Memoir
grrlscientist | June 21, 2010tags: book review, Lift, animal training, peregrine falcon, falconry, hawking, memoir, creative nonfiction, Rebecca K. O'Connor
It's rare indeed when I read a bird book by a previously-published author whom I've never heard of before, but a few months ago, I was contacted by a published writer who was unknown to me, asking if I wanted to read her story about what it's like to be a woman falconer. Of course! eagerly replied this wannabe falconer. After a few postal mix-ups and delays, the book finally arrived at my door in Germany. This slim paperback, Lift (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press; 2009),…
grrlscientist | April 12, 2009tags: book review, memoir, homelessness, unemployment, Cadillac Man, Thomas Wagner
The homeless are everywhere in New York City. I run across them every day while riding public transit, while walking around the city and while using wireless in the public libraries. After a few conversations with homeless people, I've learned that most of them avoid shelters because of the risk of violent crime there. So where do they sleep? Where do they go to get a shower and clean clothes? Are all homeless people either crazy or crackheads? How did these people end up living on the streets in the first…
ksharpe | January 11, 2009Review by John M. Lynch at Stranger Fruit
Originally posted on: January 11, 2009 4:18 PM
I've had the pleasure of working behind the scenes in a number of natural history museums. While a grad student, I had an office in the Natural History Museum in Dublin, spent a good deal of time every year in the collections of the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and a month at the Natural History Museum in London. As anyone who has spent time behind the scenes will tell you, not only are all the really cool specimens kept away from public view, but museums are populated with some very strange…
grrlscientist | April 20, 2008tags: Flights Against the Sunset, short stories, memoir, birding, bird watching, Kenn Kaufman, book review
When Kenn Kaufman was sixteen, he left home in pursuit of a dream; to see more species of birds in the United States in one calendar year than had ever been seen before. Instead of preventing him from trying to achieve this dream as most people would have done, his parents allowed him to go with their blessing. Now, as an adult, a famous birder and field guide who travels the world, we find Kaufman in a nursing facility in Wichita, Kansas, visiting his seriously ill mother after having…
grrlscientist | December 20, 2007tags: The Snoring Bird, Bernd Heinrich, book review, birds, ornithology, biography, science
I remember that I felt very cold when I read Bernd Heinrich's book, Ravens in Winter, even though it was a hot summer day. That was the first of Heinrich's books that I read, but it definitely wasn't the last. I just finished reading his most recent book, The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology (NYC: HarperCollins; 2007) and just as I wore a sweater while I finished his Ravens in Winter, I found that my normally routine daily subway rides to and from the library were…