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Shelf Life

Love affair with nature

By Jan Gardner
Globe Correspondent / November 1, 2009

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David M. Carroll has made a career out of his boyhood love. He meanders through the wetlands near his house in Warner, N.H., and wades through streams, looking for turtles and other creatures. Over the decades he has gotten to know some animals quite well. Once, for a TV appearance, he pulled a turtle out of swampy waters and told her history. Carroll’s powers of observation are widely admired, with fellow naturalist Annie Dillard calling him “a national treasure.” Three years ago Carroll received a $500,000 “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. The money enabled him to complete his new book, “Following the Water” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which has been nominated for a National Book Award.

“Following the Water” opens with a chilling encounter. Carroll sets out at the tail end of winter, hoping to observe a turtle at the moment the creature emerges from hibernation. The turtle he finds is rather gruesome. An otter apparently wrestled her out of her winter home and tore off her legs. Carroll writes, “A life of decades, likely more than half a century, has come to an end. Borrowed stardust is at length returned, and the flame that burned within passed on.”

Volumes of beauty
The Boston Public Library is the first stop in the United States for an exhibition of hand-bound books, each one a work of art. More than 100 entries in an international contest are on display through Dec. 13. Among the local exhibitors is James Reid-Cunningham, the chief conservator at the Boston Athenaeum. Alain Taral of France, who incorporated about a dozen kinds of wood into his bookbinding, won the top prize.

Scanning the future
In the future, will books still be something you can hold, or will they, as Jon Orwant of Google predicts, exist largely online? As part of the Boston Book Festival last weekend, the BPL hosted a session called “The Future of Reading.” One of the looming questions was: Should people be worried that one corporation, Google, having scanned 10 million books and preparing to scan many millions more, is amassing control over so much knowledge?

Orwant, who directs the Google Books operation in Cambridge, sidestepped the question and downplayed a lawsuit challenging Google’s plans. Brewster Kahle, founder and director of the nonprofit Internet Archive, said a private company should not be in charge of scanning the world’s books. The Archive, which operates 20 scanning centers, including one at the BPL, has scanned 1.6 million books. As evidence of the Archive’s commitment to free public access, the nonprofit is outfitting computers distributed through the One Laptop Per Child Foundation with access to those 1.6 million books, a collection that is larger than 95 percent of the libraries in the world.

Coming out
■ “The Lacuna,” by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

■ “Ford County: Stories,” by John Grisham (Doubleday)

■“Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President and the Speech that Ended the Cold War,” by Romesh Ratnesar (Simon & Schuster)

Pick of the week
Peter Marsh of Briggs Carriage Bookstore in Brandon, Vt., recommends “Invisible” by Paul Auster (Holt): “Auster proves again that as artist-as-storyteller he is a master. Set in New York, Paris, and the Caribbean from 1967 to 2007, his novel is narrated by three different voices, and Auster - like a fine painter - uses each paragraph to create color, shadow, and a vibrant texture that will stay firmly in the mind of the reader.”

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.

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