Including Advance Praise, Print Reviews, and Electronic/Broadcast.

 

"Holmes is a Rachel Carson for 21st-century suburbia." --Entertainment Weekly

 

ADVANCE PRAISE:

"This is not just a very funny and very informative piece of writing, and not just a squirrel's horde of interesting information about the place you live. It's also a very important book--a graceful and forceful reminder that the natural world is everywhere all around us, to be savored and to be protected."
--Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

"Hannah Holmes is a freewheeling, goofball Rachel Carson. Her obvious concern over our environmental blunderings never weighs down her brisk, charismatic prose or dampens her considerable wit. She opens our eyes to insect heroics underfoot, to the complicated whimsy of crows, the secretive gore of spiders. Her curiosity and constantly questioning mind have led her to create one of the most unique, entertaining, effortlessly educational homages to nature since Euell Gibbons ate a pine tree."
--Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

³Zippy as a squirrel racing across Main Street, and as jam-packed as a chipmunk's cheeks with facts that wow. SUBURBAN SAFARI is full of absorbing drama, alarming data, and adorable critters. My "Year on the Lawn" with Hannah Holmes passed all too quickly, but the message in these pages is powerful and lasting indeed. Even in the 'burbs, we can make wildlife welcome, keep our air and water purer, junglify our homes and free our laws-and after reading this witty and wise book, everyone with any sense will do so!²
-- Sy Montgomery, author of Journey of the Pink Dolphins

"Look not to the faraway and exotic locale for the species-destroying and biologically undiversified mess we've gotten ourselves into. Look in your own backyard-or Hannah Holmes's backyard, where, with reverent wonder, she looks hard at her own soils, slugs, and sowbugs to show us the grand implications of the tiniest lawn-mowing decisions. Suburban Safari proves once and for all that there is life in the suburbs and that it's worth thinking hard about how to handle it. Prepare to never look at an old crow the same way again."
-- Robert Sullivan, author of Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

 

SELECTED ELECTRONIC MEDIA:

National Public Radio: Talk of the Nation
CNN.com
WNBC: Today in New York
WAMC (Albany)
WZZM (West Michigan)
WGME (Portland, Maine)
WCSH (Portland, Maine)
Maine Public Radio: Maine Things Considered (Statewide)

SELECTED PRINT REVIEWS:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
February 25, 2005
EDITOR'S CHOICE / GRADE: A

Suburban Safari
What's going on in the yard? Science writer Holmes decides to find out, parking herself on the minuscule scrap of land surrounding her 1917 bungalow in Portland, Me. And no surprise: It's teeming, literally, with life, from a silky-eared chipmunk she dubs Cheeky to a hawk that slaughters birds crowding the forsythia bush to the slugs, beetles, and worms of a thriving microhabitat. Along the way she lectures, entertainingly, on the history of lawns and the domestication of dogs. She makes--and eats--a salad from edible weeds and hears, for the first time, the whish and whir of nighttime birds. Also, she becomes aware of how much water and energy she consumes. In a witty, imaginative, and powerful discourse, Holmes is a Rachel Carson for 21st-century suburbia. --Tina Jordan

USA TODAY
March 24, 2005

Watch as Nature Takes its Course
Witty environmentalists are as rare as shy politicians. But in Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn, Hannah Holmes laughs at herself while celebrating the wild kingdom she explores in her one-fifth-of-an-acre backyard.
She lives in South Portland, Maine, but notes, “I could have plonked myself down any old place. …Nature, oblivious to the edict that cities are for people, is carrying on with her business almost as though we don’t exist.”
Tapping the research of those she calls “real scientists,” Holmes is a science writer who doesn’t lecture. She shares the joy of discovery about the secret lives of ants, spiders and crows.
She compares the sexual antics of crickets to the Trojan War and falls for a “cheeky bugger” of a chipmunk who feeds out of her hands: “I’m flattered that this small creature can overlook the strangeness of my species and hang out with me.”
She challenges the chemically dependent, $45-billion-a-year lawn-care industry and uses no pesticides in her backyard. Her weeds attract a diverse insect population, which attracts other animals she considers her neighbors.
Such “freedom lawns,” endorsed by Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, have even spread to the White House, she writes.
Holmes calculates how her small house produces 5 tons of pollutants a year. But the good news is that “we who crave greenery can find our solace on a fairly small patch of ground. From the core of the city to the edge of the forest, Nature is busy eating, growing, fighting, reproducing, dying. Absorbing the drama is the easiest thing on earth to do. All it takes is a lawn chair and a closer look.”—Bob Minzesheimer

THE WEEK
April 1 2005

Suburban Safari
The author of The Secret Life of Dust has expanded her horizons, said Alex Irvine in the Portland, Maine, Phoenix. Turning her full attention to the fifth of an acre that surrounds her Maine home, she’s created a refreshingly original book about the natural environment of the American suburbs. Her yearlong journey in self-education will teach you to admire scraggly lawns, hate sparrows, and appreciate that “a startling slice of nature” rests just outside most every kitchen window.

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
April 2005

Suburban Safari
You might think that a book about naturalist Hannah Holmes’s scruffy backyard — a small patch of grass in South Portland, Maine — would focus on little crawlies like grubs and root weevils. Her last book, after all, was The Secret Life of Dust. But Suburban Safari is surprisingly cosmic. America’s lawns cover more acreage than any other crop, “rolling out over the U.S. at a rate of one million [new] acres a year,” writes Holmes; she lays the mowed turf bare, introducing us to their sometimes odd, always varied tenants and providing a larger context of history, ecology, and environmental woes. (Many birds like suburbs better than woods, she explains — although domestic cats kill millions, many of which are protected species, each year.) As engaging