The book goes like a true story of parts of nature.Wood frogs: Their rituals(awake for only few months a year and still thriving) seem weird. The author doesnt just stop at this observation. He goes about setting up little experiments to prove or dispute the possible explanations.Bald-Faced Hornet Nests: Hornet paper, a Talisman to ward off all evil predators from a vireo's nest.The Blues: Why ants dont eat blue butterflies?Mud Daubers and Behavior: Can you imagine being born in an encasement with food provided?Artful Diners: Rolled leaf caterpillars and dried leaves with still a bit of green at a spotThe sketches and pictures add to the magic.
This book has loads of information on tree classification, forest classification, methods used to study dynamics of forest structure, air space, the similarities in the tributaries of rivers to branching in trees, study of epiphytes.Wind breakers. Shade grown coffee. Significance of dead wood. Edge effects.Insistence of demand for original oak corks for the oak tree conservation against being replaced by other trees in demand. This brings up a point to think of - utitlity with regards to conservation.EthnobotanistDendrochronologistCanopy studiesPalynology - pollen studiesworld treetree sittingThe broad range of poems on trees,show how in the Montverde forest - and in the book - the author has learned much by combining science, art and the humanities.
Floods can fill quarries with water. The development of gas lighting with its soot made people choose brownstone over marble.Talking about Robinson Jefers house built in carmel Granite, the author introduces us to Terrane theory that explains geology of northwest north America.In Deep time in Minnesota, one gets comfortable talking about the events on earth on the timescale of million and billion years.
If you miss illustrations in books, whats a better way to go through the sketches and while you are at it learn a few things like contour drawings and gesture drawings. These workouts will get out the shy artist in you who has always wanted to draw but did not know how. Sort of like screaming to hear your own voice.Exercises like field observation, memory walking,meditative sketching, capture the day, listing will surprise and satisfy you with their outcomes.Examining negative space, varying psychic distance are other promising ways of entering the world of sketching .
Lessons of love and their intelligence in sensing impending death or trouble are abound in books like A cup of Comfort for Dog Lovers. The author's first lessons from animals she lived with from her childhood are pretty much the same. So we can believe her lessons from her long experience with animals in foxhunting.The news for me are the ones about dog shows antiquating some breeds by their nature, hunting behavior of owl, fox, listening to the animal, disabled animals being shunned, a child's tears might not get you a toy unless the toy is a suffering animal, hierarchies in herd and pack animals, patience, coat characterstic dependence on heat tolerance.
Being here has brought me to a knowledge both tangible and ineffable, of a world apart, completely distinct, from that of my own kind. - David M Carroll, Following the Water.The 'here' is the waterlands that the author has been wading in at certain times every year for almost 2 decades, watching and documenting the various turtles. Since most of them are the same ones, there is a meaning to his work, resulting in a study.He overlooks the color blue of the sky in the water,to see what is under that. Much is being done by the way of conserving nature and wildlife, but we, the general public should find that 'world apart'.
If you come across this book, you cannot skip it without reading. Its like a code or like a never ending story for a kid.The full page analysis of certain paintings are engrossing.Las Meninas of Diego Velazquez and The Art of Painting by Jan Vermeer with the painters in the picture will make the future analysis of paintings make you imagine the painter too.Pope Innocent X of Diego Velazquez, reinterpreted by Francis Bacon and Dejeuner sur l'herbe (main characters from The Judgement of Paris) of Eduard Manet interpreted by Picasso make you appreciate the importance of knowledge of history of art.After reading this book, I look for lighting source in a picture, what composition means, have come to know of painting where a character can be repeated(The Tribute Money), have a favorite painting(Primavera).
I recognised the bird on the cover as a shoebird from a national geographic article but didnt know that it was the 'most patient feeder'. This book is about the record holders. If it were just that it could have come out on cards with stats. The book is at its best with its explanation for flamingo's long legs, ostriches large eyes, jacana's spread out toes tied to their environment.The literature goes into more depth about say a humming bird's flight with its digits beyond the fast wing-beat rate. Having seen the shorebirds always on ground, looking at a picture of godwits in flight, it came as a surprise to me that they and plovers migrate so far.'Biggest communal nest' of sociable weaver had me thinking of beaver's house.
Until I saw a picture of newly born porcupines, I never thought about how they could be born with bristles. Ways to get rid of their smell was about the only thing I gathered from a movie about the spiky animals. While the first two chapters tell us about the ways of hedgehogs, the drama does not start until the third chapter where the hedgehogs are about to be shunned as bird population destroyers. Having heard calls of stilts at the sight of feral cats, I can imagine the havoc created by people about hedgehogs as culprit. The author with his radio tracking for previous study, paint blotting for identification and counting saved them from the fate of dangers of rounding up by a factor of 10.It is interesting to note that different rules apply to three legged animals released back into the wild after rehabilitation based on the role of the foot in feeding and keeping clean.
As the book is of various buildings over ages, it is also a chunk of minor history. In each description, there is the narrative of towers as gods dwellings in mountains, the innovativeness of concentric castles.The description of the buildings makes you look forward to identify the features in the pictures. The alternating curved and triangular pediments in Palacio Real, Winter Palace could not escape my attention after having read of them in Palazzo Farnese description.The aerial picture of Vauban's Fort carre made the influence easy to match in Fort Henry.John Soane. Christopher Wren.
The book begins with getting rid of r (substitute) symbols for birds (substitute). I have read of triangles in reading an artists work. In one of the methods in the book, we start with the traingle framing our subject in it.Getting the measurements to draw a thing is far from my idea of an artistic endeavour. But getting a thing right as it is, is a goal. And without such positional aids, it is hard to get anything on the paper, much like the blank page staring at the writer. While looking for angles in the picture, you are no longer thinking about how or what of the picture can you transfer onto your page. With so many details, you are only more confident of getting the drawing right. After all this study of a pear, I can appreciate still life drawings and paintings.If you dont know about values, then you really need this book. I could use the steps in the book to draw profile pictures and landscapes from a magazine lying around. After observing the skys gradations in a picture, I saw that a sunrise picture on the back of a grocery truck is not just one colour.The lesson on bridging reminded of creation of music.The authors renderings from the pictures are very instructional.
Caution: You should have a brake already figured, like an unavoidable appointment, if you dont want you fingers to crazily move onto the next pages.Most pieces are smaller than the introduction.Recalling a time that repeats, a color more vibrant and extant in imagination, a townful gaping at gulleywasher, how lies start for one - these shorts make themselves known like electric pulses.Days at the beach are all the same - Low Tide at four, Harriet DoerrBut the story my grandfather never told was his own - Good workers, John T PriceIts in a neighbour's house fiction begins - The Bend for Home, Dermot Healy..when people are dead they dont read books. This I find unbearable. - Nearing 90, William Maxwell
The characters in all the stories are so full of life - A man in the disguise of a mascot, Wannabe parents in worry, The tricksters in action.Names like 'Fragrant Hills' and sayings (until proven otherwise) like 'when the enemy thinks we will fight in the mountains, we will fight in the valleys' recreate the place. The traditional sayings fill the worried parents with hope and acceptance.I wonder how different are the possibilities in Shanghai.Mangosteen
Before reading this book, I didnt know much about Istanbul. But now nothing 'Istanbul' escapes me. What of the chef mentioned in the New Yorker? He is already talked of in the book. Musa Dagdeviren. What did Mark twain think of Istanbul in his 'The Innocents Abroad'. He will not go there again. What did Paul Therox see on his 'The Great Railway Bazaar' train? Such is the fascination that grows of a place, its people, their food, origins, their monuments, streets and daily life.Most places are not this old to have such a long history to know of. So how much ever I may wish to know of all places to the extent covered in this book, might not be possible.It takes a curator, a gardener, journalists, writers, reporters, cook book authors, an Egyptologist, a tour guide and many more to bring the far away land to life.The list and notes of related books is extensive.I have seen TV ads of hamam as a kid. But now I know of the bath house tradition.
Edwin Peterson has written 'Penns woods west' in 1958.Lee Gutkind refers to Peterson's work as 'his words were about wildlife, but his message was to man' and to his own work in 'The peoples of Penns woods west' as ' my message is to man, and about man'.Lee Gutkind has written about thehistory - of Clarion River, of the first settler John Cook, Scotty and Mamalifestyle- of a legendary marksman Jake Guiton, gameskeeper Vogelbacher, of a skilled cooper whose son though alive is lost to the war, buck season, Nessmuk's light canoes, snakehunting and sacking, truckersattitude- of one-arm blacksmith, of a papermill that 'reverses its mistakes', of mountain man McCoolresolve- of resurrecting Clarion Riverof the people of the Penns woods west.
