Rural Life Books - Page 4

Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds

Bernd Heinrich

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Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Beyond croaking, "Nevermore," what exactly do ravens do all day? Bernd Heinrich, biology professor at the University of Vermont and author of Ravens in Winter, has spent more than a decade learning the secrets of these giants of the crow family. He has observed startlingly complex activities among ravens, including strong pair-bonding, use of tools, elaborate vocal communication, and even play. Ravens are just plain smart, and we can see much of ourselves in their behavior. They seem to be affectionate, cranky, joyful, greedy, and competitive, just like us. And in Mind of the Raven, Heinrich makes no bones about attributing emotions and intellect to Corvus corax--just not the kind we humans can understand. He mostly catalogs their behaviors in the manner of a respectful anthropologist, although a few moments of proud papa show through when he describes the pet ravens he hand-raised to adulthood.

Heinrich spends hundreds of loving hours feeding roadkill fragments to endlessly hungry raven chicks, and cold days in blinds watching wild ravens squabble and frolic. He is a passionate fan of his "wolf-birds," a name he gave them when he made the central discovery of the book: that ravens in Yellowstone National Park are dependent on wolves to kill for them. Mind of the Raven offers inspiring insight into both the lives of ravens and the mind of a truly gifted scientist. --Therese Littleton

Out of the Woods: A Bird Watcher's Year

Ora E. Anderson

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Out of the Woods: A Bird Watcher’s Year is a journey through the seasons and a joyous celebration of growing old. In fifty-nine essays and poems, Ora E. Anderson, birder, bird carver, naturalist, and nature writer, reveals the insights and recollections of a keen-eyed observer of nature, both human and avian. The essays follow the rivers and creeks, the highways and little-known byways of Appalachia, and along the way we become nearly as familiar with its numerous bird, plant, and animal species as with the author himself.

These are not the memories of a single year, however, but of a long lifetime spent immersed in the natural world. Out of the Woods, presented with humor and passion, is an account of a well-lived, productive, and satisfying life. The essays offer an intimate portrait of a half century of life on Anderson’s beloved old farm (more nearly a nature preserve), where he lived in harmony with birds and nature and followed the rhythm of the seasons. We are invited to share the joys—and the disappointments and sorrows—inherent in such a life.

Generously illustrated with Julie Zickefoose’s detailed drawings and evocative sketches, this book will delight bird watchers, artists, naturalists, backyard gardeners, and anyone who is sometimes tempted to take a rutted, overgrown, and unused path just to see where it leads.

When Chores Were Done: Boyhood Stories

Jerry Apps

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Editorial Review:

The Midwest in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s was a special place-a place where parents and children worked side by side to eke out a living from the land, and neighbors stuck by each other through good times and bad.

In this affectionate, insightful collection of stories, Jerry Apps takes us to that world. He relives the toughness of farm life-plowing the soil with horses, milking cows by hand, putting in long days with heavy, dangerous machinery. He shows us the lighter side too, as he peddles his father's massive rutabaga harvest and gets to know the neighbor boys-and their personal dictionary of cuss words. We meet Frank, Pinky, and Harry, three farmers whose love of music could transform an entire community; Morty, the odd loner whom only a few wild animals could understand; and Fanny, the extraordinary collie whose role on the farm was as important as that of any human being.

Withing each story we see just how warm, loving, and supremely educational growing up on a farm could be, for it is here that a young child learns not only how to take the head off a chicken and drive a tractor like a grown-up, but to deal with illness, disability, and death. Resonating with poingnancy and humor, When Chores Were Done contains stories you'll want to read over and over again. Jerry Apps is a master storyteller who writes through the eyes of a child and with the wisdom of a man. Through the tales are personal, their lessons are universal.

Living a Country Year: Wit and Wisdom from the Good Old Days

Jerry Apps

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Editorial Review:

In his bestselling Every Farm Tells a Story, Jerry Apps brought color and detail to the dreams so many of us have of simple rural life. Here, in his signature style, he spins warm-hearted tales about growing up on a Midwestern dairy farm in the 1940s--stories that make his country year our own.

Wearing his hard-earned wisdom lightly, Apps tells a tale for each month of the year in the heart of the country, and adds aphorisms and the occasional recipe for good measure. We skate with him on a frozen pond on a moonlit night. We watch him drive the hired mans Model T touring car at the age of 10, recover from polio by driving a tractor during disking season, and learn to ride bareback on a pony named Ginger.

Whether shooting off firecrackers on the Fourth of July or suffering through "potato vacation" or overcoming stage fright at the annual Christmas program, Apps is a delightful companion, teaching us a gentle lesson as he learns. By turns witty and profound, his book reaffirms our nations rural heritage.

Cattitude Boxed Set

Christine Montaquila

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Editorial Review:

The purrfect gift for the holidays!
Diecut slipcase with faux jewels

The ladies are back, and this time with a trilogy of feline fun. Christine Montaquila and Kim Levin’s bestselling “feline guides” are now available as a boxed set, including Cattitude: The Feline Guide to Being Fabulous, Catrimony: The Feline Guide to Ruling the Relationship, and Caternal Instincts: The Feline Guide to Mastering Motherhood. All three feature the unique black-and-white documentary-style photography and clever captions that have kept cat lovers wanting more.

In Cattitude, the felines give us the dish on living large for women in any stage of life, offering advice like “Accept your body. Augment your ego,” and “Realize a tiara is a state of mind.” In Catrimony they conquer the milestone of marriage with witty suggestions to “Hide the videotape” and “Devise a holiday evacuation plan.” And, finally, in Caternal Instincts the ladies get real about the challenges of parenting, encouraging every mom to “Buy stain resistant everything” and “Accept the fact that you’ll never pee alone again.” Perfect for birthdays, weddings, baby showers, or any gift-giving occasion, the Cattitude Boxed Set is for cat lovers, photography buffs, and everyone in between.

Seasons of Real Florida (Florida History and Culture)

Jeff Klinkenberg

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

No wonder Jeff Klinkenberg loves Florida. At any time of year he can find a place in the state that's ripe to enjoy or a person whose story has aged to perfection. Arranged by season, the book opens in the fall, which Klinkenberg says is like spring in the north - a time of celebration: "Having survived our harshest season, we feel renewed," Fair weather, good food, and the joys of nature lie ahead, described here in essays that are like time capsules of "old Florida values." Preserving the past, they reveal Klinkenberg's waggish appreciation of the state's history, folkways, and landscape, not to mention its ribs, smoked mullet, stone crab claws, and fresh lemonade. Many pieces focus off the beaten path and on modern rogues who seem to turn their backsides to the subdivisions and shopping malls that pave the state: Miss Ruby, whose fruit stand features rutabagas, boiled peanuts, and her own brightly colored plywood paintings; an 85-year-old resident of the remote island of Cayo Costa who hums Beethoven while she hunts for shells; the scientists who test mosquito repellent in Everglades National Park; and the unofficial caretaker of Lilly Spring on the Santa Fe River.

It's Not the End of the Earth, but You Can See It from Here

Roger Welsch

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

CUDOS from a once Small Town Boy 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

In "It's Not the End of the Earth,..", Roger Welsch does an excellent job bringing out the humor of small town life by simply telling stories about his friends in Centralia, NE. He has a witty way of giving value to each of the members of this rural community bringing to light the peculiar habits and expressions that make them all unique, interesting, and memorable. I applaud Prof. Welsch's folkloric expose' of the kinds of everyday things that I used to laugh about with my dad - some of my favorite things.

Editorial Review:

Roger Welsch did what many Americans only dream of doing. While still in his professional prime, the folklorist and humorist quit a tenured professorship and headed toward the hinterland. Resettled in the open heart of Nebraska with his wife, Welsch proceeded to learn how to live. It’s Not the End of the Earth, but You Can See It from Here is, in his own words, "a celebration" of his "rural education." These twenty-eight tales of the Great Plains convey in familiar Welschian style "the importance, charm, beauty, and value of the typical." They describe the wisdom that Welsch’s new-found teachers share with him. From everyday country people, he learns the fine arts of relaxing, using his noggin, trusting his instincts, and laughing a lot more, while Omaha Indian friends teach him the most profound lessons of all.

The Peregrine (New York Review Books Classics)

J.A. Baker

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...red in tooth and claw 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This is nature, hard core. The line between Baker and his prey disappears during the year he spends with these birds. Magnificent, heart-stopping, sense-exploding writing. I read it slowly because it made me more observant of everything I miss when I rush. Makes you a better creature on the earth for reading it.

Editorial Review:

With no prior knowledge of birds, the author is seized with an unexplained longing to track the peregrine falcons that hunt in the river valley behind his home each winter. Though his subjects are far more elusive than the pigeons and gulls on which they prey, on rare occasions he sees a peregrine roosting or bathing, or spots a fresh kill in the grass. He outlines their strict hunting ethos: take other birds only in flight, and spare only the leg and back meat for scavengers. As winter approaches, he resolves to shun the world of men in fierce pursuit of the falcon's inner life. As the landscape thaws, Baker shares the hawk's absolute terror in the face of the stumbling, erratic human beings encroaching on its territory. Veering swiftly from the mundane to the miraculous, Baker's self-effacing diary of a long winter in the wild is a triumph of pure and immediate description.

Best Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer

Noel Perrin

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Editorial Review:

In 1963, Noel Perrin, a 35-year-old professor of English at Dartmouth College, bought an 85-acre farm in Thetford Center, Vermont. For the next forty years he spent half his time teaching, half writing, and half farming. "That this adds up to three halves I am all too aware," he said, sounding a characteristic, self-deprecating note of bittersweet amusement at the chalk on his coat, the sweat on his brow, and the mud (and worse) on his boots.

"I love this farm," he wrote shortly before his death in 2004, "every acre of it. The maples, the apple trees, the cattle, the wild turkeys. I love the brick farmhouse, which I believe to be about 190 years old ... and the two barns. I love the view from the kitchen window ... and the grander view to be had if you climb Bill Hill, the farm's in-house mini-mountain. The thing that delights me most, though, is that the farm really is a farm. It produces a little food every year, and most years a little fuel as well." It also produced four volumes of essays, beginning with the best-selling First Person Rural (1978). Some of Perrin's pieces are practical (how to build a stone wall), others philosophical (why to build a stone wall). One pretends to be about amateur sugar making, but it is really a metaphor for reality and illusion. Another pretends to be about the country as a retreat, but is really about the country as a place to meet the world head-on. One is a dangerous character sketch of a sow dangerous, because as Roy Blount said after reading it, "It almost made me decide to go ahead and get pigs."

In short, these essays are as good as the literature of farming gets. Best Person Rural is a harvest feast, bringing together twenty of Perrin's best-loved pieces and five previously uncollected items, including his moving "Farewell to a Thetford Farm."

Animal Happiness: A Moving Exploration of Animals and Their Emotions

Vicki Hearne

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Our Happiness 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I just re-read this book after many years and it holds up. This book gives one side of an important debate that is going on, a side that isn't heard from as often as it should be.

People who work with domestic animals have a different language to discuss and a different philosophy about what they are doing than people who talk about them in the fields of philosophy and the behavioral sciences.

Vicki Hearne was a member of both communities. In this book, she articulates the views of those who work with animals and makes their case. She does so strongly and beautifully and she does not kowtow to the authority of academia.

It is probably very important to read Adam's Task, by the same author, to fully appreciate this book. I am re-reading it at the moment and will review it soon.

Editorial Review:

A New York Times Notable Book of 1994! Highly respected author, philosopher, and animal trainer Vicki Hearne offers a treasure trove of animal anecdotes, all written in her unique and poetic style. Through entertaining stories about cats, horses, an ornamental carp, a scorpion, and tortoises, Hearne focuses on how each of these various creatures experiences happiness in its own special way. She takes issue with Ludwig Wittgenstein on lions and language, discusses the naming of pets, and considers the process of mourning a loved dog’s death.