From Publishers Weekly
The North Shore suburbs of Chicago, teeming with housing developments, commuters and pollution, are also home to a wide variety of wildlife. Naturalist Friederici grew up in these suburbs, and, for this mixture of memoir and natural history, he returns to his boyhood home along the Lake Michigan shore to write of what he sees, what he remembers and the importance of our connection to the natural world. In 12 highly personal essays, one for each month of the year, Friederici captures the area's "fleeting scents on the wind, half-heard rustlings of birds among fallen leaves" while discussing how it has been transformed by the boom in residential development. In March, hearing the honking of geese flying overhead, he realizes that such a sound used to be a harbinger of spring. But no longer: now that hunting is banned in the neighboring "landscape of golf courses and corporate complexes surrounded by lawns and ponds," geese remain in the Chicago area all year long. Friederici does not just describe the beauty of nature; he also details the periodic cicada's 17-year life cycle, the decline of the freshwater mussel and why chickadees are less skittish in winter. In chapters on green herons, passenger pigeons, ducks and owls, he does a superb job of blending natural history, evocative description and environmental ethics. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"The tattering of the great American wilderness is a source of lament, but this book offers eloquent witness to the beauty and complexity that live along the edges of urban life. Peter Friederici is an inspired guide to these half-wild places, combining heartful appreciation with scientific precision. His devotion to seeing and learning the significance of what he sees reveals once again the ancient lesson that the love of nature is one of the central organizing principles of human life."--Alison Hawthorne Deming
"Friederici's edge is that he combines beautiful writing with training as a field biologist. He comes up with a book that is both touching and intellectually engaging, a book that appeals to both the heart and the head."--Flagstaff Live
"These essays break our hearts with visions of what is gone, even as they encourage us to celebrate the many treasures that remain."--Arizona Daily Sun
"Celebrating the wildness that pervades the patches between roads, buildings and parking lots in urban America, The Suburban Wild addresses a question that gains increasing importance as more and more of the world converts to concrete jungle: How does wildness adapt to survive and thrive in a human-dominated world?"--E: The Environmental Magazine
"[Friederici] does a superb job of blending natural history, evocative description, and environmental ethics."--Publishers Weekly
"[Friederici] realizes that his sense of loss over the destruction of the wilderness (so eloquently expressed) is felt by many, a pervasive sorrow with profound implications."--Booklist
"[Friederici] enables readers to recognize the beauty and mystery of the most ordinary surroundings . . . and he makes the leap from the deeply personal to the universal as gracefully as a green heron poised in perfect stillness on a dead tree will suddenly take to the sky. . . . The Suburban Wild is close to poetry in its lyrical compression and imagery.”--Chicago Tribune
