We've reached another Caldecott book that I'm familiar with from childhood! (And in fact we'll run into quite a few of them for the next twenty years of Caldecott books or so.) My parents actually owned Peter Spier's Noah's Ark, so I was quite familiar with it, although I must say it never was a favorite: the ark gets awfully dirty from having so ( Read more... )

What I've Just Finished Reading

Laurel Braitman's Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves. It might also be subtitled "How Humans Drive Animals to Madness," because while some of the animals in the book seemed to have an underlying tendency toward instability, most of them seem ( Read more... )

More elephants! I’ve got kind of an elephant thing going here. Most recently I’ve been reading Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, which is good but frustrating ( Read more... )

A couple of books I’ve been reading, about fossils and England and elephants and Rome.

The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaur and Paved the Way for Darwin, by Christopher McGowan ( Read more... )

At some point I will post substantive things again, but for now, another link: Elephants Hold Vigil for Human Friend, which is about elephants filing past the home of a human who helped them.

Awwwwwwww. I love elephants. I feel that there's great potential for higher-level human-elephant communication.