 | | Additional Information about Chasing Monarchs
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| Synopsis | Interspersing fieldwork observations with reverent lyrical descriptions, a naturalist describes his quest to track the monarch butterflies' winter migration.
| | Size | | Length: | 256 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in. | | Width: | 6.0 in. | | Thickness: | 1.0 in. | | Weight: | 16.8 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | After chasing Bigfoot in his last book,Robert Pyle has shifted his attention to a smaller creature, but one that is just as remarkable. The monarch butterfly is our best-known and best-loved insect, and its annual migration over thousands of miles is an extraordinary natural phenomenon, though one that is poorly understood. Myths about the monarchs' travels abound, and to separate fact from fiction, Pyle set out late one summer to follow the wanderers south from their northernmost breeding grounds in British Columbia. He migrated with them down the Columbia, Snake, Bear, and Colorado Rivers, across the Bonneville Salt Flats, through Hell's Canyon and the Grand Canyon, to Mexico, then turned up the California coast to track another leg of their migration. CHASING MONARCHS is one of the most fascinating book ever written about butterflies. It's also a lively and compelling travel book about the American West, filled with unforgettable places and characters, both animal and human.
Pyle offers an account of the summer he set out to follow these winged wanderers south from their northernmost breeding grounds in British Columbia to the California Coast.
| | Industry reviews | "CHASING MONARCHS is one-third memoir, one-third nature walk, one-third travelogue and one-third research paper -- yes, four-thirds of a book. An editor should have blue-penciled the surplus, no matter how interesting some of it is. Pyle, who has co-edited a collection of Vladimir Nabokov's writings on butterflies, can get carried away on flights of lyricism, but when he's not trying to out-Nabokov Nabokov, he can be quite moving, as in this description of female monarchs at the end of a northward migration...."
New York Times - Stewart Kellerman (08/15/1999)
"Although "Chasing Monarchs" has its longueurs--windy, repetitious descriptions of vegetation and geologic formations that are of little interest to the lay reader and personal reminiscences that feel perfunctory and flat--the author's evident passion for and understanding of butterflies invest his narrative with energy and interest. By far the most absorbing portions of this book deal with Pyle's interaction with the monarchs...and his musings on their history and their habits."
New York Times Book Review - Michiko Kakutani (08/13/1999)
"The crucial test for a book of this kind is whether its obviously enthusiastic author is able to arouse anything approaching a similar interest in his readers. Pyle succeeds on the strength of some very fine nature writing and some colorful observations of the non-butterfly world that he encounters....It is not just his obvious enthusiasm for the quest but also the respect, even affection, he shows for the objects of the quest."
Boston Globe - Michael Kenney (08/23/1999)
"[Pyle's] chronicle...is a pleasure: informative, funny, wonderfully absorbing in its curiosity and erudition about the natural world, and even eloquent....[He] confesses his amazement that so few people pay close attention to butterflies, considering their ubiquity and dashing color; with CHASING MONARCHS, it will be much more difficult to ignore them."
San Francisco Chronicle - Brian Doyle (09/21/1999)
"Pyle, a prolific author of nature books, including the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, presents the orange-and-black monarch in vivid, sometimes brutal, detail...."Chasing Monarchs" is one third memoir, one-third nature walk, one-third travelogue and one-third research paper--yes, four-thirds of a book....Pyle, can get carried away on flights of lyricism, but when he's not trying to out-Nabokov Nabokov, he can be quite moving."
Kellerman
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