Philosopher Albert Camus summed it up best when he wrote: “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” The books we’ve highlighted below include a number of writers, including our reviewers, who are trying to do just that. We hope you enjoy the reviews and that you support these amazing writers. …
When I look at visitor stats for the past year, EcoLit Books has seen a steady increase in the number of daily visitors. We now average just over 200 unique visitors per day, with many days surpassing 300 and a few days over 500. For a website devoted to environmental and animal literature, these are …
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores is excellent reading, especially for those of us who’ve shared our landscapes with these magnificent creatures. Flores’s knowledge of the science and history of the coyote is vast, compiled in a highly accessible narrative that combines research, experience, and interviews to create an inspiring portrait …
Creativity is something that is easier to identify than to explain. And one person’s definition of creativity may vary from your definition. For proof, you need only enter the modern art wing of a museum to hear “Why is that art?” uttered. But though creativity may be in the eye of the beholder, nobody would …
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2022 (Published in the UK as The Sea is Not Made of Water) Life Between the Tides is my kind of book. British author, Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West, sets out to write about tide pools and the intertidal zone, but those subjects turn out to be just launching …
In 2016, we began compiling lists of the best books we read that year (new or old, it didn’t matter). And now here we are in 2021, and we’ve got another wonderful list of the best environmental books we’ve read this year. These may not be the books you’ll find in the top lists of …
So much of animal activism is focused around what one sees — witnessing the beauty as well as the suffering of the animals we share this planet with. But what about focusing less on one’s eyes and more on one’s ears? In Listen, We All Bleed Mandy-Suzanne Wong has compiled a rich array of essays …
In the book Animal Resistance there are a number of illustrations by the artist Sue Coe. And it turns out that Sue was interviewed last year by The New York Times. “My plague obsession started with the meat industry,” she said. Since the 1980s, the artist has produced series and books documenting the conditions of animals …
Few people have done as much to protect whales and the waters they live in than Paul Watson. Founder of the Sea Shepherd Society, Watson has devoted a lifetime to quite literally going head-to-head with whalers in oceans around the world. Watson is also a powerful writer, with numerous books to his name over the …
Upon reading the synopsis, Richard Girling’s The Longest Story appears to take on an ambitious task: cover the relationship between humans and non-human animals throughout all of history in under 400 pages. Yet somehow Girling, a veteran environmental journalist, is successful. Though The Longest Story does almost exclusively favor Western humanity and culture, Girling provides …
Perhaps it is human nature to rank things. We rank cities and states and countries. We have the best restaurants and best movies; we even have best friends. And when it comes to our relationships with animals we share this planet with, there is a fair amount of ranking there as well, with the human …
Katherine Applegate’s Willodeen, out today from Feiwel and Friends, aptly begins with an epigraph quoting Greta Thunberg: “I have learned you are never too small to make a difference.” This middle-grade novel geared towards tweens, but also appropriate for younger readers, explores surprisingly mature topics in a way that is still accessible and engaging for …
Justin Barker is an American animal activist, producer, and author of Bear Boy: The True Story of a Boy, Two Bears, and the Fight to Be Free. He recently chatted with EcoLit Books about the experience of writing his animal rights memoir and his advice for young activists. You can read the EcoLit Books review …
In 1995, thirteen-year-old Justin Barker was begrudgingly browsing a used bookstore with his dad when he came across PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk’s Kids Can Save the Animals: 101 Easy Things to Do. Within days, young Justin learned about animal abuse on factory farms, went vegetarian, practiced his newfound phone advocacy skills, and started his own …
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s stunning and unique novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, begins as the story of a family that moves into the The Toneybee Institute for Ape Research to teach an abandoned young chimpanzee sign language—yet while the novel is very much about language, its focus veers from chimpanzees and delves into the institute’s dark …
