John Berg's Book Reviews 
Books about nature:
I love hiking, birding, hunting for mushrooms, and just staring off
into space. There are millions of good books about these topics,
so mine is a very limited selection. My main criterion was that these
are books that are really good, but now as widely known as they should
be.
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Thomas Palmer's book Landscape
With Reptile : Rattlesnakes in an Urban World is out of print, but
get it if you can! It is about the Blue Hills of Massachusetts, and
especially about the rattlesnakes there (one of my greatest delights in
life is that I have managed to see rattlers there twice)--but it is about
a lot more than that.
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I grew up reading Sigurd Olson. He lived in Ely, Minnesota, and wrote
a lot about the Quetico, where I used to go canoeing with my Boy Scout
troop, but his range includes the whole North country. Olson started
writing as an "outdoor" feature writer for the newspapers and sporting
magazines, meaning that he wrote about hunting and fishing. As time
went on, he started to put more of his feeling for the wilderness into
the essays; as a result, the editors began to complain that there were
not as many fish caught, or ducks shot, as the readers wanted--but Olson
persevered, and eventually succeeded. The title essay in The
Singing Wilderness, now republished in a cheap (but beautiful, with
the original illustrations by Francis Lee Jacques) edition by the University
of Minnesota Press, is about how he developed his writing personality and
wilderness vision. Start with that one--then try:
Watch this space for more books
to be added!
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Revised January 23, 1998