Smart, evocative, and memorable: nature-writing done right.
Lyrical nature essays set mostly in the American Southwest, with excursions to the tropics to escape the desert sun.
Meloy (The Last Cheater’s Waltz, 1999, etc.) is the laureate of far southeastern Utah, where she works as a writer and river-runner; it’s turf she knows well, and, though the literature of the Colorado Plateau is crammed with good work by the likes of Ann Zwinger, Edward Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams, she finds much that is fresh to report. Winding her way through the “geography of asceticism, in broken lands of bare rock and infrequent green,” she contemplates the mysteries of life and death, visits the backcountry of the Navajo nation (and informs us, among other useful facts, that the Navajo language has no word for freckles), considers what it means to be attached to one particular place, and takes a few potshots at the urban civilization on the plateau’s fringes in places such as Los Angeles (or, rather, in one of the book’s few clumsy images, “the platter of human paella that is Los Angeles”). With the exception of a couple of superfluous forays to the Bahamas and the Yucatán, Meloy sticks to country that she knows intimately, and her close knowledge of plant and animal life is evident on every page. There are a few of the humans bad/nature good tropes of other environmental works here and there, though Meloy has a lighter than usual touch: “Every so often, and especially when Homo sapiens, in our unwavering devotion to becoming the first species to witness our own extinction, escalates the pace and level of destruction, the natural world (what there is left of it) seems to respond in a flurry of irksome mischief,” she writes, proceeding to report on the doings of lizards, crickets, ants, birds, and her fellow humans.
Smart, evocative, and memorable: nature-writing done right.Pub Date: July 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40885-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Seeking to be ``free to explore the universe within,'' free- lance writer Modzelewski (Sports Illustrated, Outside, etc.) spent 18 months on an islet near Vancouver Island. Modzelewski's sojourn on Swanson Island was inspired in part by his admiration for Zen masters and mountain men such as Jeremiah Johnson. He sought hardships away from people, cities, ski resorts, and college, because ``sometimes you have to lower your standard of living to reach a higher level.'' The owner of the island is Will Malloff, a ``mechanical wizard and woodworker extraordinaire'' as well as a ``healer'' who goes off alone to the woods in an attempt to heal his own lung cancer. Malloff is a fascinating characteronly not as the pure mountain man/mystic of Modzelewski's fantasy, but as a realistic bridge between modern ``civilization'' and romantic notions of getting ``back to nature.'' Some of his working tools, axes and scythes, a few found, others made or purchased, are to Modzelewski ``objets d`art''; it's no accident, Modzelewski notes, that the older tools work best, doing ``minimum damage to the earth and keeping you strong in the process.'' The author's contacts with wildlife belie his underdeveloped, perhaps naive belief in a mystical universe: an injured bald eagle he rescued and nursed, died. When, around the same time, a feather fell from the sky, he ``accepted it as sacred.'' He delivers a sound, informative natural history of cetaceans, but when a killer whale surfaced, near his skiff, ``I touched the whale; she touched me; and what passed between us changed me forever.'' One can only wonder if it was as good for the whale, too. Modzelewski's scenes of salmon fishing, profiles of local characters, observations on a giant octopus, explorations of other islands are solidly wrought. A kind of New Age natural history, hokey but engrossing. (Illustrationsnot seen.)
Pub Date: May 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016533-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
A thoughtful recounting of one woman’s travels in the post—Cold War American West. Meloy (Raven’s Exile, not reviewed), an award-winning writer and river-runner who lives in southeastern Utah, writes that she awoke one morning to discover that she was “either helplessly unmoored from my Self or hopelessly lost in the murk of Self”—a sticky tangle either way. To reattach herself to herself and also to her chosen turf, this “duck-and-covergirl born in the nuclear West” decided to revisit the land of her youth, where the Kennedy-era promise of atomic energy too cheap to meter and of mutual assured destruction kept the nation teetering between existential gloom and technology-born optimism. Meloy’s wanderings take her to the back roads of the desert Southwest, to hidden canyons where Navajo witchcraft and toxic waste reign side by side, and to little towns where uranium miners wait for cancer to claim them; collectively, the author calls these places “the terrain of strategic death.” Her travels ultimately guide her to the birthplace of the nuclear age: Los Alamos, N.M., where Meloy gives us a tour of the famed laboratory where the A-bomb was invented—but also of the surrounding countryside, where dealers in nuclear curios ply their trade “against [a] Wile E. Coyote backdrop.” Much has changed in the West since nuclear peace broke out a decade ago; as Meloy writes, “Ground zero in the nineties has at first an oddly pastoral luminosity—pastoral, that is, to desert denizens like me, who are accustomed to harmonious ‘emptiness’ and therefore find nothing missing” in the empty landscape. But in the end, as she shows us, the desert remains the desert, timelessly indifferent to human foibles. Meloy has not only rediscovered her connection to the badlands’she’s also made a fine book in the bargain. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-4065-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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