From a land teeming with kangaroos to villagers who speak with their hands.

CHASING KANGAROOS A Continent, a Scientist, and A Search For the World's Most Extraordinary Creature By Tim Flannery | Grove. 258 pp. $24

Newfoundland's seabirds, lovely as they are, can't match the exoticism of the euros, quokkas, dingoes, hare wallabies, red-necked wallabies and tree kangaroos that hop through Australia. Or, apparently, their importance.

"The fate of the kangaroos is inextricably bound with the fate of my country," writes Tim Flannery in Chasing Kangaroos, his paean to the creatures who, he argues, serve as a symbol of Australia's past and a harbinger of global change.

Chasing Kangaroos is part memoir of "roo" encounters and part story of Australia, complete with accounts of local paleontological history, aboriginal peoples and Captain Cook. It's also full of interesting details about kangaroos. The female kangaroo, for example, can dictate the pace of gestation, choosing the time when she'll deliver her joey. A colony of strongyle worms in a kangaroo's stomach indicates a healthy animal. British travelers started bringing kangaroos back to Europe toward the end of the 18th century; by 1820, herds of them were wandering some English parks.

With interesting particulars such as these, Flannery turns a story of his own preoccupation with kangaroos into a discourse on the Australian condition. He covers the struggles of aboriginal communities and the environmental concerns facing the continent as well as the rest of the world. But Chasing Kangaroos almost works best read backwards, since Flannery's concluding argument for the kangaroo as a representative of Australia compels a reader to learn more about this remarkable animal. ·

FOREVER ON THE MOUNTAIN The Truth Behind One of Mountaineering's Most Controversial And Mysterious Disasters By James M. Tabor | Norton. 400 pp. $26.95

In Forever on the Mountain, James M. Tabor revisits the 1967 Mt. McKinley tragedy that claimed the lives of seven men after they were separated from their colleagues and marooned in a vicious storm. The climbing team had come together late and was divided into two factions, which seems to have contributed to the disaster. Joe Wilcox, one of the expedition's leaders, has shouldered much of the blame over the years, both from fellow team members and others. In this book, Tabor sets out to vindicate him.

One of the chief criticisms leveled at Wilcox was that he did not summon an all-out rescue by radio once he lost contact with his fellow mountaineers. Tabor defends Wilcox -- attributing his actions to altitude sickness, exhaustion and grief -- and fingers the National Park Service for its slow reaction to the climbers. Its rescues depended upon a dysfunctional and convoluted chain of command that, Tabor writes, failed the men, as did the park service's requirement that McKinley expeditions sign on with a rescue group that owned no aircraft. (Tabor is quick to note that the NPS has since changed its policy.)

Forever on the Mountain digresses occasionally -- discussing, for instance, alpha wolf behavior as it pertained to the leaders of the trip -- and the tireless fervor of Tabor's convictions sometimes makes a reader feel browbeaten. But Tabor tells the story of the crisis and its aftermath with dramatic flair and deep knowledge. Forever on the Mountain grips even non-climbers with its harrowing scenes of thorny relationships tested by extraordinary circumstances.

THE IAMBICS OF NEWFOUNDLAND Notes From an Unknown Shore By Robert Finch | Counterpoint. 270 pp. $26

For nearly a decade, nature writer and commentator Robert Finch traveled through Newfoundland, a landscape some consider as forbidding as Mt. McKinley. The Iambics of Newfoundland (the title refers to a hitchhiker's insistence that Finch had to get the rhythm of the place to understand it) is a series of his essays about the region, a collection of impressions as well as narratives about wildlife, people and language.

Finch clearly relishes the evocative Newfoundland vernacular. Ice, he writes, "could be buckly, black, taut, tished, loose, slatchy, slob, way, and young. It could spawn, calve, and have a weather edge." He uses this rich vocabulary to enhance his cadenced prose as he describes the revelatory beauty of the province's birds, flowers and landscapes. He chronicles going hunting with locals, exploring the changing towns and driving partygoers out to replenish their beer. He is disappointed when he visits a lighthouse keeper who spends the evening surfing satellite television channels and astonished when the man tells Finch a poignant story of loss. Newfoundland plays with Finch's sense of time, history and human rapport. "I felt," he writes, "as if I were plummeting through overlapping and telescoped layers and stages of connection, toward something still unseen and unfelt."

TALKING HANDS What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind By Margalit Fox | Simon & Schuster. 354 pp. $27

In Al-Sayyid, a remote Israeli village, many of the Bedouin inhabitants are deaf from an inherited condition. They and their hearing families have developed a sign language that everyone in the village has used for generations. However, as more and more of the village's children are educated in Israeli schools, they are learning Israeli signs. Linguists are hurrying to study the Al-Sayyid system to discover what it reveals about the human instinct for communication -- before the village's indigenous language disappears.

In Talking Hands (which publishes on Aug. 21), Margalit Fox, a reporter with the New York Times, alternates between describing the work of an international team of linguists she accompanied to the village and discussing the theories and history of sign language. She chronicles the deaf community that used to live on Martha's Vineyard, the influence of Gallaudet University and the differences between American Sign Language and other sign languages. Fox explains each of her linguistic terms thoroughly, but the jargon can grow tedious for readers unused to "entity classifiers" and "endpoints of spatial verbs." The story of Al-Sayyid is fascinating, nonetheless. "After years of careful scrutiny," writes Fox, "the linguists can truly say of this language in the desert, In the beginning was the word."

Eliza McGraw is a writer living in Washington, D.C.