Soar Into This New Year and Read Flight Behavior With Us
Last year, the USFWS Library relaunched our virtual quarterly book club, America’s Wild Read. Every season we select a book to share, make it available via our library, and host a virtual book discussion via Zoom open to both employees and the public. This January, we’re excited to announce our winter book selection, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a contemporary classic of conservation literature and the evolving genre of climate fiction.
Kingsolver has been honored by her peers and embraced by readers as a contemporary author of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and journalism. But before she began writing novels, she earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a scientist and freelance writer. Based in southern Appalachia, writer, scientist, and farmer, Kingsolver has been awarded with the Pulitzer Prize, American Booksellers Book of the Year Award, Edward Abbey EcoFiction Award and was voted on the “100 Best Writers of the 20th Century” in Writers Digest.
Flight Behavior was first published in 2012 and won the Weatherford Award and was nominated for the Orion Book Award and Women’s Prize for Fiction. A blending of important issues with engaging narrative that takes on topics like climate change, monarchs, and science communication. Entertaining and suspenseful, this literary fiction novel conveys an urgent social message about the future and our ever-changing climate, as a colony of butterflies and a young woman have both deviated from their optimal flight paths.
For FWS employees you can email megan_burdi@fws.gov to borrow a print copy as available. For the general public, Flight Behavior can be found at your local library or book store. On Thursday, February 17th at 3 PM ET, we are hosting a Book Discussion via Zoom open to all. Use this Meeting ID: 161 487 0877 and Passcode: 3qY9sYM$S9 to join. There will also be a list of discussion questions posted soon if you’d like to go through those as you read.
Brought to you by the USFWS Library, America’s Wild Read is a virtual book club where we aim to inspire you to connect with the outdoors and nature through literature. We hope you will read along with us as we feature various conservation books every quarter — contemporary, traditional, new, and classic.
