You might notice the Powell's bookstore box on this page. You can use it to search for a new or used book, and if you buy it, this site gets a cut.
Encounters with our Given World
THE LAND’S WILD MUSIC
by Mark Tredinnick.
Trinity University Press.
The author calls them “encounters,” with the kind of care for parsing both words and experience that characterizes this author’s approach to what others might just call profiles of four prominent “nature writers” (another troublesome term, especially to these writers): Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams and James Galvin.
In a lovely essay called “The Job is To Pour Your Heart Out,” Edward Hoagland writes, “I believe, incidentally, that those of us who care about bears and frogs haven’t much time left to write about them, not just because---among the world’s other emergencies---a twilight is settling over them, but because people are losing their capacity to fathom any form of nature except, in a more immediate sense, their own.”
These four writers grapple with both problems, which pushes them to more public roles as advocates and activists. They (and the author) also rebel against the usual notion and sometimes past practice of nature writing as being pretty and ornamental, or even as separating humanity from the active context of nature. They are all engaged in “Encounters with Nature” (the title of a collection of Paul Shepard essays.)
For more of this review, a new review on a book about Antarctica, and other recommendations in nature, environment and science, go to BOOKS IN HEAT HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment