Stegner and Abbey “are two who have lighted my way,” nature writer Wendell Berry admitted. They have lighted the way for...
The lives and legacies of two influential environmentalists.
Gessner (Creative Writing/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington; The Tarball Chronicles: A Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill, 2011, etc.) weaves together biography, cultural criticism, travel and nature writing in this engaging record of a journey to discover the American West and two of the region’s most prominent celebrants: Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) and Guggenheim Fellow Edward Abbey (1927-1989). Besides reading the two men’s published works, Gessner visited the places in which they lived; interviewed family, friends, co-workers and students; and mined their manuscripts. Although both men felt passionately about the West and their commitment to environmentalism, they were starkly different: “Saint Wallace the Good” was the “intellectual godfather” of Western writers, “the man of order, the man of culture.” He taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard, founded Stanford’s creative writing program, patiently sat on environmental committees, and was a devoted husband and father. “ ‘Radical,’ ” Gessner discovered, “was a word he came to despise.” Abbey, scruffy and combative, was the “the man of wildness, the counterculturalist…serious about his anarchism,” who carried out—and incited—acts of environmental sabotage. Married five times and a desultory father to five children, he was “more beatnik than cowboy…right down to the jugs of wine and many women.” Yet for all their differences in style, they converged in recognizing the increasing vulnerability of the West to drought, fires, fracking and overwhelming tourism. They both battled romantic Western myths of cowboy culture and rugged individualism. Those myths and a “lyric celebration of nature,” Stegner argued, undermined effective environmentalism, which should be focused on practical steps for ensuring responsible land use.
Stegner and Abbey “are two who have lighted my way,” nature writer Wendell Berry admitted. They have lighted the way for Gessner, as well, as he conveys in this graceful, insightful homage to their work and to the region they loved.Pub Date: April 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0393089998
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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PERSPECTIVES
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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