Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren

In this collection of twelve stories, Barry Lopez - the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams and one of our most admired writers - evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past, and with nature. . An anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain always disturbingly unknowable. A successful financial consultant, failing to discover his roots in Africa, jogs from Connecticut to the Pacific Ocean in order to forge an indigenous connection to the American landscape. A paleontologist is haunted by visions of wildlife in a vacant lot in Manhattan. In simple, crystalline prose, Lopez evokes a sense of the magic and marvelous strangeness of the world, and a deep compassion for the human predicament.