DQ Blog

Recent Musings…

The Big One

The Big One

MAY 1, 2020 So here we are, amid a global pandemic of a disease called COVID-19, caused by a virus known as SARS-CoV-2. It’s terrible, and many people are suffering—suffering the disease, and suffering economic and social hardships related to the shutdowns...

Loss, Birds and Hope

November 6, 2019 On the second floor of the Metropolitan Club in New York, overlooking Fifth Avenue, is an ornate, high-ceilinged room with gray marble fireplaces, burgundy drapes, Renaissance-flavored murals, and many yards of decorative woodwork painted gold. It’s...

Sphinx

Sphinx

February 18, 2019 Forty-five years in Montana, hiking the trails, skiing the mountains, driving the back roads, and I had never caught a glimpse of a mountain lion.  It's not that they are rare here—they aren't.  They live a pretty good life and at reasonable...

October 2, 2018

     The working life of a writer is solitary. You sit alone in a room, hour after hour, day after day, and you create pages. It takes years to write a book (five years, for me, is about the minimum on a complex nonfiction project), and once that book...

Why I Love Montana: Reason #167

Why I Love Montana: Reason #167

     June 21, 2018      Speaking of snakes. But this snake story (unlike the last one, see under DQ Blog, "The Latest Is Late") doesn't involve a thirteen-foot African rock python, spotted underfoot in the grass of a Mozambique savanna.  This one is about a modest...

The Latest is Late

The Latest is Late

May 24, 2018 "We stepped out of the helicopter and there in the grass was a thirteen-foot African snake."    Ah, good: I've been wanting to write that sentence, but there just hasn't been time.  It happened a month ago—April 15, to be exact—in Mozambique, while I was...

Other Books

ChimpRiverCover250

THE CHIMP AND THE RIVERHow AIDS Emerged from an African Forest

SPILLOVERAnimal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction