An irreverent, absorbing, and insightful tale of one man's adventures following the great 7,000-mile osprey migration across two continents
A Book Sense Notable Title
David Gessner has long been fascinated by ospreys, graceful raptors with wingspans of up to six feet, renowned the world over for their swashbuckling dives into the ocean. One year, inspired by their annual trip south that crosses numerous borders, Gessner picks up and follows them. With early mornings fueled by strong Cuban coffee, evenings passed sampling local beers, and days spent alongside a cast of international characters in cars, ferries, planes, or on foot, Gessner discovers the beauty of impulsively following what you love.
"An engaging, lyrical guide to osprey migration, Cuba, and a common humanity."
--Orion Magazine
"Gessner's travels are filled with small delights. He has a great gift for conveying reverence without sanctimony, and even at his most sardonic and self-deprecating, his sense of wonder at the osprey never falters. As he stands on a rock above Cuba's Sierra Maestra, watching ospreys rocket past, we wish we could be up there beside him, binoculars in one hand, a cold beer in the other."
--George Black, OnEarth
"A grand and cheering journey on the wings of one of nature's most sociable predators."
--Carl Hiassen, author of Nature Girl
"From the tidal marshes of Cape Cod to jungle lakes in Venezuela, David Gessner lets nothing--not language barriers, not empty pockets, not steely-eyed Cuban bureaucrats or American embargoes--stop him from following the migration of the osprey. Just reckless enough to be lucky, Gessner wins over everyone he meets. Soaring with Fidel haswings."
--Scott Weidensaul, author of Living on the Wind
"Because of its robust passion and focus, Soaring with Fidel would have probably been a favorite of Teddy Roosevelt's. It's Gessner's finest book, unpredictable in the best way, and funny, too; an adventure book and much more--a book of contact, written by a writer who quickly becomes an audible and visible presence. Soaring with Fidel demonstrates that you can 'pick up one thing and find the rest of the world hitched to it.' If you've experienced a passion that you failed to follow--or that you did follow--then this is your book."
--Clyde Edgerton, author of Solo
"Exhilarating, hilarious, tender, this is David Gessner at his best. Call it whatever you want--osprey lust, wanderlust, migratory unrest--but when Gessner decides to follow the birds he loves from Cape Cod to Cuba to Venezuela and back north, over thousands of miles of mountain, swamp, and sea, we all benefit."
--James Campbell, author of The Final Frontiersman
"Equal doses of Jack Kerouac and Roger Tory Peterson promise to enshrine Soaring with Fidel in the pantheon of great travel writing and natural history."
--Keith L. Bildstein, author of Migrating Raptors of the World
"Gessner seldom sets out deliberately to be funny, as Bill Bryson does, but his deadpan, self-deprecating humor ("I had vast experience in not seeing birds") makes him an ideal traveling companion and guide. Soaring With Fidel lets you hover for a while in the thermals of fine language, seeing the same old world from a fresh and invigorating altitude."
--Wilmington (NC) Morning Star News
"David Gessner, author of Soaring With Fidel, said, 'There will be a huge holein the Cape literary community. I have done a brunch for every one of my books and had planned on doing them for each future book. Each time Jack and Bess made it a personal celebration. It was a great way to interact with Cape people, and Cabbages and Kings will be deeply missed.'"
--Shelf Awareness
"This probing investigation of the migratory flight of the osprey embraced several unexpectedly, exciting adventures . . . I found Gessner's book a most interesting read."
--NH Union Leader
"He gives an occasional nod to Henry David Thoreau, perhaps to assure us that, yep, he's read the masters, but his style--well, imagine Hunter Tompson gone birding, pen in hand."
--Hartford Courant
"As Gessner pursues [the ospreys] down the Eastern Seaboard and even into Cuba with a BBC documentary team at his heels, a lively tale of fish-eating raptors, broken embargoes and a nail-biting race to the finish line ensues . . . Gessner finds his Mecca not in the thrilling launch or triumphant end of his own 7,000-mile migration, but in the living done in between."
--Jennifer Winger, Nature Conservancy Magazine
"An interesting and complex book . . . In a surprisingly short amount of time, David Gessner has evolved into one of our most accomplished and singular writers about nature. While many authors treat their experiences in nature with a hushed earnestness and a suspect neatness, Gessner writes about the messy humanness of being outside."
--Mark Lynch, Bird Observer

David Gessner first moved to Colorado in the wake of a bout with cancer. In "Under the Devil's Thumb," this young New Englander takes readers on a joyous quest to discover the mysteries of the western landscape and the landscape of the soul as well. In the West Gessner began to rewrite his life. "Under the Devil's Thumb" is a story of rugged determination and sweat, as well as humor, adventure and hope. In and around his new hometown of Boulder, Colorado, Gessner hiked hard and ran alongside flooded creeks. He found that the West was a place of stories--stories that grow out of the ground, flow out of the dirt, work their way through one's limbs, and drive people to push their physical limits. Hiking up scree slopes toward the Devil's Thumb, a massive outcrop of orange rock that attracts climbers, hikers, and contemplaters, Gessner reflects on the illness he has so recently survived. He pushes his physical limits, hoping to outrun death, to outrun dread. He finds momentary transcendence in the joys and self-inflicted pain of mountain biking. "Nothing but the hardest ride has the power to flush out worry, mind clutter, and dread." In tranquil moments he seeks a chance to recover an animal self that is strong and powerful enough to conquer mountains, but also still and quiet enough to see things human beings ignore. In the mountain West, Gessner finds what Wallace Stegner called "the geography of hope." He finds within himself an interior landscape that is healthy and strong. Combining memoir, nature writing, and travel writing, "Under the Devil's Thumb" is one man's journey deep into a place of healing.

Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West. These two great westerners had very different ideas about what it meant to love the land and try to care for it, and they did so in distinctly different styles. Boozy, lustful, and irascible, Abbey was best known as the author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (and also of the classic nature memoir Desert Solitaire), famous for spawning the idea of guerrilla actions-known to admirers as "monkeywrenching" and to law enforcement as domestic terrorism-to disrupt commercial exploitation of western lands. By contrast, Stegner, a buttoned-down, disciplined, faithful family man and devoted professor of creative writing, dedicated himself to working through the system to protect western sites such as Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. In a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling, and by an ever-growing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death, Gessner asks: how might these two farseeing environmental thinkers have responded to the crisis? Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American overconsumption, and fighting environmental injustice-all while reawakening the thrill of the words of his two great heroes.

Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West. These two great westerners had very different ideas about what it meant to love the land and try to care for it, and they did so in distinctly different styles. Boozy, lustful, and irascible, Abbey was best known as the author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (and also of the classic nature memoir Desert Solitaire), famous for spawning the idea of guerrilla actions-known to admirers as "monkeywrenching" and to law enforcement as domestic terrorism-to disrupt commercial exploitation of western lands. By contrast, Stegner, a buttoned-down, disciplined, faithful family man and devoted professor of creative writing, dedicated himself to working through the system to protect western sites such as Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado. In a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling, and by an ever-growing population that seems to be in the process of loving the West to death, Gessner asks: how might these two farseeing environmental thinkers have responded to the crisis? Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild, confronting American overconsumption, and fighting environmental injustice-all while reawakening the thrill of the words of his two great heroes.