Once past the in-your-face, nude cover picture of Peter Orlovsky and the poet Allen Ginsberg embracing, taken by none other than Richard Avedon, a reader is provided with an inside view of the gentler and more serious aspects of the Beat... Read More

It could be alleged—no insult intended—that Tim Grove, who has worked in the most prestigious history museums in the United State, is a rewriter of history. Take the case of Betsy Ross. Every school kid knows she sewed the first... Read More

What with the damning convolutions of ignorance, disingenuousness, and angst that shadow so much of the discussion of race in the United States, it is heartening when hope glimmers, as it does when Clifton Taulbert unpacks his defensive... Read More

Suppose you chopped down a tree and then regretted it because, after all, a tree is a beautiful thing in nature. What to do? Firewood? Board feet? Or, you might consider unchopping it by following the instructions of W. S. Merwin, a man... Read More

Evolution is an ongoing process, as Charles Darwin famously argued, and so, as would be expected, the English language has undergone radical change since 1859 when Darwin published Origin of Species, which still resonates mightily. For... Read More

For those who doubt that immortality is possible in the natural order of things, Gene Logsdon, an Ohio farmer who has done a lot of hard hoeing and hard thinking in his eighty years, nominates chickweed and pigweed as plausible... Read More

“Why learn about water?” asks the first sentence this scholarly and impassioned tome and then for more than 600 pages of dense prose—interspersed with charts, graphs, photographs, and the occasional chemical formula—John A.... Read More

It’s perhaps a bit disingenuous for Angela Pelster to declare that her marvelous collection of essays is not a memoir. She might argue that nature is the principle subject, with an emphasis on trees; trees communicating with one... Read More