The great clod Notes and memoirs on nature and history in East Asia

As the subtitle says, these writings are notes and memoirs. In them, personal doings and opinions crop up within temporally progressive presentations on particular topics. After the introduction and first two chapters lead into the rest via Snyder's second great trip to Japan specifically, to its northern large island, Hokkaido subsequent chapters proceed from generality to specificity and from ancient to just-premodern times. If the general subject is the great clod that is the vast human habitat of East Asia, particular topics, surveyed in the sweep of history, include nature (flora and fauna), religion/ethics, poetry, agriculture, civilization (through the growth of communities), cultural expansion (through trade and imperialism), and painting. Each essay furnishes a graceful, very conversational (sentence fragments and all), but keenly well-informed enticement to pursue its subject further. This kind of friendly, even compassionate, mode of instruction comes, of course, from the American arguably most responsible for spreading appreciation of East Asia among North Americans. If this little book should prove Snyder's last word on East Asia, it is wonderfully enough.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2016 Booklist

The noted poet and essayist returns with a deceptively small book enfolding a lifetime's worth of study. Snyder (This Present Moment, 2015, etc.) was an environmentalist before that word was widely applied, "radicalized," he memorably writes, "by the ghosts of the original trees still hanging out by their stumps and telling me what had gone on" in the overlogged forests of the Puget Sound. He has also been a student of Asian religions for seven decades. Both interests inform this slender volume, which reads as a kind of personalized digest of scholarship and history blended with memoir and traveloguea book, in short, not quite like any other but trademark Snyder, its learning lightly worn but profoundly stated. The author begins on a rueful note that will be repeated elsewhere: that he had imagined, in his exuberant youth, that by going to China and Japan he would be immersing himself in civilizations that treated the land better than the materialist West did. Not so, he writes with wisdom gained: "large, civilized societies inevitably have a harsh effect on the natural environment, regardless of philosophical or religious values." His reading of East Asian history is a kind of understated study of the Fall of Man, tinged with anarchist morals; in the place of "a free, untaxed, self-sustaining people" rises a bureaucratized, state-governed society amenable to such things as slavery and despoliation. Religious traditions such as Taoism rise in critique, offering other objects of striving than the material: says one Buddhist exhortation, "the Perfect Way is without difficulty: strive hard!" Classical poetry, calligraphy, the best source of temple incenseall figure in the text, which has something of the feel of a valediction. Elegant and thoughtful, with much to read between the lines in commentary on a long life's work. Students and admirers of Snyder will be enchanted and intrigued. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.