It’s the perfect time of year to pick up a great book, and we’ve got a couple recommendations for you today.

Our first guest is Janisse Ray, author of Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World beyond Humans, which was just published in October by Trinity University Press. Ray tells us why she set out looking for “heart-pounding flashes of wild spectacle” in the first place, shares some stories of the places she traveled to for the book, and explains why she did all that traveling without getting in an airplane.

We also speak with Jordan Salama, a writer and journalist whose first book is called Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena, published just last month by Catapult, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Salama tells us about how and why he spent four weeks traveling down the Magdalena River in Colombia, why Colombians speak of the Magdalena River with “an almost religious fervor,” as he writes, and what he hopes people can take away from his book.

Further reading:

• “Rewilding News” on Mongabay

• FARC peace deal in Colombia sparked war on forests, report says (8 November 2021)

• In Colombia, end of war meant start of runaway deforestation, study finds (25 June 2021)

• We need more rewilding and connections to nature, says Enrique Ortiz (26 April 2021)

• Rewilding key to averting mass extinctions and reducing carbon emissions (3 November 2020)

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001

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