Eye Candy Books

National Environmental Week Gets Its Own NYC Newspaper

In celebration of National Environmental Education Week, Eye Candy Books has created a one-time broadsheet entitled, GO WILD IN NEW YORK CITY NEWS. Underwritten by the Nurture Nature Foundation and featuring the work of students and educators from across the city, the paper aims to raise awareness of all that young New Yorkers and their mentors are doing to study and protect New York's natural resources. Pick up a copy at your neighborhood Urban Park Ranger station, or download a smaller Adobe Acrobat version here.

NYC Teachers Go Wild

In the next three months, twenty 4th and 5th-grade classes across New York City will be going wild in school - at their teachers' request. The Urban Science Education Center of Teachers College has compiled a collection of urban ecology lessons plans - what they call "place-based science" - that coordinate with the content of GO WILD IN NEW YORK CITY and address the NYC Department of Education's objectives for 4th and 5th grades. Now the lessons are being test driven to see how effectively they bring science alive in the classroom and out. If earlier studies by the State Environmental Education Roundtable are any guide, studying the local environment will be engaging, empowering, and academically effective. Fingers crossed.

Cindy Adams on the Wildlife Beat

What happens when a principal in the Bronx hands a warm-hearted Post gossip columnist a kids' introduction to the natural science of the city? She devotes her Sunday column to the book, that's what. Yes, GO WILD IN NEW YORK CITY was the focus of Cindy Adams' entire Sunday column in the New York Post today, thanks to Bronx School of Science Inquiry and Investigation's John Barnes. I'm doing what I can to get him on the PR job full time - but the kids at BSSI seem to really like him.

Librarians Come Out Loudly in Favor of Go Wild

"An eye-popping resource for any child curious about the state of the natural world in the Big Apple,"  writes Elizabeth Bird in the May issue of the School Library Journal. Author Brad Matsen, Bird observes, "turns cold hard facts into riveting reading with apparent ease."  What better way to stealthily turn your little city-hardened materialist into a thoughtful urban naturalist? 

Kirkus Gets Excited About Go Wild

"Young folk, urbanites or otherwise, who think that the Big City's all concrete and honking horns will think differently after this breezy, exuberantly illustrated tour," announces the publishing industry authority Kirkus Reviews in its review this month of Go Wild in New York City. "Readers will not only get ganders at dozens of New York sights and neighborhoods, but at water tunnels deep below ground, the city's geological formations and history, its weather, gardens, common flora, insect life (in a chapter appropriately titled "Rulers of New York"), wildlife from snakes to birds and finally the food-to-garbage cycle"  - I couldn't have summarized it better myself. However, the very best part of the review is the hopeful note it ends on: Go Wild "is going to be opening eyes and minds far beyond the borders of the Big Apple." Well, all right!

Urban Ecology Craze Rocks New York

With this month's publication of Go Wild in New York City (National Geographic), the launching of gowildnyc.org and the creation of a New York City-centric science curriculum by the Urban Science Education Center of Columbia's Teachers College, interest in the natural side of city living has reached highs not seen since the mid-70s. Of course, this isn't saying much. But with plans afoot to publish companion Go Wild volumes for Washington, DC, and Boston, the youth of America may soon be almost as interested in taking care of their hometowns as they were in, say, the early 1970s. Litterbugs and gashogs, watch out!

National Geographic Society to Publish Go Wild in New York City

Where can you watch Mexico-bound Monarch butterflies and red tailed hawks from a skyscraper and then hop on a subway train, travel through a crack in the Earth's crust, and emerge face-to-face with a tree older than the US of A? There's only one correct answer: New York City. This January, the National Geographic Society will publish Go Wild in New York City, the first in a series of books on the wonders of urban ecology for kids and the grown ups in their lives, sponsored by Nurture New York's Nature and Verizon. Written by award-winning children's author Brad Madsen and featuring eye-popping graphics by Kate Lake and illustrator Paul Corio, the book and its companion Web site by the design firm Dillon Thompson provide a get-active guide to the natural side of city living. In the words of conservation biologist and the founder of the public television series Nature, Thomas Lovejoy, "Go wild in New York and the city will never seem the same again."

Prepare to Go Wild in New York City

Nurture New York's Nature, a non-profit devoted to raising awareness of the importance of the natural environment in NYC, has decided to sponsor the production of Go Wild in New York City! a book for children and the adults who spend time with them. The design firm Dillon Thompson and the writer Brad Matsen, among a host of others, will be collaborating with Eye Candy Books to create the book and its complementary Web site.