Who doesn’t like to imagine that animals have humanlike qualities? In his new book, The Inner Life of Animals, author Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees) postulates that animals of all shapes and sizes do indeed share many of the same characteristics as humans, such as love, grief, empathy, courage and gratitude.

The book is laid out as a series of short chapters, each focusing on a different emotional state and how it relates to animals. Using research studies and his own experiences as the manager of a woodland area in Germany, Wohlleben carefully lays out his opinions and reasoning of his belief that animals are similar to people in the way they interact with their surroundings. For animal lovers, his fascinating, enjoyable prose serves as affirmation that their furry friends are complex beings.

However, those who are scientifically minded might be a little more skeptical, since it is commonly thought that animal behavior is instinctive. Wohlleben anticipates this, raising the argument that it is difficult to prove that all humans experience things in the exact same way. Since we share comparable genetic code with animals, he theorizes that they also have varying degrees of sensations, but it is difficult for them to communicate how they are feeling.

Wohlleben raises other interesting connections, resulting in a narrative that is both entertaining and provocative. For example, he points out that emotions are linked to the unconscious part of the brain. Since “every species of animal experiences unconscious brain activity, and because this activity directs how the animal interacts with the world, every animal must also have emotions.” Wohlleben’s insightful observations will hopefully help build a better understanding of animals and their emotional world.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Peter Wohlleben.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Juli Berwald fell in love with the ocean during her junior year abroad in Israel, when, on a whim, she signed up for a weeklong marine biology course, snorkeling amid the coral reefs of the Red Sea. “It was as if I were Dorothy stepping into Oz,” she writes, remembering how her “world erupted in a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and textures.” She went on to receive a Ph.D. in ocean science, eventually becoming a science textbook writer.

Later, as a mother of two living in landlocked Austin, Texas, she “stumbled” upon jellyfish while working on a project with a National Geographic photographer. She became obsessed with the creatures, realizing that “to research jellyfish is not just to look at the creature unfamiliar and bizarre to most, but to study the planet and our place in it.”

Berwald shares her “crazy jellyfish adventure” in the fascinating Spineless. Reminiscent of Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl, Spineless reveals not only an around-the-world exploration of emerging science but also Berwald’s evolution as a science writer, learning to “write a book that matters,” as one jellyfish expert challenged her.

Are a series of jellyfish blooms simply a natural cycle, or are they a dire indication of global warming and increased ocean acidification? The answer, it turns out, is complicated. What’s more, jellyfish are both friend and foe—useful as food and possibly in medicine and engineering, but also the source of stings and a cause of major power plant-disrupting clogs.

As Berwald snorkels amid a jellyfish bloom in the Bay of Haifa, she watches a research photographer cavort with jellyfish like a dolphin. Readers can’t help but be swept away with enthusiasm as the researcher surfaces to say, “I love them so much. They’re like dancers.”

Full of humor and intrigue, Spineless is a seaworthy saga brimming with information about not only jellyfish but also about the health and future of the oceans and our planet.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When perusing the endless variety of foods lining the shelves of grocery stores, it’s easy to forget where it all comes from. This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm by Ted Genoways offers insight into the farming process, which has experienced significant changes over the years.

Genoways follows Nebraska farmer Rick Hammond and his family over the course of a year, providing an in-depth look at the obstacles farmers face today, including climate change, dwindling underground water supplies, oil and gas pipeline encroachment, market price fluctuations and the always unpredictable weather. There are also successes, such as President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015—but the challenges seem to outweigh the triumphs.

A Nebraska native, Genoways tells the story with genuine honesty and historical awareness, explaining how the “American farm underwent a period of unmatched innovation in the early twentieth century” with the introduction of gas-powered tractors and harvesting combines. But big corporations have now taken over, forcing cross-pollination “to produce robust seed corn” and promoting pesticide-heavy crops, which are more resistant and have higher yields.

Genoways delivers a close-up look at what farmers face today and their efforts to accomplish their goals.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, March 2017

If you’re a fan of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, you might like The Stranger in the Woods even better. Once you start, in fact, you’ll likely have a hard time putting down Michael Finkel’s fascinating new book.

For decades, cottages on North Pond in Central Maine had been broken into, with food, flashlights, clothes, books and many other items stolen. In April 2013 a Maine game warden set a high-tech surveillance trap at a camp that had been repeatedly burglarized. The trap worked, and the mysterious culprit was finally arrested: 47-year-old Christopher Knight.

This “North Pond Hermit” had been living in a carefully camouflaged tent for 27 years, since the spring day in 1986 when the then-20-year-old abruptly left his job with a security company, drove his car into the backwoods of Maine and abandoned it. (Knight’s expertise with alarm systems proved particularly helpful during his more than 1,000 burglaries to stockpile food and supplies.) Even Knight wasn’t exactly sure why he abandoned both his family and society so suddenly, except to say that he felt like a “square peg.” 

Finkel, a journalist and author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, heard about Knight’s arrest and wrote to the jailed hermit. Surprisingly Knight wrote back. They exchanged several letters, and when Knight stopped writing, Finkel flew from his Montana home to visit the inmate in person.

During the course of their visits, Finkel managed to elicit details about the life of the man he calls the “most solitary known person in all of human history.” Finkel’s account artfully blends the details of Knight’s childhood, how he survived in the woods, his legal proceedings and his eventual uneasy return to society, along with informative descriptions of various hermits throughout history and their motivations. 

Well researched and compassionate, The Stranger in the Woods is a thought-provoking account that will make you thankful for your next hot meal and warm bed, especially on a stormy, bone-chilling night.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Michael Finkel about The Stranger in the Woods.

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Let’s face it: We are fascinated by cannibalism, from Hannibal Lecter to the brain-eating zombies in “The Walking Dead.” In Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, zoologist Bill Schutt writes about cannibalism with a delightful mixture of humor and scholarship.

Our horror of cannibalism is so deeply instilled that we assume it is an aberration resulting from extreme conditions such as starvation. Until fairly recently, most zoologists shared that belief. However, research since the 1990s has demonstrated that cannibalism is anything but rare in the animal kingdom. Schutt makes a convincing and frequently hilarious argument that cannibalism is a logical and successful strategy that many animals—especially insects, amphibians and fish, but also birds and mammals—employ in order to ensure the survival of their species.

The book is at its best, however, when discussing human cannibalism. Schutt writes movingly about the tragic Donner Party, one of the most infamous examples of starvation-induced human cannibalism. He also discusses the ongoing debate about whether ritual cannibalism—the consumption of human flesh for liturgical or spiritual reasons—actually exists, or if it is a rumor based on ignorance and fear, as well as an excuse for genocide and exploitation. But the most sobering reading comes when he explores the links between cannibalism and emerging diseases, and the implications for our own future in the face of diminishing resources.

Erudite, amusing and often moving, this is a compelling examination of a serious topic. Be prepared for some pretty curious looks, though—most people aren’t used to hearing bursts of laughter from someone reading a book emblazoned with the title Cannibalism!

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, September 2016

Already a runaway bestseller in the author’s native Germany, The Hidden Life of Trees now offers English-language readers a compelling look at the “secret world” of the forest. Peter Wohlleben, a forester, documents his conversion from lumber producer to tree whisperer, and in the process he reveals the highly communicative social networks of trees.

Wohlleben notes that as humans, we have been more inclined to identify with animals than plants: We recognize a kinship across species when we notice that monkeys indulge in social grooming rituals, or that elephants mourn their dead. Using the language of anthropomorphism, Wohlleben seeks to persuade us that trees too are social beings, in constant communication with one another, caring for their sick and nursing their young. He wants us to recognize our kinship with trees so we’ll be encouraged to preserve their ecosystems more readily.

Trees “speak” to one another through scent, as African acacia trees do when giraffes begin feeding off of them. The acacias being eaten send out a warning scent, which alerts other nearby acacias to produce the bitter toxin that will dissuade the giraffes from eating their leaves. Trees also communicate through a vast fungal network twined around their roots, which transmit electrical signals and chemical compounds. Through this “Wood Wide Web,” forests are truly an interconnected ecosystem—as Wohlleben demonstrates, trees in a community will send healing sugars to the roots of weak or ill trees, and some forests will keep the stumps of their elders alive long after their trunks and branches have disintegrated. 

In part, Wohlleben wants to demonstrate how centuries of forestry have harmed trees, especially the practice of thinning out trees, which keeps them from establishing healthy underground communication lines. But even more, he wants to enchant readers into taking a walk in the woods and listening to the trees themselves.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Exhausted from work and suffering chronic pain from an injury, Alabama farm boy Harry Walker desperately needed a break. It was 1972, so he and a friend took off to look for America. They landed eventually in Yellowstone National Park, where Harry had a blast with a new girl. Then, Harry was killed by a bear.

It’s a horribly sad story. Sure, Harry did some things wrong, and the National Park Service did its best to blame him for his own death. But the context was more complicated than that, as the NPS knew and as writer Jordan Fisher Smith carefully shows in the absorbing Engineering Eden. For Smith, a ranger for 21 years, Harry’s death by grizzly bear was the tragic result of NPS myopia.

Using the lawsuit brought by Harry’s family as a focal point, Smith introduces us to the debate that consumed the national parks in the late 20th century: How should we save these treasures from depredation? Should we step back and act merely as “guardians,” letting nature re-establish its own equilibrium? Or should we be active “gardeners,” intervening to manage the parks’ ecology?

Following decades of allowing park visitors to feed bears, either directly or indirectly at dumps, the service by 1972 had embarked on a “guardian” experiment by abruptly shutting down the dumps, with no effort to help the bears make the transition. The outcome: a surge of attacks on camps by hungry bears.

Opposing the “guardian” approach was a cadre of wildlife scientists led by the colorful Craighead brothers, pioneers of bear tagging research. Through the conflicts of the Craigheads, zoologist Starker Leopold, Yellowstone scientist Glen Cole and other nature experts, Smith shows that Harry was both the victim of a well-intentioned but misguided strategy and a catalyst for a major course change. Smith believes that change has been for the better—and that Harry’s short life had true purpose.

In this gorgeous collection of 12 essays, published to mark the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams provides a poetic and searing portrait of the land and, by extension, of America itself.

Philanthropists loom large in the history of our national parks and Williams draws them in compelling detail: Teddy Roosevelt riding out to North Dakota wearing spurs he bought at Tiffany’s, Laurance Rockefeller donating his family’s ranch to Grand Teton National Park and having every object meticulously cataloged (including the positions of ashtrays) so the ranch could be recreated later. She describes the difficult test that would-be tour guides in Gettysburg must take (since 2012, only two have passed). There’s the pleasure of journalism, the unexpected detail that never disappoints, the feeling of seeing something from an inside angle. But there’s poetry, too.

The intimate moments Williams experiences in these parks, often accompanied by beautiful photography, speak to the reader—what it’s like to witness the body of a bison eaten by other animals on the plain; what kind of lichen grows on the chilly tundra; what oil-soaked sand feels like between the toes. “To bear witness is not a passive act,” she writes. 

Williams’ reverent eyes catalog how humans have impacted the wilderness, but The Hour of Land is a hopeful book. “We are slowly returning to the hour of land,” she writes, “where our human presence can take a side step and respect the integrity of the place itself.”

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Unlike OR-7, the much-watched Oregon wolf whose wanderings have captured the public’s attention (OR-7 has his own website: http://or7expedition.org/), the mountain lion in science writer William Stolzenburg’s Heart of a Lion has no name. Nor is there a happy ending to his story—in June 2011, the 140-pound mountain lion (Puma concolor, cat of a single color) was killed on a parkway in Connecticut, where his like had not roamed for more than a century.

But don’t let the tragic demise of this amazing wild creature stop you from reading Stolzenburg’s book. He uses his considerable journalistic skills to piece together the fascinating story, enabling readers to become witnesses to the “remarkable journey of one lone, impassioned cat,” a trip, it turned out, that was the farthest land trek ever recorded for a wild animal in America.

In a way, the mountain lion’s public end (scientists speculate that other mountain lions heading east are shot and not reported), helped researchers find his beginning: DNA testing confirmed that the wild cat hailed from the Black Hills of South Dakota. From there, the 3-year-old male set off across the Great Plains and the Mississippi River, through the Midwest, into northern forests, and finally, to Connecticut.

Like wolves, mountain lions are feared and often misunderstood. Heart of a Lion is also an impassioned call for less hunting, and more tolerance and protection for this versatile and elusive hunter, descendent of the ancient American cheetah. As a model, Stolzenburg points to California, which has rejected the zero-tolerance policies of other Western states.

And should there be other intrepid travelers like the mountain lion who ended his short life in Connecticut, they will not find themselves without informed and committed advocates. Christopher Spatz, who features prominently in Stolzenburg’s account, along with others interested in re-wilding mountain lions in the east, is part of the volunteer-run Cougar Rewilding Foundation. After reading Heart of a Lion, readers who wish to learn more can avail themselves of Stolzenburg’s extensive bibliography or visit www.cougarrewilding.org.

I was 5 years old when Mount St. Helens blew its top in southwest Washington State in 1980. Although I lived nearly 300 miles away, I remember my hometown of Spokane going dark in the middle of that Sunday and ash falling from the sky like eerie, gray snow.

Everyone who experienced the massive blast remembers that 57 people died that day. But what struck me after reading Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens is that, aside from the famously cantankerous octogenarian Harry Truman, who refused to leave his lodge near the mountain, we know very little about those who died. We assume that they took unnecessary risks that cost them their lives. 

In this captivating and damning book, Steve Olson examines why people were near the mountain despite warnings from geologists after a series of quakes and smaller eruptions. Government officials didn’t want to appear overzealous or hurt the already shaky timber industry by overstating the danger zone. The resulting hazard map made it appear that people could get close to the mountain on the west and northwest sides and be safe. That misleading information would have deadly consequences. 

Dozens of individuals who thought they were following the rules ventured dangerously near the volcano to camp, hike or simply take a curious peek at the awakening mountain. They were unaware that a blast would flatten the landscape for miles around, sending a cloud of searing crushed pumice zooming over the nearby ridges. One couple was camping nine miles away from the summit of the mountain. The husband, John Killian, was never found. His wife’s left arm was recovered months later. Many of the victims burned to death or were suffocated by the blast cloud. Others were crushed by falling debris.

Olson, an award-winning science writer, brings a new perspective to the navigation of natural disasters, drawing a clear picture of how industry and politics affected who lived and died that day. Eruption is an eye-opening and dramatic read that reminds us of nature’s power and unpredictability—and our human propensity for underestimating it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Olson about Eruption.
 

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, December 2015

“His name was Salvador and he arrived with bloody feet.” From the opening sentence of Jonathan Franklin’s 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea, this riveting adventure has us in its grip, spellbound and eager to know more about the mysterious Salvador Alvarenga.

We learn that Alvarenga arrived in the Mexican coastal village of Costa Azul in the fall of 2008 looking to start a new life and leave behind his troubles in El Salvador. With bravado and tenacity, Alvarenga worked his way up, first taking menial jobs and gaining the villagers’ trust, and eventually captaining his own boat and earning a reputation as the best fisherman in the village.

On November 17, 2012, Alvarenga set out with an untested mate, Cordoba, hoping to outrun a possible Norteno—a violent storm capable of producing hurricane-strength winds. After a successful haul on the fishing grounds, the pair headed home, but within 20 miles of shore, their boat encountered the Norteno. To avoid capsizing in rough seas, they jettisoned almost all of their supplies; their engine failed, and by the time the winds had calmed, the two were floating far from shore at the mercy of fickle weather and the currents of the Pacific Ocean.

Franklin, who spent a year interviewing Alvarenga, meticulously recounts the day-to-day lives of these mariners and their attempts to survive. Although Cordoba died in early 2013, the resourceful Alvarenga fought on, devising ways to catch fish, turtles and birds, and constructing a makeshift rain barrel out of plastic bottles found in the ocean. He repaired his tattered clothing with a fish fin fashioned into a needle.

By the time he washed ashore on one of the atolls in the Marshall Islands on January 29, 2014, Alvarenga had survived longer at sea in a small boat than anyone previously recorded. His story of resilience, ingenuity and grit is an unforgettable true-life adventure.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Few forces of nature are as terrifying and unpredictable as forest fires, particularly those in America’s arid West and Southwest. Depending on size, such a fire can create its own shifting weather patterns, each posing a new danger, a different path of destruction. That’s what happened in Yarnell, Arizona, on June 30, 2013, when 19 of the 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting team were burned to death in a blaze sparked by lightning. 

A former firefighter himself, Kyle Dickman first focuses on the history of the Granite Mountain unit and then delves into the background and personalities of its individual members, each of whom had to undergo grueling physical training and considerable hazing to win a place on the team. Most of the men were in their 20s, often at loose ends professionally but caught up in the gung-ho spirit of their jobs. Dickman recounts in such detail their love affairs, marriages, divorces, children, aspirations and resentments that by the time they die, the reader is quite likely to feel a sense of personal loss. Dickman varies his account by quoting many of the text messages the doomed Hotshots sent to and received from their loved ones during the final hours.

The most vivid parts of his reporting, however, are his close-ups of the fire as it invades the town of Yarnell. “Bob [a 94-year-old resident fleeing with his 89-year-old wife] couldn’t see through the smoke. He kept bumping into the trees and brush on the sides of their driveway. Then he put the truck’s right wheel into a ditch. The tire exploded. Around them, dozens of propane tanks sent columns of flames shooting into the air like fires off an oil derrick.” 

Left unanswered, Dickman acknowledges, is the haunting question of why the 19 men left a zone of relative safety to descend into the cauldron that took their lives.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.