Kelly Blewett

NonfictionTrue Crime

The Scientist and the Spy

Review by Kelly Blewett

A neatly planted cornfield in Iowa might not seem like the setting for an international trade war, but looks can be deceiving. Mara Hvistendahl, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, has been writing about China for over a decade. A former Midwesterner who is equally comfortable in farmers’ kitchens as in her high-rise apartment in Beijing, Hvistendahl is uniquely situated to tell this unexpectedly dramatic story.

Robert Mo originally came to the U.S. to pursue a career in thermodynamics. Unable to land a tenure-track job in academia, Mo accepted a lucrative position at a Chinese agricultural company. Soon, Mo was on the road to various Midwestern towns.

Police reports record sightings of “an Asian man in a suit, standing in a cornfield.” Mo was seeking corn samples from the biggest companies in the business, Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer, and he was not alone. Many companies seek shortcuts to the kinds of high-performing strains of corn that are private intellectual property in the U.S. Mo soon finds himself trailed by FBI agents, and a slow game of cat-and-mouse ensues. One larger-than-life corn consultant, Kevin Montgomery, tries to piece together the puzzle while drinking lemonade on his back porch. As Montgomery’s interviews with Hvistendahl suggest, the tactics of both the Chinese and the FBI are equally baffling for an insider in corn genetics.

Chinese agricultural espionage has been a topic of increasing significance, but where do our ideas about China come from? In The Scientist and the Spy, Hvistendahl traces the particulars of Mo’s case, but she also explores the racialized history of FBI investigations into Chinese immigrants. Her careful contextualization of the case makes its particulars loom with the uncertainty of a fun house mirror. Those who seem like perpetrators look, in certain lights, like victims, and the victims like perpetrators. As the “truth” of the case itself fades from visibility, what remains is the feeling that the case is, as Hvistendahl puts it, “a Rorschach test” for views on the Chinese technology threat. To find your own perspective, read this fascinating story, which speaks to the larger geopolitical tensions shaping our time.

A neatly planted cornfield in Iowa might not seem like the setting for an international trade war, but looks can be deceiving. Mara Hvistendahl, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, has been writing about China for over a decade. A former Midwesterner who…

NonfictionMemoir

What It Is

Review by Kelly Blewett

Until 2016, writer Clifford Thompson felt like an American first and foremost. Following Trump’s election, Thompson was shaken to see how differently his fellow Americans seemed to understand the world. He found himself reflecting on his American identity—where it came from, how it developed over time and what it means to be “rooted” in a certain set of experiences. 

For Thompson, that set of experiences includes the all-black neighborhood outside of D.C. where he spent his childhood; an undergraduate career at a predominantly white liberal arts college in Ohio; and an adulthood in New York, where he raises two daughters alongside his white wife. 

After the election, Thompson wanted to break out of his bubble and understand how others were rooted. He flew to other parts of the U.S. to interview Trump supporters and try to understand how they see Trump, themselves and the rest of the country, especially regarding race. What he heard and saw only confirmed his sense of division, even alienation. 

In What It Is, the reader experiences, via Thompson’s plaintive and disillusioned voice, the discomfort of personal recalibration. Thompson explores the world as it is and carefully thinks through how each of us can find our place within it.

Until 2016, writer Clifford Thompson felt like an American first and foremost. Following Trump’s election, Thompson was shaken to see how differently his fellow Americans seemed to understand the world. He found himself reflecting on his American identity—where it came from, how it developed over…

NonfictionEuropean History

A Pilgrimage to Eternity

Review by Kelly Blewett

Timothy Egan is Irish Catholic, thoroughly lapsed. A well-read skeptic and New York Times columnist, Egan shares a telling anecdote about his mother. On her deathbed, she still wasn’t sure how she felt about the afterlife. “I’m not feeling it, Timmy,” she told him. “I don’t know what to believe or what’s ahead.” He doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulties of faith. And yet.

Egan finds himself wanting more. He wants to slow down. He wants to take time away from his many screens. He wants to meet Pope Francis, who has captured the attention of the world. And so Egan becomes a pilgrim, determined to walk the Via Francigena, an ancient route from Canterbury to Rome. “I’m interested in the Big Questions,” Egan writes in a personal letter to the Pope. “How do we live in an increasingly secular age? What is our duty to our fellow humans in a time of rising nationalism and tribalism? And what can the Gospel say to someone who thinks he can get all the world’s knowledge from the internet?”

Egan stays on the road for months, traversing snowy mountains and sweltering valleys, getting lost and blistered and lonely, reconnecting with family and buying more comfortable shoes. He visits libraries, monasteries, plus all manner of religious sites. As he wanders, Egan beautifully describes the landscape, his personal prayers and his family’s heartbreaking experiences with untrustworthy men of faith. In the most surprising passages of the book, Egan turns to the history of Catholicism in Europe.

It’s a bloody story, full of martyrs and villains, gruesome relics and deserted graves. Egan’s lively recounting of history is juxtaposed by his contemporary observations of the emptying cathedrals of today, as he traces the many ways that the Catholic Church has changed over time. And he himself is changed through the journey. Part travel memoir, part history, part spiritual reflection—A Pilgrimage to Eternity is wholly enjoyable.

Timothy Egan is Irish Catholic, thoroughly lapsed. A well-read skeptic and New York Times columnist, Egan shares a telling anecdote about his mother. On her deathbed, she still wasn’t sure how she felt about the afterlife. “I’m not feeling it, Timmy,” she told him. “I…

NonfictionEssays

Make It Scream, Make It Burn

Review by Kelly Blewett

A tattoo that runs up the arm of acclaimed essayist Leslie Jamison reads Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto, or “I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.” Her new collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, puts her tattoo to the test. Jamison investigates outsiders: people who obsessively identify with a whale known as 52 Blue, people who believe their children have been reincarnated, people who linger in the online world of Second Life. She takes her subjects seriously, but she also finds herself at a loss to relate. Sometimes connection is impossible. Of her interaction with someone who doesn’t speak English, she writes, “Nothing that is human is alien to me, I would have told him, except I couldn’t, because some things are alien to me, like the Sinhalese language.”

Beyond the limits of relatability, she also explores the weightiness of one person trying to document the life of another. In my favorite essay, she traces the unraveling of Walker Evans and James Agee’s trip to the South, which they completed on Fortune magazine’s dime in 1936 and which resulted in the widely acclaimed Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. Her astute analysis of the differences between the draft of the magazine article and the published book blew me away.

She deepens her exploration of this theme in subsequent essays, detailing her own journalistic romp to a foreign land and the difficulties of trying to write about what she saw there, and also the way that feminists such as photographer Annie Appel have obsessively returned to their subjects to try and resist the limits of witnessing. Appel has documented herself alongside her Mexican subjects and has, over time, allowed her story to become intertwined with theirs. 

The perils of representation weigh on many people, certainly, but perhaps especially on artists. Jamison’s title Make It Scream comes from a review of Agee’s famous book by poet William Carlos Williams. For Williams, it is the duty of the artist to make life scream and smolder—to show the urgency that underlies and interconnects our lives. Nothing human is alien to me. For her readers’ sakes, I hope Jamison will keep pursuing this ideal.

A tattoo that runs up the arm of acclaimed essayist Leslie Jamison reads Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto, or “I am human. Nothing human is alien to me.” Her new collection, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, puts her tattoo to the…

Nonfiction

Guest House for Young Widows

Review by Kelly Blewett

Azadeh Moaveni offers what is sure to become a modern classic, answering the question of how Muslim women become, as the Western media puts it, “radicalized.” In Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of Isis, Moaveni persuasively argues that the West’s broad narratives of radicalization fail to account for the lived experiences of Muslim women. She seeks to remedy this by following a group of a dozen women over the last decade, each of whom individually (or occasionally, in a group) made the momentous decision to move to Syria to become the bride of a fighter in the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

These women differ in nearly every conceivable way. Some are from Europe (Germany and England), while others are from Africa (Tunisia). Some are barely teenagers, while others are heading into middle age. From isolated divorcees to devoted little sisters, the propaganda of the Islamic State deeply resonated with these women, and they headed for a literal war zone to live under a government that promised to expressly adhere to the laws of Islam. 

The stories are utterly captivating, particularly when Moaveni turns her attention to a group of teenage girls in East London who sneak to Syria under the noses of their astonished teachers and parents. Moaveni offers a deep dive into this story, providing a glimpse into the blogs these teens were reading, the images they were posting to social media and how Twitter enabled bloggers to act as direct emissaries to the caliphate. Indeed, the role of social media—from YouTube to Twitter, from Facebook to WhatsApp—cannot be overstated.

Moaveni not only provides granular views of particular women as they navigate this sociopolitical minefield but also situates these stories in a broader cultural context, rendering them legible in compelling ways. She raises as many questions as she answers, wondering, for example, what will fill the void left by ISIS and how the home cultures of these vulnerable women could have interceded in their responses to online rhetoric. I couldn’t put the book down.

Azadeh Moaveni offers what is sure to become a modern classic, answering the question of how Muslim women become, as the Western media puts it, “radicalized.” In Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of Isis, Moaveni persuasively argues that the West’s broad narratives…

NonfictionHistory

The Ghosts of Eden Park

Review by Kelly Blewett

George Remus legally defended bootleggers. Then he decided to become one. His outrageous scheme involved circulating whiskey from distilleries (that he owned) to pharmacies (that he owned) and, along the way, being robbed by bandits (whom he employed). His flashy second wife, Imogene Holmes, helped him run the ever-growing empire. They bought a mansion. They threw parties. They lived lavishly. Behind the frenetic lifestyle of this German-immigrant-turned-millionaire was an unquenchable thirst, not for whiskey (he was a teetotaler) but for acceptance and admiration. 

When Holmes betrayed Remus by starting an affair with the prohibition agent Franklin Dodge, Remus began to exhibit signs of madness. These “brainstorms” culminated in murder: Remus shot Holmes at point-blank range. The following trial captured the attention of the country. Remus, ever hungry for the limelight, defended himself and pleaded “transitory insanity.” By the end, his fortune was gone.

In The Ghosts of Eden Park, Karen Abbott tells the story of Remus’ rise and fall with a novelist’s eye, and incredibly, every line of dialogue is taken directly from a primary source. Without embellishment or overt psychologizing, she pulls readers into the kaleidoscopic world of Jazz-Age America, full of flappers and whiskey parties, boisterous criminals and crooked government agents. Though Remus seemed unstoppable, he met his match in Mabel Willebrandt, a U.S. attorney and staunch feminist who was determined to bring him down.

As a resident of Cincinnati, where the crimes took place, I drove past the landmarks from Remus’ story: the sites of the Alms and Sinton hotels, the fateful roundabout in Eden Park. I was transfixed, not only by the incredible research that informed this compulsively readable book but also by what the story reveals about human nature, the interplay of brilliant and unpredictable individuals and the societies in which they live, and the way that greed, fame and lust can—and have—corrupted the motives of both lovers and enemies. If you are a fan of true crime, historical nonfiction and the Jazz Age, this is not a book to miss.

In The Ghosts of Eden Park, Karen Abbott tells the story of Remus’ rise and fall with a novelist’s eye, and incredibly, every line of dialogue is taken directly from a primary source. Without embellishment or overt psychologizing, she pulls readers into the kaleidoscopic world of Jazz-Age America, full of flappers and whiskey parties, boisterous criminals and crooked government agents. Though Remus seemed unstoppable, he met his match in Mabel Willebrandt, a U.S. attorney and staunch feminist who was determined to bring him down.

NonfictionMemoirComing of Age

Out East

Review by Kelly Blewett

Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer relates the travails of a group of privileged New England kids as they navigate an expensive, indulgent and raucous summer in Montauk in their late twenties. (References to Gatsby abound.) They commute from Manhattan for summer weekends at a rambling house referred to as the Hive, which is filled with an ever-shifting set of toned young people and high-end brand names.

These career-driven 20-somethings want an adult summer camp, and they need it. Glynn finds himself deeply lonely in the city, weighed down with anxiety that he’ll die alone. Following a series of frightening events, including a nearly fatal car crash and the death of his family’s matriarch, Glynn’s life seems to be spinning slowly out of control. With thoughts of his own mortality haunting him, Glynn begins to wonder why real and enduring connection has been so elusive.

When feelings for a male friend develop into something more, Glynn finds himself bearing the weight of a secret about his sexual identity. John is not the only member of the group figuring things out. A set of beautiful 20-something girls—Ashley, Perrie and Kirsten—are on their own journeys for love and connection. Ashley, memorably dubbed the Mayor of Montauk, spends the summer longing to find a handsome man she once glimpsed at a bar. Perrie finds a new boyfriend every weekend, while Kirsten flits between two inappropriate men. The other boys in the house, half of whom John refers to as “the finance bros” and half of whom are gay, don’t fare much better.

What endures about this portrait is how deeply human it is to be uncertain, to be driving a hundred miles an hour toward nowhere and longing to have a buddy in the car. This group of friends receive each other in all the Montauk messiness, from early morning runs for coffee to long conversations on the roof. They drink together, philosophize together, go to the beach together, admire each other and watch each other make terrible decisions. While reading this book, you are ultimately grateful that they have each other and are reminded of the precariousness of the emotional inner life that undulates just beneath the surface, even for people who look as though they have it all.

Out East relates the travails of a group of privileged New England kids as they navigate an expensive, indulgent and raucous summer in Montauk in their late twenties.
NonfictionSocial Science

No Visible Bruises

Review by Kelly Blewett

“I talk to a lot of people who don’t want to talk to me,” writes author Rachel Louise Snyder on the first page of No Visible Bruises. She begins with the case of Michelle Mosure Monson, fatally shot by her abusive husband, Rocky. He also killed their two children before committing suicide. Years later, Snyder sat down with Michelle’s father, trying to unravel what happened. She watched hours of home videos. She connected with Michelle’s family, law enforcement and community members who were traumatized by the crime. Most didn’t want to talk about Michelle. They felt complicit, wracked with regret and grief. 

The suffering induced by domestic violence is bigger than we can begin to understand, Snyder explains. Because these crimes are generally perceived as private, it’s nearly impossible to trace the collective impact. Snyder sets herself to the task, arguing that we need a broader research-based view of domestic violence. 

Snyder’s careful reporting about Michelle’s case lays the foundation for the many other stories she examines. Beyond the victims and their families, Snyder profiles several men who are trying to overcome their violent tendencies. She visits them in prison and sits in on counseling sessions, showing how hard it is for them to be aware of their processes of escalation—and how easy it is for them to slip back into violent tendencies that put them and those around them at risk.

Finally, Snyder examines what interventions are interrupting the cycle of violence. This section offers tangible hope that our collective efforts, especially those that unite professionals around high-risk cases, can result in real change. Although No Visible Bruises is not easy or light reading, Snyder’s willingness to tell the intimate stories of domestic violence sheds light on an often neglected subject. All of us have a stake in becoming more aware of and responsive to private violence, and this book proves why.

All of us have a stake in becoming more aware of and responsive to private violence, and this book proves why.
NonfictionAging

The Art of Dying Well

Review by Kelly Blewett

Journalist Katy Butler first wrote about death in her 2013 memoir, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, which charted the decline and death of her father. Six years later, she offers a tremendously helpful follow-up, The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life. This substantial book, written for the aging and those who love them, offers a stage-by-stage look at the path toward death.

It might not seem like fun reading, but the salience of the topic is undeniable: Seventy-five percent of Americans want to die at home, but fewer than 33 percent do so. Butler points out that basic documentation can ensure a patient’s end-of-life medical intentions, yet more than 70 percent of us haven’t filled out the paperwork. Cultural conversations overvalue dramatic medical interventions that traumatize both the dying and those who love them. Butler writes, “There is a way to a peaceful, empowered, humane death, even in an era of high-technology medicine.” She goes on to offer a road map for the journey. Organized into seven chapters that begin with “Resilience” and end with “Active Dying,” Butler’s book is a nuts-and-bolts guide to supporting ourselves and each other through the final stages of life. For her, the path toward a good death begins years in advance, and no detail is too small.

For most of us, the shift toward death is invisible, frightening and largely idiosyncratic to our own circumstances. What Butler offers here is an overview of the terrain and helpful commentary about empowering, meaningful actions for people in a wide range of circumstances. If you are aging or love someone who is, this is a book to add to your list.

This substantial book, written for the aging and those who love them, offers a stage-by-stage look at the path toward death.

Nonfiction

How to Disappear

Review by Kelly Blewett

In How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, essayist Akiko Busch offers a wide-ranging meditation on what it means to disappear. “Invisibility can mean one thing and then the opposite,” she writes in the introduction. “It enables and denies. It has become a loaded idea.” The essays in this collection, with their divergent focuses on nature, technology, identity, creativity and popular culture, beautifully unpack the concept of visibility.

To be seen is foundational to being known, yet humans have devised a stunning array of strategies for hiding in plain sight. Such strategies seem to take a cue from the natural world, which Busch writes about with clarity and precision. Her examples range from the immediately relatable, such as the sounds and sights of a New England forest or a houseplant that appears to be a stone, to the more unusual, such as her observations while scuba diving in the Caribbean. Camouflage, subterfuge and misdirection all animate her examples. Like animals and plants, humans have invented ways to maneuver “our way in and out of one another’s sightlines.”

Meanwhile, closer to our living rooms, we grow increasingly familiar with being constantly surveilled. Traditional conceptions of privacy erode as Big Data renders the minutiae of daily life visible in ways difficult to fully comprehend. Perfectly phrased status updates, photos circulated to hundreds in a single click and increased communication have led to a culture of performance and a pervasive (exhausting) awareness of how we present ourselves. Busch offers a timely and thoughtful exploration of visibility in our current moment. To be seen or to disappear is political, technological and psychological. It impacts how we move through the world and how we occasionally try, like living things always have, to hide. 

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, essayist Akiko Busch offers a wide-ranging meditation on what it means to disappear.

NonfictionBiography

The wonderful life of Mister Rogers

Review by Kelly Blewett

Not only is 2018 the 50th anniversary of the national premiere of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but—as two feature films and this full-length biography attest—it is also a moment when our culture is feeling particularly nostalgic for the Presbyterian minister in his cardigan sweater and sneakers. Maxwell King, former director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, prepared to write this biography of Fred Rogers by interviewing many people who knew Rogers best—from Rogers’ wife, Joanne, to the attendant who saw him every morning at the gym before his swim and Rogers’ many friends and co-workers.

King offers a comprehensive look at Rogers’ life in The Good Neighbor, from his privileged childhood in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, through his difficult college experiences (dropping out of Dartmouth College to pursue a music degree from Rollins College) to his early days in broadcasting and his meticulous work on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The show was unique in the landscape of children’s television, and Rogers’ fingerprints were on every element. The opening credits feature his hometown of Latrobe; the songs, which he wrote, reflect his deep commitment to social and emotional education; and the puppets embodied characters Rogers first imagined when he was a child.

Rogers emerges from this biography much like I imagine he did every morning from his swim: fresh and glowing with health, secure in his identity, calm and creatively focused. His passions for puppetry, childhood development, faith and music come through clearly. It is undeniably heartening to read about someone who cared so deeply for children and childhood.

Rogers’ ideas will make readers want to cheer. “There are many people in the world who want to make children into performing seals,” he once said. “And as long as children can perform well, those adults will applaud. But I would much rather help a child to be able to say who he or she is.” In a time when antagonism seems to divide us, Rogers’ messages of authenticity, respect and neighborliness continue to refresh.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Maxwell King about The Good Neighbor.

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Not only is 2018 the 50th anniversary of the national premiere of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but—as two feature films and this full-length biography attest—it is also a moment when our culture is feeling particularly nostalgic for the Presbyterian minister in his cardigan sweater and sneakers. Maxwell King, former director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, prepared to write this biography of Fred Rogers by interviewing many people who knew Rogers best—from Rogers’ wife, Joanne, to the attendant who saw him every morning at the gym before his swim and Rogers’ many friends and co-workers.

NonfictionScience

Lost in mazes of the mind

Review by Kelly Blewett

You might guess that Helen Thomson, a journalist who studies neuroscience, would be a fan of the late Oliver Sacks. And you’d be right. Like Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Thomson’s Unthinkable features case studies of people who inhabit unimaginable realities, among them a man who believes he is a tiger, a woman who is continually lost and a man who feels the bodily sensations of others as he observes them.

Thomson brings to the project an eye for detail and narrative prowess, and unlike a scientific investigator such as Sacks, she does not seek to study these astonishing minds in clinical settings, but instead in more natural ones. Based in England, Thomson travels thousands of miles to meet her contacts and visit their homes. She asks the kinds of personal questions scientists might avoid. For instance, she queries one subject, who strongly associates people with colors, what color he associates with his mother—and even with Thomson herself.

Yet Thomson’s aim, ultimately, is to shed light on what each case can tell us about our own life experiences, particularly as they are mediated by the three-pound lump of flesh in our heads. How do we find our way around, perceive our bodies and record our memories?

Neuroscience has exploded in the last two decades as imaging technology and a renewed exploration of human cognition have illuminated the inner workings of our minds like never before. Thomson traces the roots of this enterprise and shows how these extraordinary cases relate to ongoing investigations into the nature of perception. Fans of Sacks will enjoy and quickly devour this insightful and very readable book.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You might guess that Helen Thomson, a journalist who studies neuroscience, would be a fan of the late Oliver Sacks. And you’d be right. Like Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Thomson’s Unthinkable features case studies of people who inhabit unimaginable realities, among them a man who believes he is a tiger, a woman who is continually lost and a man who feels the bodily sensations of others as he observes them.

NonfictionMemoir

Ten arboreal epiphanies

Review by Kelly Blewett

Picture a tree. Perhaps you visualize it at a distance, as though observing a photograph. James Aldred, a professional climber who has been on payroll for National Geographic and the BBC, would likely conjure something much more intimate: the texture of the bark, the give of the branches. Aldred’s new book, The Man Who Climbs Trees, lets us see the trees alongside him. If you’ve ever marveled at the ecosystems housed by these majestic, ascending towers of life, you will enjoy nestling into the pages of this book.

Each of the 10 chapters focuses on a particular tree from around the world. Aldred’s descriptions are breathtaking. When climbing the “Tree of Life” in Costa Rica, he happened upon a 6-foot iguana, which he refers to as an “arboreal dragon.” When in Borneo, he paused midway up a tree, closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the rainforest. When he opens his eyes, the view “rushed at me from every direction, as if a veil had been lifted. The jungle was so much greater than the sum of its parts, and I was nothing more than an atom adrift within this overwhelming tide of energy.”

As this passage suggests, Aldred’s devotion to these natural spaces verges on spiritual. Aldred gives the reader a real sense of his embodied experience. He describes all varieties of bugs—ants, bees, wasps, spiders—and how they crawl on his skin as he scales the trees, as well as the sheer exhaustion of tossing a rope over an ever-higher target. He recalls incredible primates—gibbons, gorillas, howler monkeys and so forth—and envies their climbing expertise. He spies lumbering elephants, stealthy cats, colorful birds, graceful butterflies and determined tree frogs. Truly, Aldred offers a feast for the imagination, one that will draw you back to the landscapes that you’ve loved and pull you forward toward new ones. This wide-ranging and beautiful book, brought to life with expertise, affection and respect, is not to be missed.

Picture a tree. Perhaps you visualize it at a distance, as though observing a photograph. James Aldred, a professional climber who has been on payroll for National Geographic and the BBC, would likely conjure something much more intimate: the texture of the bark, the give of the branches. Aldred’s new book, The Man Who Climbs Trees, lets us see the trees alongside him. If you’ve ever marveled at the ecosystems housed by these majestic, ascending towers of life, you will enjoy nestling into the pages of this book.

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