Margaret Renkl's glowing review in the New York Times turned me towards this. I'm always on the lookout for another Helen MacDonald, Henry Beston, Loren Eiseley, or Aldo Leopold. At his very best, Doyle nips at their heels with deft and vivid imagery, precise observations, sometimes gorgeous language, and emotional power. He's very good on birds: a coop-raiding gyrfalcon is described rising "easily into the fraught and holy air" with a chicken dangling from its "daggered fist," then glaring back at the henhouse owner "with the clear and unarguable message, I am taking this chicken and you are not going to be a fool and mess with me." An owl "launch[es] at dusk, like a burly gray dream against the last light." There are herons and hummingbirds and hawks besides. He is a devoted and devout father: he cradles his groggy toddler son after the boy's major heart surgery, clicking numbly through TV channels until the child suddenly rouses, takes the remote, and clicks it back to watch "the massive grace and power and patience of" tigers, and laughs while his father weeps and prays. Lovely, poignant, and sometimes funny - his sister's assessment of the minds the guinea fowl she supervises at her convent made me laugh out loud... birds again.

He can also be arrogant and not nearly as funny as he thinks he is ("Brian Doyle Interviews Brian Doyle"); he likes to refer to cats at the spawn of Satan. The verbiage is lush, the sentences are long. One essay - and not a particularly good one, about pants - begins with a 379-word sentence, which he is quite proud of. He has cultivated a very particular style of dense, straggling passages, packed with alliteration, and rattling chains of nouns, adjectives, clauses and semi-colons. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it's precious and I picture him clacking down on the final period and chuckling to himself: "Ha! There! That's a good one!"

All told, I found this uneven: some pieces brought smiles or a lump to my throat; others I skipped after the first sentence. Doyle is a wonderfully observing, thoughtful writer dedicated to this craft, his family, the natural and spiritual worlds. He wonders if a dead mole would miss the pressure of the soil against its body, and decides to bury it rather than tossing it over the fence. He ponders the rough, jokey, fierce love of brothers; the gentle intelligence and kindness of his father. He raves at human violence and why we cannot seem to evolve beyond it, even while hoping we might someday do so. He reminds us of the gift we have in the world, and how we shouldn't miss a detail. He's right about that.

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“Something is opening in me, some new eye. I talk less and listen more. Stories wash over me all day like tides. I walk through the bright wet streets and every moment a story comes to me, people hold them out like sweet children, and I hold them squirming and holy in my arms and they enter my heart for a while, and season and salt sweeten that old halting engine and teach me humility and mercy, the only lessons that matter, the lessons of the language I most wish to learn; a tongue best spoken without a word, without a sound, hands clasped, heart naked as a baby.”

“But you cannot control everything...All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference...You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow...That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.”

“Not to mention they (raptors) look cool, they are seriously large, they have muscles on their muscles, they are stone-cold efficient hunters with built-in-butchery tools, and all of them have this stern I could kick your ass but I'm busy look, which took me years to discover was not a general simmer of surliness but a result of the supraorbital ridge protecting their eyes.”

Brian Doyle is a Canadian writer of novels, essays and short stories. He died in 2017 of brain cancer, at the age of 60. This is an excellent collection of his essays, released in 2019. He has a knack for finding the joys in life – a stroll in the woods, birding his favorite patch, a deep discussion with a good friend, watching the wonder of his children at play. He also had a strong spiritual side as well and a couple of these pieces explore the solace he finds there. If you are looking for something uplifting during these dark times, give this terrific book a try. ( )

Like petty and shorts stories, I love essays because they allow one to dip in and out of reading whenever one wants. This one though I read even more slowly and with a certain amount of sadness, knowing this wonderful author passed on at the early age of sixty.

These essays are written with a sense of wonder, and grace. There is humor and sadness, wonder and delight. Stories of the last, when his wife gave birth to twin boys, one who would need more than one surgery. The difference in the boys as they grew, at night one held on tons stuffed animals, the other clung to a can of sardines. His young daughter and his observations of her younger days. Wonder at the things in the natural world. So beautifully done, poignant, the many things that make of a life.

"What do we really know well about any creature, including most of all ourselves, and how it is that even though we know painfully little about anything, we often manage world-wrenching hubris about our wisdom."

This author is another that will be missed.

ARC from Netgalley. ( )