Wood Lit

For the past 150 years, various federal, state, and county agencies have done their best to erase coyotes from the American landscape. We have attacked them with guns, dynamite, and poison…

In this fascinating and well-researched history, scholar Silas Chamberlain traces the evolution of hiking in America from the early 1800s to today. He describes how romantic and transcendental…

Long an admirer of oaks, I was pleased to receive a copy of arborist William Bryant Logan’s book for Christmas last year. In its 300 pages about acorns and the people who ate them, about…

In 2017, spring peepers appeared in my neighborhood wetlands, on April 16, with trademark enthusiasm, broadcasting sexual exuberance across our narrow, wooded valley … a full-throated,…

The same thought came up frequently as I read Mark Mikolas’s A Beginner’s Guide to Recognizing Trees of the Northeast: I wish I had had this book when I was first learning to…

With so many good tracking books already available, you might think that all has been said on the topic. But Linda Spielman’s new addition to the field, A Field Guide to Tracking Mammals…

Being fond of plants, I expected to like Anita Sanchez’s new book about Carolus (Karl) Linnaeus. What I hadn’t expected was my emotional reaction – I found myself a bit…

I hope to live long enough to see catamounts come home to the Northeast. Not just one or two mountain lions, mind you, but viable breeding populations that haunt deer, ratcheting their…

Adventure begins with Matt’s late-spring visit to “the Pit,” a vacant lot at the edge of his neighborhood. Matt notices something he’s never seen before: water is…

With catchy rhymes and colorful artwork, author Miranda Paul skillfully weaves the seasonal play of children with water to introduce the water cycle. Water is Water, an award-winning…

You may well remember Annie Proulx’s first book, The Shipping News – a bestseller adapted to film, or her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which became an Oscar-winning…

I was a bit swamped by new, amazing bird information a couple of years ago when I read Bird Sense, an earlier Tim Birkhead book. This new book, The Most Perfect Thing, is just as good, and…

About 25 years ago, I was thrilled to learn that Russian scientists had introduced radioactive material into a tree and found the same material in nearby trees, proving that trees are…

New Hampshire’s Hubbard Brook Research Forest is a testament to how much can be gained from an enduring commitment to scientific research. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of researchers…

The North Country lost an iconic writer when Howard Frank Mosher died this past January after a battle with cancer. Mosher wrote 11 novels and dozens of short stories set in Vermont’s…

Without making a partisan political statement, I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of ways America is greater than it’s ever been. Consider cooking. Thanks to the proliferation…

In 1979, Laura and Guy Waterman came out with the acclaimed Backwoods Ethics, a book that advocated low-impact hiking, camping, and alpine management. This is a rerelease of that book with a…

My wife and I spent a summer 25 years ago living with a crow. A veterinarian acquaintance had been given a fledgling that had fallen out of a nest, and through a series of handoffs the bird…

Dean Bennett begins this memoir by reminding his readers that, in days gone by, the most important enterprise in the small Maine town of Locke’s Mills used to close down on the first day…

Have you, too, been annoyed by books that should have been abbreviated and published as pamphlets – how to change a tire, organize your garage, or how to make kimchi? I was ever so…