Just finished reading Suburban Safari by Hannah Holmes and find I have strikingly little to say about it. I love the cover, which is an upclose shot of an eastern grey squirrel, and I like the concept: following the natural history of a suburban lawn for a year. I did, not, however, love the book. It's well researched. It's interesting. It's suitably scientific and suitably personal. It's just not fabulous. I've been reading it since September, I believe, and never found it can't-put-down-compelling (I read another personal essay/ecological research book, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, during that time and found it hard to leave, so it's not the genre). Maybe my big issue was that Holmes spent a great deal of time taming a chipmunk to run into her house, run up her stairs and eat off of her hand, fed her squirrels and crows everyday, and then looks down on people for planting butterfly bushes to attract butterflies (in a part of the word where Buddleja is not invasive).
Definitely worth reading. Definitely not sending anyone out to buy it right now (altough it does have a big squirrel on the cover).
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i think that woman would drive me nuts. (didn´t mean the pun, sorry). what is her freakin problem with planting butterfly-attracting plants? and i´m outraged that anyone would think they are an ecologist or sensitive to nature and teach animals to eat out of their hands. that´s just stupid, or at the very least very irresponsible.
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