The 2018 Nonfiction Challenge Part VI: The Great Outdoors

June marks midsummer for those of us in the northern hemisphere (my condolences to those of you in the southern half of the planet...) so it's time to head outdoors WITH our read -- literally and rhetorically.

For this month's non-fiction challenge, pick up a book that has any kind of connection to the world out of doors. Want to write about gardening? Go for it. About saving the environment? Sure. About outdoor sporting events, from baseball to sailing? Are you a hiking, white-water rafting, parasailing or other summertime sports nut? Whether your love doing it yourself or just reading about others doing it, this is the month to hunt down a book on your outdoor topic of choice. How to host the perfect BBQ? Well, that happens outdoors, too...

As always, the only rules are that it be NON-FICTION and that you be able to demonstrate some kind of connection to this month's theme...

What we're reading!

For planning purposes...

What's on deck for the rest of 2018:

July – The Arts -- from ballet to classical music, to jazz and rock and roll, to sculpture and painting, and the people involved in these -- oh, and books about books, of course!

August – Short and Sweet: Essays and Other Longform Narratives -- self explanatory. Essays from any anthology, longform pieces from the New Yorker, etc. Please make them reasonably long and not just an 800-word news feature from Mashable. Think, New York Times Magazine, perhaps, or London Review of Books, or...

September – Gods, Demons, Spirits, and Supernatural Beliefs -- from the Book of Common Prayer to things that go bump in the night. A biography of the Dalai Lama? Go for it.

October – First Person Singular -- This is the spot for anything first person. Anything that anyone has written about themselves and their lives in any way. Tina Fey? Paul Kalinithi? (sp?)

November – Politics, Economics & Business -- The stuff we all know we should know about but sometimes hate to think about, especially these days. Call it the hot button issues challenge. Immigration/Racism? Banking regulation? Minimum wage debates?

December – 2018 In Review -- Frustrated because you've got leftover books? You've got too many book bullets from other people? Or -- omigod -- that new biography was just published and you must must must read it? Or you've been reading the lists of best reading of 2018 in the NY Times and just realized, omigod, you MUST READ this one book before the end of the year? This is your holiday gift, from the challenge that keeps on giving...

Some suggested reading ideas for this challenge

Disappointment River by Brian Castner -- about canoeing up the Mackenzie River to the Arctic

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Otter Country: In Search of the Wild Otter by Miriam Darlington

Where Poppies Blow by John Lewis-Stempel

The Seabird's Cry by Adam Nicolson

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Turning: Lessons From Swimming Berlin's Lakes by Jessica Lee

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout by Phillip Connors

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (rowing is an outdoor sport...)

The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West

Anything by Levison Wood, modern day Indian Jones style adventurer who has walked the Nile, walked the length of the Americas, etc. etc.

Any of those books about sailors encountering epic storms... or trying to sail around the world single-handed, and so on.

The Morville Year by Katherine Swift (about gardening)

Journal of a Trapper by Osborne Russell

Other non-fiction books that people want to throw out as book bullets this month

(I'll post them below if you suggest them in your own posts, or or you can send ideas to me in a PM and I'll add them to the list)

What we've been reading that doesn't necessarily fit into a category right now, but that's incredibly good.

Jacob's Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill
A lot of us read Howard's End is on the Landing when it was first published; I've just started reading this, and wanted flag it.

Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kyle and Blain Roberts is an excellent and timely book about how we remember history and who has the right to tell and shape historical narratives, with the story of Charleston's history, and slavery and the civil war and the figures around it at the heart of the book. I thought I understood the ways history has been distorted, but nope...

Novels related to this month's theme:

No, they don't count for the challenge! But if you run across a great work of fiction that you'd like others to be aware of, here's a place to flag it....

The Brothers K by David James Duncan

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

The Odyssey Project by Lawrence de Marino

The Overstory by Richard Powers

I have three books lined up for this month.

1. American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of A Nation by Eric Rutkow - As another book I read said in it's opening sentence "From time immemorial the grasses and the trees have been at war. Right now the trees are winning." That was in a book about our endangered prairies, so I wanted to read a book about the trees and the forests in the continental U. S. I have started this one already and am about 120 pages into the book. So far, this is a history of how Americans have used, or misused, their forests and trees. Cutting down the Brazilian rainforest is nothing new.

2. Seeing in the Dark: How Backyard Stargazers Are Probing Deep Space and Guarding Earth From Interplanetary Peril by Timothy Ferris. This title was on ALA's Alex Award list Timothy Ferris invites us all to become stargazers, recounting his lifelong experiences as an enthralled stargazer, and capturing the exquisite experience when ancient starlight strikes the eye and incites the mind. Astronomy is the most accessible and democratic of all the sciences: Anyone can get started in it just by going outside with a star chart on a dark night and looking up.

3. I plan on listening to the autobiography Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. This one was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for autobiography and one I have been wanting to read since it came out. I put in my ILL request for the recorded version of this title and hope it gets here in time for me to get it "listened" to before the end of the month. I have never surfed and yet I find it a fascinating form of recreation. I hope to learn more about the sport, the life, and the ocean.

My three books are an ambitious plan. I told myself when I started this challenge that I would try to read or listen to one book per month for this category, but here I am with my eyes bigger than my allotted reading time. I hope that the rest of our fellow travelers get so caught up in this subject that they overreach as well. It will make me feel better.

I'm going to read The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime by Jason Turbow. This one has been on my radar for several years after being recommended by Linda Holmes from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour and Monkey See Blog
https://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2010/03/the_baseball_codes_attention_b.ht...

>7 benitastrnad: I enjoyed Barbarian Days, especially the first part about his childhood. I'm also reminded I wanted to read his earlier memoir about living and teaching in South Africa.

I am going to read about trees: The Hidden Life of Trees to be exact. I'm intrigued to find out if I learn much more following reading a couple of tree books last year.

ETA: I've also requested White beech: the rainforest years - I enjoy Greer's writing.

I am planning on reading Scouting on Two Continents by Frederick Russell Burnham. It is an account of his years learning to scout from Native Americans and scouting across the Old West and then later using the same skills in Southern Africa.

I think I’ll read Travels with a Donkey in the Cevannes since I didn’t get to it in the travel month. It’s about a hike so I think it will fit.

I am planning to read Under the Lights and In the Dark: Untold Stories of Women's Soccer by Gwendolyn Oxenham I also have some other outdoorsy books in my TBR shelves if I get time.

I started A buzz in the meadow by Dave Goulson. About life in the French countryside and especially the critters in his meadow. Read a few pages, and the book is really promising, nice readable style and interesting.

>8 benitastrnad: "my eyes bigger than my allotted reading time". Oh I so know that feeling! I'm hopeful that we have similar categories next year, so that I can get to some of the ones I really really really want to read but simply won't manage in the allotted time.

>11 charl08: I'm keen to see what you think of The Hidden Life of Trees, which is also on my TBR pile. I don't think I'll get to it this month, but I'm really looking forward to reading it eventually.

My original plan for this month was to read a freebie from Project Gutenberg, Samuel Hall Young's Alaska Days with John Muir. I started it last week, but because it was an ebook I hadn't realised until I opened it up just how short it was, so I already finished it before June started. Anyway, I'm not sure if you'll include it in the "What We're Reading" post or the BBs post, but I'm certainly counting it for this month's theme! And as I have several other relevant books for this month, I decided to start on another one which I've been really keen to get to, John Lewis-Stempel's Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field. Incidentally this would also have worked for January's theme as it won the 2015 Wainwright Prize. I'm yet to meet a Wainwright winner or nominee that I didn't love.

>Hi Jackie. Was it interesting, your Alaska book?

And I'll be interested in what you think of Meadowland. Earlier in the year I was looking for a book about meadows and life in them, and I found the one I've started now A buzz in the Meadow, seems your book might be similar and a good addition.

I am planning to read De laatste generatie (The last generation : how nature will take her revenge for climate change) by Fred Pearce

>17 EllaTim: It was interesting, and made me want to visit Alaska! The author was a Christian minister in Alaska, and he and Muir became very great friends and went on several trips up the Alaska coast, Hall preaching the gospel and Muir mapping the at that time minimally mapped glaciers and coastline. This is an account of the trips, it's part admiration-of-John-Muir and part isn't-Alaska-beautiful kind of thing. While I was reading it I was seeing headlines about permission being sought to explore the potential for more oil extraction in Alaska, and that made me sad. I suspect that the Alaska that Hall and Muir wrote about is already very different today, never mind if Big Oil gets its hands on it :(

I like the sound of A buzz in the meadow, I've added it to my wishlist.

OK, I think I'm up to date, and have thrown in some extra reading ideas! I'll be reading (I hope, if I catch up...) Penelope Lively's upcoming gardening memoir (I'll buy it when it's published mid-month in the US) and a book available from the UK -- Rain: four Walks in English Weather. I'd like to also get to Adam Nicolson's book about seabirds, but I've been appallingly sluggish about reading my library books so am wary about over-promising. I didn't manage to finish ANY of my planned May reads, so wrapping those up is the first order of business!!

Well, I started, and got distracted from Life in the Garden so I'll go back and finish that. Two books I'd planned for earlier months fit here too, so I might read one of those: Love of Country and Philip Hoare'S RisingTideFallingStar.

Btw, are you feeling better Suz?

I'm planning to read E Che Kar by Hank Pedersen. It details a 1937 trip through Glacier Park. My copy is the only one on LT, so I probably won't get many join ins.

Bonus: It has a purple cover. :)

>20 Chatterbox: I read Rain: four walks in English weather a couple of years ago and really liked it. She's also written a series based on the four seasons which I'd really like to get hold of.

>22 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks, the migraine is retreating, probably bec. we finally got a thunderstorm or two. I'm going to take it easy this evening and tomorrow and hope to KEEP it gone this time. Six days out of eight is too damn much. Thanks for asking.

>24 Jackie_K: Glad to hear that it's good -- it just sounded appealing.

>21 Caroline_McElwee: Could you let me know the author of "Love of Country" pls? or double check the touchstone? It seems to be linking to a work of political theory... I want to be sure I post the correct book image! :-)

Two books for this month:

1. A FIELD GUIDE TO The Norton Book of NATURE WRITING

I'm rereading this one to go along with the immensely dense Norton Book
which I hope to complete for next year's June Nature Challenge.

2. For a gentle balance, here's also THE GARDEN IN THE CLOUDS by Antony Woodward.

Well I fell down last month abysmally not being able to get into any of the books at my disposal on the topic. But I did read American Fire: Love, Arson and Life in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse which was very good.

This month I will read American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee and/or Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

I have The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot so will probably tackle that since it was mentioned in the suggested reading ideas.

>29 Familyhistorian: I really liked that book - read it last year and having been reading a lot of Macfarlane since.

>29 Familyhistorian: >30 Oberon: I really like Robert Macfarlane - I too have The Old Ways although don't think I'll be able to get to it this month. I've also found any book with a foreward by him is usually pretty good - he's very generous in supporting other nature writers.

>31 Jackie_K: Another fan of The Old Ways here too. His enthusiasm for the Scottish writer about mountains (name escapes me) has been attributed (by me) to her being republished in a lovely new paperback edition. It tempts me in the bookshop.

>33 charl08: The author you're after is Nan Shepherd. He raves about her in Landmarks a lot (that would be another great book for this month's challenge). I noticed her book in Waterstones the other week - might have to add it to the (ever-growing) pile!

I have decided to read The Lost Art of Walking. I started it last night and was drawn in immediately. Nicholson is an engaging writer and funny! I had originally started reading another book that had been on my shelf for a long time, called The End of Nature but I noticed it was published in 1989 - almost 30 years ago!! - and after reading the first few pages, I realized it was going to be a depressing read, especially knowing how much has deteriorating over the 30 years since it first came out. I don't want a depressing read right now. It's summer, it's hot and doom and gloom about our environment is not what the doctor ordered. The Lost Art of Walking seems the right book for me now!

>6 Chatterbox:

THE BROTHERS K by David James Duncan
ties in perfectly with baseball non-fiction
while
THE ODYSSEY PROJECT, a mystery by Lawrence De Marino
fits greatly into the cold outdoors.

The library had a new copy of Turning: a swimming memoir on the shelf when I went this morning to return some books. So reading that!

>28 brenzi: I listened to American Wolf this past month and loved it. If you're interested, it's the book chosen by the Outside and Beyond book club on FB this month so it should have some interesting author interviews and info.

By post >5 Chatterbox: I had a BB. I've already requested Denmark Vesey's Garden at my library.

I finished American Wolf a couple weeks ago. It's a good read. Not nearly wolf-sciencey enough for me, but a great overview of the reintroduction and the political and practical issues surrounding that.

I've got The Hidden Life of Trees and I started it a while back and got totally bogged down in the introduction and quit. I may pick that up again.

>39 nittnut: Oh good! It won't fit for this challenge (in spite of garden in the title) but it's a fascinating read. I'm passing on my ARC to someone I met at the Athenaeum here who was born & raised in Charleston and anticipate an interesting discussion...

On a separate note -- I LOVE the cover of American Wolf.

And I just spotted a non-fiction book by Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel. It's about traveling through the Northwest Passage, by boat -- something that is now, finally, possible thanks to global warming. I'll probably read it but will reserve judgment on whether it fits here and whether to add it.

>40 Chatterbox: Ha! Garden in the title. :) It looks fascinating for sure.

The cover of American Wolf is stunning.

>26 Chatterbox: Fixed the touchstone in >21 Caroline_McElwee: Suz.

>40 Chatterbox:

Here's one for Thomas Paine from Tennyson (XCVI):

There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.

>43 m.belljackson: Thanks! and
>42 Caroline_McElwee: Thanks!

The Owl on the cover of MEADOWLAND:the Private Life of an English Field by John Lewis Stempel echoes recent perfect photo on Mark's thread.

Went to abe.com and got directed to MEADOWLAND: A novel of the Viking Discovery of America by Thomas Holt.
For $4.4l, I got a Like New copy of that, as well as the Stempel book, and Chinua Achebe's There Was A Country.

>45 m.belljackson: Oh I'm so glad you've got a copy of Meadowland as well. I am just over half way through it and LOVING it.

>46 Jackie_K:

Looking forward to your review of MEADOWLAND,
notably since the meadows described in the book I chose, The GARDEN in the CLOUDS,
are not terribly evocative or inspiring.

If Meadowland arrives soon, I will add it to this month's reading.

I finished The Last Generation : How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change by Fred Pearce.
He explores global climate patterns in past and present, shows how rapid some are changing and gives possible outcomes if the trends are not changed. The earth seems to be in great manmade distress and the future is not looking bright.
The book was published in 2009, so some facts may have worsened since.

>48 FAMeulstee: Someone I know had recommended The Land Grabbers by Fred Pearce, a debate over who really "owns" the land, as a "must read" book, so I added it to my Kindle. Where it languishes.... I think it's slightly more recent, though. Along similar lines -- environmental issues vs human impact on the world.

I have finished the first of the four short segments that make up Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison. She's very lyrical as a writer, but I find myself wondering how she is going to distinguish one section from the next. As it was, the nature and rhythm of the prose were such that I found myself kind of gliding off into a kind of netherworld of inattention occasionally -- my fault, actually, but still.

>51 Jackie_K: Interesting reaction! Actually I think my reaction was kind of similar, and with the passage of time I'm not sure I remember any great differences between them, but I quite like that langurous 'netherworld of inattention' in a book sometimes :) It is worth staying with it till the end - the very final bit of the book is beautiful.

>2 Chatterbox: Oddly, The GARDEN in the CLOUDS does not have that much about actual gardening, but it has inspired renewed interest in creating stone walls so I'm adding IN THE COMPANY OF STONE by Dan Snow to this month's Non-fiction.

I’m just starting The End of Plenty for this challenge.

>37 charl08: Finding this a bit samey. She's got a phd in environment studies, and is interesting when she writes about that, but I'm beginning to doubt there are many more ways to describe a body of still water...

I read Drawdown earlier this year and thought it was excellent. I'd recommend it if someone is looking for a solutions focused book on reducing greenhouse gases.

The GARDEN in the CLOUDS starts off oddly with the author's mother forcing him to steal plants.

With his wife and children, author Antony Woodward moves from "...the airless, Tupperware skies of London"
to Tair-Ffynnon, a small holding near the top of one of the Black Mountains of South Wales. Driven by how
he intensely competes to be included in the Yellow Book of outstanding gardens, the story makes interesting,
but not compelling, reading. Competition drives the plot, rather than any deep, true love for plants, flowers,
trees, seeds, and, eventually, bees.

I've just finished John Lewis-Stempel's Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, and LOVED it. I'd say it's already a contender for my top book of the year. The author, as well as being an accomplished nature writer, is also a farmer in rural Herefordshire, right on the border with Wales, and this is the account of a year in the life of his meadow. Month by month he details the animals, birds, insects, and plants (not to mention the weather) which make up the life of the field, and I thought it was gorgeous. Highly recommended.

And here's another one for the covers post (>2 Chatterbox: ) - I've just started reading Swimming with Seals by Victoria Whitworth, which is about wild swimming in Orkney. I'm only a chapter in and I'm loving this one too. This has been a great theme for me this month and we're only just over a week in!

>57 Jackie_K:

What a great review of a great choice in Wales!

I'm looking forward to my copy, on the way from the UK.

Unlike >57 Jackie_K: I had less success with my swimming memoir Turning: a swimming memoir. The author is young to be writing a memoir, and I felt it showed. She swam whilst finishing a thesis in Berlin.

To me it increasingly read as though she had analysed other books in the genre and assembled her own based on that criteria. Historical / literary forebear? Check. Reference to painful personal history? Check. Personal challenge/ deadline? (Swimming x lakes in a year). Having read a fair few memoirs interrogating experiences of depression, this one just felt insufficiently thoughtful, for me.
Kudos to her for the swimming though.

IN THE COMPANY OF STONE by Dan Snow has the deeply personal touch, love, and incredible, inspiring photographs that were missing from my first choice for the month. 5 Stars.

I am now 25 pages into my second selection for this topic Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris and I am really liking this book. The author speaks eloquently about the value of a hobby that lead him to his career as an astrophysicist. I keep telling myself this is a book I should purchased for one of my stargazing relatives who just needs a gently nudge to turn him into a backyard stargazer fanatic.

My recorded copy of Barbarian Days came on Monday. (I had placed an ILL request for it) I started listening to it immediately, and it is also a good'un, as we say at home. This author sucked me into how he learned to surf, where he surfed in Hawaii as he was growing up, and what his life at school was like. This is a good memoir and seems worthy of winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.

I'm reading a fun and interesting book by Simon Barnes called Ten Million Aliens. It's a natural history book described by National Geographic as "A deeply researched, often hilarious compendium of stories about the weird and wonderful creatures that surround us." The short chapters alternate between vertebrates and invertebrates from whales to worms and are packed full of fascinating facts and personal stories.

For those who are reading books about trees for this challenge, especially The Hidden Life of Trees, I highly recommend the fiction book The Overstory by Richard Powers. If you've ever hugged a tree, you will want to read this.

I am making very good progress on all of my current titles for this month. I am leaving on a short vacation tomorrow, so I will be on LT only a few times in the next 5 days.

Barbarian Days is a very well done recorded version of this autobiography. It is narrated by the author and defies the rule of "don't let the author read their own books." Finnegan is doing a great job. He is still in junior high and just getting his start as a surf bum.

American Canopy. I am about 200 pages into this one and it is full of information and history. I am just up to the 1880's and the Progressive Era. Gosh-o-Friday, Teddy Roosevelt wouldn't be part of the Republican party today with his pro-public space policy. He practically created the National Forest and National Historical Site system on his own with the stroke of that Executive Order pen. It is a good thing that the presidents after him respected his judgement when he created these National Forests. If they had done what the present occupant has done, we wouldn't have a tree standing in the U. S. Oh well - now it is on to the unmitigated logging of the Northwest forests. Much sadder chapter ahead.

Seeing in the Dark. This is turning out to be a wonderful peon to the night sky and the people who watch the stars. This is almost a memoir, but not quite. The author starts out with his experiences of stargazing when he was in junior high, and I am now up to his travels around the country as a college student. He is an astrophysicist but his bachelors degree is in English. He may have been watching stars ever since he was in 5th grade but he certainly had his head in the clouds regarding his career choice. His writing chops show in this book, as each chapter is wonderfully written and full of interesting information about all aspects of space. Right now I am reading about radio waves and radio telescopes.

All three of these are great reads. I am so impressed with all of them and can't decide which ones to read first. It was a major decision trying to figure out which one to take on this short trip. American Canopy won. It is going in my backpack since it is lighter weight and I think I can finish it over the long weekend.

>63 GerrysBookshelf: That description reminded me of the book about all the germs that we have floating around us -- I think it was This is Your Brain on Parasites.

Thanks for the reminder about The Overstory. It's a chunkster, and I had it on my list to read after picking up an ARC at ALA Midwinter. I really do have a LOT of good books on hand to read...

Penelope Lively's gardening memoir just arrived on my Kindle, so I'm going to try to read that this weekend. While the book about walking in the rain is short and well-written, it also feels very repetitious and has an oddly soporific impact on me!

I finished my read, Under the Lights and In the Dark by Gwendolyn Oxenham

Oxenham is a former college soccer player, a sports journalist, and a women's soccer aficionado. In this book, each chapter tells the story of a different woman soccer player, or women's soccer topic. Portland plays a big role in the book (we are, after all, soccer city, and the promised land for women's soccer, given that our games typically draw 16,000 to 20,000 fans). She also gives an international perspective, covering players from Africa, South America and Europe.

I think that my favorite chapter was the one on Nadia Nadim, who is a professional soccer player and also a medical student. She was born in Afghanistan, and moved to Denmark as a refugee child. There she got involved in soccer, a perfect match for her intensity, and aggressive drive. She played last year for the Portland Thorns, and we loved watching her. Unfortunately, she left us to play for Manchester City.

The book really highlights the difficulties that women athletes have, and also the strength and drive they bring to the game. Women athletes are paid way less than men, even when they are super talented. It is also hard for women players to get the recognition, product endorsements, etc.

In the Company of Stone delivers at once incredible photographs by Peter Mauss,
an introduction to dry stonewalling,
and poetic descriptions of stone walls created with love by Dan Snow. 5 Stars of inspiration.

>67 m.belljackson: I like the sound of that.

Ooh. Swimming With Seals caught my attention. >57 Jackie_K: are you still liking it?

>67 m.belljackson: That sounds great, onto the wishlist it goes!

>69 nittnut: Yes I am, very much - I should finish it soon, but it's exactly my kind of book. Orkney, swimming, wildlife, history, archaeology, memoir, it just has it all. It's the book I'd love to write (well maybe not the wild swimming or marriage breakup bits, but ...! ;) ). It's beautifully written.

>69 nittnut: >70 Jackie_K: And today they've just announced that Swimming with Seals has been shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize (see here for details of the prize: https://www.englishpen.org/events/prizes/penackerley-prize/ ), along with I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell and The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard. This is a new prize to me, but I see that last year it was won by The Outrun (which was one of my top reads of last year, also about Orkney, and would have been another good suggestion for this month's theme)

Red Letter Outdoor Book Day here in Token Creek =

Lor sent her hardcover (!) copy of John Muir's Wild America - so beautiful and inspiring -
and Meadowland arrived from the UK!

I'm all set for the 2019 Great Outdoors Challenge.

Thank you to Lor and Jackie for their sterling recommendations.

>71 Jackie_K: I see that Swimming With Seals is free for kindle if you have Amazon Prime. Book Bullet for sure!

Although I was reading The Feather Thief as a sure crime read for a different challenge, it did have quite a bit of outdoor details.

I loved the way it started- the background info including the story of Alfred Russell Wallace who independently came up with the theory of evolution after studying the birds of Malaya; the Victorian feather trade; the explanation of tying the arcane salmon flies and the heist from the British Museum of Natural History.

I thought the ending weaker - perhaps because there wasn't really closure in the case; perhaps because I had the feeling that this would have made a fascinating magazine article, but had a lot of filler to expand it into a book.

>73 streamsong: I'm afraid Amazon Prime isn't enough, it takes Kindle Unlimited to get it for free.

>73 streamsong: I think Kindle Unlimited is free with Prime. Or at least that's the way it works for me.

>75 streamsong: It isn't for me.
This is what a search turned up:

Is Kindle Unlimited free for Prime members?
It is a part of Amazon Prime membership program that costs $99 a year. KOLL lets you borrow one Kindle book a month with no due dates. Kindle Unlimited is separate from Amazon Prime and Kindle Owners' Lending Library. This is a standalone ebook subscription service with a monthly fee of $9.99.Jul 13, 2017

Which is slightly ambiguous. Is "It" of the first sentence KOLL or KU? In any case it wants to charge me $7.99 for Swimming With Seals and I sure have Amazon Prime.

What's worse, not one of my 3 local libraries carries Swimming With Seals or any other book by Victoria Whitworth.

2017 is pretty old. Try this link on the Amazon site.

https://www.amazon.com/primeinsider/tips/10-prime-payoff.html/ref=insider_hud_gt...

ETA - the confusion may be that only certain kindle books are free to prime members once you download the Kindle app. There is still a charge for Kindle Unlimited books.

>76 quondame: Audio version is available for free. I'm hard of hearing, and much prefer actual reading.

I finished reading American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow. This was a fascinating look at American history through its use and misuse of its trees and forests. The book started with the primeval forest and the harvesting of the New England White Pine for the exclusive use of the British Navy and ended with the impact of the Environmental movement and Global Warming. There was a whole chapter on tree diseases and the impact of them on our trees. Dutch Elm Disease and the Chestnut Blight and how the attempt to stop the Dutch Elm Disease led to Rachel Carson studying the effects of pesticides. Famous people who loved trees, all the way from Henry David Thoreau to Aldo Leopold were written about as well as those who hated trees, like Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. It was truly an amazing history and very well written. I highly recommend this book to history lovers as well as those who love our forests and trees.

>79 benitastrnad: - Good to hear praise for this one. I've it on my shelf since last year but just have not yet got to it.

So I finished Swimming With Seals yesterday. What can I say, except everyone should read it!

My review: An intensely personal memoir of how wild swimming - mainly in the same bay in Orkney - helped the author understand herself, her place in the world, deal with loss and relationship break-up, as well as how nature, history, archaeology, myth, religion and personal stories interact and are intimately bound up with each other. The book is framed throughout with her original facebook posts describing individual swims, and all those topics - bereavement, her academic interests, childhood in Africa, moving to Orkney, myth, marriage breakup, religion, giving birth, being an 'incomer', writing, archaeology, memories, history, swimming, nature, friends (in no particular order) - are then threaded throughout. I thought it was a stunning book. 5/5.

This month's challenge has been a really good one for me - two 5* books in a row!

I have a good start on Seeing in the Dark by Tim Ferris. This one is starting out so well that I think it is going to be another winner. I don’t know if I will get done with it this month as I am going to be at a conference for several days this week and that will take me away from my reading, but I am really interested in what the author has to say about amateur astronomers and the vital work that they do. I am now reading a chapter on the stargazing hobby of Edmund Haley. This book is also written well and is so easy to read. I am going to be sorry to see this month end as so many different kinds of books about so many different outdoor interests.

I just finished an advance review copy of Gardenlust: a Botanical Tour of the World's Best New Gardens by Christopher Woods. The copy of the Lively book suggested at the top of the thread finally arrived. I may not get to it this month, but I plan to read it soon.

>81 Jackie_K: I'm sold. :)

I finished and loved American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee. By making a character of one particular wolf, 0 six, and her life at Yellowstone, Blakeslee was able to brilliantly explain the plight of wolves in the Northwest and their appearance on again/ off again on the Endangered Species list. It’s a sad but informative page turner.

I finally started my book for this month - The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca. I'm liking it so far.

I am on CD #5 of the 15 CD set of the recorded version of Barbarian Days by William Finnegan and I am really liking this book. There is lots of technical information on surfing, waves, and the ocean, as well as about the late 60's and 70's surfing life. This guy was a real surf bum and rebel. I admit that his laconic reading of his autobiography takes some getting used to but the book is very interesting and perfect for this challenge. I doubt that I finish it this month, but I am going to start listening to it in the evening while I knit, and that should move things along.

I finished the book from MT TBR that I intended for this challenge: E Che Kar by Hank Pedersen about a hiking trip through Glacier National Park in 1937. I enjoyed the photographs; the parts written by the author, however, were so flowery as to be almost unreadable. :(

I bought this at a Glacier Park gift shop a few years back. Normally, I wouldn't keep a book that I rated two stars, but the two stars come from the photos- and are worth keeping the book.

I am only 52 pages into Seeing in the Dark but find it totally fascinating. I am reading it at work during my lunch hour and my lunch times have been erratic this last month so I haven't been able to read as much at a time as I would like. I am reading chapter 5 and in this chapter the author is talking about the roles of amateurs and professionals in exploring the sky. He has just finished a portion of the chapter in which he talks to amateurs who are presenting posters of their research in collaboration with professional academics at the American Astronomical Society meeting. The man he interviewed is an aerospace engineer who does nightly observations on "Late-Type Stars." (These are stars cooler than our Sun.) He is working with an astronomer at Wichita State University and his graduate student group. They are measuring the the chemical composition and how the atmospheres change when they vary in brightness. He goes out every night for twenty minutes to take his measurements on an 8 inch off-the-shelf telescope. Having him collaborate with the academics makes the research cheaper for the academic institution because they don't have to pay for time at the big telescopes when a small telescope, in the right location, can do the job. It is a win-win situation for everybody and it makes for fascinating reading.

I am so totally going to finish this book and look for the others by this author. This is great stuff.

Oh dear, we're almost at the end of the month....

I have read Rain: Four Walks in English Weather and it was good. Excellent writing, but it felt very repetitive. I'd suggest breaking it up so that you don't just feel that you're reading the same thing over and over and over and over again.

I do still want to read Penelope Lively's short book about gardening and may get to that but my head (yet again!!) had been annoying.

How have others been doing?? I'd like to at least try to get up to 150 posts. And yes, I realize I'm an annoying person about this.

Anything amazing this month?

I still have The Seabird's Cry sitting and staring at me reproachfully.

I've failed miserably this month - haven't read any non-fiction!

I'm enjoying The Baseball Codes but I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it before the end of the month.

I am still reading 2 books for this challenge, my choice for this month as well as last month's. I have just been too distracted the last little while to focus but am enjoying both and both will be finished, just maybe not this month.

As stated upthread, this month's challenge has been brilliant for me with not one but two 5* reads - Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, and Swimming with Seals. It's going to be hard to top that, although I am already looking forward to next month's read.

Would love to find Swimming with Seals and Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field but no luck in the local library system. Did however find Where Poppies Blow.

I am half done with Barbarian Days and enjoying it. I am listening to the recorded version and it has taken some time to become accustomed to his reading style. He doesn't sugar coat his surf bum days and talks about how irresponsible he was during that time of his life. I am beginning to wonder if he ever grows up.

>93 katiekrug: The nonfiction gods will get you.

I'm hoping that I'll be more focused next month, in time for the "Arts" month.

I actually managed to get one in under the wire! It's not totally about the outdoors, but enough.

Morning: How to make time a manifesto (Allan Jenkins) ****

Not quite Plot 29 perhaps, in this meditation Jenkins explores the pleasure and benefits of being an early riser. Beautifully observed, but what I felt strongly was that this was certainly a luxury of the creatives, and middle classes. If the ‘workers’ were seeing the early hours it was in order to start work early, or commute to work, rather than to carve out some quiet time to themselves. Most of those interviewed for ‘My Morning’ which punctuates Jenkins’s own journaling were writers, actors, artists with more control over their time, and the time to take naps later in the day, to make up for rising at 4.30am! The only others included were a fisherman and one or two others whose work was in nature.

>101 Caroline_McElwee: Interesting, but you're right -- it does sound like a book crafted out of middle class/upper class privilege. No shift workers?? But if there was good writing, that makes up for a lot!

I have finally started reading Penelope Lively's Life in the Garden and was intrigued to realize that she is in the middle of five generations of women who garden -- her grandmother, mother, daughter and granddaughter. Her mother tried to create a flourishing garden in Egypt, including planting daffodils. These "were rightly aghast at what was required of them and sent up just a few spindly blooms."

>98 benitastrnad: I enjoyed this, especially the opening about his childhood time in Hawaii. It left me with a sense of an obsession / addiction which ties in to the folks I know of through my dad who are still surfing in their 70s.

I'm not sure if this counts, but I've nearly finished a book about the 1908 Olympics, which mostly takes place out of doors - sometimes to the detriment of ticket sales. It turns out the games was mostly a grumpy competition between the US and UK definitions of athletics. But some fun stories about athletes achieving amazing things despite the very different attitudes to preparation back then.

>101 Caroline_McElwee: This seems ripe for a 'response' book about the pleasures of sleeping in.

>105 charl08: That one sounds like it might be kind of interesting.

I keep trying to start The Secret Life of Trees. I don't know what the deal is, except the introduction really annoyed me.

>107 nittnut: That's a shame :( Do you mean The Hidden Life of Trees? I bought that in a fit of enthusiasm earlier this year, although I've not got to it yet.

#108
I heard an interview with the author of Hidden Life of Trees and he was very amusing and what he talked about was amazing. I have a copy of the book and will have to get to it sometime in the future.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, & Full Body Burden by Kristen Iverson are two of my non-fiction books for June, both of which feature a good deal of outdoor life. I don't think a circus is exactly outdoors, but it is sure different than indoors, so The Electric Woman by Tessa Fontaine is at worst a near miss. It reads rather like a novel.

>107 nittnut: What aspect of it annoyed you? The title intrigued me, but I kept having visions of Tolkien-style talking and moving trees...

>112 Chatterbox: Thanks for the reminder of Dan Egan's book about the Great Lakes, which has been hanging around here for a shamefully long time (I got an ARC...) I do want to read it, as I've been fascinated with stuff like the marine archaeology in the lakes and then ended up writing about (of all things) zebra mussels, when they started hitching rides on shipping into the lakes.

Finished The First London Olympics 1908. It made me realise how some things about the event ( like who decides the rules) I just take for granted.

I ordered DRINKING WATER by James Salzman from Daedalus Books latest catalogue - for next year's challenge!

A few years ago, we had a full house RO water system installed after rural well tested high for bacteria and nitrates, likely from local manure runoff.

I'm still reading A buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson.

He writes about his small farm in France, nature there, descriptions making me feel pretty jealous. About insect life and his research. Very interesting and entertaining. He's a good writer.

And now I'm in the part about threats, those awful neonix insecticides that turn out to be really harmful. Slowing my reading down.

Lots of information in this book, and I wanted to look up every animal he names, so lots of googling necessary. But it's worth it. He makes quite clear how much we still don't know about insects and their lives and what they mean to us.

I'm still reading The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. I was on vacation for 3 weeks and didn't take any of my challenge books with me. I have been trying to cram them in during the last week or so but this one won't be done before the end of tomorrow.

So next month is the arts. Would books about writing be considered books about the arts?

>117 Familyhistorian:, yes, as long as it's not just a "how to write a blockbuster novel in 5 easy steps" or even Elements of Style, classic though it is. But I'd put Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird in that category -- she demonstrates how good writing is constructed/crafted. It would be interesting if anyone wanted to read EM Forster's book about literature and writing, Aspects of the Novel -- that used to be iconic but I haven't seen anyone reading it in ages.

I will post the next challenge sometime tomorrow, but will wait as long as possible in hopes of reaching the ever-elusive 150 posts and ensuring the maximum SEAMLESS transfer between threads so that EVERYONE will be able follow smoothly along, not just those who are active participants of this particular thread and thus will easily find and click the link at the bottom.

I have been reading Penelope Lively's new book about gardens, gardening and how gardens fit into books, etc. and am enjoying it. It's not as much like The Morville Hours, another great book about gardening, as I had thought it might be, however.

>117 Familyhistorian: I think a book about writing could work, although as >118 Chatterbox: says, probably not a 'how to' book. I think 'arts' can be interpreted very broadly indeed. Last year for one of the Category Challenge monthly challenges there was a category of the arts (I think it was the CATWoman challenge), and I decided to read Dawn French's autobiography. So not the most highbrow, but art is art :)

I'm going to read a book about the Iraqi National Youth Orchestra for July's challenge. If (unlikely) I get the time to read another one then top of my list is Cary Elwes' book about filming The Princess Bride. But I might have to save that for this challenge next year, assuming that 'the arts' is included again for one of the months.

Would Olivia Laing's book on writers who drank count? Otherwise I'll be trying to catch up with recent exhibition books - Portrait of the Artist: Kathe Kollwitz,who was a German print maker. I have stalled on the first chapter (the text is rather clunky, sadly, unlike the stark, powerful images of grief).

>119 Chatterbox: I've added The Morville hours to the wishlist :-)

Waiting for the July challenge!

I'm impressed with the number of categories of outdoor books.

I'm reading a local book for a true crime challenge that also fits into the challenge. It's called The Magruder Murders and reads suspiciously like a dissertation made into a book.

In 1863 a well known merchant and local politician was crossing the divide between Idaho and the Bitterroot valley of Montana with a string of mules and a good amount of gold, when he and four others were murdered and the gold stolen.

I first heard this story when I was acting as a wilderness volunteer in Idaho's Selway wilderness, not far from where the murders occurred.

We were sitting around a campfire after a long day of hiking, and told that neither the murderers nor the gold was ever found, and that of course the murdered men's ghosts still walked.

The book is far more mundane and not particularly well written. I think I much prefer my campfire ghost story.

>118 Chatterbox: Funny that you should mention Bird By Bird as that is what I have picked out to read.

With 126, we're on our way toward today's 150 goal...

I've got a couple of good books chosen for July's ART CHALLENGE, but need to locate exact titles and authors.

I have chosen my book for July, and of course, I have a few others too, if by some miracle I should manage to finish the first. I am still working on my May and June challenge reads. Both are good, though, and will get finished. I am not a fast reader, though not quite as slow as this may indicate, as I read other books in between the challenge books during these last several weeks. Which is part of my problem, as I do tend to juggle perhaps more than I can handle.

Loving all the ideas here. I must get back to >166 Robert MacFarlane. Library books come in and root out others.

No books for me for this challenge this month. I do have at least one lined up for July, though.

Haven't chosen my July book yet

>119 Chatterbox: I love The Morville Hours.

I found the first one considered for July: THE AGE OF EMPIRES - searching for 3 others...

>129 kidzdoc: So what will it be, Darryl??

>130 torontoc: I haven't had a chance to think about my July books yet, either...

And a reminder of the July theme: July – The Arts -- from ballet to classical music, to jazz and rock and roll, to sculpture and painting, and the people involved in these -- oh, and books about books, of course!

Hope to have the thread up and running late tonight or first thing tomorrow -- which will be Canada Day!

>108 Jackie_K: I have both - they are two different books - they were given to me at Christmas.

>111 Chatterbox: I have no idea. I sat down yesterday to read the preface again, and it didn't bother me at all. *shrug* Moody reader syndrome I guess.

July already. Goodness. I have no idea what to read. I will wait and see what gems you all come up with.

Are we still trying to get to 150?

I can help for a minute.

Still not sure which to start with - THE PAINTED ART JOURNAL by Jeanne Oliver
or A POWER STRONGER THAN ITSELF by George Lewis...

Funny story. At least I think it's funny. My son (11) is doing his Reading merit badge for scouts. We went to the library yesterday so he could use the computer to search out 6 books from 4 different categories (fiction, non-fiction, poetry/plays, biography). He complained all. the. way. there about having to read poetry. The first thing the librarian did was help him search out Where the Sidewalk Ends. He scoffed, and sat down to read and prove to us that there was nothing in there he wanted to read. 10 minutes later I had to take it away so he could find other books on the list. *grin* Another skeptic bites the dust.

I do have a possible book for next month! The biography Mr. E chose at the library is Myth Maker, which looks like a fairly enjoyable read. It's about J.R.R. Tolkein.

So I have Bird by Bird which I’d love to get to but I’m also wondering if another book about books might work although it’s not something that actually discusses the writing process—- Aaron Lansky’s Outwitting History?

>142 nittnut: - For *poetry* for your son, may I suggest Sharon Creech. Specifically, Love That Dog, Hate That Cat, and Heartbeat. It's free style, not rhyming, poetry, but very much from a young adult's point of view. Very creative and very engaging. Those are 3 separate titles, by the way. All readable in one sitting, too.

>144 brenzi: I think that would be a perfect book! It discusses a whole literary culture, which is even more on point. I really liked/loved it.

Well, I've been noodling around, and remembered that I have Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-50 by Agnes Poirier on my list to read this year. And a book by Phillip Hook about auctioneering and the shady side of the art market is a possibility: Rogues' Gallery. Plus, I still want to read Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Painters' Eyes by Paul Staiti.

Also, NetGalley approved me to read Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America by Heidi Waleson. I've had Brian Moynahan's book about Leningrad and Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony hanging around forever.

And not surprisingly, I'm awash in books about books:

Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy by Benjamin Balint
The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature
Maya Jasnoff's bio of Joseph Conrad
The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy by Daniel Kalder

The problem will be choosing what to read...

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to finish up Penelope Lively's book on gardens, which is fun but very rambling. Like a garden path. This has not been a wonderful month for me in theme-related non-fiction.

>145 jessibud2: Excellent! Thank you. I did not know that Sharon Creech had poetry. I really liked Walk Two Moons, but never ended up reading anything else by her.

>152 nittnut: - I would bet that you will love these 3 titles too. I sure did!

I am still working on Seeing in the Dark and will post to this thread when I finish it. The book is simply so interesting with the added bonus of being fun to read, that I will not abandon it to next months theme. I am so intrigued by this title that I checked out two other titles by Tim Ferris. The Whole Shebang and another one that has a title I can’t remember.

I just finished The End of Plenty, which was very good. It explores climate change and environmental issues, along with population growth projections, from the agricultural perspective. The author's degrees are in agronomy and journalism, and he has reported on agricultural matters for National Geographic and various other scientific magazines over the years, from around the world. So he brought a depth of knowledge along with good writing, which is always a bonus. Recommended.

>120 Jackie_K: Was that Dear Fatty, Jackie? That was an interesting read. I have a whole section on writing and I am sure I can come up with something about the art of writing.

I finished another soccer book; Laurent Dubois's The Language of the Game. He does a really good job of looking at soccer from an international perspective and talking about the political implications. Also, he tries to give equal attention to Women's soccer, so now I am a fan of his.

I also noted that he wrote a book about the Banjo, maybe I should read it for next month?

I finished the Penelope Lively book, Life in the Garden, late in the evening of the 30th, thus squeaking in under the wire. It was good, but a little scattershot: compares and ruminates on real-life gardening and gardens in books and what gardens symbolize to us -- places of peace and contemplation, a stake in the future, etc. She notes that some authors seem really to have understood viscerally what it means to have gotten their hands dirty in a garden and to grasp the nuances of plantings, while others just read seed catalogs (PG Wodehouse, in spite of the marvelous description of a Scottish gardener in one of his Blandings novels...) She hops, skips and jumps all over the place: gardening and social class (giant red dahlias are vulgar, but dainty blue and silvery-white cultivars of campanula are higher-class); how the landscape gardeners like Repton and Capability Brown were mocked in fiction and how they transformed landscaping; the astonishing impact of Gertrude Jekyll; the Englishness of the herbaceous border and how it came to be. All this interwoven with gardens she has known and created, plants she has loved or loathed and books or literary snippets referring to gardening. Worth a read if you're an avid gardener; not so much if you're not already even an armchair gardener (and somewhat knowledgeable.) These days I'm strictly armchair but enjoyed the discussion of roses...

>158 Chatterbox: - You have reminded me of another book I read and loved a few years ago that would have fit here: Cultivating Delight by Diane Ackerman. I love Ackerman as a writer and this one positively sang to me. I may also seek out the Lively one, as well. I live in a townhouse and have a garden the size of a postage stamp but these books help me dream!

#159
Oh, that book sounds delightful. I got hit by a Book Bullet.

I finally finished my June book over this past weekend The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime was fun and interesting even for a casual baseball fan.

I finished listening to Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan and I really liked this one. He sure can wax poetic about a wave and I can understand that some readers will be impatience with this style, but he diligently tries to explain why he has an obsession with surfing and his hopes that you, the reader, will come to understand it. This morning on my way to work he was describing a wave that was a black wall with indigo tops and on a few waves the tops were a more mellow navy blue. What guy thinks like that? I think that he does that to make a point about why he is so invested in surfing. Or addicted to surfing, might be a better term. He seems to be hyper-aware of the expanse of the ocean, his position in it, and his place on the Earth as well as the individual wave he is riding and it is this that keeps him surfing even as he enters his 60's. His descriptions of the highs that he gets while riding the board are amazing.

Scouting on Two Continents by Frederick Russell Burnham

This was my June book for the non-fiction challenge. I admit that it was July before I finished it but I have waited longer to review it because I haven't been able to sort through my thoughts on it.

I enjoyed the book, which is an autobiography of Frederick Russell Burnham. Burnham was born in Minnesota (yay!) and was caught up in the Dakota War of 1862 (also called the Sioux Uprising - see my review of The Picture Story of the Sioux Uprising) wherein he was nearly killed as a child. Burnham's father died while he was young and Burnham went to work as a rider for Western Union in what was then Arizona territory. At 14 he became a scout with the US Army and participated in the hunt for Geronimo. He spent years learning to track, scout, prospect and hunt from old scouts and Apache. Burnham also got involved smuggling and a feud known as the Pleasant Valley War that is somewhat reminiscent of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. In short, Burnham lived a cowboy sort of life in his teenage years complete with gunfights and hostile natives and cattle rustling.

At 23 he got married and shortly after that he decided that the West was won and that he needed a new challenge. Thus he relocated his family to Southern Africa and set out to answer Cecil Rhodes' call for settlers in what is today Zimbabwe. Almost immediately upon arriving, Burnham was swept up in what becomes known as the First Matabele War. The war was between English and Dutch settlers and the Matabele people who are kin to the more famous Zulu. Burnham adapted his training and expertise to become a scout. As such he was dispatched on a highly dangerous attempt to capture the Matabele king. The group was cut off and slaughtered with Burnham and two others being sole survivors. The event, known as the Shangani Patrol became something like an Alamo story in Rhodesian history.

A few years after the First Matabele War, the Second Matabele War erupted under the leadership of Mlimo, a spiritual leader for the Matabele. Badly outnumbered, the settlers were besieged without much hope for relief. Burnham was again dispatched on a high risk plan to assassinate Mlimo and end the war. Despite incredible risks, Burnham found and killed the leader resulting in the collapse of the Matabele war effort.

Apparently because he was easily bored, Burnham decided to leave Africa to chase gold as part of the Klondike Gold Rush. Again, Burnham used his incredible knowledge and skills to make good on his prospecting claim and survive the barren conditions of the Klondike. Burnham was not a prospector for long before the Second Boer War between the English and Dutch (or Boer) settlers broke out. Burnham received a personal appointment as chief of scouts from the commanding British general. Burnham fought throughout the war including being captured and escaping. He was badly hurt and had to return to England for treatment toward the end of the war. For his war efforts, Burnham was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, second highest award in the British Army. He was also personally granted the right to retain his British military rank despite his American citizenship.

Following this work, Burnham became very active in the Boy Scouts of America. Burnham had met and befriended Baden-Powell while in Africa and Baden-Powell credited Burnham with teaching him much about scouting that ultimately formed the first Boy Scout handbooks.

Scouting on Two Continents ends at this point in Burnham's career. He went on to further adventures that are detailed on his Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Russell_Burnham. The book states that he was saving these stories for a further volume of memoirs but as far as I can tell such a book was never written.

Scouting on Two Continents is a relatively obscure book. When I picked up a copy (after reading an article making reference to the book) I had to buy a first edition off of Ebay. I think a new printing might be available now. Burnham's story is so incredible that it deserves to be much more widely known. He lived a life that seems to rival Indiana Jones at time. Certainly any one of the major periods of Burnham's life could have been a full length book or major feature film.

On to the big caveat (and I suspect the reason the book is out of print). Burnham makes a number of overtly racist comments throughout the book and clearly imbibed the white colonial narrative of bringing civilization to the natives. At a time where there is a discussion of removing mention of Cecil Rhodes from Oxford, Burnham's praise for the man is highly discordant. A part of me wants to attribute Burnham's racism to losing friends in war (as well as his daughter who died of malnourishment during the Second Matabele War). My paternal grandfather maintained a hatred for the Japanese due his combat experiences in WWII. However, Burnham manifests far more sympathy toward Native Americans than he ever does to the Africans. Further, despite acknowledging valuable assistance from allied Africans in the multiple conflicts, Burnham seems to view those individuals as exceptions to his overall low opinion to the bravery, intelligence and decency of the native Africans.

Maybe Burnham is a victim of his times, maybe he was scarred by war - either way I have hard time justifying his racism. However, I do not believe that his extraordinary life and significant accomplishments should be consigned to the dustbin of history for this failing. For that reason, Scouting on Two Continents is worth reading.

I started The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot a few months ago but it was slow going so I just finished it now. The author explored pathways and trails in many different places, not only the UK but war torn areas of the Palestine and other places in the east. I enjoyed the history of the places he visited and could see that there was a logic to the way the book was organized but it didn't pull me through the narrative.