Finding Home (Concord Library)

Rating:
Summary: A provocative collection
Review: No matter what you think about environmentalism, nature, and ecology, this book has an essay to challenge your assumptions. More than that, though: these essays don't merely challenge, but rather expand your viewpoint.

The essays are arranged under five categories: Finding Home; The Geographies of Home; Other Walls, Other Wildness; A Child's Sense of Wildness; and Metaphors of Desire. There are magnificent and evocative essays by such well-known writers as Barry Lopez, Scott Russell Sanders, Terry Tempest Williams, and David Ehrenfeld, but also some wonderful pieces by writers who are less known. One of my own favorites is Wallace Kaufman's "Confessions of a Developer", an essay I found so fascinating that I wanted it to be an entire book of its own.

As can be expected from any work originally published by Orion Magazine, the writing here is uniformly excellent. Even if you have no interest in the ideas and philosophies behind these essays, you can revel in the beautiful language of most of them. It would be a shame, though, to ignore what these writers have to say.

Rating:
Summary: A provocative collection
Review: No matter what you think about environmentalism, nature, and ecology, this book has an essay to challenge your assumptions. More than that, though: these essays don't merely challenge, but rather expand your viewpoint.

The essays are arranged under five categories: Finding Home; The Geographies of Home; Other Walls, Other Wildness; A Child's Sense of Wildness; and Metaphors of Desire. There are magnificent and evocative essays by such well-known writers as Barry Lopez, Scott Russell Sanders, Terry Tempest Williams, and David Ehrenfeld, but also some wonderful pieces by writers who are less known. One of my own favorites is Wallace Kaufman's "Confessions of a Developer", an essay I found so fascinating that I wanted it to be an entire book of its own.

As can be expected from any work originally published by Orion Magazine, the writing here is uniformly excellent. Even if you have no interest in the ideas and philosophies behind these essays, you can revel in the beautiful language of most of them. It would be a shame, though, to ignore what these writers have to say.