UP Notable Book Club: the Crystal Falls Community District Library in partnership with the U.P. Publishers & Authors Association (UPPAA) has scheduled author events with winners of the UP Notable Book List. The fourth event is with U.P. author and NMU professor James H. McCommons featuring Camera Hunter, the first significant biography of Marquette’s famous naturalist George Shiras III in decades! The events are open to all U.P. residents free of charge. U.P. Book Review published this review of McCommon’s book.
In 1906 George Shiras III (1859-1942) published a series of remarkable nighttime photographs in National Geographic. Taken with crude equipment, the black-and-white photographs featured leaping whitetail deer, a beaver gnawing on a tree, and a snowy owl perched along the shore of a lake in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The pictures, stunning in detail and composition, celebrated American wildlife at a time when many species were going extinct because of habitat loss and unrestrained hunting. As a congressman and lawyer, Shiras joined forces with his friend Theodore Roosevelt and scientists in Washington, DC, who shaped the conservation movement during the Progressive Era. His legal and legislative efforts culminated with the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
Camera Hunter recounts Shiras’s life and craft as he traveled to wild country in North America, refined his trail-camera techniques, and advocated for the protection of wildlife. This biography serves as an important record of Shiras’s accomplishments as a visual artist, wildlife conservationist, adventurer, and legislator.
More information about the U.P. Notable Book list, U.P. Book Review, and UPPAA can be found on www.UPNotable.com
Established in 1998 to support authors and publishers who live in or write about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, UPPAA is a Michigan nonprofit association with more than 100 members, many of whose books are featured on the organization’s website at www.uppaa.org. UPPAA welcomes membership and participation from anyone with a UP connection who is interested in writing and publishing books.