A soulful and sobering memoir of climate change and personal responsibilities.
An American-born Canadian journalist contemplates mindful living in a world threatened by climate change.
In her first book, one-time Seattle lawyer Saxifrage tells the story of how she evolved from “comfy mama to climate hawk.” Her transformation began when she participated in an organic farming program on Cortes Island, just off the coast of British Columbia. Saxifrage and her husband immediately fell in love with the island’s unspoiled natural beauty and bought a 20-acre parcel. Eager to help preserve Cortes Island for future generations, the author began to serve on community environmental boards and research climate change. What she learned from these experiences led her to implement a plan—which included buying a hybrid vehicle, line-drying clothes, riding bicycles, using electricity rather than natural gas and traveling long distances by bus—to reduce personal carbon emissions. As part of this project of "claiming [their] relationship" to the Earth, she and her husband even renamed themselves after a tiny flower of the genus Saxifragaceae. The more invested she became in the well-being of Cortes Island and the planet, the more connected she felt to the living, the dead and herself. The ancient human jawbone discovered on a second property the family owned allowed Saxifrage to understand “the gift of limited time in this beautiful place” that she had been granted. Efforts at remembering dreams connected her to her innermost self and a Jungian collective unconscious. At the same time, heightened awareness led to increased anxiety about the rapidity of ecological destruction. Mindfulness pulled her from the depths of her own encroaching despair. Through this practice, Saxifrage learned that her task as a planetary caretaker was to find the balance to enjoy life while finding the resilience she needed to carry on the fight to save the Earth.
A soulful and sobering memoir of climate change and personal responsibilities.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-86571-798-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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