Today, when most personal memoirs involve misery and dysfunction, it is exhilarating to encounter a life of modesty, happiness, and stability. Often when thinking of nature writers and naturalists, the image of a rough-hewn rural, rugged outdoor type wrestled into epiphany by the arms of Mother Nature comes to mind. Thomas Urquhart found a different path. He combined a classical education with a lifelong passion for opera, literature and art, but from his earliest days he was a devoted amateur naturalist. For the Beauty of the Earth begins with the lives of Urquhart's ancestors, among them his grandmother, “a patron saint of lost causes” who cherished her signed photo of Robert E. Lee and his great aunt Catharine, arrested while protesting what she considered the judicial murder of Sacco and Vanzetti with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Marianne Moore. Through the years, birding provided Urquhart with opportunities for travel, a practical education, and a passionate place in the natural world. From the hills and fields of England—both olde and New—he takes us to Italy for “birding through the Renaissance,” then invites us to the wild landscape of Camargue in Provence, and the villages of Mali in West Africa.
