The Forest Unseen
A Year's Watch in Nature

Letter I wrote to the author: I’ve just finished reading The Forest Unseen. I have slowly savored your book over many weeks, reading one day’s entry, at most two, at one sitting. I have never read anyone who combined a meditative consciousness with a scientist’s mind so beautifully. You presented the......more

I should have loved The Forest Unseen. Forests delight me, and I've also spent time sitting in them and simply watching. There are many thoughts and opinions that Haskell and I share. Unfortunately, this book just bored me. Maybe it's my own fault, because I tried to read it through like I would any......more

The premise of this most excellent natural history of a forest is that the author stakes out a small circle in the woods, say about 4-6 feet across, in a tiny tiny (but one of the only left, sigh) old growth forest remnant in eastern tennessee. He goes out everyday for a year and “just sits there” o......more

Well, I'm clearly in the vast minority here, but I'm just not enjoying this book enough to push through and finish it. There have been a couple of chapters that I've found pretty interesting, but they've been few and far between, and at times I've found myself feeling pretty skeptical about what he'......more

Great read. The Forest Unseen The Forest Unseen David George Haskel begins the book with a description of Tibetan Monks making a sand painting, a Mandala. He compares his exploration of a one square meter patch of an old-growth forest on property owned by the University of the South to the Mandala. Hi......more