The Nature Study Reading Society is devoted to reading and discussing an array of nature study books. Book Group discussions are held on the second Friday every other month in the Robins Library Reading Room, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. For more information, contact [email protected], or call 804-262-9887 x240.

2020

January 10, 2020
Eager: the Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
by Ben Goldfarb
286 pages

Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks has been distorted by the fur trade that once trapped millions of America’s beavers.

March 13, 2020
Nature’s Temples: The Complex World of Old-Growth Forests
by Joan Maloof
200 pages

This evocative and accessible narrative defines old-growth and provides a brief history of forests.

 

May 8, 2020
Landmarks
by Robert Macfarlane
434 pages

Macfarlane explores place-words: terms for aspects of landscape, nature, and weather, drawn from dozens of languages and dialects of the British Isles.

July 10, 2020
The Sea Around Us
by Rachel Carson
256 pages

Originally published in 1951, Carson’s book provides a timely reminder of both the fragility and the centrality of the ocean and the life that abounds within it.

September 11, 2020
American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
by Victoria Johnson
480 pages

This groundbreaking biography tells the story of the physician who built America’s first botanical garden.

 

November 13, 2020
Erosion: Essays of Undoing
by Terry Tempest Williams
335 pages

Williams sizes up the continuing assaults on America’s public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy.

January 8, 2021
The Overstory
by Richard Powers
502 pages

The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is an impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a paean to the natural world.

 

Past Selections 

Life List: A Woman’s Quest for the Most Amazing Birds
by Olivia Gentile

A frustrated housewife sets out to see more bird species than anyone in history—and ends up risking her life again and again in the wildest places on earth.

 

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History
by Cynthia Barnett

It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world’s water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.

 

The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade Its Rivers
by Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle tells the epic story of America and its rivers, from the U.S. Constitution’s roots in interstate river navigation, the origins of the Army Corps of Engineers, the discovery of gold in 1848, and the construction of the Hoover Dam and the TVA during the New Deal, to the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina and the water wars in the west.

 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

 

Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island
by Earl Swift

Chesapeake Requiem is an intimate look at the island’s past, present and tenuous future, by an acclaimed journalist who spent much of the past two years living among Tangier’s people, crabbing and oystering with its watermen, and observing its long traditions and odd ways.

 

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich
by Bernd Heinrich

From one of the finest scientist/writers of our time comes an engaging record of a life spent in close observation of the natural world, one that has yielded “marvelous, mind-altering” (Los Angeles Times) insight and discoveries.