Monday, June 08, 2020

Six top books about appreciating living creatures

Lydia Millet (born December 5, 1968) is an American novelist and conservationist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as a Guggenheim fellow, among other honors.

Her new novel is A Children's Bible.

At The Week magazine, Millet tagged six favorite books about appreciating living creatures, including:
Where the Animals Go by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti (2016).

This book of beautiful maps, created using modern technologies, traces the various movements of wild animals, from loggerhead sea turtles to emperor penguins. I share it, along with these other revelatory works, because the COVID-19 pandemic began in the trafficking of wildlife for food and body parts. Blame for the leap of the disease to people can't be laid at the feet of bats, pangolins, or civets, of course; it was the direct result of our own bad behavior, and of blindness to how the exploitation and abuse of wildlife is linked to our own well-being.
Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue