About this item
Highlights
- Lauded essayist takes to the high seas in hot pursuit of elusive birds, artistic ghosts, fathers and their memories, and above all, safe harbor.
- About the Author: Poet and essayist Charles Hood has been a factory worker, a ski instructor, and a birding guide in Africa.
- 272 Pages
- Nature, Ecosystems & Habitats
Description
About the Book
"The author takes to the high seas in pursuit of elusive birds, artistic ghosts, fathers and their memories, and above all, safe harbor"--Book Synopsis
Lauded essayist takes to the high seas in hot pursuit of elusive birds, artistic ghosts, fathers and their memories, and above all, safe harbor.
"Among nature writers now working, Charles Hood is my favorite." --Jonathan Franzen
Charles Hood is on a boat, wearing at least two life jackets as he scans the sky for seabirds and plumbs the depths of his--and our--relationship with the vast Pacific Ocean. Winner of the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year for his collection of essays A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature, Hood now brings his irrepressible curiosity to the lives of petrels, frigate birds, sea snakes, and flying fish. During our voyage, he resurrects Melville's journey on tempestuous seas to San Francisco, takes us into the storm-tossed minds and paintings of J. M. W. Turner and Winslow Homer, and surfaces the trauma--still reverberating--to ocean and family ecologies alike from World War II. As sharp and witty as ever, Hood also turns his scrutiny on a more personal history, navigating murky waters of harm and forgiveness, love and entrapment. Full of wonder, joy, and terror at the shared capacity of the ocean and the humans on its edges to nurture life and damage it irreparably, this book is a vessel, seaworthy and transportive.
Review Quotes
Praise for Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds:
"In his rollicking essay collection Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds, Charles Hood reckons with the ocean's simultaneous allure and risk through stories of seabird-watching and of his father's wartime service in the Pacific Theater." --Foreword
"Among nature writers now working, Charles Hood is my favorite. He never stops telling stories, and his perspective is fundamentally comic, even when he's recounting a tragedy." --Jonathan Franzen
"Hood's eye for wonder out on the water is an absolute delight. Enlightening and quietly heart-wrenching at times, this book gave me a deeper appreciation for how the sea connects us all." --Rosanna Xia, author of California Against the Sea
"Charles Hood professes to be scared to death of water and with good cause; but he is also one of the world's most accomplished list keepers of birds and animals that fly above and float on and course beneath lakes and rivers and oceans. Hood swims in a sea of words you never knew you needed and his prose will teach you how powerful the free-style stroke can be." --William Fox, Director of The Center for Land + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art
Praise for Charles Hood:
"Reading Hood's work will make you feel smarter but, even more crucially in this dire age, more open to the sublime." --Los Angeles Times
"Once you've had a taste of the world of Charles Hood, you'll want to follow him wherever he goes. He's brilliantly entertaining." --Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Dog of the North
"With a poet's sensitivity, Hood shows himself to be as in love with words as with what he sees around him [...] his essays will charm, delight, and bring attention into high gear so that even a walk through an empty city lot will reveal treasures for the mind and heart." --Foreword Reviews"Hood is the love child of Rebecca Solnit and Edward Abbey, assuming such a child had been raised in an art colony by demented garden gnomes." --Michael Guista, author of Brain Work
About the Author
Poet and essayist Charles Hood has been a factory worker, a ski instructor, and a birding guide in Africa. His recent books published by Heyday include Nocturnalia, an appreciation of nature after dark, and the essay collection A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature. His wildlife studies have taken him around the world, from the high Arctic to the South Pole, and from Tibet to West Africa to the Amazon. Mammal no. 1,000 seen and recorded on his world animal list was a Crossley's dwarf lemur in Madagascar. (Mammal no. 999 was a Malagasy white-bellied free-tailed bat.) Recently retired and now professor emeritus, Hood lives in the Mojave Desert with two kayaks, two mountain bikes, two dogs, and five thousand books.