Janet Lembke

Presents arguments supporting the existence of animal thoughts, feelings, and abilities to make choices, tracing the evolution of a wide variety of living creatures, from domestic pets to honeybees, while sharing stories about people from various cultures and historical periods whose lives were significantly impacted by animals.

How We Relate to Other Species and Why it Matters

Because the Cat Purrs

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

Old Latin Poetry from Its Beginnings to 100 B.C.

Bronze and Iron

The author of the acclaimed Dangerous Birds followed that success with a new collection of essays on the natural world, these connected by the theme of water: exploring issues as varied as the joy that water brings, the wistful rememberings it engenders, and its sacredness. As with all of Lembke’s essays, the world of classical myth and its characters meld with her native haunts and their people, lending resonance to the seemingly simplest things: a beetle in the garden, a tangle of forgotten roses, an afternoon rainstorm. Now available in paperback for the first time, Skinny Dipping brings us waters as diverse as the mythical River Styx and the Bullpasture, a stream near Lembke’s Virginia home. In the title essay she looks down a long corridor of time to visit Pliny, the natural historian, for a "skinny dip" in A.D. 79; "Up the Creek" examines a lazy day’s canoe trip with a frightened young friend about to leave home; "And This Way the Water Comes Down at the Gorge" is a tale of a burial—with a fine supporting cast of Faulkneresque characters. Skinny Dipping will delight all lovers of Janet Lembke’s other books, and anyone who appreciates the art of the personal essay.

And Other Immersions in Water, Myth, and Being Human

Skinny Dipping

"A new book by Janet Lembke is always a cause for celebration."—Sue Hubbell We share our lives, for better or worse, with a multitude of animals, white-tailed deer and white-tailed eagles, hens and wrens, frogs and guppies, and, last but hardly least, bugs and bacteria. For the most part, we drift along separately, with neither man nor animal affecting the other's way of life. Sometimes, however, we fall in love—as in the case of the cat in the title—or otherwise encounter our animal neighbors in ways that change both of us. Lembke challenges her readers to consider the idea that all creatures are conscious, with the ability to make choices, exercise awareness, and seek pleasure while shunning pain. Rarely has a book of natural history covered such a broad range of subjects, from the everyday bargains we make with our pets and other domestic creatures to descriptions of bungee-cord snail sex and the purpose of a honeybee's sting. Lembke explores the evolution of her subjects, and draws on literature and myth to paint gorgeous, wide-ranging portraits of everyday (and more unusual) encounters, such as that of a gardener and a groundhog, or a chicken egg and Augustus Caesar's wife. This is a sensitive and timely appraisal of how we treat the creatures we share our planet with—and how we ought to. It is a book that no lover of intelligent writing about the natural world will want to miss. 20 b/w illustrations.

Press on Scroll Road

A pagean to gardening, a collection of essays, poems, recipes on the history of gardens and gardening.

Harvests

Virgil

A masterful new verse translation of one of the greatest nature poems ever written.

A New Verse Translation

Virgil's Georgics

Offers a collection of essays which focus on the trees of the American South

Janet Lembke

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