Glimpses of Paradise

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Fred Bruemmer’s photographs of bird and animal massings around the
globe are stunning, breathtaking, second to none. The author of numerous
books, including Seasons of the Seal, The Arctic World, and The Long
Hunt, Bruemmer has been perfecting his specialized field of bird and
animal photography for 10 years.

In Glimpses of Paradise, he captures Edenic scenes of a lost world that
once teemed with birds and animals, and still does in a few rare
locations that are almost inaccessible to all but the most patient and
daring of humans. Bruemmer’s rare photographs include the shared
migrations of wildebeest and zebra in the Serengeti–Mara ecosystem of
Tanzania and Kenya; an “armada” of armored horseshoe crabs creeping
ashore at New Jersey’s Delaware Bay to repeat their ancient rite of
mass breeding; and whooper swans massed on a lake in Hokkaido, Japan’s
most northerly island. Hokkaido has a winter like Northern Ontario’s,
but the whooper swans’ chosen lake is warmed by thermal springs and
never freezes.

Bruemmer’s lively text ranges freely over historical, geographical,
and environmental details to form a perfect partner for the photographs,
which have pride of place. The text can be as poetic as the photos. The
annual migration of the wildebeest is “immutable as the tides.”
Massed flamingos feeding in Kenya’s Lake Bogoria are described as
“rose red against the dark waters of the lake ... a mirage-like image
of entrancing beauty.”

Glimpses of Paradise should be in libraries everywhere. Bruemmer has
long since earned his international reputation as a superb writer and
photographer. This excellent volume will only add to it.