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FINDING HOME

WRITING ON NATURE AND CULTURE FROM ORION MAGAZINE

A thoughtfully compiled and provocative collection of 19 essays, selected from the Orion quarterly by editorial-board member Sauer, that explore the possibilities of living artfully on the earth. On local ground, David Ehrenfeld, real-estate developer Wallace Kaufman, and others write of change in landscapes they know intimately and of the ways in which we as individuals and as a nation are letting the land go. John Stilgoe traces the self- conscious history of our physical and emotional relationship to beaches, and Barry Lopez describes the contradictions between a ``homogeneous national geography'' projected by politics and advertising and the ``rigors'' of heterogeneous ``local'' geographies that individuals actually experience. Other essays describe innovative ways to redefine lands and cultures physically through humanly populated biosphere reserves and species restoration. Encompassing a broader geography, essays by Susan Power Bratton and others acknowledge a vital sense of reciprocity between man and nature. Included is Darrell Addison Posey's ``The Science of the Mebengokre,'' whose revelations about the sophisticated land-management systems of a branch of Amazonian Indians offer one of this collection's most compelling examples of how misguided are our notions of ``pristine'' wilderness. Explicit in three exuberant essays on childhood and nature is the importance of encouraging children, as future caretakers, to develop connections with nature early in their lives. And by expanding the vocabulary of metaphor and challenging methods of observation, contributors to the book's final section reexamine the ways in which we engage nature so that, in our perceptions of earth and its inhabitants, we reside alongside it and not above it. A valuable and admirably nonpartisan reformulation of our cultural relationship to nature, containing work by many of America's foremost nature writers.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1992

ISBN: 0-8070-8518-9

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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A FIRE STORY

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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H IS FOR HAWK

Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...

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Our Verdict

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    finalist


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist

An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.

Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.

Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.

Pub Date: March 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0802123411

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014

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