PRAISE FOR THOMAS URQUHART’S FOR THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH

“This memoir is so compelling because of the power of its thought and its writing. Urquhart’s style is deceptively reserved, quietly crafted, complex, flexible and dryly humorous. He has the English appreciation and capacity for the bon mot, noting, for example, that national priorities are reflected in the fact that in France one pays for gas ‘about what one pays for wine in America.’ The vital link he perceives between nature and art provides him with such felicitous images throughout as ‘English sparrows brawl under a split-wood fence, in the manner of Breughelian peasants at a kermesse.’
   “Urquhart writes throughout with a fine ear for the sound and rhythms of his sentences, as when he notes "the powerful musculature of a hare highlighted in the red rays of a setting sun as it races across the rosy fields." Such constant pleasure is there in reading his prose, in fact, that I continually forgot I was reading this book to review it. Instead, I found myself thinking how much I would like to invite this man to dinner, so capable does he seem of talking knowledgeably, intelligently and engagingly about anything.”
— Robert Finch, The Los Angeles Times

“Here is a book that not only unifies two seemingly opposing forces—untamed nature and western civilization—but argues that they are in fact symbiotic. Of all the thousands of popular nature books published since the 1890s, not one that I have ever read or even heard of dare to marry the dark leit motifs of Wagner’s Ring or details from the notebooks of Leonardo, with the quest for the elusive wall creeper, or the echo parakeets of Mauritius. It is a wide-ranging tour de force through art, music, literature and nature. Not only that, it is a gossipy entertaining read to boot.”
— John Hanson Mitchell, author of Ceremonial Time

“‘Charming’ is one of those words we don’t use much anymore—it implies quaint or precious. But not in this case. I haven’t read a book in a long time that let me drift so easily into that other, larger world all around us, that managed to say serious and useful things with such grace and gentleness. My evenings with it felt, well, charmed.”
— Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“A memoir of happiness and modesty: a wonderful read.”
— Maine in Print

Shoemaker & Hoard says:

“Today, when most personal memoirs involve misery and dysfunction, when the competition is to describe the most disrupted and fragmented existence imaginable, it is exhilarating to encounter a life of modesty, happiness and immeasurable stability thoroughly recounted.

“Often when we think of nature writers and naturalists we think of the rough-hewn or the rural, rugged outdoor types wrestled into epiphany by the arms of Mother Nature. Thomas Urquhart found a different path. He combines a classical education with a lifelong passion for opera, literature and art. And from his earliest days he has been a devoted, devotedly amateur, naturalist.”