Dinosaur Dreams: A Father and Daughter in Search of America’s Prehistoric Past
By B.J. Hollars
University of Nebraska Press | 2025 | 256 pages
Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness
By Andrew Furman
University Press of Florida | 2025 | 224 pages
This summer I had the good fortune of reading two nonfiction books that, like my own essay collection Satellite, include the incidents, insights, and inventiveness of fatherhood: B.J. Hollars’s forthcoming Dinosaur Dreams: A Father and Daughter in Search of America’s Prehistoric Past (available October 1, 2025) and Andrew Furman’s recently published Of Slash Pines and Manatees: A Highly Selective Field Guide to My Suburban Wilderness.
Both books are not only deeply nourishing but also essential reading in an era defined by rapid cultural and environmental change. Take, for instance, this passage in Dinosaur Dreams:
Somewhere between Lewistown and Great Falls—as the clouds hang like shawls in the sky—the van’s touch screen prompts an eerily prescient message: Would you like to take a break?
I lift an eyebrow toward the ghost in the machine.
Would I like to take a break? From what? Driving? Modern society? The existential crisis of a planet on the brink of collapse?
Yes, I believe I would. However, I have no idea how to relay my response to the touch screen. Do I press a button? Offer some verbal acknowledgement to my robot overlords?
“Yes,” I say aloud to no one. “I would like to take a break.”
Now Ellie’s the one lifting an eyebrow.
“Dad,” she says, “are you… okay?”
“Are any of us?” I wonder aloud.
“Well, I’m good,” she says cheerily, offering a thumbs-up.
I shift my sleepy gaze back to the touchscreen, where all traces of the message have vanished.
“Then I’m good, too,” I yawn. “Daddy just needs coffee.”
Taken together, the books form a resonant yet contrasting set, not exactly a pairing of fine wine and cheese, but the more satisfying locally brewed beer and grilled bratwurst, perhaps. Where Dinosaur Dreams takes place chronologically over a few weeks of the summer of 2023 as Hollars and nine-year-old Ellie embark on a 2,000-mile road trip to complete the Montana Dinosaur Trail, Furman’s Of Slash Pines and Manatees covers the longer time period of the pandemic, give or take a year or three on either side, comprising 15 essays ranging from narrative to lyrical to experimental in three sections: Being with Plants, Being with Animals, and Being with Yourself.
Both books are also steeped in fascinating characters. Hollars lists them at the beginning of Dinosaur Dreams as if they are actors in a play, from Richard Baker of the Rivertown Rounders in Great Falls, Montana, to Dave Trexler, a paleontologist of Two Medicine Dinosaur Center. Clearly, though, the stars of the show are Hollars and Ellie, not to mention the dinosaurs themselves, or at least their former selves, often scattered in nearly indiscernible fossils across (and beneath) the wide-open Montana landscape. Place is an essential character here, too, and the museums and dig sites that Hollars and Ellie visit across Montana provide a kind of lifeline, no less cultural than economic, to several small towns and remote tribal areas.
While Furman’s wife, neighbors, and others are actors in Of Slash Pines and Manatees, the stars here, too, are Furman and, in one lovely if not angsty essay in particular, his tween daughter Eva. More even than Dinosaur Dreams, however, place and the plants and animals of place—in this case, the diminishing lushness and growing sprawl of South Florida—are the attraction. And to our great benefit, Furman is usually inseparable from these plants, animals, and subtropical landscapes. Take this scene set in 2017 from the essay “Yellow-Crowned Night Heron,” for instance:
“You sure do like the birds,” Evelyn greets me from the road without breaking stride each time she sees me craning my neck, staring up into the pine, by which she means hello. “Yep, they’re pretty neat,” I say hello back. The birds are quite something to look at, once you commit yourself to staying put for a time.
They don’t seem to do a great many things, but what yellow-crowned night-herons do they do with almost mesmerizing deliberation and care. They snap twigs and branches from live oak trees. They walk gingerly across the russet bark and present the twig or branch to their mate, who accepts it, weaves it into the nest. They stand side-by-side to face the evening sun. They preen one another with languorous swipes of their chunky bills, flash their nuptial plumes. They seem so dippy in love, canoodling as they do, that I’m sometimes compelled to avert my eyes.
Here I must admit a particular affinity for Furman’s essays because I, too—like his daughter Eva does today—lived in Florida for the formidable years of my youth. And like Furman, I have swum among the manatees, walked among the slash pines, swum in rivers and lakes and oceans among turtles and snakes, alligators and sharks. Of Slash Pines and Manatees therefore returned a bit of my youth in the landscape of longleaf pines and saw palmettos and slow-flowing rivers where I formed my environmental ethic, and for that I give thanks. Of course, Furman’s Florida is much different, much more developed, than my Florida of 40 years ago. Yet the strange and delightful human and more-than-human community that is Florida has likewise informed his environmental ethic, which he notes in the book’s introduction:
The realms, the wild and the human, are separate realms, we like to think, yet maybe not so separate after all, the border between thinner than a pane of glass. In this brief moment, it occurred to me, I glimpsed the environmental ethic that has informed my own way of being in Florida these many years, the ethic that inspires each of the chapters in this book you hold in your hands, an ethic that acknowledges and embraces the radical intermingling between realms we have long seen in opposition to each other.
I celebrate this “radical intermingling” throughout these essays, which are themselves as tangled, diverse, and alive as the subtropical forests and swamps of South Florida—a suburban wildness where boundaries blur and unexpected connections thrive.
While Of Slash Pines and Manatees invokes the Florida where I grew up, Dinosaur Dreams brings me back to the many road trips I’ve taken across the Western U.S. with my daughters when they were Ellie’s age—sometimes in search of beings like the Sandhill crane (a bird about as close to a dinosaur as one can imagine), other times exploring a storied place inhabited for generations if not eons before us. And like any memorable road trip, where relationships are at the core of the voyage—the majority of the trip is spent on the road, after all—what I admire so much in Hollars’s book is the intimacy he shares with his daughter and therefore with his readers. The relationship matures even in their journey’s relatively short time frame and is all the more precious because of that:
Something like wonder crosses Ellie’s face as she wades into its ankle-deep water. I feel it too. We’re sharing a piece of the world that we have found together. A small, secret place that required a literal walk across a plank.
Then—as the last of the light fades beneath the million-year-old Rimrocks—a change occurs. Just like that, the kid is gone, and a preteen Ellie appears in her place. I am stunned by the transformation, which has undoubtedly been occurring for weeks but is only catching up with me now. Why is it that evolutionary change can take millions of years within species but happens in a heartbeat when it’s your daughter?
Why indeed? As a father of daughters, I know that sudden transformation—and find this touching scene especially poignant, one of many in a book filled with action, adventure, natural and human history, and more.
If it’s not clear by now, what these books really narrate, what makes them so important, is a word that’s all too rare in our techno-driven, politically divisive world today: love. Love of and for our children, our friends, our homes and communities, the more-than-human world, and the places disappearing far too fast, far too often. In Dinosaur Dreams, Hollars hasn’t just recapped his delightful road trip with his sweet daughter Ellie, he’s penned an enduring love letter that resonates through the mysteries of deep time and a world just as mysterious, beautiful, and challenged today. In Of Slash Pines and Manatees, Furman hasn’t just presented finely crafted essays on plants and animals, he’s opened his heart to the reader, inviting us into the intricate, intimate, and diverse built and natural communities he adores.
Hollars and Furman have filled these pages with love. I am grateful and replenished by their remarkable, lovely books.
Simmons Buntin is the author of Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far; a collection of sustainable community case studies titled Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places; and two books of poetry, Bloom and Riverfall. He’s also the co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org and president of the nonprofit Terrain Publishing. Simmons lives in Tucson where he is the senior director of marketing and communications at the University of Arizona’s College of Information Science, and can also be found at urbanwild.substack.com.
Read “Stopover,” an excerpt of Satellite by Simmons Buntin appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by InesBazdar, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Simmons Buntin by Chris Richards.
