Barbara Hurd begins her foray into the increasingly popular pursuit of caving as we all would -- with a panic attack. Nevertheless, as her hunger to understand caves and caving increases, she lures the reader in deeper as well, to the extraordinary fascination of these dark spaces. Hurd illuminates the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas and Barry Lopez the Arctic. She ranges from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona and, with passionately informed prose, makes these places -- with their stalactites and blind cavefish and ancient galleries of white flowstone and soda straws -- come alive. Characters weave in and out of her story as well: a childhood friend dying of cancer, a wildlife biologist who specializes in bat guano, an elderly Indian guide, and the disembodied voice of a fellow caver, never seen, with whom she spends a profoundly illuminating half-hour. Entering the Stone is both a rich and a compelling natural history of some of the most extraordinary places on earth, as well as a stunning investigation of dark interiors, both terrestrial and human.

Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark

Science & Math

Hurd, Barbara

Nature & Ecology

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

An evocative anthology of nine imaginative essays explores swampland ecology and the allure of muddy environments, with reflections on ancient mythology, Eastern spirituality, and literature to celebrate these rich and fertile habitats, too often ignored and disparaged by humankind. Reprint.

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Mariner Books

The naturalist-author of Stirring the Mud offers an illuminating study of the natural history and spiritual quality of caves, describing the intriguing interiors of caves around the world, their unusual inhabitants, the fascination caves hold for fellow cavers, and other aspects of these dark and mysterious locales. Reprint.

Entering The Stone: On Caves And Feeling Through The Dark

A remarkable meditative foray into the strange and seductive beauty of swamps and bogs. "Barbara Hurd writes about people with the canny poise of Cheever, and about nature with the loving exactitude of Thoreau. And everywhere in her work is a speculative energy and elegance that make her essays a rare achievement." -J. D. McClatchy, author of The Rest of the Way

Beacon Pr

In these nine evocative essays, Barbara Hurd explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Hurd's forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for rich thoughts about mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In her observations of these muddy environments, she finds ample metaphor for human creativity, imagination, and fear.

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and the Human Imagination

Barbara Hurd continues to give nature writing a human dimension in this final volume of her trilogy that began with Stirring the Mud and Entering the Stone. With prose both eloquent and wise, she examines what washes ashore, from the angel wing shells to broken oars. Even a merman appears in this brilliant collection that throws light on the mysterious and the overlooked. Writing from beaches as far-flung as Morocco, St. Croix, or Alaska, and as familiar as California and Cape Cod, she helps us see beauty in the gruesome feeding process of the moon snail. She holds up an encrusted, still-sealed message bottle to make tangible the emotional divide between mother and daughter. She considers a chunk of sea glass and the possibilities of transformation. The book began on a beach, Hurd says, "with the realization that a lot of what I care about survives in spite of―perhaps because of―having been broken or lost for a while in backward drift. Picking up egg cases, stones, shells, I kept turning them over―in my hands and in my mind." Each chapter starts with close attention to an object―a shell fragment of a pelican egg, or perhaps a jellyfish―but then widens into larger concerns: the persistence of habits, desire, disappointments, the lie of the perfectly preserved, the pleasures of aversions, transformations, and a phenomenon from physics known as the strange attractor.

Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

University of Georgia Press

In these nine evocative essays, Barbara Hurd explores the seductive allure of bogs, swamps, and wetlands. Hurd's forays into the land of carnivorous plants, swamp gas, and bog men provide fertile ground for rich thoughts about mythology, literature, Eastern spirituality, and human longing. In her observations of these muddy environments, she finds ample metaphor for human creativity, imagination, and fear.

Biological Sciences

In this exhilarating work, Barbara Hurd explores some of the most extraordinary places on earth, from sacred caves in India to secret caves in Arizona. With passionately informed prose, Hurd makes these strange dark spaces come to light, illuminating the natural history and spiritual territory of caves as powerfully as Kathleen Norris portrayed the Dakotas. Entering the Stone provides an awe-inducing tour through a fragile and beautiful subterranean world.

Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark

Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage weaves rich explorations of science, history, mythology, literature, and music. The listening of the book delineates and champions a kind of attentiveness to what is not easily heard and is written in language that is as precise as it is poetic, providing original ways of engagement in the natural world. As in Hurd’s other books, the previously unknown or the barely known becomeless mysterious but still retain the quality of mystery. The book presumes that nature is a mix of the chaotic and the wondrous. It addresses worry and advocacy―worry about our carelessness that can destroy the balance of that mix and a cry for us to pay more attention to humanity’s relationship to natural history. Listen, be alert, it says without hectoring. Rivers, ferns, streams, birds all have a life that is delicate and worth preserving. Barbara Hurd is one of our finest environmental writers, and this book will please the choir and persuade those on the ambivalent edge.

Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

History

Americas

Barbara Hurd’s Listening to the Savage weaves rich explorations of science, history, mythology, literature, and music. The listening of the book delineates and champions a kind of attentiveness to what is not easily heard and is written in language that is as precise as it is poetic, providing original ways of engagement in the natural world.
As in Hurd’s other books, the previously unknown or the barely known becomeless mysterious but still retain the quality of mystery. The book presumes that nature is a mix of the chaotic and the wondrous. It addresses worry and advocacy―worry about our carelessness that can destroy the balance of that mix and a cry for us to pay more attention to humanity’s relationship to natural history.
Listen, be alert, it says without hectoring. Rivers, ferns, streams, birds all have a life that is delicate and worth preserving. Barbara Hurd is one of our finest environmental writers, and this book will please the choir and persuade those on the ambivalent edge.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hurd, Barbara. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hurd, Barbara

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hurd, Barbara. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Entering The Stone: On Caves And Feeling Through The Dark

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and the Human Imagination

Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark

Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)

Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books)