4 books like Mara Tusconi Mystery Series

A Parrot Without a Name is the tale of a quest as primitive and compelling as any grail search from medieval legend. It’s the story of John O’Neill and Theodore Parker, two of the 20th century’s most accomplished birders and ornithologists, and their pursuit of the least known and most elusive birds in the whole of South America. Parker, whose death in a small plane crash in the Ecuadorian mountains cut off one of the most famous and unique escapades in birding – he ended up knowing and recording the calls of more than 4000 bird species – shows up as a colorful character with all the quirks of other great scientific iconoclasts such as Alan Turing and Robert Oppenheimer. 

Those of us who wage the battle to conserve wildlife don’t always do so in the field. A successful conservation strategy starts with good science, but it often requires effective communication and political strategies as well. J.A. Mills, the author of Blood of the Tiger, is a master at both. Mills, who researched and battled illegal wildlife trade for traffic and the World Wildlife Fund for two decades, gives the reader an often thrilling and always insightful look at the still unfinished battle to save wild tigers from extinction at the hands of poachers and Chinese moguls. She is as expert in describing the politics of CITES – the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species – as she is in detailing the operations of the Chinese markets where tiger parts are sold. Full disclosure: Although Ms. Mills and I have worked in very different domains of the global environmental… show more.

If you’ve ever felt the sensation of being hunted by a predator who’s higher on the food chain than you are – a man-eater – Quammen's book will bring it all back to you. If you haven’t had that particular pleasure, the book’s discussion of the planet’s most exotic predators – crocodiles, lions, bears, and tigers – will fascinate and educate you. The focus here is not just the ‘big, fierce animals,’ but also the human communities that interact with them, fear them, track them, and try to understand them. In one desperately drawn passage, Quammen describes a tracker ‘who followed a single tiger for more than forty-five days... feeding himself from the leftovers of the tiger’s kills when his food stocks got low.’ Wow. 

This book reminds me that our outer journeys are also journeys through our inner landscape.

Matthiessen tells the moving story of a Himalayan pilgrimage in search of enlightenment after his wife’s death. The quest helps him make peace with his loss, as well as gives him a more profound understanding of the fleeting beauty of life.

The narrative especially resonates for me because it takes place in the Himalayas, a part of the world I’m closely connected to: I lived in Nepal when I was a small girl and have spent a lot of time with my Tibetan family in Darjeeling, India.