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Publicity Contact: Jennifer Huwer
212/547-3995
jhuwer@randomhouse.com
Praise
for Allison Wallace’s A KEEPER OF BEES
“Set against the back-drop of an absentee husband, A KEEPER OF
BEES provides a view of a swarm’s rituals, until they eventually
abscond their hive. The parallel provides Wallace with fodder for a
meditation on achieving happiness…Engaging.”
-- Seed Magazine
“An
absolute delight. Under Allison Wallace's gentle gaze, bees turn out
to be a lot like humans. Like Annie Dillard, she has a playful eye
for the world's ineffable magic, and the subtlety and compassion
of her language raises natural
history to the level of literature. This is a wonderful book.”
-- Mckay Jenkins, author of
The White Death: Tragedy and Heroism in
an Avalanche Zone
“In A KEEPER OF BEES [Wallace]
has elegantly woven her knowledge of the practical workings of the
hive with the place of bees in nature, agriculture, literature,
history and, not least of all, her
own life to create a beautifully
profound book.”
-- Jane Brox, author of
Clearing Land: Legacies of the
American Farm
“Her voice is equable, wry, and sane,
unobtrusively informed by reading, reflection, and the twists and
turns of experience. [Wallace] is informative on the subject of
bees; and wise, in an engagingly offhand way, about the habits of
human beings.”
-- Franklin Burroughs, author of
Billy Watson’s Croker Sack
and The River Home
“An engaging collage
of memoir and musings on the ‘ordinary miracles’ of the lives of
bees and beekeeper. Her blend of biological and philosophical
insights gives the reader a deeper appreciation of the many stories
that intertwine in a single spoonful of honey.”
-- Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of
Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
“To be honest, I hadn’t paid much attention to bees.
But I couldn’t put this book down. How can a book about an insect be
so deeply humane? From science and her own rueful reflections,
Allison Wallace has woven a moving story about a life of beekeeping
and the truths that honeybees tell about what it means to be fully
human.”
-- Kathleen Dean Moore, author of
The Pine Island Paradox
“Allison Wallace offers us sweetness and light in abundance,
but the sweetness is the sort that’s coupled with tartness, of mind
and tongue, and the light is the kind that burns as well as
illuminates. Like the finest books about the sustaining mystery we
call nature, this one entertains us while enlarging our sense of
where we truly dwell. It demonstrates that literature can be witty
as well as wise.”
-- Scott Russell Sanders, author of
A Private History of Awe
A
KEEPER OF BEES
Notes on Hive and Home
by
Allison Wallace
In
A KEEPER OF BEES: Notes on Hive and Home (Random House;
On-Sale: July 11, 2006), Fulbright scholar and first-time author
Allison Wallace approaches the popular topic of beekeeping from the
perspectives of philosopher and scientist. The result is a mixture
of personal memoir and exploration of the natural world, with
musings that illuminate both human and honeybee behavior.
Allison Wallace was a young graduate student living miles from
campus with her husband when she encountered, close-up, her first
beehive. Fascinated rather than annoyed by the bees keeping house
next to her garden, she began to study them and even built a hive of
her own. Life in the woods did not stay peaceful for long, and she
and her husband eventually left these first bees to establish new
hives and a new home for themselves in rural Maine. When her
marriage broke up some years later, she and her bees headed back
South, this time to Arkansas. Today Wallace is affectionately known
to some of her neighbors as “the bee-lady.”
Wallace is a companionable writer as she reflects on all things
honeybee, from their origin (one hundred million years ago) to how
they function as a society of workers (all of the workers are
female). She tells us honey is one of only two naturally-occurring
substances that serve their animal makers biologically as food, and
only food (the other substance is milk). She also tells us the many
surprising ways honeybees play an integral role in human society as
they have since our earliest history.
Stories about Wallace's efforts to keep and know honeybees are
weaved with musings on human need for companionship, intimacy,
meaningful work, and a connection to place that all creatures do
their best to establish. Honeybees serve as the inspiration for
Allison Wallace's insights on a wide variety of themes such as
desire, regret, spirituality, evolution, ambition and memory.
Wallace explores the biology of honeybees as well as the vagaries of
human existence. Her conversational writing illuminates the many
small and varied ways we are unavoidably connected to nature around
us.
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