Lives of the Naturalists: A profile of Vadim Birstein
I wrote this as a profile for the New Yorker over the summer of l999, but it never ran, for reasons that illustrate the problems I have even with as fine a publication as the New Yorker. Some of this had to do with Vadim himself, an unusually multi-dimensional individual and in this sense an …Read More
Annals of Civil War
NEW YORKER, JUNE 20, 1994
FLIGHT FROM DEATH The violence in Rwanda was threatening to explode in Burundi, where the author’s Tutsi relatives live, and he knew he had to get them out.
-BY ALEX SHOUMAFOFF
THE minibus sped past hundreds of deplacés walking along the road with mattresses, cooking pots, and bundles of possessions on their heads. “Africa …Read More
Turtle, Talk of the Town
New Yorker, Dec 30, 1985
A FRIEND who lives in Westchester writes: One evening a couple of weeks ago, I got a call from my cousin-in-law Andy, who lives across the Sound from us, in Locust Valley. He had just been taking his new sea kayak out for a spin. Sea kayaking, he tells me, is …Read More
To the Mountains, mit Four Teenage Boys
Outside Magazine, August 1994
WE CHECKED OUT OF THE hut and were on the Kander firn Glacier by eight-myself and my rwo sons, Andre and Nick, and their school buddies Jerome and Alex. The snow was still frozen as we traversed beneath the long, jagged ridge of the Tschingelhorn, a bloom of sunlight projecting over us …Read More
The Reverend Gary Davis
Rolling Stone December 23, 1971
It was the Reverend’s 73rd birthday: he was in fine spirits. Someone in England had sent him a box of small cigars and he’d been smoking on them steadily in spite of a bad cold. When we reached the standstill in front of the Midtown Tunnel, he suddenly broke out coughing, …Read More
The Real Adirondacks
This article originally appeared in the summer 1997 issue of the since-defunct Snow Country magazine. It was recently published in an anthology of new Adirondack writing called Rooted in Rock (Syracuse University Press).
The black flies will eat you alive, the natives are hostile, the mountains are low and boring, the trails are muddy and slippery, and the …Read More
The Rain Forest: A Close Up Look
The Rain Forest: A Close Up Look
Boston Museum of Science Magazine, October 1990
This version is print friendly
Note: We recieved a recent email asking for a link from this article to their page and have obliged. Banana Garden.Com is a site devoted to the rainforest plant and banana. June ’07
The science writer Timothy Ferris and I were bouncing …Read More
The Navajo Way
Men’s Journal, Novermber 1998
One of the most remarkable things about this republic is that there exists within its borders a parallel universe known as Dinetah, a nation of more than 155,000 souls who subscribe to a mind-set completely different from the modern American belief that everything in nature is there for the taking. Dinetal is …Read More
The Little Drummer Bird
Adirondack Life, May/June 1990
After an absence of three weeks (I had been in Peru, which seemed on the verge of plunging into chaos and anarchy), I reached my home -a small log cabin high in the Adirondacks -late in the night of last April 30. The deep, undisturbed sleep I immediately sank into, which I’d …Read More
The Gods Break Through in Uganda, The Nende Files
This is the complete original version, a few sentances were cut from the version that appeared in Lapis Magazine, Issue 4, Spring 1997.
I had been to Nsambya Hospital seven years earlier, to interview Sister Nelizinho Carvalho, a heroic nun who had started the first blood-screening program in AIDS-ravaged Kampala. This time I was looking …Read More