Reviews

Recently with having two little ones running around at home I’ve found that my search for good books about trees and nature is constant. They are my favorite books to read with the littles. And they are my favorite books to receive, and give, as gifts. So I thought it would be fun and helpful to share with our Women’s group in case you are wanting to find similar books for your littles, or hoping to find the perfect gift!

Last week, I listened to an audio book from my local library titled, The Confidence Code for Girls: Taking Risks, Messing Up, & Becoming Your Amazingly Imperfect, Totally Powerful Self by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, best-selling authors of The Confidence Code.

This book is written for teens and pre-teen girls, but it is also written for moms and other superhero women who remember the struggles of their own teen years and want to support the girls in their lives. I even found some take-home lessons for myself as a grown-up, confident woman.

A Review by Leigh Macmillen Hayes, writer and author of the blog wondermyway.com

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (Viking) by David George Haskell

The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (Penguin) by David George Haskell

The premise of The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature is simple enough, but only a naturalist like David George Haskell could write this beautiful book. Poetic and scientific, The Forest Unseen is extraordinary.

Mammal Tracks and Scat: Life-Size Pocket Guide by Lynn Levine
A waterproof, 44 page pocket-size book, with life-size illustrations (Yes, even the bear!) It’s a guide that’s great for tracking through all seasons.

In 1824, London’s Royal Horticultural Society sent the young botanist David Douglas on an expedition to the Pacific Northwest to study and to collect native flora and fauna. The sensitive details of Douglas's journey are marvelously captured by the contemporary author and naturalist Jack Nisbet in The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest.

David Douglas: A Naturalist at Work connects Douglas’s historical explorations with Nisbet’s contemporary ones. Nisbet opens the lens of history, as the text becomes a parallel experience where the reader visits places both in historical and contemporary time, effortlessly traveling between the two. Nisbet’s evocative vignettes follow David Douglas’s journals out into the field.

Part memoir, narrative nonfiction, and natural history, "Eating Dirt" manages to capture both what it feels like to engage in hard seasonal physical labor and what it might feel like if you were the forest itself.

In The Open Space of Democracy , Terry Tempest Williams focuses poetically on personal engagement that is possible within a democracy, while artist Mary Frank’s images are woven throughout this small, beautiful book.

"Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton" is dedicated to Horan’s love for “all the trees that have provided the vital wood flesh for millions of magical books throughout the ages.” Horan’s journey collecting actual seeds from famous authors’ trees is an engaging travelogue, homage, and memoir.

The Women and Their Woods program was recently recognized by the Northeast Environmental Partners as an organization in Northeastern Pennsylvania that has achieved environmental protection or conservation through partnering with others.