If you want to know things like how the lives of a dikdik & a duiker differ (but you could tell them apart), this is the book for you!

Henry David Thoreau :: _Walden_ :: _The Maine Woods_
John Muir :: _My First Summer in the Sierra_ :: _Travels in Alaska_

The analogy is almost perfect. Each of these writer-naturalists is most often identified geographically with the setting of his best-known work (i.e., Walden Pond or the Sierra Mountains). Each was intrigued by a vastly different habitat located north of his usual stomping ground -- and was so enticed by that wilderness region that he made multiple visits and took copious notes on everything he saw. For Thoreau, it was the forests and mountains of Maine, while Muir delighted in the glaciers of Alaska. Both made their trips by water with native guides but also with at least one old friend along for companionship. They later produced travelogue essays and / or lectures about their journeys, both describing miles and miles of terrain and the very few residents they encountered along the way. Both _The Maine Woods_ and _Travels in Alaska_ chronicle the discoveries made during three separate trips: Thoreau's adventures occurred in 1846, 1853, and 1857; and Muir's happened in 1879, 1880 and 1890. Both men died of a lung disease (tuberculosis, pneumonia) before making final edits on the third portion, the last journey, of each book. Both of the resulting books were put together by surviving relatives and were published posthumously. Eerie, isn't it?

That being said, my advice to the reader of Thoreau is the same as written in my review of Muir's _Travels in Alaska_: Don't read this one first if you haven't read anything else by him. Read _Walden_ and some of the shorter travel pieces before moving on to _The Maine Woods_. Here Thoreau is at once fascinated by the thickness of the forests and appalled by the devastation caused by the lumber industry. You'll follow him up Mount Katahdin and canoe along with him on lakes and down rivers. You'll learn about the kind of true camping that could be done only in the wilds of sparsely-inhabited country. You'll see lots of trees and plants and animals and hear some of Thoreau's opinions about nature and mankind. And you'll be pleased to know that everyone returns home safely in the end.

Thoreau was asked on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God. His retort was, "I did not know we had ever quarrelled." Even though he told a friend that he would die without regret, these kinds of last-minute questions must have forced him to take quiet mental stock of the events of his life in search of something that didn't quite fit with his philosophy. It is said that his final words were "moose" and "Indian." I believe that, with those utterances, he had finally realized his sole regret in life: that he had witnessed the killing of several Maine moose -- the last one, by his Indian guide -- and had done nothing to stop the slaughter. Whenever the hunters were thus engaged, Thoreau retreated to his botanizing and documenting the plant life in the area. He deliberately put blinders on at a time when he could have prevented the animals' deaths. And perhaps his own rationalizing behavior was not made clear to him until the end. For as he says here in the "Chesuncook" chapter, "Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine-trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it." That statement could be a personal chastisement, a reminder to himself. If that's the only wrong performed during your lifetime, Henry, then you did pretty well.

Wilson crafted this book about the "love of life" for a wide-ranging audience. Biophilia begins in journalistic style recounting Wilson's various expeditions to the Amazon river basin in search of elusive species of ants. He describes the scenes in the forest with appeal to all five senses, making it easy to mentally accompany with Wilson upon his tropical trips. The adventurous feel in the opening chapters allows Wilson to demonstrate biophilia instead of describing it. It becomes obvious that biophilia is a major force affecting the way humans react to living organisms. Wilson describes biophilia as the "innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes."

In the middle of Biophilia, Wilson sorts out different time divisions, arguing that the way you organize time creates biases. Wilson holds that most humans divided time according to their own evolution. Humans are not the only species that matter. Bacteria, fungi, protoctists, and plants have been around far longer than Homo sapiens, and humans depend on these other kingdoms for survival. This argument allows Wilson to build a platform from which to apply his notion of biophilia.

Wilson alludes to a "conservation ethic" throughout the first half of the book of which he makes his readers aware in later chapters of Biophilia. Wilson's term "conservation ethic" describes what humans need to do because of biophilia. Clear evidence shows that humans depend on other living organisms for survival. Wilson argues that humans need to care for natural resources if we want to remain alive. He uses this book as strong evidence to form global awareness of biophilia and the conservation consequences it warrants.

Wilson closes this book by recapping his intense accounts of the explorations of untamed nature in the Amazon river basin. He mentally leads the reader through forests with clear descriptions of the thousands of organisms he encountered.

The interspersed chapters of his adventures through nature were welcome surprises to his technical arguments in favor of biophilia. Wilson's enthusiasm for other living organisms is contagious, and his enthusiasm makes this book both entertaining and applicable.

This book covers a wide expanse in both time and scope, from the microscopic and across time... exploring life's varying time scales. I found this book to be wriiten on a personal level bringing the reader into confidence and like a father or grandfather showing us the marvels of nature first hand. I'm sure that was his intent, to reawaken us, to show how man is intergrated and plays an intergral part in the natural affinity of life on the planet, explaining that biophilia is central to the evolution of the human mind.

We go from rain forests in Brazil, to handfulls of soil, explore the bird of paradise, and study the Huron Peninsula of New Guinea. Through all of this we acquire a greater appreciation for life and the intricate symbiosis that interplays on our human equilibrium.

The book has excellent illustrative text that brings a unique vividness to the author's excellent writing. This is a book that takes the reader on a rich educational look... a serious look... at nature and all of the intergral parts as interplayed in life. Man whether he likes it or not, is tied to this planet and its life force.

Alfred Chester is something along the lines of the godfather of what we now know as eighties literature. Warmer than Bukowski, more detached than Faulkner, closer to the point than Sherwood Anderson ever got, the novels pumped out thirty years later by such authors as Ellis and McInerney could have been tarred by the same brush, though Chester mixed a kind of hard-boiled romance with his stark realism. And yet, as Edward Field reminds us in his introduction to the book's nonfiction appendix, Chester was almost totally forgotten by the time of his death in 1971, at the age of forty-three. The fact that an obscure, unknown, then-out-of-print writer could have still influenced a whole (albeit a bad) genre should tell us something: specifically, that Chester is possibly the most neglected important American writer of the twentieth century.

It seems to me that Chester became a forgotten writer as the stars of contemporaries such as Bukowski and Ferlinghetti were rising because Chester went the opposite way of such writers. What Buk et al. distilled from Faulkner was the no-nonsense prose, the ability to tell a tale in the elevated prose that marks poetry while keeping the work as readable as possible. This made Buk et al.'s work more accessible to the public, and thus it was ripe for mainstream consumption. Chester, on the other hand, wrote prose that's as close to poetry as one is ever likely to find; rather than work on the accessibility factor, Chester shuned the idea and mined the simple power of words, leaving them elevated, but unpolished. As such, Chester's stories often demand to be read at leisure, in small doses, and more often than not the writing is thick, many-layered, difficult; yet the reward is there. Chester was a profoundly good writer, and every story in this collection is a gem.

The second section of the book, comprising about seventy pages, is a series of reflections on Chester by those close to him during his descent into the madness that ultimately, though indirectly, caused his death. Such authors as Cynthia Ozick, Dennis Selby, Ira Cohen, and Robert Friend recount anything from one-page snatches of image to long essays on Chester's life. There's a lot of good material here (and it reinforces the autobiographical nature of Chester's work), but it seems to me that Chster's material could have stood on its own, and the biographical materil would have made for a good anthology-style biography of Chester.

The previously-mentioned descent is all too obvious in Chester's work. Early material is tight, ominous, less obtuse than the later work, and with more attentino paid to craft. "As I Was Going Up the Stair" is a horror story in the grand old tradition, but with a sense of newness about it that still rings fresh today; like the best of today's authors, Chester gives us not ghosts and ghouls, but the horrors of absence, of separation. This is stuff that should be in Norton Anthologies, without a doubt. In contrast, the fifty pages that have survived from Chester's final manuscript, "The Foot," show the contrast between the early, almost surreal prose of Chester's early career and the loose, ultra-realistic, somewhat rambling feel of later pages. I do agree with Robert Friend (despite how that last sentence sounds) that "The Foot" may well be the best thing Chester ever wrote; it's a perfect study in how to write a romance novel without a single drop of excess emotion. It is as beautiful, and as stark, as the cinematography in the film version of (Chester contemporary) Paul Bowles' landmark novel _The Sheltering Sky_. It seems that the landscape of Bowles' and Chester's Tunisia-- both were part of the early-sixties expatriate community in western Africa-- may have influenced Chester's writing more than even he knew.

This is very, very strong work, a piece of literary history America is in danger of losing, to its great detriment. Chester should be required reading for any short story writer. ****

The chapter "In the company of ants" is probably one of the best chapters [of any book] that I have ever read. I found the hierarchal structure of the leaf-cutter ants very intriguing. What marvellous little creatures! I'll never look at an ant the same way again. Here's a little snippet for you:

"Watch where you step. Be careful of little lives. Feed them crumbs of coffeecake. They also like bits of tuna and whipped cream. Get a magnifying glass. Watch them closely. And you will be as close as any person may ever come to seeing social life as it might evolve on another planet."

I also loved three other chapters entitled, "Humanity seen from a distance", "The little things that run the world" and the final chapter, "Is humanity suicidal?". Other interesting chapters are about snakes, or rather serpents, sharks, altruism & aggression, etc. The essence of the book is really as the title suggests, "in search of nature".

Towards the end, a sincere and legitimate message is delivered by the author. It is a very moving assertion and everyone, yes everyone, should read it. Edwin O. Wilson is proof that Carl Sagan wasn't the only good author.

Physicists interested in the mathematical aspects of quantum field/string theory would do well to read these volumes as well.

Deserving, in my opinion, more than 5 stars -- many more!!

"Krutch" was just plain boring. "Sex" was somewhat redeeming.

I'm not sure what to say about "Sportsmen" - which as Abbey puts it, is simply excerpts from a printed leaflet. It sure was scary. The question is, with the questions raised about Abbey's honesty of description, and sincerity of purpose, how factual is this piece titled "Sportsmen"? I don't want to believe it, and Abbey spent the whole rest of the book crying wolf. I don't know.

I absolutely love some of Abbey's books. We all love "Desert Solitaire", and the charicatures of "The Monkey Wrench Gang", etc., are wonderful. But this patchwork of rehashed essays seems just like a cheap way to make some extra cash. In summary, a careful read of this bookwill likely expand your image of this writer, but leave you with questions about his veracity. I guess the next book for me will have to be "Confessions". Don't make this your first foray into Abbey's world. You're likely to miss the best.

Is there anything I liked about this book? One thing I took away from this book is an appreciation of how many tree species there are in the world that live to an ancient age. I remember growing up thinking there were only three species that lived a long time: the California redwoods and the Bristlecone Pine. Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest and my knowledge expanded a little more as I discovered that cedars and yews and a few others could live a couple thousand years or so. Pakenham's two tree books then expanded my understanding even more, and now "Ancient Trees" has awakened me to the fact that tree species capable of living thousands of years are not all that uncommon -- maybe uncommon considering the number of tree species extant, but not uncommon geographically. They are everywhere, on all continents. This is a revelation to me. But as another reviewer pointed out, some of the claims in this book sound more like superstitions than scientific facts. 9,000 years for a single tree? I don't care if it IS a yew. Give me some proof, not the testimony of local legends.

"Among all the varied productions with which Nature has adorned the surface of the earth, none awakens our sympathies, or interests our imagination so powerfully as those venerable trees which seem to have stood the lapse of ages, silent witnesses of the successive generations of man, to whose destiny they bear so touching a resemblance, alike in their budding, their prime, and their decay."

A tree that lives for a thousand years inspires awe and reverence. These are wonders of the world both modern and ancient. They need to be saved, and they need to be seen. I wish I could see them all. This book is as close as I'll ever get. I have, though, stood in the redwood forest of California and felt the sense of awe that so inspired Muir, a sense of being inside the sacred cathedral of nature. My senses were hushed and my spirit elevated. I wonder what Reagan thought when he stood there (as he undoubtedly did). Perhaps he wondered how many cubic feet of timber the tallest tree in the world might yield.

There are eighteen chapters, each devoted to different types of tree with specimens over a thousand years old, from the majestic redwood to the strange welwitschia, the "dwarf tree of the Namib desert," which reaches a height of only about five feet, and produces but a single pair of leaves in its lifetime, which can extend to two thousand years. Other chapters are devoted to fig trees, mighty oaks, sweet chestnuts, limes, olives, yews, cedar, gingko, the Montezuma Cypress, and of course the Bristlecone Pine, the oldest tree of all with one specimen, the Methuselah tree, said to be over 4,700 years old.

The colorful photographs from around the world by Edward Parker are beautiful, lavish and give us a sense of the enduring presence of the trees in their settings. There is a map of the world with numbered bullets to show locations.

The text, which tends to the cloying at times, alas, could use some work. Such boilerplate sentences as "Yet today, despite all the research that has taken place, the Amazon continues to be an awesome and mysterious place that holds many secrets" (p. 60) are all too frequent. Would that the text were more devoted to the simple sharing of factual information about the flowering of the trees, pollination, pollinators, seed dispersal, and perhaps about related species. The attempt to wed the trees to the ancient myths of indigenous peoples or to fix the "religious significance" of the trees has its place, but is takes up too much of the text here. I would prefer more information on the ecology of the trees. In the chapter on the majestic European limes, nowhere is it mentioned that these are not citrus trees! (Or am I the only one to think that a lime tree might be a citrus tree?)

The sometimes careless editing also detracts from the beauty of this book. While it may be forgiven that "gingko" is spelled two different ways ("gingko" and "ginkgo") on the same page (e.g., on pages, 19, 182, 183), it is not acceptable to have a photo of Brazilian nuts mistakenly identified as pods (p. 63). Additionally, on pages 30-31 a sentence is broken off and then there are three lines of repeated text.

In spite of these flaws this is a beautiful book that makes us feel in touch with nature and gives us a sense of the strength and endurance of living things.

My only complaint is that the western red cedar gets a mere two-sentence, small-font honorable mention in the rear of the book.