Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren

In this collection of twelve stories, Barry Lopez—the National Book Award–winning author of Arctic Dreams and one of our most admired writers—evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past, and with nature.

An anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain always disturbingly unknowable. A successful financial consultant, failing to discover his roots in Africa, jogs from Connecticut to the Pacific Ocean in order to forge an indigenous connection to the American landscape. A paleontologist is haunted by visions of wildlife in a vacant lot in Manhattan. In simple, crystalline prose, Lopez evokes a sense of the magic and marvelous strangeness of the world, and a deep compassion for the human predicament.