2012 English
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***Winner of 2013 Best Book Award from the National Academies.**
Finalist for 2013 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.**
Winner of the 2013 Reed Environmental Writing Award.
Winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award for Natural
History Literature.
Runner-up for 2013 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
A biologist reveals the secret world hidden in a single square meter of forest. *
In this wholly original book, biologist David Haskell uses a one- square-meter patch of old-growth Tennessee forest as a window onto the entire natural world. Visiting it almost daily for one year to trace nature's path through the seasons, he brings the forest and its inhabitants to vivid life.
Each of this book's short chapters begins with a simple observation: a salamander scuttling across the leaf litter; the first blossom of spring wildflowers. From these, Haskell spins a brilliant web of biology and ecology, explaining the science that binds together the tiniest microbes and the largest mammals and describing the ecosystems that have cycled for thousands- sometimes millions-of years. Each visit to the forest presents a nature story in miniature as Haskell elegantly teases out the intricate relationships that order the creatures and plants that call it home.
Written with remarkable grace and empathy, The Forest Unseen is a grand tour of nature in all its profundity. Haskell is a perfect guide into the world that exists beneath our feet and beyond our backyards.
"...a welcome entry in the world of nature writers. He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist." The New York Times
"Very much a contemporary biologist in his familiarity with genetics and population ecology, he also has the voracious synthetic imagination of a 19th-century naturalist. Most important, Mr. Haskell is a sensitive writer, conjuring with careful precision the worlds he observes and delighting the reader with insightful turns of phrase." The Wall Street Journal
"...a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry." Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University
David George Haskell is a professor of biology at the University of the South and was named the Carnegie-CASE Professor of the Year in Tennessee in 2009. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Michael Healy has appeared Off-Broadway and on national TV, most notably on Saturday Night Live for three years, as well as in several national commercials. His audiobook recordings include The Collector of Lost Things by Jeremy Page and The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.