This is an extremely well put-together book. Beautifully written, which helps - positively poetic in places - but the disparate parts are held together very cunningly. In the first section, Leopold collects observations and mini-essays about the wildlife on his farm over the course of a year. Affectionate, observant, and quietly compelling, studded with illustration, this section nudges the reader into sympathetic feeling towards the plants and animals he describes. That sympathy is underlined in the subsequent section, which collects similar sketches over other American wild spaces, though the tone here is more elegiac. The stories of the enormous bear living on a mountain and subsequently killed for efficiency's sake, and Leopold's own slaughter of a wolf and the regret he felt watching her eyes as she died, are genuinely affecting. Together, these sections set up the reader to get through the quite different final section: a series of short essays on the ethics of conservation. I certainly found these interesting, particularly the argument for "land ethic as a product of social evolution" and the evolution of such an ethic as "an intellectual as well as an emotional process," but I'm not sure that readers, in general, would approach these essays with such enthusiasm had they not been primed by the loss of what came before.

It's very, very cleverly structured. And the illustrations are delightful.