This Cold World

Shivering at the bus stop this morning put us in mind of a memorable passage from Bill Streever’s Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places (a past favorite of the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s Book Club):

“The world warms, awash in greenhouse gases, but forty below remains forty below. Thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways is still thirty degrees with sleet blowing sideways. Cold is a part of day-to-day life, but we often isolate ourselves from it, hiding in overheated houses and retreating to overheated climates, all without understanding what we so eagerly avoid.

We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force. Cold freezes the nostrils and assaults the lungs. Its presence shapes landscapes. It sculpts forests and herds animals along migration routes or forces them to dig in for the winter or evolve fur and heat-conserving networks of veins….

Imagine July water temperatures of thirty-five degrees. Imagine Frederic Tudor of Boston shipping ice from Walden Pond to India on sailing ships in 1833. Imagine Apsley Cherry-Garrard on his search for penguin eggs at seventy below zero in 1911. Imagine a dahurian larch forest that looks like a stand of Christmas trees on Russia’s Taymyr Peninsula at sixty below or a ground squirrel hibernating until its blood starts to freeze and then shivering itself back to life.

But none of this is imaginary. Our world warms, but cold remains.“

And whether you’re burrowed inside your warm house, or tucked away underground, here’s two excellent books from the Land Library’s shelves to help you appreciate the cold winter days!

Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich, This Cold House: The Simple Science of Energy Efficiency by Colin Smith

Read Full Post »

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

What do you hope to learn about in the coming new year? It’s an exciting prospect to set yourself a course of study, and little by little gain insight into what matters most to you. For the Land Library, our endless (and always rewarding) quest is to learn more about our place on earth.

From that yearning was born our 25,000 volume collection of natural history books — and also the Rocky Mountain Land Series, our long-running series of author talks, presented in partnership with the Tattered Cover Book Store. Today, we’re excited to announce the Land Series 2011 Winter lineup of authors, photographers, historians, and naturalists. Each Land Series presenter widens our appreciation of the stories behind our age-old relationship with the land, and for that we are extremely grateful!

Historian Douglas Brinkley (pictured above) rejoins the Land Series with his new book The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom 1879-1960. This is the second volume in Brinkley’s planned Wilderness Cycle, and he was last with us for the cycle’s beginning: The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. This latest volume introduces a lively cast of characters influential in preserving the Alaskan wilderness, visionaries such as William O. Douglas, Charles Sheldon, John Muir, Bob Marshall, and the marvelous Muries (Olaus, Mardy, and Adolph).

Douglas Brinkley is a marvelous storyteller in print and in person, so we hope you can join us for a very special evening!

Intrepid traveler Sara Wheeler will return us to the arctic wilderness with her new book The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic. More than a decade ago she traveled to the opposite tip of the world in her classic book Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica (also pictured above).

With The Magnetic North, Sara Wheeler leads us on a circumpolar route, providing an up-to-the-minute portrait of a region growing in global importance day by day.

Closer to home, we also have:

Oil and gas industry veteran Bob Cavnar will join us to discuss his behind-the scenes analysis of an accident we were all assured could never happen: Disaster on the Horizon: High Stakes, High Risks, and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout. Mark White, former governor of Texas writes: “Bob Cavnar has written the definitive story of the blowout in the Gulf….A must read for everyone concerned about the oil industry, the effectiveness of government regulation, and America’s energy future.”

We’re also happy to welcome back David Wann. David has joined us in the past for such books as Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, Simple Prosperity, and Reinventing Community. His new book, The New Normal: An Agenda for Responsible Living places each individual’s responsibility for a healthy planet front and center.

OK, wait a minute — who is this man, and why does he look so familiar??

We have been lucky enough to have Robert Michael Pyle join us several times before, but it is with special enthusiasm that we’ll be welcoming Bob back this year. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, is a beautifully written memoir of Bob’s growing up along Denver’s High Line Canal. His carefree mucking-about cast the seeds for his future life as a naturalist. The Thunder Tree will soon be released in a new paperback edition (with a foreword by Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods):

And lastly, here’s an author we’ve been hearing about for quite some time:

We first became aware of Philip Connors in The Paris Review‘s Summer 2008 issue. For nearly a decade, Connors has spent half of each year in a fire lookout tower in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest.

Here’s a book that many, many people are talking about, months before its publication!

“What a wonderful book. Philip Connors went up to the mountaintop to serve as a lookout and he came down with a masterwork of close observation, deep reflection, and hard-won wisdom. This is an unforgettable reckoning with the American land.” Philip Gourevitch

So PLEASE join us this Winter for the chance to meet the following authors!

ROCKY MOUNTAIN LAND SERIES Winter 2011

Saturday, January 22nd, 2:00pm:

Bob Cavnar, author of
Disaster on the Horizon: High Stakes, High Risks, and the Story Behind the Deepwater Well Blowout

Wednesday, January 26th, 7:30pm:

Douglas Brinkley, author of
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom 1879-1960

Thursday, February 10th, 7:30pm:

David Wann, author of
The New Normal: an Agenda for Responsible Living

Monday, March 14th, 7:30pm:

Sara Wheeler, author of
The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic

April, exact date & time TBA:

Robert Michael Pyle, author of
The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland

Tuesday, May 3rd, 7:30pm:

Philip Connors, author of
Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

All Land Series events will take place at the Tattered Cover’s Historic LoDo Book Store (16th & Wynkoop in lower downtown Denver). For more information, visit the Tattered Cover’s event page. Each program is FREE of charge — truly a wonderful opportunity for lifelong learners of all ages!

And be sure to check-in for updates. With more new books on their way, many more authors will be booked in the weeks ahead! Hopefully, authors such as Hannah Nordhaus (her new book is pictured below). Stay tuned!

Read Full Post »

On the Honey Trail with Eva Crane

This is the first in a series of posts in preparation for our upcoming Literature of the Land Book Club on Bees & Beekeeping (presented in partnership with the Helen Fowler Library at the Denver Botanic Gardens).

Trained as a nuclear physicist, world renowned bee expert Eva Crane is easily one of the most intriguing and accomplished figures who have found their way onto the Land Library’s shelves. Her sudden shift from quantums to bees came on the occasion of her wedding in 1942. Among the wedding presents that day was a working beehive — a thoughtful gift meant to help the young couple cope with stingy wartime sugar rations. That it did, but it also set Eva on a lifelong fascination with bees, beekeeping and honey hunting.

For the next fifty years Eva Crane visited over sixty countries on the trail of the honey bee. Her travels yielded over 180 papers, articles and books, culminating in The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (pictured above), a hefty tome that Paul Theroux called a masterpiece “for its enormous scope and exhaustiveness, and for being an up-to-date treasure house of apiaristic facts.“

Eva Crane’s passion and dedication went beyond her own work. She founded one of the leading institutions of the beekeeping world, the International Bee Research Association. After her death in 2007, the IBRA published a special tribute to its founder, Eva Crane Bee Scientist, 1912-2007, the latest (but hopefully not the last) Eva Crane volume added to the Land Library’s shelves!

As this black & white photo shows, though scholarly by nature, Eva Crane was no stranger to the intricate workings of the hive. Also pictured above are two classic works by Crane: The Archaeology of Beekeeping (1983) and Bees and Beekeeping: Science, Practice and World Resources (1990).

And here’s the very first Eva Crane book the Land Library was lucky enough to find. We were in search of good books on rock art to add to our collection, and, lo and behold, in a dusty bookshop in New York’s Lower East Side we came upon Eva Crane’s The Rock Art of Honey Hunters, a fascinating study of over 150 sites across the globe!

For more information on the RMLL/Denver Botanic Gardens Book Club, click here.

Read Full Post »