Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mlayden 's review for:
Diary of a Young Naturalist
by Dara McAnulty
WOW!!
Much has been said in other reviews about this amazing book, so I won't dwell too much on eulogising the absolute beauty and rawness of the writing.
Instead this is a personal comment on my reading of the last few weeks and the strange synergy between three books. I started with "Living mountain" by Nan Shepherd, which was the first book for a long while that really made me thirst for wild places. I did not think I would read a book so soon that would top its raw wonder and observation of nature, but Dara's book flowed along the same sparkling brook into magical places.
Then I read "Kindred" by Rebecca Wragg Sykes about what the current thinking about Neanderthals is. the book showed them to be a much more complex and fascinating species. One of the clues to their sense of wonderment were hints of bird wings at their sites.
Dara, talks often of his kindred, other people who are fascinated by wildlife and who he feels comfortable with. Being Autistic it is not easy for him or his family to fathom the brutality of Homo sapiens stomping around their wonder filled world.
It is hard not to see Dara and his remarkable family as some sort of new branch of our homind family which has evolved to live in a dying world and help heal it. People who can feel the deep pain and make sense of it, that normal consumers completely miss as they pillage and live mere existences of independent bleakness.
He and his siblings have ecstatic hugs, dances and other explosions of activity when they meet wonder. He feels the deep connection to the past when visiting and delights in the beauty of our native language. The family measure trees in hugs and delights in the sensation of contact with the earth.
Neanderthal like, the shear wonder of birds wings and feathers leave traces of a bottomless sense of loss several times in the book. Blanid's joy over finding a jays feather and despair over losing it a moment later, a thread joining us no doubt over 100,000s of years to our neanderthal forebears.
What an absolute beautiful and remarkable family. Thanks Dara for sharing your wonderment and its flip side the sense of despair brought on by venal stupidity of an immature arrogant species. Hopefully you and your generation of eco healers will move us to a higher plain of evolution. So that someday our descendants will look on exhibits of Homo Consumer only to remind them of the horror of the time before the new age of wonder and deep meaning.
Much has been said in other reviews about this amazing book, so I won't dwell too much on eulogising the absolute beauty and rawness of the writing.
Instead this is a personal comment on my reading of the last few weeks and the strange synergy between three books. I started with "Living mountain" by Nan Shepherd, which was the first book for a long while that really made me thirst for wild places. I did not think I would read a book so soon that would top its raw wonder and observation of nature, but Dara's book flowed along the same sparkling brook into magical places.
Then I read "Kindred" by Rebecca Wragg Sykes about what the current thinking about Neanderthals is. the book showed them to be a much more complex and fascinating species. One of the clues to their sense of wonderment were hints of bird wings at their sites.
Dara, talks often of his kindred, other people who are fascinated by wildlife and who he feels comfortable with. Being Autistic it is not easy for him or his family to fathom the brutality of Homo sapiens stomping around their wonder filled world.
It is hard not to see Dara and his remarkable family as some sort of new branch of our homind family which has evolved to live in a dying world and help heal it. People who can feel the deep pain and make sense of it, that normal consumers completely miss as they pillage and live mere existences of independent bleakness.
He and his siblings have ecstatic hugs, dances and other explosions of activity when they meet wonder. He feels the deep connection to the past when visiting and delights in the beauty of our native language. The family measure trees in hugs and delights in the sensation of contact with the earth.
Neanderthal like, the shear wonder of birds wings and feathers leave traces of a bottomless sense of loss several times in the book. Blanid's joy over finding a jays feather and despair over losing it a moment later, a thread joining us no doubt over 100,000s of years to our neanderthal forebears.
What an absolute beautiful and remarkable family. Thanks Dara for sharing your wonderment and its flip side the sense of despair brought on by venal stupidity of an immature arrogant species. Hopefully you and your generation of eco healers will move us to a higher plain of evolution. So that someday our descendants will look on exhibits of Homo Consumer only to remind them of the horror of the time before the new age of wonder and deep meaning.