"Vesper Flights," Helen Macdonald's 2020 collection of essays, proved the perfect pandemic read to put its inconveniences into perspective. She illuminates the many small and intricate wonders of all that's alive — plants, birds (birds aplenty) and seasonal changes in one small slice of geography. By paying keen attention and paying tribute to a natural world that flourishes in spite of our inattentiveness, she calmed me with her focus on how nature goes its own ways without human nudging. It's hard to feel personally penalized by the virus after absorbing her meditations on the living — but not human — world.
Carla Waldemar, Minneapolis
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