Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World
By Susan Brind Murrow (Houghton Mifflin / $18.95)
Few nature writers can claim the credentials of Susan Brind Murrow, a classicist, linguist and translator of ancient Egyptian mythology and contemporary Arabic poetry. In Wolves and Honey, she calls upon her uncommon training and her poet’s eye for beauty and meaning to uncover the mysteries of upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region. Her musings move gracefully through time and space, from Greek poets to Johnny Appleseed to agricultural science, but always return to the natural world and the two men—a beekeeper and a trapper—whose lives and tragic deaths influenced her deeply. Of one she writes: “He had, one might have said, a beautiful radiance: He was a man who saw things, who saw things and understood them.” The same could be said for Murrow herself.
— Beth Duris
