[Book Notes]
Small Is Possible
Life in a Local Economy
By Lyle Estill, New Society Publishers, 2008.
In an age of increasing globalization, it is
hopeful to be reminded that there are still
communities where transactions are han-
dled in handshakes rather than receipts.
Estill takes us on a loving stroll through his
North Carolina neighborhood and shows
us how small-scale sustainability—feeding,
fueling, and financing locally—is both pos-
sible and preferable.
Coming Clean
Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal
By Michael Brune, Sierra Club Books, 2008.
Coming Clean’s focus is grassroots empowerment and a clearsighted indictment of
our ugly marriage to fossil fuels. Brune
completes each chapter with a bulleted
list of actions we can all take to steer
toward sustainability, and he doesn’t fail
to name names and throw some light on
both the plunderers and restorers of
American energy.
The Wide Open
Prose, Poetry, and Photographs of the Prairie
Edited by Annick Smith and Susan O’Connor,
University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Using photographs, fiction, and nonfiction,
the editors have skillfully assembled a
complex portrayal of the West’s high, dry,
and cold plains into a beautiful book.
Writers from Judy Blunt to Richard Ford
and from James Welch to Peter
Matthiessen explore what this vast land-
scape and our attachment to it means to
our cultural consciousness.
Agrostis exarata, bent grass, collected by John Muir, 1875. Courtesy of the Missouri
Botanical Garden.
What Makes a Child Lucky
A Novel
by Gioia Timpanelli, W. W. Norton, 2008.
Despite rather unlucky circumstances, food
and land and story and friendship magi-
cally buoy a child through an extended
exile on the edge of his Sicilian town.
specimens,” he exhorts his siblings), and
herbaria to Harvard, the Missouri
Botanical Garden, and the University of
the Pacific, among others. Some spent
almost one hundred years in a trunk or
attic. They were found through heroic acts
of detection and perseverance on the part
of author Bonnie Gisel. Some, however,
were lost forever.
It’s a gift to be able to scrutinize Muir’s
letters, both received and sent, his graceful sketches, his botany textbooks, and
almost two hundred of his plant specimens. Nature’s Beloved Son provides
opportunity to rest from the fray, get
drunk on beauty, and be grateful for a
genius of our tribe.
— Judith Larner Lowry
