It was with no small amount of wholly unintentional irony that I began reading Mark Essig’s Lesser Beasts; A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig while eating a ham sandwich. Such is the ubiquity of pigs. Yet for all the many ways the lives of modern humans have and to this day continue to intersect […]
Edited by John van Whye, this first-of-its-kind edition of Wallace’s famous work promises not only to make Wallace’s ideas and discoveries more accessible to modern readers, it also seeks to put his work as a whole in much richer context by placing Wallace and his writings squarely in their time.
Long before John James Audubon began to chronicle the wildlife of North America in his paintings, Mark Catesby had already undertaken such a project and as a result produced The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, the activities of the U.S. Forest Service were not just the doings of some far off bureaucrats in Washington D.C.; they were the stuff of daily conversation around the restaurants and coffee shops of the hundreds of small towns populated by people who drew their existence from the vast tracts of forests that blanket the region.