Just prior to Christmas a number of books arrived on my desk; most of which I had been expecting but one was a complete surprise – an advance reading copy from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt of Scott Sampson’s forthcoming How to Raise a Wild Child; The Art and Science of Falling in Love with Nature
Now ordinarily I tend to shy away from the “why children are so alienated from nature / what you can do about it” category. Far too many, in my experience, have tended either to be simplistic emotional appeals aimed at fretting middle class parents or academic treatises forming the basis of a sermon preached directly to the choir.
However as the author of How to Raise a Wild Child is Dr. Scott Sampson, who is not only vice president of research and collections at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science but also “Dr. Scott the Paleontologist” of the Jim Henson Company’s PBS Kids television series Dinosaur Train, I have elevated hopes that this book may be different. As he has both the expertise in natural history as well as demonstrated experience in communicating not only the content of the subject but the excitement of it as well to young children, should these qualities be properly combined in this present book it may be not only quite interesting but truly useful to parents and teachers as well.
How to Raise a Wild Child will be published in March of 2015. Look for a review of it here sometime shortly before then.
