Ever since I was a child, I've loved books about the Poles, so there was little doubt I would read The Quickening. What I found in these pages was a startling new kind of story about Antarctica, one I'd never experienced before. As a journalist, I'm drawn to stories by other journalists who observe and describe the world through their own lenses, but rarely are these stories told with the immediacy of such a personal narrative juxtaposed against the immensity of an external landscape that looms large and distant and foreign in our collective consciousness. This is the honest, hopeful book that we all need in the face of threats that often feel too large to address.
An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction
"The Quickening is a book of hope."-Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky
An astonishing, vital work about Antarctica, climate change, and community.
In 2019, fifty-seven scientists and crew set out onboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer. Their destination: the ominous Thwaites Glacier at Antarctica's western edge. Their goal: to learn as much as possible about this mysterious place, never before visited by humans. And with them is author Elizabeth Rush, who seeks, among other things, the elusive voice of the ice.
I came to this book as a journalist and science writer writing about wolves, but if I were still a literature teacher, this book would be on my syllabus for the beauty, specificity and elegance of the writing. The book is thought-provoking--a deep dive into big ideas like rewilding and wolf reintroduction--but it is also a taut narrative blending individual stories together into a gripping story of loss and discovery and hope for a better future. And while I loved the story, it is the language that will remain with me long after the specifics of the plot have slipped away.
A wild and gripping novel about one woman's quest to reintroduce wolves to the Scottish Highlands at any cost.
Inti Flynn arrives in the Scottish Highlands with fourteen grey wolves, a traumatised sister and fierce tenacity.
As a biologist, she knows the animals are the best hope for rewilding the ruined landscape and she cares little for local opposition. As a sister, she hopes the remote project will offer her twin, Aggie, a chance to heal after the horrific events that drove them both out of Alaska.
But violence dogs their footsteps and one night Inti stumbles over the body…
As a journalist and science writer, I sometimes turn to thrillers and crime fiction as an escape from data and scientific papers. This book certainly entertained, but it was so much more. This book is the beauty of the landscape, the authenticity of characters and the weight of what lurks just beyond what we all want to see, where something dark and evil resides in a shady space that is as much about what we shun in ourselves as what we publicly decry in the world.
It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die.
Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or less: he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme…
Chasing Shadows is the remarkable conservation success story of the return of the white shark to the western North Atlantic as seen through the eyes of the shark biologist who (quite unexpectedly) found himself in the middle of it.
