Leila Philip: Author Talk

Join us for an author talk by award-winning author Leila Philip about her New York Times best-selling book Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, which investigates the fascinating role that beavers had in the history of the United States and their enduring contributions to the past, present, and future of our waterways.

From award-winning writer Leila Philip, Beaverland is a masterful work of narrative science writing, a book that highlights, though history and contemporary storytelling, how this weird rodent plays an oversized role in American history and its future. She follows fur trappers who lead her through waist high water, fur traders and fur auctioneers, as well as wildlife managers, PETA activists, Native American environmental vigilantes, scientists, engineers, and the colorful group of activists known as beaver believers.

Beginning with the early trans-Atlantic trade in North America, Leila Philip traces the beaver’s profound influence on our nation’s early economy and feverish western expansion, its first corporations and multi-millionaires. In her pursuit of this weird and wonderful animal, she introduces us to people whose lives are devoted to the beaver, including a Harvard scientist from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, who uses drones to create 3-dimensional images of beaver dams; and an environmental restoration consultant in the Chesapeake whose nickname is the “beaver whisperer”.

What emerges is a poignant personal narrative, a startling portrait of the secretive world of the contemporary fur trade, and an engrossing ecological and historical investigation of these heroic animals who, once trapped to the point of extinction, have returned to the landscape as one of the greatest conservation stories of the 20th century. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Beaverland reveals the profound ways in which one odd creature and the trade surrounding it has shaped history, culture, and our environment. The New York Times Editors' Choice

Leila Philip is the author of award-winning books of nonfiction that chronicle diverse, personal journeys. In The Road Through Miyama, Leila, already fluent in Japanese and a potter, traveled to Japan to apprentice to a master potter in southern Kyushu. A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family, took her much closer to home (literally), and weaves the history of the Hudson valley farm where she spent her childhood with a revealing account of what’s involved in cultivating orchards. Both books received awards, and glowing national reviews. A Guggenheim Fellow, Leila has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She works across genres, publishing poetry, essays and theatrical script and is currently at work on a documentary film. She was a contributing columnist at the Boston Globe and teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at the College of the Holy Cross where she is a professor in the English Department.

Like all Southbury Public Library programs, this event is free to attend and open to anyone regardless of town of residency. Registration is required. This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Southbury Public Library and the Southbury Land Trust.  For more information about this program, please email Rebecca at rrandall@biblio.org or call the reference desk at 203-262-0626 ext 2