CMP Review 2025-08-14

August 14, 2025

I have bittersweet feelings about bookstores. Probably my ambivalence stems from a shop I visited in London years ago that had a rare hardcover by Jean-Henri Fabre. Fabre exemplifies Charlotte Mason’s view that science can be taught with literature. “The French mind,” she wrote, surely with Fabre in mind, “has appreciated the fact that the approach to science as to other subjects should be more or less literary.”

I saw the book and knew it was a find but for some reason I left the store without it. I’ve regretted it ever since. So when my son-in-law invited me to John K. King Books in Detroit, I was worried it might leave me with some pangs.

They did have a rare edition of Fabre’s This Earth of Ours. I suppose we learn from our mistakes. It’s now mine and I’m looking forward to reading it.

And I’m looking for recommendations of books like it. What more recent English-language books do you think appreciate the idea that science can be learned in a “more or less literary” approach? Please let me know in the comments.

@artmiddlekauff