A COUNTRY LIFE: Living the Questions ...

A COUNTRY LIFE: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell, illustrated by Lauren Jarrett (Random House: $11.; 221 pp.). Hubbell’s tales of bee-keeping in the Missouri Ozarks have a warm, conversational tone. A pragmatic conservationist, she refuses to treat the surrounding woods as a theme park attraction or an exploitable resource: She cares for the natural world and receives sustenance from it. Debating whether to cut a dead tree for firewood or allow it to return to the soil, she reflects, “One person with a chain saw makes a difference in the woods and by making a difference becomes part of the woodland cycle, a part of the abstraction that is the forest community.”