Houghton Mifflin

Lang Elliott is among the best and best-known recordists of birdsong in North America. His new book, The Songs of Wild Birds, is a combination of words, images, and often spectacular sounds that will delight and intrigue birders and non-birders alike.

Elliott’s selection of 50 species reveals a distinct eastern bias (could a western volume be in [...]

Few are the birders who can write and paint with equal skill. Julie Zickefoose has long been among my favorites, and Letters from Eden, with its thoughtful prose and fine images, is certain to cement her reputation as one of North America’s best birding writers and painters.
Letters from Eden is handsomely and carefully produced, in [...]

Roger Tory Peterson spent the last 50 years of his life recycling.
His reputation (and his fortune) made with the brilliance of the 1947 Field Guide, Peterson seemed largely to coast after that as a writer, cobbling together books, articles, and those notorious Forewords out of material and ideas dating back in many cases to the [...]

The author isn’t always responsible for the title that appears on his or her books, and though I don’t know for sure, I’d guess that at least the typography on the cover of this one caused its authors a moment’s discomfort. The Shorebird Guide, it’s called. The designer’s italics were probably meant as nothing more [...]

Not that many centuries ago, poetry was the usual mode of composition for all sorts of learned and scholarly texts. From the days of Lucretius to the end of the European Middle Ages, even natural history treatises were as likely to be written in verse as in the workaday language of prose. It’s different now, [...]