About this item
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 forestIn 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.
About the Author
David Haskell is a writer and biologist known for his rich integration of science, lyrical writing, and attention to the living world. The late E. O. Wilson said of his writing that it is "...a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry". Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize winner and director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT wrote that he "may be the finest literary nature writer working today". Haskell's books, The Forest Unseen and The Songs of Trees, won numerous awards including the US National Academies' Best Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction, Reed Environmental Writing Award, National Outdoor Book Award, Iris Book Award, and John Burroughs Medal.Born in London, brought up in France, he has lived for the last thirty years in various parts of the United States, including Tennessee, Colorado, and New York. Haskell received his BA from the University of Oxford and PhD from Cornell University. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and Professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, where he has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching.His latest book, Sounds Wild and Broken, continues his deep sensory attention to the world, celebrating the joy and creativity of the living world as expressed in sound, from insect songs to human language and music.In a world beset by barriers, his work reminds us that life's substance and beauty emerge from relationship and interdependence. Find him at dghaskell.com or on social media @DGHaskell (Twitter) , DavidGeorgeHaskell (Instagram and Facebook) .
