From AudioFile
Narrator Bernadette Dunne faces the challenge of providing coherence to a cornucopia of short essays. She produces something almost poetic from the simple prose about natural things in the author's life. The topics skip from animals to memories to men in rapid change, sometimes from sentence to sentence. Time flits around like a butterfly, so Dunne's relaxed approach and soft, motherly voice provide continuity. Honey bees receive the most scientific attention; we spend a good amount of time hearing about their social behavior and importance in producing crops. A few paragraphs in Latin sound stilted, but the pleasant remainder will delight many. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Take a ride through nature on a hummingbird's back! In her gem of a book, Susan Brind Morrow flits reverently through the natural world, focusing intently on a specific facet to extract only precious nectar before winging her way on to the next discovery.

An exploration of the natural realm requires a sense of wonder, which Morrow enlivens with historical curiosity and an eye for the mysterious as careful as a trapper's nose for a trail. A naturalist, linguist, and classicist, Morrow brings readers a meditation upon the meaning of nature in relation to seemingly disparate realms: the natural and the cultural, the literal and the metaphorical, tradition and science, the temporal and the transcendent. Wolves & Honey also introduces an old-style trapper and an intuitive beekeeper, men who struggle to survive on their respective frontiers, continually pressed upon by a shrinking wilderness. The author's special friendship with these men creates a touchstone for exploration as symbolic as her memories are personal, offering an inspired rendering of the natural world diffuse with poetry and suffused with luminous beauty.

With writing evocative of Annie Dillard and a sprinkling of the classicism found in the writing of Anne Carson, Susan Brind Morrow has carved out a wonderful place of her own in the forest of works on nature. (Fall 2004 Selection)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Susan Brind Morrow brings her singular sensibility as a classicist and linguist to this strikingly original reflection on the fine but resilient threads that bind humans to the natural world. Anchored in the emblematic experiences of a trapper and a beekeeper, Wolves and Honey explores the implications of their very different connections to nature, while illuminating Morrow's own poignant relationship with the lives and tragic deaths of these men who deeply influenced her. Ultimately for Morrow, these two -- the tracker and trapper of wolves, the keeper of bees -- are a touchstone for a memoir of the land itself, the rich soil of the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. From the ancient myth of the Tree of Life to the mysterious reappearance of wolves in the New York wilderness, from the inner life of the word "nectar," whose Greek root ("that which overcomes death") reveals our most fundamental experience of wonder, to the surprising links between the physics of light and the chemistry of sweetness, Morrow's evocative writing traces startling historical, scientific, and metaphorical resonances. Wolves and Honey, attuned to the connections among various realms of culture and nature, time and language, jolts us into thinking anew about our sometimes neglected but always profound relationship to the natural world.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New Yorker

The Finger Lakes region of western New York is remote from much of the state, and, unlike the Hamptons, the Catskills, and the Adirondacks, was never really settled by summer people. It is nevertheless a beautiful and somewhat mysterious part of America—with long, clean lakes, hidden valleys, and towns bearing Greek names like Hector and Ithaca—and was the birthplace of Mormonism, spiritualism, and the American women’s-suffrage movement. Morrow grew up in Geneva, at the north end of Seneca Lake (where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed Dick Diver ended up). Her short, affecting book is partly a memoir recalling the habits of bees, the return of wolves, and “a life spun together through layers of sense impressions,” and also a meditation on the outdoors that evokes “the smell of damp earth, the sweetness of maples and pines . . . as though it were freedom itself.”

Publishers Weekly

In this lyrical memoir, Morrow (The Names of Things) muses on New York State's Finger Lake region, where she grew up. Her ruminations are loosely based on her memories of two men-one a trapper, the other a beekeeper-whose ability to connect with nature had a profound influence on the way she views the world. In a poetic narrative, she contemplates the natural history of the area and tells of the people who have inhabited it-the Seneca, spiritualists, fur traders, artists, scholars, scientists and nurserymen. Morrow goes beyond the obvious, allowing each observation to remind her of something else and searching for the inner meaning of words. The sight of a flock of crows, for example, reminds her of a poem by the Greek poet Pindar, and this leads to a meditation on what it means to be a poet. The apple tree, which grows so plentifully in the region, is a "talisman that one could follow through the layers of Finger Lake soil, through layers of memory and history," and this prompts thoughts on the Swedenborgian missionary John Chapman (known as Johnny Appleseed), spiritualism, the molecular structure of sweetness, Lucretius and the origin of apples in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet. Agent, Tina Bennett. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This wonderful glimpse into the natural world of the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York blends nature, society, horticulture, agriculture, and history. Native son and linguist Morrow (The Names of Things) starts with the deaths of two beloved friends who were deeply rooted in the region's natural world. Eloquently covering a large natural canvas, moving back and forth between the present and the past, Morrow brings to life the uniqueness of this region as well as the meaning of remembrance and responsibility toward family and friends. Recommended for all natural history and New York collections.-Michael D. Cramer, Schwarz BioSciences, RTP, NC Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews