The Fields Pond Book Group meets monthly on Thursday nights at 6:30 p.m., in-person at the Orono Public Library and online via Zoom. If you would like to participate, please contact Joyce directly at rumery@maine.edu to sign up for the Zoom link, which she will send out shortly before the meeting.
Here is the title and a brief synopsis for February’s selection. The group will take a hiatus during December and January.
February 12, 2026
Boyle, Rebecca. Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet. 2024. 336 pp.
The moon holds the key to some of science’s central questions, and Boyle explains why it has been the secret to our success on Earth. The astrophysical, geophysical, conceptual, religious, and historical influence of Earth’s moon can be seen in virtually all aspects of human development. Boyle reframes the history of scientific discovery through a lunar lens, from Mesopotamia to the present day. Touching on ancient astronomers including Claudius Ptolemy; ancient philosophers from Anaxagoras to Plutarch; the scientific revolution of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler; and the lunar fiction of writers like Jules Verne that inspired Wernher von Braun, the scientist who succeeded in landing humans on the moon, Boyle charts our path with the moon from the origins of human civilization to the Apollo landings and up to the present.
March 12, 2026
Casey, Susan. The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. 2023. 352pp.
For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What’s down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of fiendish creatures and deadly peril. But now, technologies allow scientists and explorers to dive miles beneath the surface, and we are beginning to understand this strange and exotic underworld: A place of soaring mountains, smoldering volcanoes, and valleys 7,000 feet deeper than Everest is high, where tectonic plates collide and separate, and extraordinary life forms operate under different rules. Far from a dark void, the deep is a vibrant realm that’s home to pink gelatinous predators and shimmering creatures a hundred feet long and ancient animals with glass skeletons and sharks that live for half a millennium—among countless other marvels.
April 9, 2026
Ackerman, Jennifer. The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. 2021. 368 pp.
A radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds, the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They are also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own: deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.
May 7, 2026
Dunn, Jon. The Glitter in the Green: In Search of Hummingbirds. 2022. 352 pp.
Hummingbirds are a glittering, sparkling collective of over three hundred wildly variable species. For centuries, they have been revered by indigenous Americans, coveted by European collectors, and admired worldwide for their metallic plumage and immense character. Yet they exist on a knife-edge, fighting for survival in boreal woodlands, dripping cloud forests, and subpolar islands. They are, perhaps, the embodiment of evolution’s power to carve a niche for a delicate creature in even the harshest of places. Traveling from the cusp of the Arctic Circle to near-Antarctic islands, nature writer Dunn encounters birders, scientists, and storytellers in his quest to find these beguiling creatures, immersing us in the world of one of Earth’s most charismatic bird families.
June 11, 2026
Lewis, Daniel. Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future. 2024. 304pp.
The world today is undergoing the most rapid environmental transformation in human history, from climate change to deforestation. Scientists, ethnobotanists, indigenous peoples, and collectives of all kinds are closely studying trees and their biology to understand how and why trees function individually and collectively. Lewis, curator and historian at one of the world’s most renowned research libraries, travels the world to learn about these trees in their habitats. Lewis takes us on a journey to plant breeding labs, botanical gardens, research facilities, deep inside museum collections, to the tops of tall trees, underwater, and around the Earth, journeying into the deserts of the American west and the jungles of Peru, to offer a perspective on the crucial impact trees have on our entire planet. When a once-common tree goes extinct in the wild but survives in a botanical garden, what happens next? How can scientists reconstruct lost genomes and habitats? How does a tree store thousands of gallons of water, or offer up perfectly preserved insects from millions of years ago, or root itself in muddy swamps and remain standing? How does a 5,000-year-old tree manage to live, and what can we learn from it? To study the science of trees is to study not just the present, but the story of the world, its past, and its future.