Griffith’s love for words and her skill in using them, her easy familiarity with a host of poets, novelists, naturalists and...
An exuberant and erudite exploration of the meaning of wilderness and its place in our lives.
Griffiths (A Sideways Look at Time, not reviewed) traveled over seven years to some of the world’s wildest and most remote places seeking to understand how wildness expresses itself. She has categorized her journeys by the four elements—earth, water, fire and air—adding a fifth, ice, and concluding with a trip into the recesses of the human mind. The first chapter, “Wild Earth,” is an expedition into the Amazon basin, where she becomes immersed not just in the physical wildness of nature but in the culture of the indigenous people. When shamans introduce her to the hallucinogenic drink ayahuasca, she feels herself being transformed into a jaguar, an experience she describes vividly. The next, “Wild Ice,” takes her to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, where she lives among the Inuit and bears witness to the beauty of the land and the destruction by white newcomers of the native culture. In “Wild Water,” she learns about the wildness of the ocean and the creatures in it from the Bajo people of Indonesia, sea gypsies who live on a small island off Sulawesi. The hot, dry Australian outback is the setting for “Wild Fire.” There she lives among the Aboriginal people, comparing their spiritual understanding of the desert with the less felicitous attitudes of the white settlers. The highlands of West Papua are the setting for “Wild Air,” and there she is again traveling with native guides through exceedingly rough country and climbing high mountains. In Griffiths’s eyes, indigenous people are blessed with a wisdom and spirituality that the rest of us, herself excluded, just don’t get; a persistent theme is the harm done to the native people and their environment by intruding whites, especially Christian missionaries.
Griffith’s love for words and her skill in using them, her easy familiarity with a host of poets, novelists, naturalists and anthropologists, her openness to new experiences and her willingness to reveal so much of herself, make this a fascinating journey.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58542-403-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A vital, visually stunning photographic volume.
A conservationist and art photographer explores the erotic aspects of trees.
For more than 20 years, Arbor has been creating intimate photos of trees and people together. The humans, which include herself and others, are nearly always nude, and the folds and curves of their bodies harmonize with the sinew of the trees. In one, the author prostrates herself, as if on an altar, along a platform at the base of a 285-foot mountain ash; in others, she reclines on a willow that appears as though it’s bending to drink at a nearby pool or nestles in the crook of a windblown Cyprus, the curve of her back in perfect accord with the outermost bough’s lurch to the left. In one black-and-white photo, she molds herself to the basal furl of an enormous fig tree, pressing her palms and her cheek against its bark, looking like something from the pages of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. “For tens of thousands of years,” she writes, “people took refuge under trees, held council under trees, and depended upon trees for survival.” Indeed, from even earlier. Anyone perusing Arbor’s book can’t help but feel eerily reminded of humanity’s distant ancestors—the earliest hominids—and how some of them would have lived nearly their whole lives in the vanished oaks and beeches of the Pliocene (“we lived in kinship with them,” she achingly writes of that forgotten past). Sometimes the models’ fetal poses in the trees drift toward the sentimental, à la Anne Geddes’ work, and some readers may be amused by the fact that sometimes the models are difficult to locate, bringing to mind Where’s Waldo? But such levity isn’t unwelcome, and it serves only to intensify the fact that humans can appear eerily camouflaged in nature. Fortunately, Arbor has a remarkable eye for how light and shadow shape the viewer’s experience of texture, and some pictures are every bit as powerful and haunting as Edward Weston’s images of bell peppers—or, for that matter, of trees. Forest giants from Tasmania to South Africa to Anatolia have never seemed so alive.
A vital, visually stunning photographic volume.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-72604-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: TreeGirl Studios LLC
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An Amish farmer's blissful account of the rhythms of nature and work, finding delight in everyday places. ``Sometimes I wonder whether I farm to make a living or whether it is all a front, just an excuse to be out in the fields looking at clouds,'' writes Kline (Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer's Journal, 1990), who works the farm in northwestern Ohio where he grew up. He's not a typical modern-day farmer: He plows with draft horses and uses chemical pesticides only as a last resort, and then reluctantly. His view of wildlife is more enlightened, too. He tolerates woodchucks (considered unredeemed pests by farmers dependent on expensive heavy equipment) because their burrows nurture foxes, rabbits, and other species. Kline organizes his observations into short, discursive essays that shift easily from farmstead to fields, woods, and the community. Though some early passages seem pedestrian (the section on spiders reads like an elementary science text), his observations of plants and animals grow more intriguing the farther from home he wanders. Kline's finest moments involve fascinating interactions with wildlife that show how attuned he is to nature. He observes a titmouse plucking fur for its nest from a sleeping raccoon's back, recalls a pet crow from childhood who liked to grip the hood ornaments of cars and go for a feather-ruffling ride, and stands stock still in a field until a weasel passes between his legs, close enough for Kline to observe drops of blood on its nose. He respects nature, and it rewards him with genuine oddities: A damselfly lays eggs on his finger; a napping woodchuck arches its back appreciatively when he scratches it with his walking stick. Though Kline's thoroughly charming survey of the natural world focuses on the flora and fauna indigenous to Ohio, it has much to teach us about appreciating wild things wherever we happen to be. (four illustrations, not seen) (Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-8203-1938-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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