A backyard can hold more than most people ever see in it. Richard Louv's Noticing turns to the wild land around his California home and asks what closer attention might reveal.

Readical Key Points

• Personal essays on nature, the senses and attention, from the author of Last Child in the Woods
• Built from the author's own encounters with animals, plants and weather near his home, set beside research and practices for paying attention
• Reviewed in Kirkus Reviews and Booklist
• Hardcover, 288 pages, Algonquin Books, 2026

Louv writes from close to home, recording what he meets on the land around where he lives. He argues that people have many more senses than the familiar five and that each can be sharpened with practice, drawing on neuroscience, nature photography, mindfulness and Indigenous traditions for ways to do it. His name for the result is "bioenchantment." Not every encounter is gentle, and the essays leave the hard ones in.

Readers who know Louv's writing on children and nature will find the same concern turned inward, toward one observer and one stretch of ground. It suits readers of nature writing and personal essays, and anyone who walks the same trail every day without seeing much of it. The classroom here is a backyard, and the lessons take as long as the looking does.

About the Author

A journalist by training, Richard Louv has written ten books, among them Last Child in the Woods, The Nature Principle and Vitamin N, published in twenty languages. He cofounded the Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit he later served as chair emeritus, and received the Audubon Medal in 2008.

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