Review by Booklist Review
(It is Booklist policy that a book written or edited by a staff member receive a brief description rather than a recommending review.) This collection of nature writing features the short fiction of such accomplished writers as Rick Bass, Margaret Atwood, Barry Lopez, E. L. Doctorow, and Tess Gallagher. Diane Ackerman's foreword, "The Character of Nature," and Seaman's introduction, "The Edge of Wilderness," provide the framework for the collection of 11 stories. --Bonnie Smothers
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a departure for DK Publishing, Booklist editor Donna Seaman collects 14 diverse and intriguing short works of fiction under the title Our Nature: Stories of Wildness. Contributors include popular nature writers like Linda Hogan and Diane Ackerman, who provides the foreword, and general fiction writers like Margaret Atwood, who suggests, fancifully, that she was a bat in a previous life. Recognizing that one need not write directly about nature to appreciate it, Rick Bass, Barry Lopez and E.L. Doctorow each explore how thin the line is that separates supposedly civilized beings from wild (or animalistic) behavior. With the freedom and expansiveness that fiction allows, each contributor shows how undeniably a part of nature we all are. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Seaman, an editor at Booklist, has compiled a superb collection of short stories that digs deep into the psyche to explore our wild nature our instincts, fears, and spiritual connections to nature. The impressive array of authors includes novelists E.L. Doctorow and Linda Hogan, as well as environmental writers Rick Bass and Barry Lopez. Several environmental issues, such as habitat destruction, logging, and chemical spills, provide a subtle backdrop upon which the stories unfold. In Kent Meyers's "The Heart of the Sky," a farmer restores a field to wetlands after an encounter with a Canadian goose. The old man in Simon J. Ortiz's "Men on the Moon" asks the simple yet profound question, Is it really important that men get to the moon? Stories range from tragic (Doctorow's "Willi") to whimsical (Margaret Atwood's "My Life as a Bat") to delightfully humorous (Lorrie Moore's "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens"). Highly recommended for both academic and public libraries. Maureen J Delaney-Lehman, Lake Superior State Univ. Lib., Sault Ste. Marie, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In Seaman's debut anthology of 14 previously published stories by such literary lights as Margaret Atwood and E.L. Doctorow, Lorrie Moore and Barry Lopez, and with a foreword by Diane Ackerman, the theme of wildness gains a pleasing complexity. Atwood's "My Life as a Bat" looks sympathetically at wildness in a former life, while Moore takes a more ironic view of the loss of a cat in "Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens." More sobering considerations of the subject, in which affinity with nature gives rise to alienation, comes in Rick Bass's "Swamp Boy," as adolescent cruelty knows no bounds in pursuing a boy with a passion for the bayou, and in Lopez's "The Open Lot," in which a talented but misunderstood researcher at New York's Museum of Natural History is compensated by a persistent view of wildlife in an empty lot of Manhattan. Finally, in Kent Meyers's "The Heart of the Sky," wildness proves providential to a family in trouble who are redeemed when a farmer stops his combine to save a trapped Canada goose. A nicely mixed, strongly written collection. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
