Aldo Leopold was a wildlife philosopher and guru, and is widely seen to have been a highly influential leader of environmental thinking in the USA.
This book, written by one of his daughters, is a tribute to Leopold and an account of the family times in the shack in the Wisconsin woods which features in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.
You need to have read A Sand County Almanac to get the most out of this book – and I recommend it strongly. There can be few almost 70-year-old books on environmental matters which are so worth reading in these times.
This book tells the story of how and why Leopold bought and renovated the shack in the woods, and what his aims were with the land around it. We learn about Leopold, his wife and the sisters and brothers of the author of this tribute. I was interested to read of the attempts to hunt deer with bows and arrows in these woods.
Leopold wrote about Passenger Pigeons, and so I wrote about him, and of my visit to the area featured in this book, in A Message from Martha.
The book is illustrated with many black and white photographs that take us back to the 1930s and 1940s.
If you are already a fan of A Sand County Almanac then this is an interesting read; if you don’t know Leopold’s book then start with that and you may then want to learn a bit more about the person who wrote it.
Stories from the Leopold Shack: Sand County revisited by Estella B. Leopold is published by OUP.
Inglorious: conflict in the uplands by Mark Avery is published by Bloomsbury – for reviews see here.
Remarkable Birds by Mark Avery is published by Thames and Hudson – for reviews see here.
Behind the Binoculars: interviews with acclaimed birdwatchers by Mark Avery and Keith Betton is published by Pelagic – here’s a review and it’s now out in paperback.
Thank you for this Mark, I’ll order a copy as A Sand County Almanac is one of my favourites. I was given this book as a child by my mother along with others that have had lasting appeal, books by Richard Jefferies and Henry Williamson among others.
These books were read often and then in 1963 I think it was that Rachel Carlson’s book Silent Spring was published..That was a real eye opener and my colleagues and I read it time and again and discussed the implications often in our tea breaks.
Some books have lasting influence so I look forward to learning something new about Leopold.