The Snow Geese
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In a debut of great delicacy and distinction, a young nature philosopher describes his journey as he follows the northern migration of the snow goose and reflects on the powerful attraction of home.
Every spring, millions of geese embark on an arduous three-thousand-mile homeward journey from their winter quarters in the southern United States to their breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic. One year William Fiennes, recovering from a long illness, decided to go with them. Intrigued by what he’d read about the birds’ extraordinary annual journey, he was also desperate to escape the depression that had dogged his convalescence, and the belief that at age twenty-six, his life had ground to a halt.
Part memoir, part nature study, part travelogue, the story of Fiennes’s journey is not just about geese. It’s about homecoming: the birds on their long trip home, the pull of nostalgia, the urge to leave home and the even stronger urge to return. Fiennes is a gifted natural writer with a distinctive voice that is deeply thoughtful, wry and keenly observant. His book vibrates with ideas, with stories and anecdotes, with humankind as well as wild fowl. The joy of being alive, being on the move and – above all – going home are poignantly captured in this intelligent, exuberant book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neither bird nor beast, Fiennes's debut book is a hybrid of memoir, naturalism and travel writing in which he describes his several-month journey through North America following the migration patterns of snow geese from the southern U.S. to the Arctic Circle. Fiennes fell in love with these birds when he read Gallico's haunting classic, The Snow Goose, while recovering from an unspecified serious illness in his mid-20s. After he regained his strength, the snow geese became his obsession, and he planned a journey that mirrored the birds' own. The geese's migrations become a metaphor for Fiennes's wanderlust and nostalgia, his displacement as an Englishman in North America and his longing for and emotional distance from the family home that both enchanted and imprisoned him during his convalescence. Fiennes is a fluid writer whose best moments are found in his witty, knowledgeable observations of the birds' behavior and natural surroundings. His minutely detailed, folksy sketches of the people who befriend and educate him a limnologist (expert in freshwater bodies) for the Fish and Wildlife Service, an 82-year-old fellow bird-follower from Iowa, a hunter of the snow geese feel unnecessary, as do some of the musings about his own larger psychological journey. Nonetheless, this intricately woven, ambitious book will appeal to both bird lovers and travelers, especially those interested in far northern climes.
