figures, slideshow
A new, retrospective catalog from Penn State Press, prepared to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, lists Outbound Journeys in Pennsylvania as its bestseller in the Keystone Books imprint, with over 10,000 copies sold since its publication in 1987. The sequel, More Outbound Journeys in Pennsylvania, hasn’t sold as well — only 3000+ — probably because people […]
Jeremiad
In honor of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s dire predictions, I found the following in Peter Matthiessen’s End of the Earth, published in 2003: I seek to understand phenomena that might help our self-destroying species to appreciate the shimmering web of biodiversity in the Earth process, the common miracles, fleeting as ocean birds, which […]
Sy Montgomery books for kids
I have read all three of the books by Sy Montgomery in the Houghton Mifflin “Scientists in the Field” series for kids in the 9 to 12 range. They are excellent. All have wonderful photos by Nic Bishop that accompany a fascinating text. The Snake Scientist discusses the thousands of red-sided garter snakes that hibernate […]