Chasing Spring
By Bruce Stutz (Scribner / $24.00)
In Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season, writer Bruce Stutz marks his recovery from heart surgery by participating in spring as it unfolds across the nation. His conclusion: “See spring now, because it is changing.” Adopting the form of a personal journal, Stutz shares insights about his own renewal and that of the world around him. Beginning with a pilgrimage to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, for a chilly visit with a groundhog named Phil, Stutz’s journey follows lengthening daylight all the way to Alaska’s summer solstice. Along the way, melting snow, greening shoots, migrating songbirds and spawning fish reveal that changes in climate could be disrupting the delicate balance that has sustained humans and nature for millions of years.
—Sara M. Kaplaniak
Home Ground
Edited by Barry Lopez (Trinity University Press / $29.95)
For more than two centuries, Americans have laid claim to the national landscape by inventing words to define it. Looking-glass prairie. Desire path. Envelope field. Such colorful, idiosyncratic terms evoke a sense of belonging, of personal connection between people and place. They recall a time when we were less learned about the natural world but also, in some way, more intimately familiar with it. Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape offers an unusual record of this rich vocabulary. Editor Barry Lopez has enlisted 45 prominent writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Jon Krakauer and Terry Tempest Williams, to identify and imagine 852 natural features as diverse as America itself. The result is a compendium of vivid descriptions that celebrates our ability to name what we see around us, and, in the process, deepens our attachment to the places we’ve chosen as our own.
—Beth Duris
Letters from Eden
By Julie Zickefoose (Houghton Mifflin / $26.00)
A delight in equal parts for its writing and its fluid illustrations, Letters From Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods is a seasonal round of tales from artist and naturalist Julie Zickefoose, who lives with her family on 80 acres of rolling Appalachian woodland in southern Ohio. This isn’t the treacly stuff that often passes for nature writing but the hard-edged, hard-won honesty of a woman who cherishes not just the spring song of a bluebird but also the memory of copperhead venom searing her hand—an unapologetic animal rescuer who faces the consequences of her mercy when the bullfrog she raises starts gobbling hummingbirds. And her drawings and paintings bring it all to glorious life—field sketches of turkeys and turtles, loosely rendered watercolors that resolve themselves into quiet landscapes and leaping foxes. Letters From Eden is a simple joy.
—Scott Weidensaul
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