"Smart, funny, and shot through with aching love, This Is How A Robin Drinks is both a call to action and a balm for the solastalgic heart. This profoundly beautiful, desperately necessary book will change the way you see the world and every living thing within it, including yourself." --Margaret Renkl, author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
"Inspiring and full of wonder. These vivid stories combine curiosity, wit, and a keen sense of the many ways that exultation and heartbreak mingle when we look closely at the everyday life of our yards, parks, and cities."--
David George Haskell, author of
Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction"Joanna Brichetto is a suburban Thoreau. In fifty-three crisp essays that can be read as daily meditation, she takes us to pocket parks, dead mall parking lots, and concrete canyons in pursuit of little ecological marvels. This collection is essential to understanding the need for widespread habitat protection and restoration and a reminder of the capacity and limits of nature to resist human destruction."--
Georgann Eubanks, author of
Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction"It would be hard to imagine a more delightful, engaging, and insightful introduction to urban natural history. Brichetto's love of nature is infectious, and with a little luck it will go viral and infect us all. Her laugh-out-loud wittiness draws us in for more and reminds us to hit the pause button on our hectic lives as an antidote to the day's news."--Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard
"Joanna Brichetto loves her native planet--yes, our trashed twenty-first-century world--with passion and eloquence worthy of Walt Whitman or Annie Dillard. In her scintillating visions of urban nature, she follows a lost dragonfly through a Goodwill store, peers through a soccer game at the cicadas buzzing around it, and reports that a hummingbird's heart beats so fast its body hums in her hand--all shared with novelistic detail and poetic precision. Brichetto's love is not a warm fuzzy thing because this is not a warm fuzzy world. Her passion for nature is lusty, skeptical, disappointed, sacred, profane."--Michael Sims, author of The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
