Hannah Holmes
"What an amazing book. I don’t often really use the term ”life-changing,” but this is"
I’m not a scientist. In college I majored in moldy English novels, which was the closest thing to a writing degree offered by the University of Southern Maine. I planned to be a rock star. Or an artist. I avoided the mandatory laboratory-science course until the eleventh hour, at which time I realized I should have spent the previous four years in the geology department. But it was a bit late.
After a stint as an editor at New York-based Garbage Magazine in the late 1980s, I returned to Maine to start a freelance writing career. I worked for oodles of magazines, traveled the world, and gathered a fascinating variety of fungal infections and other diseases.
In the late 1990s, I was recruited by the Discovery Channel Online for a grand experiment called live internet reporting. Under this model, Discovery detailed writers to distant and uncomfortable corners of the globe, from which we wrote daily dispatches on various subjects. I spent one unbathed month hunting dinosaurs in the depths of Mongolia’s Gobi desert, for instance. I spent another at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, where the fine volcanic ash made a ruin of my computer, fogged my contact lenses, and fixed my hair in the style of a ball of jute twine. Stuck for weeks on a research vessel in the Pacific, I endured low-grade harrassment from an unsavory researcher, but in the end found myself piloting the Alvin submarine around “black smokers” a mile and a half under the ocean. I also wrote a column called “The Skinny On…” [link] which dealt with weighty scientific issues like why your pee smells funny after you eat asparagus. It was a glorious era, until one fine day while covering an adventure race in New Zealand, when I was roused from my sleeping bag in a field of sheep doo, and pulled off the project. Discovery.com’s own plug had been pulled.
The magazine market was on the ropes, too, so I took to book-writing. My first effort, The Secret Life of Dust, was published in August, 2001. Dust had been a hard sell to publishers, but readers loved it. So did judges: It was a finalist for the prestigious Aventis Prize for Science Books in the UK. Most recently, The Secret Life of Dust has been published in Japan, where people read from right to left, and up to down. The beautiful Japanese cover is on the back, and the book has a built-in silk bookmark.
My last book, Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn, gave me some quality time at home. After bouncing around the world investigating the strange and exotic, I dug into the home turf – and found it every bit as weird as any other place I’ve been. All the creatures and plants we disregard on a daily basis proved to be utterly absorbing, once I observed the details of their behavior. (And make no mistake, plants behave. They also misbehave.) It was a great year, and the friendships I made continue on. At the urging of my squirrels and birds, I’ve allowed native sunflowers to take over a flower garden – the squirrels express their gratitude by decapitating the plants, leaving ugly green stalks. The latest batch of young crows are so verbal that I’m trying to teach one to talk a bit. This takes patience.
To read hannah’s revealing answers to the Booktopia Book Guru’s TEN TERRIFYING QUESTIONS…and to leave a comment - CLICK HERE
After a stint as an editor at New York-based Garbage Magazine in the late 1980s, I returned to Maine to start a freelance writing career. I worked for oodles of magazines, traveled the world, and gathered a fascinating variety of fungal infections and other diseases.
In the late 1990s, I was recruited by the Discovery Channel Online for a grand experiment called live internet reporting. Under this model, Discovery detailed writers to distant and uncomfortable corners of the globe, from which we wrote daily dispatches on various subjects. I spent one unbathed month hunting dinosaurs in the depths of Mongolia’s Gobi desert, for instance. I spent another at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, where the fine volcanic ash made a ruin of my computer, fogged my contact lenses, and fixed my hair in the style of a ball of jute twine. Stuck for weeks on a research vessel in the Pacific, I endured low-grade harrassment from an unsavory researcher, but in the end found myself piloting the Alvin submarine around “black smokers” a mile and a half under the ocean. I also wrote a column called “The Skinny On…” [link] which dealt with weighty scientific issues like why your pee smells funny after you eat asparagus. It was a glorious era, until one fine day while covering an adventure race in New Zealand, when I was roused from my sleeping bag in a field of sheep doo, and pulled off the project. Discovery.com’s own plug had been pulled.
The magazine market was on the ropes, too, so I took to book-writing. My first effort, The Secret Life of Dust, was published in August, 2001. Dust had been a hard sell to publishers, but readers loved it. So did judges: It was a finalist for the prestigious Aventis Prize for Science Books in the UK. Most recently, The Secret Life of Dust has been published in Japan, where people read from right to left, and up to down. The beautiful Japanese cover is on the back, and the book has a built-in silk bookmark.
My last book, Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn, gave me some quality time at home. After bouncing around the world investigating the strange and exotic, I dug into the home turf – and found it every bit as weird as any other place I’ve been. All the creatures and plants we disregard on a daily basis proved to be utterly absorbing, once I observed the details of their behavior. (And make no mistake, plants behave. They also misbehave.) It was a great year, and the friendships I made continue on. At the urging of my squirrels and birds, I’ve allowed native sunflowers to take over a flower garden – the squirrels express their gratitude by decapitating the plants, leaving ugly green stalks. The latest batch of young crows are so verbal that I’m trying to teach one to talk a bit. This takes patience.
To read hannah’s revealing answers to the Booktopia Book Guru’s TEN TERRIFYING QUESTIONS…and to leave a comment - CLICK HERE
All Hannah Holmes Books
RRP $24.99
$24.50