Wood Lit

If you have kids, you know that children’s books about animals usually fall into two camps: There are the basic non-fiction books that give your kids just enough information to raise a…

Thomas O’Donnell’s reminiscences of his boyhood in a remote lumbering settlement provide an amusing and entertaining description of family life in a nineteenth-century logging…

Intensely personal poetry only works if readers can recognize something of themselves, or some universal truth, or something fun or beautiful in the prose. If it’s there, the poet and…

There’s something about wilderness rescues and mishaps that seems to bring out the voyeur in many of us. Are we drawn to the cautionary tale, fascinated by the raw power of nature and…

For cabinetmakers, both professional and amateur, the name Christian Becksvoort will have the same kind of resonance that Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle will have for a baseball fan. Becksvoort…

If you are peering into one of those GPS devices many people now find indispensable, everything, anywhere, is shown in relation to your own location. With GPS, you’re always at the…

The Northeast has become a hive of ecological counter-intuition, at least by the framework of any living memory. According to Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How…

Authors and publishers of field guides, take note: the bar has gone up with A Field Guide to the Ants of New England. Ants? Ants. Lilliputian ants whose entire colony is enclosed in an acorn,…

“I’ll be darned; the little critter is sharper than I give him credit for,” writes now-retired Maine Game Warden John Ford of a young warden recruit. Together, with another…

It’s a guidebook, but hardly one to slip in the backpack or back pocket while hiking. With its glossy color photos, New England’s Natural Wonders: An Explorer’s Guide, by…

Genevieve Jones was ahead of her time. Born in 1847 in Circleville, Ohio, into a tight-knit and nurturing family, she grew up observing the natural world with her father, Nelson, and her…

Environmentally conscious Americans have been partaking, for some time now, in long, spirited, and often muddied discussions about energy. Whether it’s wind, hydro, wood, nuclear,…

One thing that still amazes me about living and working in Maine is the amount of ecological diversity one can find in a fairly small area. The other day, I came across a black spruce stand…

On a December morning, a decapitated buck, one leg hacked off, showed up in a gully near my home. Once I deciphered what was bleeding in the tawny leaves, I begged my neighbor with a backhoe…

Cedric Pollet’s Bark: An Intimate Look at the World’s Trees ranks with the day in November 1972 when I walked into Chartres Cathedral and saw the magnificent stained-glass…

If you’re going to get a casual reader interested in a 442-page history of anything, you’d better have an engaging subject matter. Fortunately for Eric Jay Dolin, the fur trade is…

By the time you read this, the annual banquet of fiddleheads may have passed, but a cornucopia of other wild foods, medicines, and materials are available to anyone who cares to discover them.…

Roger Tory Peterson, a man in need of a big biography, finally has one. At 422 pages, Elizabeth Rosenthal delivers a thorough and masterful account of the man known to friends as the “King…

Elisabeth Tova Bailey was a vigorous, outdoorsy woman living in Maine when she contracted an enigmatic virus or bacterial infection, possibly while vacationing in a Swiss village or on the…

I’ve long been an admirer of Cathie Pelletier’s Mattagash novels. In The Funeral Makers, Once Upon a Time on the Banks, and The Weight of Winter, she creates a fictional territory as rich…