I have been leisurely savoring a diet of essays from British author, Helen Macdonald’s new book, Vesper Flights since I received it for my birthday earlier this month. For many of us interested in the outdoors, there was some special, relatively wild, area we could explore in our childhood. Ms. Macdonald’s was a nine-acre meadow 35 miles outside London where she could be found knee deep in a pond looking for newts, climbing old rhododendrons or learning names of local butterflies.
She describes this book of essays as a “wunderkammer”, a German word for a cabinet of wonders. She states her chosen subject for these essays is love, “Specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us”. Refreshingly, she states “Science encourages us to reflect upon the size of our lives in relation to the vastness of the universe…And it reveals to us a planet that is beautifully and insistently not human”.
Her cabinet of wonders include many types of birds, her pet parrot (whom we met on a Zoom interview this month), wild boars, hares and microbes living on the fringes of life. An enticing essay on mushrooms is titled “Sex, Death and Mushrooms”. We travel with her to The Empire State Building for nocturnal bird migration viewing, the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Turkish coast for an eclipse, and a walk in a British winter woods. She meets a refugee in one essay and in another, considers her own migraine headaches but it morphs into thoughts on climate change.
You could call this nature writing, but it is also armchair travel literature and memoir all flavored with social commentary. This book is a tasty treat.
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