I’m beginning to wonder if Mark Avery has even risen from his reading chair for the past fortnight as he posted three new book reviews to his blog this Sunday: Tessa Boase’s new “Mrs Pankhurst’s Purple Feather,” Seán Lysaght’s “Eagle Country,” and an updated and reissued edition of David Lack’s classic 1956 work “Swifts in a Tower.”
On the eve of European colonization, the Potomac River valley was a remarkably fertile place, teeming with game and fish, and with rich soil well suited to cultivation; yet when the first colonists arrived they found much of it apparently uninhabited. Why?
For as long as I’ve ventured afield in search of whatever nature might wish to show me, I’ve gone fully vested. That is to say, I’ve worn a field vest. Not that I have anything against day packs or shoulder bags, mind you; I just find that vests (or as my British friends call them, waistcoats) allow me to carry what I need in a way that allows me easy access to all of it while still letting me move about with a feeling of being unencumbered.
When one is a reviewer of books, each trip to the post office is a potential path to discovery. For example, just the other day a package arrived containing a new book from Oregon State University Press: A Hunger for High Country; One Woman’s Journey to the Wild in Yellowstone Country by Susan Marsh.