Charles Hood: Acorns In a Nutshell

FREE COMMUNITY EVENT

Naturalist-poet Charles Hood returns to Kepler’s with Acorns In a Nutshell, his reflections on the oak trees’ “dark pearls” with many charming tangents on the bugs, birds, bears, and botany buffs who love them.

About the Book

Acorns are the oak seeds whose abundance feeds bears, boars, birds, beetles, and human beings. Some acorns are the size of cupcakes, while some are the size of a pencil tip; still others fuel jays’ brainy prowess in the animal kingdom, and some feed humans (once you leech out the tannins).

Lively and engaging, dense in factoids yet airy and light in spirit, this book celebrates the acorn’s role in forest ecology and human history, sharing many fascinating stories of adaptation, endurance, and epic survival. Acorns: small but mighty and always newsworthy.

The Studies in Nature series offers close observations, passionate research, and natural obsessions on a variety of nature-related topics. Featuring illustrations by Stacy Hsu and black and white photography, they offer big ideas in a small, giftable, and collectible package.

About the Speaker

Charles Hood is a poet and naturalist. The author of over twenty books, he has been a factory worker, a ski instructor, a dishwasher, and a nature guide in Africa. Nature study has taken him across all fifty of the US states and to eighty countries, from New Guinea to Borneo to the South Pole. Along the way he has been lost in a whiteout in the Himalayas, contracted (and survived) bubonic plague, and published more than seven hundred photographs. His titles with Timber Press include Wild LA, A Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, and a guide to the best roadside hikes in California. Jane Goodall wrote the foreword to his book Wild Sonoma, and his essay collection, A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat, was named the Nonfiction Book of the Year by the editors of Foreword. He lives in the Mojave Desert with two kayaks, two mountain bikes, two dogs, and five thousand books.…