Podcast Extras for the Winter Issue
Two of our Book Recommendation Panel members suggested readers listen to podcast episodes to enhance their reading experience.
Kate Vannelli recommended, The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen, for the Winter issue of Nature Book Guide, “here’s a podcast episode that really articulated my feelings on the book so well.”
It is an episode of the New York Times, “The Daily:”
For Sam Anderson, a staff writer, traveling with animals can lead to enlightening experience. In this essay for The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Anderson explores what he has learned from a lifetime of voyaging with animals, and what it means to connect with another creature: bridging spiritual, physical and even temporal distances, and reaching into “something like evolutionary time.
“An animal voyage,” Mr. Anderson writes, “is special because it requires us to make many journeys all at once.”
Katie Smither recommended The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. She suggested readers enjoy a reading (by actor Liev Schrieber) of "The Distance to the Moon" from Cosmicomics, as broadcast by Radio Lab:
What if the moon were just a jump away? In this short, a beautiful answer to that question from Italo Calvino, read live by Liev Schreiber.
According to one theory, the moon formed when a Mars-sized chunk of rock collided with Earth. After the moon coalesced out of the debris from that impact, it was much closer to Earth than it is today. This idea is taken to it's fanciful limit in Italo Calvino's story "The Distance of the Moon" (from his collection Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver). The story, narrated by a character with the impossible-to-pronounce name Qfwfq, tells of a strange crew who jump between Earth and moon, and sometimes hover in the nether reaches of gravity between the two.