Every time I read one of Bernd Heinrich’s books, I feel closer to the natural world.
Heinrich is such a personable and highly informed guide. I feel like I’m walking by his side. Or, in some cases, flying by his side. I get tired of myself, and Bernd Heinrich turns my eyes outward, not inward.
This book is about animal migration, that heroic, mysterious journey that so many animals take part in and that, in many cases, is astonishing in its reach. How do these animals find their way to a distant place that, in some cases, they’ve never been to before? The bar-tailed godwit, for example, migrates every year from Alaska to New Zealand—and, months later, back—a total of 18,000 miles (without stopping).
Acclaimed scientist and author Bernd Heinrich has returned every year since boyhood to a beloved patch of western Maine woods. What is the biology in humans of this deep-in-the-bones pull toward a particular place, and how is it related to animal homing?
Heinrich explores the fascinating science chipping away at the mysteries of animal migration: how geese imprint true visual landscape memory; how scent trails are used by many creatures, from fish to insects to amphibians, to pinpoint their home if they are displaced from it; and how the tiniest of songbirds are equipped for solar and magnetic orienteering over…
I love gossip. But like many of us, I’m reluctant to admit it. Unless it’s high-brow literary gossip, as it is in the journals of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt.
They were French brothers who lived in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. They knew everyone who was anyone, especially writers, and wrote down everything they saw and heard. I love paging through this literary eavesdropping.
Gustave Flaubert, the author of Madame Bovary, was a frequent dinner companion. So was the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev and French writer Émile Zola. In these pages, I find these great writers unplugged, complaining, bragging, lusting, being open and beyond free in their talk.
Where else can I find a reference to Flaubert, Zola, and Turgenev discussing “the special aptitudes of writers suffering from constipation?” Only here.
No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers Goncourt
The journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature, a work that in its richness of color, variety, and seemingly casual perfection bears comparison with the great paintings of their friends and contemporaries the Impressionists.
Born nearly ten years apart into a French aristocratic family, the two brothers formed an extraordinarily productive and enduring literary partnership, collaborating on novels, criticism, and plays that pioneered the new…
I love the films of Alfred Hitchcock. After reading a few pages, I knew this was the book for me.
It’s a series of interviews the French filmmaker François Truffaut had with Alfred Hitchcock about his films. I’ve always wanted to ask Hitchcock questions about his movies, and now Truffaut has done that for me.
How often do you get to sit in on a discussion like this? For example, I was fascinated to learn that the famous shower scene in Psycho took seven days to film with seventy camera setups. All for forty-five seconds of film.
I can be an impatient reader, and one of the things I loved about this book is that, like an anthology, I could skip from film to film, going where my curiosity took me, jumping years at a time without penalty.
One is ravished by the density of insights into cinematic questions...Truffaut performed a tour de force of tact in getting this ordinarily guarded man to open up as he had never done before (and never would again)...If the 1967 Hitchcock/Truffaut can now be seen as something of a classic, this revised version is even better. Phillip Lopate The New York Times Book Review
Escaping the sound and fury of New York, I moved to a small village in Provence near Avignon. There I found a tiny plot of streamside land and set about raising a vegetable garden that eventually connected me to my village and to the villagers in ways I never would have dreamed.
French Dirt is about planting, watering, and tending. It's about the sun, sky, the open air, and the thrill of working the French earth. It’s about joy and disappointment. Most of all, it's about the growing friendship between an American outsider and a close-knit community of French villagers. It’s my love story about living in a little village in the South of France outside of time and the beauty and belonging I found there.
