Walking the High Ridge: Life As Field Trip (inscribed to butterfly specialist Lincoln Brower)
Pyle, Robert Michael [Lincoln Brower]
Language: English
Published by Milkweed, St. Paul, 2000
- First Edition
- Softcover
- Used
Seller: Rural Hours, La Grande, OR, U.S.A.Rural Hours
AbeBooks seller since June 16, 2020
Condition: Used
US$ 475.00
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
A truly lovely lepidopterist association copy, inscribed on the half-title page: "July 27, For Linc [Lincoln Brower] & Linda, with deep affection, great pleasure in the recollection of days afield & long friendship, and looking forward to walking your ridge again with you this fall, from Bob, 'For the Monarchs,' Lep Soc 2001 -- Corvallis." Pyle has also made a butterfly-and-mountains sketch at the top of the page, and Brower has added his initials and the date and place of the annual meeting of the Lepidopterist Society. Pyle also signs in full on the title page. Lincoln Brower was the foremost expert and conservation champion of the monarch butterfly, which he studied for six decades, publicizing its unique migration patterns across generations from North to Central America. See his New York Times obit. Among many zoological and conservation awards, he was recipient of the E.O. Wilson Award from the Center for Biological Diversity. Pyle is likewise a renown lepidopterist, but equally renown as a writer, and is the winner of the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing among other honors. This book is in Milkweed's Credo series which "explore[s] the essential goals, concerns, and practices of contemporary American writers whose work emphasizes the natural world and human community"; it is an autobiographical personal essay from Pyle in which he narrates and reflects on his career?mainly through his love and pursuit of butterflies (he weaves in, too, a wonderful snippet of the butterfly novel then in progress, now finished, Magdalena Mountain). A great association as such. Foremost ecocritic Scott Slovic provides a critical biography to follow, and finally a comprehensive bibliography of Pyle's work, including articles, etc., is provided, in which Lincoln Brower is mentioned at least once as a co-author of the scientific paper "Mexican-American Interchange of Western Monarchs, and Their Floral Corridors." There was a simultaneous hardcover published in limited numbers; this is the paperback, here crisp, feeling as new, but with very faint staining to the top edge of the text block, thus near fine. With a price sticker on the rear wrap. A great association.…
Seller Inventory # 1944
- Title
- Walking the High Ridge: Life As Field Trip (inscribed to butterfly specialist Lincoln Brower)
- Author
- Pyle, Robert Michael [Lincoln Brower]
- Publisher
- Milkweed, St. Paul
- Publication year
- 2000
- Binding
- Softcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1571312420
- ISBN 13
- 9781571312426
- Edition
- First edition.
- Seller catalogs
- Association Copies
“Teaches us how to be the best kind of human beings.” —ECLECTICA
As a boy in Colorado, Robert Michael Pyle fell in love with alpine heights and the butterflies that float above the tree line. This early passion sparked a career in conservation that took Pyle across the globe—until he realized that he was no longer as intimate with the natural world that first spurred him to action.
Walking the High Ridge is a journey through Pyle’s “unruly pack of interests”—biology, nature conservation, and literature—to his decision finally to choose the life that would give free reign to his scientific and creative impulses and keep him “as much as possible, out of doors.”
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
In Walking the High Ridge, Pyle describes his development as a writer and lepidopterist ("my most important classes in school," he writes, "were typing and plant pathology"), helped along by mentors and "sacred texts" like The Origin of Species and A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America. Readers familiar with Pyle's work will appreciate his account of how several recurrent themes in his work came into being, among them what he calls "the extinction of experience," which is given book-length voice in The Thunder Tree.
Students of nature writing will appreciate, too, his views on the craft. One, gently stated, is a devotion to appropriate technology (meaning pencils, paper, and binoculars). Another is a concern for natural literacy and for finding one's place in the world. "I tell students," he writes in his amiable memoir, "that a nature writer can be thought of as an amanuensis to the land: the land speaks, we take dictation, and by dint of great attentiveness, care, love, and luck, we might get some of the words right." --Gregory McNamee
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Rural Hours
La Grande, OR, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since June 16, 2020
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Visit us at www.ruralhours.com. Rural Hours (formerly Wood River Books) specializes in ecology, natural history, nature and science writing, the environment, ecopoetics, contemporary essay, and literary journalism, with a special passion for association copies and notable inscriptions. Our name is an homage to Susan Fenimore Cooper's book Rural Hours (1850), considered the first work of environmental nonfiction by an American woman. The daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, Susan Cooper was also an accomplished watercolorist, and her birds from Rural Hours populate these pages. Her rendering of a "chimney swallow" (now known as a swift) serves as our logo and mascot: sleek and elevated, part sky and part city street. Rural Hours is mainly a project of writer and teacher Nick Neely. Along with a pair of MFA degrees in nonfiction and poetry, Nick has a Master's in Literature and Environment from the University of Nevada, Reno. He has much expertise and years of experience in the field of eco-writing. His first book, Coast Range, was a finalist for John Burroughs Medal for nature writing and his second book, Alta California--about a 12-week trek he made along the California coast--was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Check out the "Rambles" page for eventual short essays from him on environmental lit, new books, and more. Rural Hours is a young venture, but we aspire to be among the leaders in the field of rare and interesting eco-writing. We believe, emphatically, that environmental literature and its preservation is in the service of the preservation of the world. In addition to helping serious collectors and institutions build their libraries and archives, our goal is to curate a substantial "house collection" of environmental writing for public display on this site and beyond, one that shows the evolution of the genre(s). That will be a perennial work in progress. We hope to draw a deep, explorable map of environmental writing that traces the lineage and connections between authors and artists determined to render and protect the earth, locally and globally. At the same time, we would like to challenge the usual contours of the "environmental literature" canon and promote a more diverse and inclusive array of voices; in that way, our longterm goal is to excavate the past and curate toward the future. Rural Hours also hopes to eventually have an open shop and gallery space, but for now we are only online. You've come to the right the place. Enjoy poking around, and then head out for a walk.…
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Rural Hours
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