Best of
Nature

1950

My Neck of the Woods


Louise Dickinson Rich - 1950
    In her early thirties, she took to the woods with her husband. They found their livelihood and raised a family in the remote Maine backcountry. Louise made time after morning chores to write about their lives, and these magnificent books are the result. They are still captivating readers a half-century later.

Old Herbaceous: A Novel of the Garden


Reginald Arkell - 1950
    G. Wodehouse’s immortal butler, Jeeves. Born at the dusk of the Victorian era, Bert Pinnegar, an awkward orphan child with one leg a tad longer than the other, rises from inauspicious schoolboy days spent picking wildflowers and dodging angry farmers to become the legendary head gardener “Old Herbaceous,” the most esteemed flower-show judge in the county and a famed horticultural wizard capable of producing dazzling April strawberries from the greenhouse and the exact morning glories his Lady spies on the French Riviera, “so blue, so blue it positively hurts.” Sprinkled with nuggets of gardening wisdom, Old Herbaceous is a witty comic portrait of the most archetypal—and crotchety—head gardener ever to plant a row of bulbs at a British country house.This Modern Library edition is published with a new Introduction byPenelope Hobhouse, a renowned garden designer and lecturer and the author of numerous gardening books.

Ruby Throat: The Story Of A Hummingbird


Robert M. McClung - 1950
    

People of the Deer


Farley Mowat - 1950
    With them, he observed for the first time the phenomenon that would inspire him for the rest of his life: the millennia-old migration of the Arctic's caribou herds. He also endured bleak, interminable winters, suffered agonizing shortages of food, and witnessed the continual, devastating intrusions of outsiders bent on exploitation. Here, in this classic and first book to demonstrate the mammoth literary talent that would produce some of the most memorable books of the next half-century, best-selling author Farley Mowat chronicles his harrowing experiences. People of the Deer is the lyrical ethnography of a beautiful and endangered society. It is a mournful reproach to those who would manipulate and destroy indigenous cultures throughout the world. Most of all, it is a tribute to the last People of the Deer, the diminished Ihalmiuts, whose calamitous encounter with our civilization resulted in their unnecessary demise.

The Tiger Child: A Folk Tale from India


Joanna Troughton - 1950
    The tiger child is sent to fetch some more fire from the village, but on the way he gets distracted by his friends. By the time he gets to the village, he has forgotten what he has been sent to fetch.

One Horse Farm


Dahlov Ipcar - 1950
    It's a book that comes from the heart for legendary Maine artist Dahlov Ipcar, who has lived on a farm in Georgetown, Maine, for more than seventy years. "It was the life I lived," she says.

A Search for God, Books I & II


Edgar Evans Cayce - 1950
    It took the group eleven years to apply and compile the twenty-four lessons that became A Search for God, Books I and II. This material has helped individuals and groups around the world to discover a closer attunement to God.