Return to Warden's Grove

Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows

By Christopher Norment

“Norment’s cabin, like Thoreau’s, opens into the widest prospects of hearts and minds. Return to Warden’s Grove is a story of fortitude, love of truth, and a wandering, wondering heart. The picture appears gradually, humbly, in the repeated daily acts of minute observational and intellectual honesty from which science is built. He is willing to feel and question everything. What good is science? How much of science secretly draws from intuition, heart, and that mysterious connectedness to the natural world that no one can explain, or explain away? And how can a person really be at home anywhere? I don’t know of another work that better engages these foundational questions.”

—David Oates, essayist and poet, author, Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature and City Limits: Walking Portland’s Boundary

Banded Harris's Sparrow, Warden's Grove, June 1989. Photo by Chris Norment.

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University of Iowa Press

To find out more about Harris’s Sparrows, visit the following web site:

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Harriss_Sparrow_dtl.html.

Cabin at Warden's Grove; Thelon River in background, July 1990. Photo by Chris Norment.

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Read an excerpt, a description or the review from Chris Norment's first book!