Walking the High Ridge: Life As Field Trip (inscribed to butterfly specialist Lincoln Brower)

Pyle, Robert Michael [Lincoln Brower]

ISBN 10: 1571312420 / ISBN 13: 9781571312426

Published by Milkweed, St. Paul, 2000

About this Item

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

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Walking the High Ridge: Life As Field Trip (inscribed to butterfly specialist Lincoln Brower)
• Publisher: Milkweed, St. Paul
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1571312420
• ISBN 13: 9781571312426
• Binding: Softcover
• Edition: First edition.
• Seller catalogs:
  • Association Copies

About this title

Synopsis

“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.”

Review

In his books on butterflies and the natural history of the Rockies and Pacific Northwest, Robert Michael Pyle has combined rigorous science with graceful expression--a blessing for his readers, and a model for other interpreters of nature.

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