Kimmerer invites us to reconsider how we see our relationship with the earth. Even if you are a nature nut like me, the way she brings you into the understanding of earth as a provider, a magician, and a wise sage made fall in love yet again with where we live and wanting to learn more of how to better live alongside, and with, nature.
Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…
From my review at the Southern Review of Books: Across each of these vulnerable essays, Park offers no definitive path forward. What each essay points to is unending change. This book is needed. Instead of sharing hard-and-fast edicts, the kind desired by those with a fundamentalist frame of mind, Park advocates for courage and conversation. When we, too, ask questions about life, death, parenting, the climate, God, and how to be a good human, she is generous enough to tell us a hard truth: there are no answers. But knowing, and even understanding, isn't the goal. The task, according to Park, is not to shrink away from this difficult time, but to engage with it, to do something to make it better, and to continue...without end.
For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells’s Believers, World Without End circles the connections between climate change and faith in the fear and fascination of the end of the world.When Martha Park’s father announces he is retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moves home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hopes to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she becomes increasingly compelled by her uncertainty, and grows curious whether doubt itself could be a kind of faith that more closely echoes…
I read this again while I was recovering from major surgery. It felt like I'd come home somehow. Which is weird because I was at home a lot. But Gautreaux's settings and characters are all so familiar, they bring you back to the place inside you where you first discovered what "home" meant. It was great to have this part of my healing process.
Set largely in rural Louisiana, Tim Gautreaux's masterful debut story collection follows men and women whose ordinary lives reach a point of rupture, a moment when convention gives way to crisis and everything changes: A drunken train engineer charges toward disaster, a father borrows and old airplane to chase down his daughter's kidnapper, a young man falls in love with a voice on the radio. Written with humor, suspense, and a powerful affection for humanity in all its wild forms, Same Place, Same Things is the first great work by a master of the form.
One word describes Louisiana fifty years from now after climate change intensifies: Soaked. A nearly silent Cajun man is the last speaker of Louisiana French but doesn't know what he is saying. A Vietnamese woman recovering from the trauma of war looks for home in a hurricane. A farmer gambles his inherited land on the best marijuana Louisiana has ever known. Laughing in the face of oblivion, lending a hand to the hopeless, adapting in spite of tragedy, and enduring when everything else is gone, is what the people of Louisiana, Toby LeBlanc's people, do best.
