I grew up fascinated by the natural world, in particular by the hemlock trees in a hollow in the North Carolina mountains where my family owned a cabin. Later, the hollow and that cabin would provide inspiration for my novel, Hemlock Hollow, in which a scientist wrestles with the ghosts of her past. Those hemlocks are in decline now due to the hemlock wooly adelgid, an invasive species working its way through the Appalachian Mountains. In many ways, my writing takes the grief of losing something so dear as grist for stories that center the power of place over time, and I’m drawn to other books that do the same.
I love this book because it evokes the rich tapestry of the land I grew up in and the people I grew up around, capturing in typical Kingsolver fashion those liminal edges between feral and tame, local and outsider, privileged and not so privileged.
Set in the Southern Appalachians, it tracks three characters’ lives over the course of a single, fecund summer. Science plays a big role, but so does faith, as the characters come to terms with gospels of their own making. As Kingsolver writes, “Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”
It is summer in the Appalachian mountains and love, desire and attraction are in the air. Nature, too, it seems, is not immune. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and interrupts her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself marooned in a strange place where she must declare or…
Part memoir, part requiem, this book is an ode to the hardscrabble beauty of the land and people of the longleaf pine. I read this book when it first came out in 1999 and more recently revisited it.
Janisse Ray writes about Georgia, where she grew up in a junkyard off Highway 1 and where my grandmother was from. She could just as easily have been writing about North Carolina and our fast-declining hemlock population here.
Reading this book gave this Appalachian boy an appreciation for the flat savannah down east with an ecosystem and culture both unique and fascinating.
From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a "heartfelt and refreshing" (New York Times) memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. This new edition updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope.
Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray…
This book is an upriver journey of self-discovery, a mystery evoking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and an exploration of the ethical entanglements of the modern pharmaceutical industry.
I was struck by the rich tapestry of life that Patchett evokes in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil in stark contrast to the bland, suburban Minnesota from which the main character, Marina, travels. Science plays a major role in this, and I was moved by the central questions at hand, which are what price are we willing to pay for scientific advancement and, at the end of the day, is scientific advancement even progress at all?
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION
There were people on the banks of the river.
Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women for ever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery; she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors, whose patience is fast running out. Anders Eckman, a mild-mannered lab researcher, is sent to investigate.
A curt letter reporting his untimely death is all that returns.
Now Marina Singh, Anders' colleague and once a student of…
What’s not to love about a book structured as a tree? This is a vast, episodic novel that takes traditional storytelling and turns it on its head.
A cast of characters connect through stories that grow from seed to trunk to limb. I finished this long read and immediately wanted to start again. It’s the kind of book that rewards a second or third pass. Complex, rife with science and faith and desperate longing, this book is a celebration of the tree, a clarion call to return our attention to our roots before it is too late.
One of Powers’ characters asks, “What do all good stories do?” He answers, “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.” I think that’s true of all of these books, and most definitely this one.
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers's twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours-vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see…
I love how Kimmerer braids botany with her personal history and the traditional knowledge of the Potawatomi people.
Part memoir, part natural history, this book reveals how much we can learn from plants if we just take the time to pay attention. In so many ways, science is just that: paying attention, attuning to the world around us we too often mindlessly pass through.
This book caused me to slow down and see nature unfolding around me and to reflect on my own journey from an inquisitive Boy Scout entranced by salamanders and crawdads to a busy adult, oblivious to the micro-worlds unfolding in my own backyard. This book is an invitation to reshape your relationship with nature and to relearn what has been lost.
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…
When a college professor inherits a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina, she must contend with the ghosts of her past. The discovery of a boy’s journal lures Caroline McAlister into the depths of a century-old murder and toward a past she thought she had long ago escaped. Her voice tangles with Carson Quinn’s in the laurel hell of a hollow they haunt a century apart, sharing hard lessons about love and loss.
I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.
Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.
Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…
A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.
Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…
