Deep Listening and Time Passing: Four Recent Nonfiction Books of Note 

Sam Pickering 

Steven Harvey, The Beloved Republic: Essays. Wandering Aengus Press, 2023. 216 pages.  

$20.00. Paperback.

E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith, chickens, GIN, and a MAINE Friendship. Down East 

Books, 2020. ix + 235 pages. $24.95. Hardback. 

Todd Ballantine, Birdlife: A Naturalist’s Guide to Birds of the Southeast. The University of  

South Carolina Press, 2022. x + 197 pages. $22.99. Illustrated. Paperback.  

Susan Cerulean, I Have Been Assigned The Single Bird; A Daughter’s Memoir. University of  

Georgia Press, 2022. 164 pages. $19.95. Illustrated. Paperback. 

Kim Haines-Eitzen, Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—And  

What It Can Teach Us. Princeton University Press, 2022. xx + 145 pages. $18.69. Illustrated. Hardback.  

In A Promise of Ankles, Alexander McCall Smith wrote, “we must keep alive the happiness we experience before the world closes in on us.” Yes, but people must also embrace, maybe treasure, sadness and grief, the senses of loss and of time’s passing, loneliness, and muffled anxiety. Steven Harvey’s The Beloved Republic is a volume of essays collecting and reflecting the miscellaneous nature of passing during the past twenty-five years. Unlike a novel’s movement, fused to and predetermined by a plot, the collection drifts like Harvey’s life itself as he mulls what expands his mind and affects his days.