this is a story about a urban space, about how nature can win and make them alive again.
Well written, informative, and full of food for thought
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Christopher Brown was inspired by the nature and wildlife he began to notice within his city when he purchased an empty lot in an industrial area in Austin to build his home. He began to document the ways that nature reclaims the places humans abandon.

I thought this book was beautifully written and the topic was very interesting. It was also very dense and I had difficulty focusing on the overall message.

In A Natural History of Empty Lots, Christopher Brown explores the hidden wilderness within urban spaces, blending history, memoir, and keen observations of nature. His adventures through back alleys and forgotten pockets of land reveal the resilience of wildlife in places we often overlook. While the book reflects on environmental challenges, it remains a hopeful reminder of nature’s power to thrive even in urban settings.

Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots offers a fascinating glimpse into the wild spaces within cities. His vivid writing allows readers to experience the beauty and resilience of nature, even in urban environments. As a European reader, I sometimes felt a slight disconnect due to the uniquely American setting and social issues, but the universal themes of nature’s survival and urban development resonated deeply.

This book is both thought-provoking and inspiring, and I look forward to discussing its insights with friends from the U.S.

This is an interesting look at the despoliation of suburban land and abandonment to scrapheap, landfill, toxins and wasteland. Set in Texas, we follow the author as he buys an 'empty lot' which contains a defunct oil pipeline and accoutrements, a slope through trees and brush to a stream, and much garbage. He builds a house, dug into the terrain left by removing the pipe. The place is crawling with large ants, and one weekend away sees the house filled with dead arthropods.

The account jumps back and forth in decades, and occasionally looks at the long past, including perhaps the most interesting item, a tree the megafauna fed from before humans arrived. Mesquite, a tough, thorny tree, has seeds which were eaten by mastodons and giant sloths, but now nothing much eats them - until some escaped parakeets set up camp.

Various rambles are detailed, some by kayak and some on foot. Birds of many sorts feature, wildlife including coyotes, deer and snakes.

The author, trying to live in harmony with land, but wanting to be near town, tells how he resisted development in his area after economic crashes had subsided. Light development was okay, but not high density. A developer literally compromised a councillor who had agreed to speak against intensive rebuilding. Nobody much seemed to care about space for nature. The author does meet fellow travellers, and hopes to reduce harm. He leaves us with sightings of moths, vultures and a bald eagle.

I like the read and the message, but the occasional photos could have been larger and clearer, and I would have liked more nature and less philosophy. This is an unusual memoir, and a look at naturescapes neglected in more ways than one.
I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

The writing and the observations are beautiful, but the book feels way too long. The later chapters are really great and gripping but the first half really drags and has a lot of repetition. That is a theme throughout the book, a lot of things are repeated. The love Brown has for nature and all things wild is inspiring, but it feels like it leans a bit too heavily into memoir for the title. Some pictures are also repeated which is a shame. The pictures all being in black and white also feels like it takes something away from the experience.

Being in the UK the edgelands and the areas of wilderness bordering our cities are perhaps even more important due to space limitations, but there was still something missing that didn't quite transfer seamlessly. My opinion of this book is really split down the middle. On one side I ended up really enjoying it towards the end and I appreciate a lot of the history I picked up from reading this, but the first half was slow and I don't know the author or America well enough to appreciate some of the themes in the parts about his personal life.

I live in a suburban sprawl. People keep their grass nice and streets are lined with parked cars. And yet, we have seen skunk, raccoon, opossum, deer, turkey, vultures, hawks, Red-winged Blackbirds, Canada geese, Mallard duck, Killdeer, a multitude of bird species, and rabbits, along with the expected squirrels, rats, and chipmunks. Area parks have been home to coyote, which are regularly spotted in yards and along streets.

A block away is a park filled with oak trees. A few people leave a patch of yard go wild, with native flowers. Our yard regularly filled with violets in spring, and other flowers that thrived here before 1965 when our street was developed. A neighbor once told me that her son caught pollywogs in the swamp that was here.

A few more blocks away is a park that, in the late 50s, was noted as the best preserved site in the state for wildflowers. A mile down the road is a deer proofed Arboretum that is carpeted with trillium every spring.

You don’t have to move to the country to experience nature. And Christopher Brown shares the wonders he found in urban pockets of wastelands and alleys over decades. His memoir is a reminder of nature’s power to survive, to surprise us, and the joy and beauty that we can find all around us, if we only look.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

Thank you for this ARC. I love it. I have always been a huge fan of empty lots. I love the romanticism in this book. What a delight!

Christopher Brown is an attorney and author of several science fiction books, and this book covers his journey looking for a property in Austin, Texas to build a unique home that would be affordable and use land that was overlooked. He choses a property in East Austin and builds a home that is triangular shape, is partially underground, and has plants growing on the roof. Having lived in Austin for more than 40 years, I was amused by Brown's romanticism about living in this location, and his response to the wildlife that would appear near his home. Austin is full of wildlife including deer, coyotes, foxes, and birds including the owls that live on the University of Texas campus. I currently live near the Llano River on Lake LBJ, and we have deer as well as owls that hoot to either in the evening. Brown uses a lot of buzz like brownfield and intersectional space, but when he starts claiming that gentrification is a form of colonization, he has me laughing out loud. I heard this complaint both in Austin and Santa Fe, and its just a response to the lack of ability to accept change. Brown tries to spin the story like he is a struggling artist, but the house he build is valued at more than $2 million and is in a very sketchy neighborhood. Not the best investment decision.

This was very informative to see the similarities and differences where nature and city collide, very beautiful.

A Natural History of Empty Lots is part memoir, part ecology book, part deep meditation on the relationship between modern society and nature, especially in cities. It was at times very repetitive, and pretty pessimistic. He focused a lot of what was gone, even when they weren't gone, like Native Americans. It was like the "Sometimes I still hear their voice" meme. Not great. It raised interesting questions, but was ultimately too dull to warrant finishing.

It's really great to have another Texas naturalist writers, a modern one, to add to the catalog. We've been without Texas nature writers for too long in this state and the voices are needed as we continue to swallow whole the landscapes around cities. As a nature writer myself, I loved that the author was able to highlight the nature living right under our noses, in our cities. Too often we spend time looking for the vast western landscapes to give us the nature we desire, to make us feel something enough to want to protect it, when we have nature right at home that is just as worthy of observation, appreciation, and protection.

This will be a book to revisit multiple times in the future.

Brown writes about the intersection of “civilized” urban life and the natural world, centered around his adult home of Austin. The urban world comes across as particularly gritty - rusty, crumbling, obtrusive, and uninviting - and the natural in stark, often elegant contrast. Browns prose is orotund and flowery, perhaps too so for my taste. As a city dweller and avid birder, this book appealed to me but a leaner, more direct book might have appealed more.

I was interested in this book for the wrong reasons I guess. Growing up in the Bronx, NY, we had plenty of empty lots to spend our days in, with our imagination running loose. Yes, most were not safe, and all could have been dangerous, but the innocence of when children could be left on their own to explore was worth it. This book was none of that for me. I suppose I wanted to be transported back to a more innocent time, instead of reading another textbook. I thank NetGalley and Timber Press for the advance read.

Hmmmm.. great premise, absolutely love nature writing. Something didn’t quite gel for me whether it was the USA roots, social narrative or writing style… thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

This was an interesting conversation about urban life and how we have both destroyed and preserved the wild spaces within it. Some parts were a slog to get through, but I did enjoy the read and will likely seek out more of the author's work.

After his divorce and the 2008 market crash, Christopher Brown purchased a vacant lot in Austin, Texas. Not a vacant residential lot, which wouldn't have been anything out of the ordinary, but a vacant lot in an industrial area. Not only littered with trash and concrete but an old petroleum pipe, the site needed plenty of cleanup before he could build a home there. And in the years it took to accomplish all this he started a new family and explored the area, which abutted the Colorado River which runs through Austin, finding more wildlife than he had expected, and chronicled it in this memoir.

Brown, a lawyer and science fiction writer, has built a truly amazing house - I looked it up online and it's really cool. It's not an embarrassing mansion but rather a modern concrete and glass structure that incorporates its design into nature - the roof is covered in native soil and plants, practically hiding it from certain angles. He even has a triangular pool out front that complements the house beautifully. And the high point for me really was when he discussed the house itself and the way it invites nature - sometimes in unpleasant and unplanned ways, such as the snakes that found it to their liking.

But while I applaud his admirable accomplishment, there's a profound sense of ennui from Mr. Brown's writing which saturates the book with weariness and cynicism. He continually refers to pretty much everything as polluted, destroyed, and even brutalized by us. He seems to have such a deep disdain for humanity, especially the white "colonists" of the US, that everything about us is a plague. It's so pervasive that I found little joy in his descriptions of seeing foxes, owls, and hawks. He even describes the trash along the river in great detail. Of course, environmentalist that he is, he complains when the real estate crowd starts looking at the area for redevelopment after he sets in motion the gentrification of his neighborhood by publicizing his beautiful home in the dumps. The optimism (or at least the small measure of joy) I hoped to find in the book was too weighed down by Brown's pessimism, and I had to force myself to finish. In the end, I found the book simply 'meh' - nice in a few parts, but mostly not an enjoyable read. (I received an advance electronic reviewer copy from NetGalley and the publisher.)

This book merges the strains of nature writing found in Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey and brings them to your back yard. It has the close observation and reference of Leopold with the cutting insight and fierce defense of Abbey, except it doesn't ask you to go to Sand County or Utah. You can go down to that weed-choked creek nearby and see for yourself.

The author is a lawyer, so he sees the way our legal system and society views nature as either productive property or waste lands. The final chapters give some hope that nature might have some standing in the system. In the meanwhile, we can fight for that vacant lot in the neighborhood and the voles, foxes, and vultures that call it home.

A Natural History of Empty Lots is fantastically written and is entirely captivating. The author chose such an unappreciated landscape for their spotlight and absolutely shined. There are so many of these unfortunate empty lots scattered throughout the United States and when left untouched by human hands for long enough, these spaces revert to their natural wild beauty. This author reminisces on their hidden beauty and insight into how he views these spaces and which the rest of us can learn from.

Somehow, just from the title and cover, I'd assumed this was British nature writing - and that despite 'empty lot', now I think about it, being more of an American term. But the Americans... surely they don't need to write about edgelands? They have all those vast open spaces, don't they? It's only on this old, crowded little island that the Anglosphere needs to grub around in the neglected corners for some tiny sliver of wildness, right? Well, apparently not. Inevitably, this means that there are times when a UK reader who pays the least attention to this stuff will be tempted to gentle condescension: aw, bless, he's seen his first urban fox and he's treating it like a big deal! But it's always good to have people on side, and the differences are fascinating, right down to little stuff: they do have feral parakeets too, but a different species to England. More broadly, though, the wild that's itching to come back is different; under their crumbling light industrial units, the earth still remembers being a prairie, and there's a wider selection of decent-sized fauna ready to slip into the gaps too. On the human end of the equation, the myth of the frontier still lingers, its roots troubling and its persistence easily hijacked by the automobile industry among others - but also potentially useful to naturalists, if they can just find the right handholds. The overall effect is oddly optimistic, at least early on, a welcoming eye on the way the world reclaims even the territory humanity appears to have most thoroughly mucked up - albeit always with a countervailing awareness that capitalism, just as opportunistic as any weed though a good deal uglier, will often be ready to grab those derelict spaces right back. And as the book goes on that's exactly what happens, Brown's own wild house project part of the gravity that makes his neglected corner of Austin an appealing prospect after all, bringing with it the usual hideous developments that kill precisely what made an area attractive to them in the first place: "The signs promised the coming of a complex that called itself The Eclectic, even as they and you knew it would be anything but." The book tries to retain at least a note of bittersweet hope, talk about allying with your neighbours to fight City Hall - but it's too aware of how rigged the game is to feel like more than a faint gleam in the darkness. Still, at the same time as he has the eye of a lawyer (which he is) for the way systems twist to maintain control, he also has the knack of a science fiction writer (which he also is) for the powerful image; the husk of the Chevy in the hidden wetlands, in particular, feels like something out of a story by Jeff Vandermeer (who provides a blurb), offers a promise that one day some approximation of the wild will win this thing, with or without us.

Running in parallel with all this, though, there's a strand of what I'm pretty sure would have been played at least slightly for comedy in a British equivalent, but is possibly even funnier for being delivered with an entirely straight face. I think I was primed for this simply by his son being called Hugo, a name which in Britain I only ever encounter on absolutely terrible people, and yes, by his father's account this Hugo is very different, but parents always feel that way, don't they? Meaning I was already prepped to read on two levels before Brown started talking about the desire to make a home which breaks down the conventional Western division between inside and out, our space and nature's. A green roof is mandatory, of course - which entails shipping barrels of special sealant from halfway across the world (much to the interest of Homeland Security), heavy watering during a drought, and of course a flamethrower. Sharing the house with large ants is already a step more wildlife-friendly than I'm prepared to go, but that's as nothing compared to the immortal line "The architects who designed our house did not intend to create an optimal habitat for deadly serpents between the bedroom and the kitchen. But that's what they did." Most of us might rethink at that point, but not Brown, who even after a litany of other lethal housemates, and a reluctant admission that he might occasionally need to kill something posing an immediate threat to his dogs or infant daughter, nevertheless cheerily concludes "But the revelation that you can coexist with the full ambit of the food chain down in the postindustrial hobbit hole you have made your home is potent affirmation of the possibility of cultivating biodiverse life in a little corner of our urbanized world." To which, fond as I am of just vibing in the various semi-rewilded spaces around my own home, I can only reply, rather you than me, mate.

(Netgalley ARC)