Making the MexiRican City
To commemorate National Hispanic Heritage Month, this week's review analyzes the community-building and activist practices Mexican and Puerto Rican migrants employed in 20th-century Michigan.
Posted on in Review of the Week
Natural Encounters
Happy Summer! This week's review tracks outdoor adventures along the East Coast, encouraging us to check these green spaces off our bucket list
Posted on June 21, 2021 in Review of the Week
Natural Encounters: Biking, Hiking, and Birding through the Seasons
Beehler, Bruce McP. Yale, 2019
283p bibl index, 9780300243482 $30.00, 978030024489
Organized around the calendar into twelve chapters beginning with the month of July, this book proceeds through the months of crisp fall, icy winter, and muddy spring, leading the reader on a 365-day reminiscence of the seasons as observed in and around Washington, D.C. Ornithologist Beehler (Smithsonian Institution) has been prolific in documenting exotic birds and their environments (CH, Oct’08, 46-0856)as well as migratory North American species (CH, Aug’18, 55-4462). Here, he pays homage to a postwar classic by Louis Halle in which the former State Department official described the natural environment he observed while bicycling to and from work in and around the US capital. Climbing onto his own bicycle some seventy years later, Beehler likewise recalls his own observations while biking along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. But this book, written in the shorthand style of a journal account, is not limited to the immediate area of metropolitan Washington. Beehler also details fossil trips and other field excursions in and around the greater Eastern seaboard, at many points drawing specific comparisons to Halle’s earlier observations. A charming account, this is a book that any amateur naturalist will gladly own.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
Reviewer: S. E. Brazer, Salisbury University
Subject: Science & Technology – Sports & Recreation
Choice Issue: Nov 2019
Enjoy this week’s review? Check out more reviews of Science & Technology titles:
- Nature Underfoot: Living with Beetles, Crabgrass, Fruit Flies, and Other Tiny Life around Us
- The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
- Birds in Winter: Surviving the Most Challenging Season
- Spacefarers: How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond
- Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals
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