From the vantage point of her 70th year, this collection is a testament to a lifetime of doing just that.
A collection of essays that serve as a solid introduction to a writer blessed with an all-consuming consciousness steeped in both faith and science.
Over the span of a 40-year career, Dillard has written memoirs (An American Childhood, 1987, etc.) and novels (The Maytrees, 2007, etc.), but she is perhaps best known for her nonfiction narratives, which are personal and deeply aware. “It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open” she writes in an essay excerpted here from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner that made her a literary celebrity at the age of 29. “Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children. Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot?” Over the four decades since the publication of Pilgrim, the author’s vision has only sharpened. Seeing a trapped deer (“The Deer at Providencia”) raises the eternal question of suffering. In “The Weasel,” Dillard contrasts an encounter between a thinking animal and a reactive one. She’s at her best when seeing the world in a grain of sand, or billions of them; the essay “Sand” is also about prehistoric life and the Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who devoted his life to uncovering it. A similar juxtaposition of micro and macro is at work in “An Expedition to the Pole,” in which Dillard compares dual approaches to the infinite: Arctic exploration and Catholic Mass. The author gives insight into her own craft in her advice to younger writers: don’t bank your fire. “Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now,” she writes.
From the vantage point of her 70th year, this collection is a testament to a lifetime of doing just that.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243297-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
A fine overview of wide-angle environmentalism.
Hannibal (Good Parenting Through Your Divorce, 2006, etc.) explores the ambitious Spine of the Continent Initiative, a massive project to protect wildlife and land by connecting expanses of acreage across North America.
The concept, pioneered by conservation biologist Michael Soulé, has been picked up by many others over the years, as a long-term way to help preserve wildlife and plant life in the West. Its ultimate goal was to unite discrete areas of publicly and privately owned wilderness to create one huge nature preserve stretching from Alaska to Mexico. In the first third of the book, Hannibal focuses on the history of conservation biology. The last two-thirds spotlight some of the many small organizations and researchers that are contributing to the larger vision, including projects focusing specifically on beavers, jaguars and wolves, among others. Throughout, Hannibal repeats the idea that everything in an ecosystem is connected. It’s a seemingly simple concept, well-backed by research, and the author discusses how, in the long run, working for the preservation of even a single species links directly to larger issues such as climate change. Because Hannibal writes in a casual first-person voice, the narrative is occasionally haphazard, as she delves into the history of the beaver-pelt trade in America in one section and explores Soulé’s life-changing experience with Zen Buddhism in another. It has its share of odd moments, as when Hannibal compares beaver ponds to the concept of romanticism, or when she asks a scientist who experimented on temperature-intolerant pikas in the 1970s, “How could you fry those bunnies?” The author doesn’t fully explore the opinions of anyone who might oppose the Spine plan, but the book works well as an introduction to modern conservationist figures and concepts for casual readers.
A fine overview of wide-angle environmentalism.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-7214-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Densely packed, adroitly written life history of the red- cockaded woodpecker by McFarlane, a ``woodpecker expert and conservationist.'' Red-cockaded woodpeckers are perfectly adapted to the pine forest—once enormous—that started at the Gulf Coast, ran a thousand miles to the Atlantic, and up to the Chesapeake Bay. Unique among woodpeckers, they are cooperative: Nonbreeding males are ``helpers,'' assisting the breeding pair by incubating the eggs, or by brooding and feeding the nestlings. Their home is a deep cavity drilled in a live pine, with resin wells—a strong snake repellent—ringed around the entry hole. What caused this species to be put on the endangered list in 1968? Their perfect adoption to the longleaf pine forest, McFarlane says, exposed them to timber companies that clear-cut huge acreages for pulpwood (used for making paper). In 1975, the Fish and Wildlife Service convened a five-man symposium (including a timber-company representative and a forester for the Service, neither of whom considered the species endangered) to draft a ``Recovery Plan'' for the bird. The plan emerged in 1979 and was immediately embroiled in proposals and counterproposals, one problem being that listing of endangered species halted during the Reagan Administration. At this time, no new plan has been approved and the woodpeckers continue to disappear. Although the climax here is the ``Peckerwood Politics'' that have led to the woodpecker's imperilment, McFarlane's discussions of avian territoriality, breeding, nesting, and anatomy have great depth, expanding our understanding of a single species into a broad appreciation of ecology. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 13, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03066-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
