Every autumn, the monarch butterflies east of the Rockies migrate from as far north as Canada to Mexico. Memory is not their guide -- no one butterfly makes the round trip -- but each year somehow find their way to the same fifty acres of forest on the high slopes of Mexico's Neovolcanic Mountains, and then make the return trip in the spring.
In Four Wings and a Prayer, Sue Halpern sets off on an adventure to delve into the secrets behind this extraordinary phenomenon. She visits scientists and butterfly lovers across the country, offering a keenly observed portrait of the monarchs' migration and of the people for whom they have become a glorious obsession. Combining science, memoir, and travel writing, Four Wings and a Prayer is an absorbing travelogue and a fascinating meditation on a profound mystery of the natural world.

Reviews

Mexico's Neovolcanic Mountains is for monarch butterflies something like Capistrano is for cliff swallows: a landmark in the species' annual migrations. Halpern (Migrations to Solitude) visited that region to attend the International Conference on Monarch Butterflies, and her observations and encounters while at that meeting form the framework of this book. With a sense of wonder, Halpern writes of the mystery of how these monarchs, some of which she might have seen at her upstate New York home in the summer, had made the long and perilous journey to this remote destination. No less fascinating are the tale's cast of characters, from academic biologists to Mexican peasants. Nevertheless, although it is a perfectly competent piece of nature/travel writing, this book is less engaging and informative than Robert Michael Pyle's epic Chasing Monarchs (LJ 7/99), which is a better choice for general readers. Gregg Sapp, Science Lib., SUNY at Albany Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Accomplished author (Migrations to Solitude) and journalist (co-founder of the magazine Doubletake) Halpern has a passion for monarch butterflies that drives this evocative, insightful portrait of a species and the people who study it. Every autumn, monarchs in the Eastern United States and Canada migrate thousands of miles to a handful of Mexican overwintering sites, where they rest for the return trip home. "[N]o single butterfly ever makes the round trip," yet thousands converge on the same few sites year after year. Monarchs are the only butterflies to migrate such long distances; the question of how they find their way remains, according to Halpern, one of the great unsolved mysteries of animal biology. Among the a host of colorful scientists and dedicated volunteers she visits are Bill Calvert, the "cowboy entomologist" who sleeps in his truck when out collecting field data, and Chip Taylor, who looks like Father Christmas, snacks on bee pollen and has mobilized hundreds of volunteers to help determine the butterfly's migration routes. Not afraid of dirtying her hands, Halpern weighs butterflies with Calvert by the side of the road in Mexico, tags and raises monarchs with her eight-year-old daughter at their home in the Adirondacks and takes a glider ride to better understand the thermal forces that propel the butterflies for much of their journey. Her lively, lyrical account of monarch life will delight armchair and active naturalists and anyone interested in scientists in action and skies loud with the beat of wings. (May 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

"Infused with love, emboldened with passion, graced with flickers of transcendence. . . . Sentence by sentence this is an exceptional book." --"The Chicago Tribune"
"A charming, sophisticated, and dryly witty account of this most beguiling of insects and the engaging fold who make up its devouts." --"The Seattle Times
""Nature writing at its best. [Halpern's] spare, direct prose gracefully weds scientific passion with poetic precision." --"The Christian Science Monitor"
"Sue Halpern is hot on the trail of one of nature's more intriguing mysteries. . . . Full of fascinating fact and conjecture delivered in clear layman's language." --"The Boston Globe"