Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly [Hardcover]

Sue Halpern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

Every autumn, the monarch butterflies east of the Rockies migrate from as far north as Canada to Mexico. Memory is not their guide — no one butterfly makes the round trip — but each year somehow find their way to the same fifty acres of forest on the high slopes of Mexico’s Neovolcanic Mountains, and then make the return trip in the spring.

In Four Wings and a Prayer, Sue Halpern sets off on an adventure to delve into the secrets behind this extraordinary phenomenon. She visits scientists and butterfly lovers across the country, offering a keenly observed portrait of the monarchs’ migration and of the people for whom they have become a glorious obsession. Combining science, memoir, and travel writing, Four Wings and a Prayer is an absorbing travelogue and a fascinating meditation on a profound mystery of the natural world.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sue Halpern, a gifted student of the natural world, has a knowing passion for butterflies--"not love, exactly, offered suddenly, but a similar quickening of heart and desire ... tugging on my imagination as if it were a loose sleeve."

In Four Wings and a Prayer, that passion takes flight in quest of the monarch, a species of butterfly suddenly much in the news. In the company of freelance biologist Bill Calvert, ecologist Homero Aridjis, and other scientists and activists, Halpern travels into the highlands of Michoacan, Mexico, to which monarchs born east of the Rocky Mountains migrate each autumn, flying as much as 200 miles a day to get there before the onset of the highland winter. There she ponders the complexities of the monarch's life--after all, she writes, "how did the monarch butterflies from the eastern United States and Canada, millions of them, end up every year in the same unlikely spot, a remote and largely inhospitable fifty acres of oyamelis pine forest?"--and the unfortunate events that have felled monarchs by the untold millions in recent years, including the destruction of habitat and climate change.

Halpern's enthusiasm for Lepidoptera is catching, and her graceful advocacy of the monarch should inspire renewed concern for their well-being in the world. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Accomplished author (Migrations to Solitude) and journalist (co-founder of the magazine Doubletake) Halpern has a passion for monarch butterflies that drives this evocative, insightful portrait of a species and the people who study it. Every autumn, monarchs in the Eastern United States and Canada migrate thousands of miles to a handful of Mexican overwintering sites, where they rest for the return trip home. "[N]o single butterfly ever makes the round trip," yet thousands converge on the same few sites year after year. Monarchs are the only butterflies to migrate such long distances; the question of how they find their way remains, according to Halpern, one of the great unsolved mysteries of animal biology. Among the a host of colorful scientists and dedicated volunteers she visits are Bill Calvert, the "cowboy entomologist" who sleeps in his truck when out collecting field data, and Chip Taylor, who looks like Father Christmas, snacks on bee pollen and has mobilized hundreds of volunteers to help determine the butterfly's migration routes. Not afraid of dirtying her hands, Halpern weighs butterflies with Calvert by the side of the road in Mexico, tags and raises monarchs with her eight-year-old daughter at their home in the Adirondacks and takes a glider ride to better understand the thermal forces that propel the butterflies for much of their journey. Her lively, lyrical account of monarch life will delight armchair and active naturalists and anyone interested in scientists in action and skies loud with the beat of wings. (May

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037540208X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375402081
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,172,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Four Wings and a Prayer - caught in the morass of New Age, May 27, 2001

By 

T.W Trotter (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly (Hardcover)

Author Sue Halpern has written a book about her time spent with people across North America who follow the supposed migration of Monarch Butterflies through the United States to Mexico. Entitled Four Wings and a Prayer - Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly, the book chronicles her journeys throughout the US and Canada in pursuit of knowledge about the Monarch butterfly while detailing her interaction with the various butterfly enthusiasts (lepidopterists) that she meets along the way. Superficially, the book's subject would seem to hold much promise. Interesting people, little-known facts, sweeping vistas described in stirring detail; there would seem to much that this book could offer the reader, sadly, not much of it is here. Like far too many writers today, Halpern can't seem to keep herself out of the story. In the context of this book, which indeed includes some fine passages, Halpern's New Age navel- gazing is largely unwanted and often tiresome; "What is passion? I asked myself again." Halpern writes (and the reader cringes) and then goes on to wax philosophically about `knowing before understanding' or some other such airy-fairy mysticism. It's unfortunate that in a book that offers glimpses of some true characters Halpern can't help interjecting herself. The reader is told that Bill Calvert is a legend among Lepidopterists not only for his research but for his passion and unique character, yet description of that character is largely limited to repeated references to his messy truck and trite answers to the questions of others. The reader can forgive Calvert this though after having been subjected to Halpern's rhetorical wonking - by the end of the book the reader suspects that Calvert might not have been so taciturn had the company been less vocal. Like so much literature today Halpern's Four Wings and a Prayer unfortunately attempts to serve up commonplace events as mystic happenings. Worse still, the story is overlaid with the trappings of New Age mysticism at its worst: the reader is treated to the writer's account of her attempt to think like a butterfly and to experience flight as known by a butterfly via a convenient flight in a glider. These events, which are silly and romanticised in themselves, in the context of the book enmesh the reader in a sickly treacle of breathless prose from which it is frustratingly hard to escape. Hard fact is confused with psuedo-intellectual fancy, buried beneath a style of writing which encompasses so much forced gravitas that the reader is wont to think that the appropriate response would be to cry while reading this book.

At 29.95 CAN and at 207 pages this book is certainly not a good buy for everyone. Those that ponder this book should do so at length. Contrary to the heartfelt testimony printed on the cover this book will probably not "change your life" nor is it "a book we have needed whether we knew it or not". This book may be life-affirming and transcendent to a crystal-wearing, latte- guzzling "wind spirit" but to the average reader, even to the inveterate naturalist, this book is bound to be a disappointment. If you want to read of one woman's spiritual awakening in the world of butterflies this might be the book for you; but for those truly interested in the fascinating sub-culture of the lepidopterist and their pursuit of the Monarch, your money is better spent elsewhere.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Magical, Poetic, Lyrical breathtaking, May 19, 2001

By 

sam bryks (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly (Hardcover)

Sue Halpern has a gift of composition to describe the wonder of the Monarch Butterly that practically takes your breath away. The book begins with her journey with a butterfly tracker real life "Indiana Jones" character as they drive to the butterfly preserves in Mexico. Her description of her first visit there which happened earlier with her tiny daughter and the truly awesome, almost religious experience of the sound of millions of butterflies rustling wings and of butterflies alighting on her daughter walking up her arm, the child watching without fear takes you into this book like a lover invites you to be with her. This is a book for all ages, and will be a standard to invite readers to the mysteries and beauty of nature. It is also hoped that the book serves to help advocacy to preserve this miracle of nature which is taken foregranted by so many. Sue Halpern is a writer in the same pantheon as Barry Lopez and Farley Mowat in her research skills, her love of nature and her literary abilities.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars it soars, May 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly (Hardcover)

Halpern has the precision of a scientist, the grace of a poet, and the passion of someone truly informed and alarmed by humanity's headlong tilt against the beauty and variety of our natural world. Never shying away from the complexities of her subject--scientists and nature-lovers from a rich and profligate country demanding preservation sacrifices from the peasants of a poor one--she writes a seamless, and ultimately very moving, tale of wonder.