With a format, size, and style of content that is very reminiscent of the original Golden Guides and the Observer’s Books series, the new Princeton University Press Little Books of Nature series is a welcome development indeed.
With her superb mix of erudition and wit, Dr. Hana Videen’s first book “The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English” captured both the minds and hearts of those who read it. Now, in her second book, The Deorhord; An Old English Bestiary,” she delves more deeply into the fascinating and sometimes mysterious hoard of Old English words used to describe the animals known to the medieval English world.
For most of the places I visit, a single field guide is sufficient to cover the area at hand; however when I travel in China, with its 1,431 species of birds to be found within its borders, no single field guide has previously been sufficient to cover the expansive area across which I must travel on my duly appointed factory-visiting rounds. Fortunately, this past January that changed…
I’m often moved to ranting whenever I’m presented with a reminder of one of the many extinctions our species has committed. A recent rant was inspired by a new book from Princeton University Press: Prof. Gísli Pálsson’s “The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction,” a gripping narrative history of the the extinction of the Great Auk.