A beautifully detailed exploration of flora and fauna.

Author Ron Larson offers a natural history of a Great Basin landscape that focuses on the northern region including Lake Abert and Abert Rim, and the adjacent area in southcentral Oregon. Although the jewel of this landscape is a lake, the real story is the many plants and animals—from the very primitive, reddish, bacteria-like archaea that thrive only in its high-salinity waters to the Golden Eagles and ravens that soar above the desert. The untold species in and around the lake are part of an ecosystem shaped by ageless processes from massive lava flows, repeated drought, and blinding snowstorms. It is an environment rich with biotic and physical interconnections going back millions of years. 

The Great Basin, and in particular the Lake Abert region, is special and needs our attention to ensure it remains that way. We must recognize the importance of water for Great Basin ecosystems and the need to manage it better, and we must acknowledge how rich the Great Basin is in natural history. Salt lakes, wherever they occur, are valuable and provide critically important habitat for migratory water birds, which are unfortunately under threat from upstream water diversions and climate change. Larson’s book will help people understand that the Great Basin is unique and that wise stewardship is necessary to keep it unspoiled. The book is an essential reference source, drawing together a wide range of materials that will appeal to general readers and researchers alike.

Every year, more than twenty species of terns, gulls, and colonial wading birds raise their young on rookery islands all along the Gulf Coast. Their breeding and nesting activities go on in the wake of passing oil tankers, commercial fishing vessels, and pleasure boats of all kinds—human traffic that threatens their already circumscribed habitats.

John C. Dyes has spent more than ten years photographing and observing the birds in their rookeries on the Texas Coast, and, in Nesting Birds of the Coastal Islands, he presents a year in the birds' life through fine photographs and an evocative and informative text. In a month-by-month account, he follows the annual rituals and daily dramas of courtship, mating, and chick rearing among herons, egrets, spoonbills, cormorants, ibises, and other birds that migrate and gather in colonies ranging from half a dozen birds to tens of thousands.

Why are the eggs of the marsh wren deep brown, the winter wren's nearly white, and the gray catbird's a brilliant blue? And what in the DNA of a penduline tit makes the male weave a domed nest of fibers and the female line it with feathers, while the bird-of-paradise male builds no nest at all, and his bower-bird counterpart constructs an elaborate dwelling?

These are typical questions that Bernd Heinrich pursues in the engaging style we've come to expect from him—supplemented here with his own stunning photographs and original watercolors. One of the world's great naturalists and nature writers, Heinrich shows us how the sensual beauty of birds can open our eyes to a hidden evolutionary process. Nesting, as Heinrich explores it here, encompasses what fascinates us most about birds—from their delightful songs and spectacular displays to their varied eggs and colorful plumage; from their sex roles and mating rituals to nest parasitism, infanticide, and predation.

What moves birds to mate and parent their young in so many different ways is what interests Heinrich—and his insights into the nesting behavior of birds has more than a little to say about our own.

A sweeping account of three Gujarati Muslim trading communities, whose commercial success over nearly two centuries sheds new light on the history of capitalism, Islam, and empire in South Asia.

During the nineteenth century, three Gujarati Muslim commercial castes—the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons—came to dominate Muslim business in South Asia. Although these communities constitute less than 1 percent of South Asia’s Muslim population, they are still disproportionately represented among the region’s leading Muslim-owned firms today. In No Birds of Passage, Michael O’Sullivan argues that the conditions enabling their success have never been understood, thanks to stereotypes—embraced equally by colonial administrators and Muslim commentators—that estrange them from their religious identity. Yet while long viewed as Hindus in all but name, or as “Westernized” Muslims who embraced colonial institutions, these groups in fact entwined economic prerogatives and religious belief in a distinctive form of Muslim capitalism.

Following entrepreneurial firms from Gujarat to the Hijaz, Hong Kong, Mombasa, Rangoon, and beyond, O’Sullivan reveals the importance of kinship networks, private property, and religious obligation to their business endeavors. This paradigm of Muslim capitalism found its highest expression in the jamaats, the central caste institutions of each community, which combined South Asian, Islamicate, and European traditions of corporate life. The jamaats also played an essential role in negotiating the position of all three groups in relation to British authorities and Indian Muslim nationalists, as well as the often-sharp divisions within the castes themselves.

O’Sullivan’s account sheds light on Gujarati Muslim economic life from the dawn of colonial hegemony in India to the crisis of the postcolonial state, and provides fascinating insights into the broader effects of capitalist enterprise on Muslim experience in modern South Asia.