Friday, February 22, 2008

What is Bruce Barcott reading?

The latest contributor to Writers Read: Bruce Barcott, author of The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird.

One book tagged in his entry:
Michael Novacek's Terra: Our 100-million-year-old ecosystem -- and the threats that now put it at risk. Novacek is a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, and he writes about the history of the Earth like Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks about space. Well, okay, maybe not quite as breezy as Tyson -- Novacek bulks up Terra with 65 pages of endnotes -- but this is fantastic scientific history, written with an overriding purpose. To wit: Novacek lays out what we know about the planet's previous five great extinctions, and draws lessons for the sixth, which is the stewpot we currently find ourselves in. [read on]
Among the early praise for The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw:
"Barcott’s compelling narrative is suspenseful right up to the last moment."
–Publisher's Weekly

"An engrossing but sad account of a brave and quirky champion of nature."
–Kirkus

“…A riveting account of one woman’s fight to save one of the last bastions of an endangered species... Barcott writes of international politics, ecology and endangered species, and human relations with equal facility. This real page-turner of narrative nonfiction is hard to put down.”
–Booklist
Read an excerpt from The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Bruce Barcott is also the author of The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier and is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. His feature articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Sports Illustrated, Harper’s, Utne Reader, and other publications. He contributes reviews to the New York Times Book Review and the public radio show Living on Earth, and is a former Ted Scripps Fellow at the University of Colorado.

Writers Read: Bruce Barcott.

--Marshal Zeringue