Reviews

Photo: Ralph Daily/Flickr

Memorial Day Weekend is just around the corner, and that means backyard barbeques and trips to the beach. As you gear up to head outside, remember to take sunburn precautions. Nothing spoils the holiday fun like red, blistered, painful skin. Here are tips to prevent burning, and 184 top-rated beach and sport sunscreens.

An obsessive birder—and Audubon member—saves a species considered extinct for three centuries.

Those seeking to understand fungi have, for the most part, had only two resources available: field guides to edible mushrooms, or graduate level textbooks. 

Now, with the publication of The Kingdom of Fungi by Jens H. Petersen, we have a beautifully illustrated source of information about the phylogeny, ecology, and biology of these fascinating and important organisms.

I’ve always thought ducks were pretty great. They’re beautiful birds big enough to see a good amount of detail. They tend to stay in one place long enough to offer a really satisfying look, sometimes with the naked eye. And often many species congregate together—on open water.

So when I heard that Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny’s new film “A Birder’s Guide to Everything” was about four high schoolers chasing a long-forgotten duck, I was pretty stoked. After seeing the movie Monday, I can say wholeheartedly that it didn’t disappoint.

Richard Crossley shows us the next step in the evolution of bird identification guides.  If you love raptors this new guide belongs in your library.

Neon glowing fish, dolphins with prosthetic limbs, and computer-controlled beetles as military spies are just a few of the peculiar creatures that Emily Anthes highlights in her intriguing new book, Frankenstein’s Cat. As the title implies, Anthes, science journalist, explores the vast ways in which scientists have used biotechnology to alter some of our non-human cohabitants of this planet. We’ve come a long way since Dolly the Sheep was cloned in 1996, she shows in her fast-paced book, but the ethical issues surrounding bioengineering are no less complicated today.

In each issue of Audubon, the editors review a mix of narrative nonfiction titles, as well as art books and children’s books about nature. For ease, we’ve compiled the dozens of fantastic works we reviewed in 2012 in one place, and we’ve added a few additional books that we covered exclusively online.

Remote lands populated by cannibalistic natives and poisonous snakes set the stage for biologist Tim Flannery’s latest book, Among the Islands. The renowned author delves into his 1980s and ’90s expeditions to catalog unique, elusive species, like a red-gray tree-climbing mouse and a monkey-faced bat. He bounces from the Solomon Islands to Fiji to Bismarck’s Isles, falling into a sinkhole while trying to set a mist net and trudging through thigh-deep guano to get a closer look at an insect-eating bat. 

The cover of Jim Sterba's new book, Nature Wars. Crown Publishers, 368 pages, $26.

Whether it’s deer in the backyard or raccoons in the chimney, nature is making a comeback—in suburbia. In his new book, Nature Wars, reporter Jim Sterba explores how, ironically, many Americans are living closer to nature than ever before—and how ill-equipped we are to deal with it. 

Bee guys are a rough-around-the-edges bunch, solitary souls who prefer their buzzing wards to other humans, characters who place their fate and livelihood on honeybees’ wings and nature’s whims.

“There are fewer and fewer of them,” writes journalist Hannah Nordhaus, “and they tend to a breed…that is literally dying. Yet they persist, against all logic and pecuniary sense because beekeepers—who have, after all, chosen careers involving stinging insects—are not terribly rational people.”