The Concord Bookshop - Established 1940

Please join us at the Bookshop on Thursday, May 23rd at 7 pm as we welcome back John Hanson Mitchell, reading from his latest book, An Eden of Sorts.

Along with his nonfiction work, John Hanson Mitchell is editor of the award winning magazine, Sanctuary, published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.  He was editor of The Curious Naturalist, and a co-author, with Chris Leahy and Tom Conuel,  of the coffee table edition of The Nature of Massachusetts (l998), illustrated by the internationally-recognized Swedish painter Lars Jonsson. In 2001 he won a Vogelstein grant for Following the Sun. He was awarded an honorary PhD from Fitchburg State University for his work on the book Ceremonial Time  and was given three different grants for his work on Looking for Mr Gilbert. He is also winner of the John Burroughs Essay Award for his Sanctuary piece,  “Of Time and the River”.  In  2000,  he was given the New England Booksellers’ Award for the body of his work.  Mitchell attended the Sorbonne and is a graduate of Columbia University.  A former journalist, he has had assignments in Kerala in southern India and also the South China Sea and has written extensively about Western Europe. 

An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of My Feral Garden (Hardcover)

By John Hanson Mitchell

$23.95

ISBN-13: 9781581571721
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Countryman Press, 6/2013

Twenty-five years ago Mitchell cut down a 1 1/2-acre stand of 75-year-old white pines and planted a garden in their place. AN EDEN OF SORTS is a history of the plants and animals that lived on the tract over the next decades, including two generations of half-wild children What started out as a plot with no more that five or six flowering plants and shrubs, over the years grew into more than a thousand species of plants and animals inhabiting the property. This is a paradoxical yet hopeful narrative of what can happen to a plot of land when it is properly managed.

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