PositiveWall Street JournalAlternating between jeremiad and dark satire, Mr. Chapman, a seasoned environmental journalist from Georgia, thinks that we have lived precisely the way Muir admonished us we shouldn’t—namely, as if the world were made for humans. While Mr. Chapman isn’t loath to name his villains, he is more interested in the good guys ... Walking, for Mr. Chapman, is a form of activism as well as personal penance, a way of making himself see, and feel, the drastic changes in a lacerated landscape he still loves. There are, to be sure, moments of delight even for him, which seem magical because they are so rare.
Adam Nicolson
RaveThe Wall Street JournalLife Between the Tides is, on the most obvious level, a record of three separate tidepools he created over the course of a year in Ardtornish Bay on the western coast of Scotland ... What he encounters as life unfolds in these miniature oceans is a struggle for existence eerily like that in the human world ... Close to the end of Life Between the Tides, Mr. Nicolson, looking back, concedes the apparent \'pointlessness\' of his shoreline shenanigans: “They were for nothing.” Yet Mr. Nicolson’s tidepools are for nothing only in the sense that writing about them is for nothing. His tidepool-making is a form of narrative-making, the deeply human effort—unachievable for prawn or periwinkle—to extract meaning where water meets the land, where human history and natural history merge ... A master of exquisite, personable prose, [Nicolson] has written authoritatively about Homer, Jacobean England, romantic poetry, seabirds and the stark landscapes of the Shiants, a group of small, uninhabited islands he inherited from his father. Yet, as diverse as they are, Mr. Nicolson’s books are unified by a similar impossible hankering—exquisitely expressed—for a more cohesive past, for all the things that premodern forms of social life and culture got right ... Life Between the Tides thus tells a story that is not just about tidepools but even more so about the ways, barely remembered today, in which one might strive to live a life in sync with the rhythms of the land and the sea ... A book as shimmeringly beautiful as any of his pools.
Ernest Freeberg
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalA Traitor to His Species is chock-full of...details, and yet the narrative’s pace never slackens. Expansive yet carefully documented, Mr. Freeberg’s book is less the biography of a man than of a noble effort that eventually spanned the nation ... In the end, A Traitor to His Species isn’t primarily about animals or their rights. Instead, as articulated in Mr. Freeberg’s clear-eyed conclusion, this is a book about us, about the searing truth that how we choose to treat animals reveals what kinds of humans we are.
Helen MacDonald
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...dazzling ... Embarking on her own vesper flights but with her eyes trained on animals, Ms. Macdonald reminds us how marvelously unfamiliar much of the nonhuman world remains to us, even as we continue to diminish it ... She is in awe of the \'invisible fungal networks that weave each forest into a symbiotic community, a place full of life hidden from our own\' ... The essays in Vesper Flights give us the literary equivalent of such a resilient network, which is why I would recommend reading them in sequence: Connected by invisible threads, they gradually enmesh the reader in a universe of limitless potentiality, where a livable future suddenly becomes imaginable again. Acknowledging that nature exists everywhere, not only in places where humans don’t live, means that there are things, big and small, we can and must do: design houses so that they offer space where swifts may nest; switch off the lights in our big cities at night to keep migrating birds from getting confused; demand that a beautiful meadow, home to multiple forms of life, be made part of that new housing development instead of being flattened by asphalt.
Toby Musgrave
PositiveThe Wall Street Journal...aptly titled, consistently entertaining ... Mr. Musgrave treats us to an extensive, admiring account of his subject’s circuitous route to fame and power ... A designer and historian of gardens, Mr. Musgrave appears to believe that a profusion of carefully cultivated details will yield the maximum overall effect. But with the mercurial Banks, this method doesn’t fully work. Even after more than 300 pages of fact-filled prose marked by a steady penchant for the passive voice...Sir Joseph remains a mystery ... A thoroughly public person, with few tangible traces of an inner life, Banks confused even his contemporaries. They found him to be alternately caring and callous, gentle and coarse, philanthropic and utterly self-centered. He was all these things and yet none of them.
