Bruce Barcott

Writers such as Edgar Allen Poe have historically cast the raven as a mythic, foreboding prophet. But a new novel by a Canadian naturalist depicts the black bird as a chatty and even heroic species. Bruce Barcott reviews Raven’s End.

Reviewer Bruce Barcott takes a look at some eco-friendly commercial crusades from two unlikely sources: Shell Oil Company and the Evangelical Environmental Network.

The world’s largest desert has a reputation for being vast, barren and formidable. But a new book reveals that much of what we know about the Sahara is a mirage. Reviewer Bruce Barcott takes a look at “Sahara: A Natural History.”

Milford Beeghly built an empire and a science out of corn when, in the 1930s, he started working on hybrid seed corn. His grandson, Montieth McCollum, has pieced together a documentary of Beeghly’s successful, yet closeted, life. Bruce Barcott reviews “Hybrid: One Man’s Passion for Corn.”