Allegory to nature

Hoagland’s natural world is a glorious bestiary besotted with roiling life forms -- plant, animal and human -- and he revels in exploring and dissecting all of them. His intense, egalitarian essays celebrating bear stalkers, red wolves, garter snakes, penguins, midges, tigers, elephants and frogs continue the tradition of 19th century Emersonian rhapsodists who believed that heaven is right here on Earth if we can pay attention to nature.

He’s a magpie writer, piling fact on vertiginous fact, ramping up details, ferreting out wilderness mysteries with nonstop exuberance and compassionate, sharp-witted intelligence. Large or small, nothing escapes his omnivorous, roving eye: Belizean basilisks, reprobate gringos, growling icebergs, canoodling crustaceans, cannibal foxes or the “glacial chatter” of hoarfrost on a pane. “There is a slow-fuse, out-of-body ecstasy at the doorstep, if we have the eyes and ears for it,” he writes. After you’ve read Hoagland, your backyard will never look the same.

-- Susan Dworski