https://airmail.news/books/2025/3/editors-picks-39
“A work of sublime intelligence and importance” The Dawning Moon of the Mind
~Simon Winchester
“A riveting compendium of observations from a very curious, very interesting mind… [Morrow] manages paragraphs as poets manage line breaks.” Wolves and Honey
~The Boston Globe
Orion Magazine – Anthony Doerr’s Reading List
https://orionmagazine.org/article/anthony-doerrs-reading-list/
“An etymological wonderment.” The Names of Things
~William Safire New York Times
“In this lovely book Susan Morrow takes you on a unique journey.”The Names of Things
~Fareed Zakaria
“I’ve never read anything quite like Wolves and Honey. It made the experience of reading what it should be- a shared sense of the wondrous textures of the world” ~Barry Lopez
“Beautifully crafted prose…One of those rare…books that mix a perfect combination of personal insight and historical depth.” Wolves and Honey
~USA Today
“Informative, perceptive, beautifully descriptive, Susan Morrow’s book is a delight.” The Names of Things
~Elie Wiesel
“Curious jewels pop up on every page of Susan Brind Morrow’s first book The Names of Things.”
~Pico Iyer, Time Magazine
“An incomparably beautiful book that manages somehow to combine linguistic scholarship, adventure, philosophy, and something even more precious: the author’s delight in living. An absolutely beautiful book.”
-Christopher Buckley
“[Morrow] casts an immediate spell upon anyone who cares for pure hard prose shot through with lyrical insights. Most writers describe the world with one, or possibly two senses. Morrow reacts with all five.”
~Edmund Morris, The Spectator
“A meditation on the outdoors that evokes ‘the smell of damp earth, the sweetness of maples and pines… as though it were freedom itself.’” Wolves and Honey
~The New Yorker
“A profound and profoundly inspiring book” The Dawning Moon of the Mind
~Verlyn Klinkenborg
“The Names of Things” is a book about immersion, in Susan Brind Morrow’s case in the sprawl of Egypt, its sights and sounds, its landscapes, peopled and unpeopled, the individuals she meets, the stories she absorbs, and above all, the language she enters. It is not a book about Egypt— aboutness implies a distance she willingly surrenders, to enter as far as possible a whole other mode of existence, to go to the bone. She takes next to nothing with her, beyond her sharpened senses and unquenchable curiosity. Language is her talisman. Arabic words polished stones brought back in her pocket. But she is after much more than learning the language: she wants to witness words being brought into being, to see what they stem from, to experience them as epiphanies, not fossilized remnants. The same outward clarity saturates her own lean, spare prose— her wandering attention yields up epiphanies of human connection, of danger and delight, of trance and realization. It is a book of utter absorption, an absorption that deeply becomes the reader’s. There are few travelers who go so far.” ~Alistair Reid
“Susan Brind Morrow is living an extraordinary life. With great courage and physical endurance she has spent months on end in some of the harshest environments on earth. She has traveled many of the remote and dangerous roads, tracks and paths in Egypt and Sudan. However, she is not just exploring simply for the sake of exploration, she is fascinated by, and fascinating about, the geology, history, zoology, botany, societies and language she encounters. She sees with an artist’s eye and listens with the ear of a poet, interweaving her travels with personal and family background. The Names of Things is literally an amazing and wonderful book.” ~Martin Bernal
“Fortunate is the mind that finds… the passage of nature into language and language into self… That’s the enormous underpinning, I think, of Susan Brind Morrow’s captivating, lyrical, evocative memoir… transporting and quite beautiful. Of the many books I’ve read this year, [this] is the one which has moved, delighted, and inspired me most.”
~A Common Reader Book of the Year
“As she offers one stunning observation after another, Morrow executes wonderful modulations of tone and rhythm, evoking the sweep of sand and star, the flow of time.” The Names of Things
~ Booklist
“… I encountered The Names of Things in New Orleans post-Katrina. The store was dank, and I ended up throwing away the book after I read it because of mold. But I gave a new copy to Belle Gironda. In the Brind Morrow scene cited in DOUBLE | VIGIL, I am captivated by how Susan surrenders to the swarm. I want to know if it is like Belle’s yielding to the masses when she smuggles medical supplies into Tahrir. In the early days of my vigil for Belle, I turned to Susan Brind Morrow to understand throngs, to watch a single body within a mass movement. Brind Morrow’s words were a safe passage to contemplate. As news poured out of the streets of Cairo, there were the sources we cited in the opening montage of DOUBLE | VIGIL. Now, thanks to the videos of director Leil-Zahra Mortada, we can watch/hear/read Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution on YouTube. We can hear perilous first-hand accounts… We can hear how they navigated the throngs, what they believe they accomplished, how they conquered their fears. The Facebook portal… is https://www.facebook.com/HerstoryEgypt”
~Anderson Moseman
“I read passages over and over because the language was so well crafted and beautiful.”
~Amazon
“I read Susan Brind Morrow’s The Names of Things when it first came out, but it is one of those books that is so interesting and odd that rereading is as much a pleasure as first reading. And so imagine my delight when I discovered she has a new book out, Wolves and Honey. It too was fantastic—the kind of book I want to own, because it is so rich, so multivalent that each rereading opens up new levels of meaning.”
~Living Small
“A friend lent me a book called Wolves and Honey by Susan Brind Morrow. It’s one of those books where on page one you call your store and order another copy. It is… one of the most beautiful, arresting evocations of the natural world I have ever read.”
~Laura Harrington Books
“Morrow’s book takes readers out far beyond where most have never been… and somehow yields up passages that speak directly to the experience of humankind.”
~Publishing Blog
“Morrow’s memoir of New York State’s Finger Lakes region is among the most eloquent inquiries into how humans currently mesh with nature.”
~Northern Woodlands
“There is intense poignancy here, such urgent affection for the people and the land that your heart must grow as you read, to absorb the unconfined generosity, the limitless possibilities within.”
~Whole Earth
“It was a book that drew me to itself, quietly, lovingly… There is beauty in every detail of experience.”
~Abrupt.org
“I was reading one of my favorite books again for the umpteenth time, The Names of Things.”
“The Names of Things… I love that book. There is something in it to sustain the spirit.”
“A contemporary mid-eastern Walden”
“One of my absolutely favorite books… coloring a world that would be threatening to others”