SelfPortrait With Turtles: A Memoir

Product Description Discusses the role of nature in shaping the attitudes of David Carroll, naturalist and author, and recounts his artistic training, his time as a teacher, and the key encounters with turtles that influenced him. From Publishers Weekly Carroll, a naturalist and an artist, discovered turtles when he was eight years old, and in this slight but charming memoir, he tells how these wetland creatures forever changed and directed his life. After his first encounter with a spotted turtle in a woodland pool near his home in a central Pennsylvania housing project, he was obsessed, wading in swamps, marshes, streams and ditches to find turtles no matter where he lived. This infatuation led to a fascination with everything in nature, and he combined this interest with his talent for drawing and painting, attending the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and embarking on a brief career as an art teacher. Although he was popular with the students, especially the more unconventional ones, he was too exuberant and imaginative to last in that profession, so he and his wife, also an artist, moved to rural New Hampshire, where he could devote himself to nature studies. Carroll has now been observing turtles for 50 years, and although he laments that their habitats are often lost to development, he continues to find them everywhere. In an especially touching final chapter, he tells of following one particular spotted turtle for 18 years and finally succeeding in observing her annual nesting ritual. Unlike his earlier book, The Year of the Turtle, this is not a natural history of turtles but rather a meditation on the author s life as a naturalist and a paean to the intriguing creatures that lured him to that calling. Illus. by the author.Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Authornaturalist Carroll (Swampwalker s Journal, 1999) spent his early years in the city. When he was eight, his family moved to a town with woods, streams, ponds, and a salt marsh within walking distance. When Carroll saw his first turtle on his first outing through the wetlands, he was hooked. When a highschool art teacher declared that art was the only thing that lasts, the author then had the two guides for his life s work. A degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston led to turtles in the Fens and the woman who became his wife. Bouts of teaching are interspersed with rambling in search of turtles, and a final move to New Hampshire settles the author and his family in a landscape that comes complete with chelonian denizens. In a wonderful blend of natural history, memoir, and drawings, the author leads us through his life and how it has been shaped by his love of nature and turtles. This beautifully illustrated memoir will be sought out by lovers of good nature writing.Nancy BentCopyright American Library Association. All rights reserved About the Author David M. Carroll is the author of The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections, and Swampwalkers Journal, which won the John Burroughs Medal, the highest award for nature writers.A graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and of Tufts University, he has received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Hampshire and an Environmental Merit Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for his work on wetlands. In 2006 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, given to to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations. He lives in New Hampshire. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The First Eight YearsConsecrated to the God of my parents before my eyes were open, I lived my first eight years in a closed circle of family, relatives, church, and school. I lived in a totally human environment filled with human concerns and c