Barbara Hurd's Listening to the Savage weaves rich explorations of science, history, mythology, literature, and music. The listening of the book delineates and champions a kind of attentiveness to what is not easily heard and is written in language that is as precise as it is poetic, providing original ways of engagement in the natural world. As in Hurd's other books, the previously unknown or the barely known becomeless mysterious but still retain the quality of mystery. The book presumes that nature is a mix of the chaotic and the wondrous. It addresses worry and advocacy-worry about our carelessness that can destroy the balance of that mix and a cry for us to pay more attention to humanity's relationship to natural history. Listen, be alert, it says without hectoring. Rivers, ferns, streams, birds all have a life that is delicate and worth preserving. Barbara Hurd is one of our finest environmental writers, and this book will please the choir and persuade those on the ambivalent edge.

This book contains evocative nature writing in the tradition of Terry Tempest Williams and Gretel Ehrlich. Barbara Hurd continues to give nature writing a human dimension in this final volume of her trilogy that began with ""Stirring the Mud"" and ""Entering the Stone"". With prose both eloquent and wise, she examines what washes ashore, from the angel wing shells to broken oars. Even a merman appears in this brilliant collection that throws light on the mysterious and the overlooked.Writing from beaches as far-flung as Morocco, St. Croix, or Alaska, and as familiar as California and Cape Cod, she helps us see beauty in the gruesome feeding process of the moon snail. She holds up an encrusted, still-sealed message bottle to make tangible the emotional divide between mother and daughter. She considers a chunk of sea glass and the possibilities of transformation.The book began on a beach, Hurd says, ""with the realization that a lot of what I care about survives in spite of - perhaps because of - having been broken or lost for a while in backward drift. Picking up egg cases, stones, shells, I kept turning them over - in my hands and in my mind."" Each chapter starts with close attention to an object - a shell fragment of a pelican egg, or perhaps a jellyfish - but then widens into larger concerns: the persistence of habits, desire, disappointments, the lie of the perfectly preserved, the pleasures of aversions, transformations, and a phenomenon from physics known as the strange attractor.

In these nine evocative essays, Barbara Hurd explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Hurd's forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for rich thoughts about mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In her observations of these muddy environments, she finds ample metaphor for human creativity, imagination, and fear.

In this exhilarating work, Barbara Hurd explores some of the most extraordinary places on earth, from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona. With passionately informed prose, Hurd makes these strange dark spaces come to light, illuminating the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas. "Entering the Stone" provides an awe-inducing tour through a fragile and beautiful subterranean world.

In this revised and updated edition of the most authoritative guide to coffee, Corby Kummer travels the country and the world to give you all the latest information you need to make a great cup at home: • The best beans and how to buy and store them • The grinder that's essential for great coffee • Incisive reports on brewing and espresso-making equipment and tips on how to get the best from them, with photographs of current models • A complete, up-to-date list of sources for beans, equipment and Fair Trade organizations