The Story Isn't Over: Bewilderment

Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

Norton

 "Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light."

Plato

 Bewilderment, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can mean “confusion from losing one’s way.”  Richard Powers’ previous novel, The Overstory, featured nine major characters (and their back stories), in a narrative told in several voices that took places in many locations over decades.  It is 502 pages long, and ends: “This will never end.” This novel had powerful scenes, memorable ideas and impressive sentences; it broke new ground in contemporary fiction and won the Pulitzer Prize, but bewilderment was probably not uncommon among readers trying to navigate it.

 Except in its basic concerns, Bewilderment is in many ways its opposite.  In just 278 pages (not all of them entirely filled with prose) comprised of short chapters (some just a couple of pages.)  The story is told by one narrator in one narrative voice, and apart from first-person description, it is basically a series of dialogues between two characters.  There are only a few locations, and it takes place in a single year.

 A couple of early reviews (in the Guardian and the New York Times) characterized the book as polemical and unliterary.  Dwight Gardner in the Times (a reviewer no writer should ever read) called it an “earnest opinion page essay” and “middling Netflix sci-fi product.” “As fiction it is DOA.”

 I take an opposite view: to me the book is highly literary, and to suggest otherwise misleads readers who might anticipate a kind of self-help book.

 The narrator is Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist and the single father of a troubled nine year old son, Robin.  Robin is highly intelligent and sensitive, but his behavior endangers both of them (though it would barely seem unusual in novels of a different age): school officials want him in treatment that usually means drugs, and Theo’s parental rights are also threatened.  

Robin’s equilibrium in what we all know is often a nasty world for a sensitive child, is thrown off by the sudden death of his mother, an environmental activist, two years before.  The dialogues between Theo and Robin that form the bulk of this book often center on her. Much of Theo’s reminiscence is also about his wife.   She (Aly) is the novel’s third major character.  There is a phantom fourth, to be noted later.

 To avoid drugging his son, Theo seizes on the hope implied in an experimental treatment called decoded neural feedback.  (It is being developed by a scientist he and his wife knew, who becomes a subsidiary but important character.)  As a literary device, this works like Wells’ time machine: it’s plausible and drives the story. It’s also a real and potentially useful and scary thing, though Powers gives it superpowers it may never possess.  In the novel, Robin entrains with the ecstatic state previously recorded by his mother, absorbing her equanimity and empathy as well as their shared passions for the natural world.  For a while it works: with his sketchbook in hand and his eyes wide open to the non-human world, “Fascination had made him invincible.”

 The precocious and angelic child, the child who sees and feels what adults are too jaded and conflicted to see and feel, has a long literary pedigree, going back at least to Charles Dickens.  Paul Dombey, the son in Dombey and Son is a clear precedent.  Their literary nature is as memorable, revelatory and tragic characters.  Readers who are looking for tips on how to deal with their own children suffering from “eco-anxiety” (a now leading source of mental and emotional problems for the young) should not expect a happy ending in this sense.

 As substitute bedtime stories, Theo shares with Robin examples of radically different forms and fates of life that may be possible on distant planets, based on Theo’s astrobiology but with literary models in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities for example, and the mind-bending varieties of civilizations in an acknowledged science fiction masterpiece, Olaf Stapledon’s Star-Maker (which Theo mentions late in this book.) 

 There’s also the precedent of Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which both major characters mention in this novel as a kind of model for Robin’s experience.  Powers has said in interviews that when he went back to re-read that book, he saw that Keyes prefaced it  with a version of the quote from Plato at the top of this column, about the two types of bewilderment: of going from darkness (in Plato’s cave of illusions, for instance) into the light, and of leaving the light for the darkness. That in essence is the movement of Bewilderment. 

The irony of Robin’s angelic vision is that he is the only one who is attuned and attends to this earthy, physical world—the not just human but planetary universe that humanity ignores (and therefore is profoundly ignorant of), that humanity misunderstands and is actively (if not always consciously) destroying.  For example, only Robin sees the huge great horned owl in their own neighborhood that is invisible to others until they see photos of it on their phones.

 As often in literary tradition, the character names don’t appear to be arbitrary.  Maybe Robin Byrne is a bird whose wings are burned when he flies too close to the sun, so perhaps this is also a slant on the Daedelus and Icarus story. Theo is the flawed god of this tale because he’s the sole teller, revealing what he’s tried to create and what he has failed to fix.  But Robin’s journey is also joyful, and (in a book in which Buddhism is referenced more than once) he lives a kind of enlightenment: of being in the present moment, and the intense presence of the planet.  The ghost of his mother Aly, as patterned in the neural feedback machine, becomes Robin’s ally, like a goddess to a mortal.  Even the neuroscientist Currier is a carrier, bringing Robin together with his mother, and ultimately uniting them with Theo.

 The structure of this book aids the simple magic of its sentences to create beautiful reading.  There is more going on than simplicity would cover, and some of it remains puzzling to me, but re-reading is likely to either solve the mysteries or deepen them.

  The novel is set in a kind of near future or alternative present, or slightly skewed recent past, in which Trump is triumphant.  This recognizable political background noise becomes deafening and defining at the end, which makes this also seem like a literary equivalent of a realistic novel set in Nazi German in the 1930s. 

Robin’s voice reminded me especially of the Quibbler boys in Kim Stanley Robinson’s similarly near-future or alternate-present Science in the Capitol trilogy, reborn as the long novel Green Earth.  There are other literary connections there as well.

 The missing fourth character I mentioned is the one non-human (also ghostly) character in the story (though lots of animals—and aliens—are mentioned): Chester, the family dog, whose death shortly after Aly’s precipitated Robin’s crisis.  Robin wanted to get “a new Chester” but Theo demurred.  He thought better of that decision later, but too late. As a literary matter, a dog in the family might take the story places the author didn’t want to go.  But as a practical matter, the father’s decision seems under-explained and flawed.  For a child so desperate to bond with non-human life, an animal companion could be better therapy than drugs, or a machine.

Part of Robin's sweetness becomes the ecstasy he feels just seeing the world underneath, above and around the human world.  It becomes part of the beauty of the reading.  But this also makes his tragedy all the more troubling, as well as the essentially artificial way he comes to it. 

 As he did with The Overstory, Powers challenges the assumption that literary fiction can’t include non-human life as legitimate subjects. Other writers in other traditions do this routinely—Powers mentions sci-fi in interviews, but there’s also Native American fiction and other forms and traditions that often get overlooked if not sneered at by the literary establishment.  But Powers has too much literary cred for them to ignore.  That some feel compelled to deny literary legitimacy to this novel, which is less than a frontal assault on human supremacy, is telling.  There is a vital movement in law to assign rights to non-human life and the natural environment as a whole.  That may happen before those captive to a Manhattan mind get an inkling.

 Readers seem far ahead of them.  More important than being short-listed for the Booker, Bewilderment was selected for the Oprah book club. 

The Overstory of Our Time

Congratulations to Richard Powers and The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It's a significant achievement, not only for the author (who in my opinion should have won years ago for The Time of Our Singing in 2004) but for fiction that takes the world seriously--that is, the world beyond urban relationships, beyond only human relationships to other humans.  It may be too late to make the crucial difference, but if there is time to avert the end of life as we know it, the importance of human relationship to other life must be acknowledged.

Here's a link to my review posted here in October 2018.

Overstory: The Word for the World Is Forest

The Overstory: A Novel
 Richard Powers 
W.W. Norton

 “It’s a book about taking the non-human seriously,” author Richard Powers said in an interview, concerning his latest novel, The Overstory. It is an assertion that for much of human history, and even today in many parts of the world, would seem ridiculously unnecessary. What could be more serious than the “non-human”—everything from the weather and plants that provided food and medicine, to the animals that people hunted, or fell prey to?

 It’s true that our literature missed much of this unwritten but not unstoried history, but even in the 19th century there were still wolves at the gate in Europe (and in Tolstoy), and into the 20th century in North America the struggles of pioneers were central to the novels of Cather and others.

 But the deep sense of interrelationship with the specific environment of a place, its embedded animals and plants, escaped much literary treatment. (It can be found however in contemporary accounts of some surviving indigenous cultures, such as Richard Nelson’s books on the Koyukon.)

Literature missed it, while science and the economic system governing culture ignored and denied it. Nature became a controlled resource, and science joined in a simplistic analysis that conformed to ideologically-driven theories of nature as uniformly rapacious, violent and individualistic, mirroring the structure of dominant capitalism that mandated that other life had no value except as it served humans, and especially certain humans’ profits. Meanwhile the urbanized segment of humanity with pest control, running water, flush toilets and printing presses turned inward, and human culture became increasingly arrogant, ego-driven and delusional.

Like Naomi Klein to the climate crisis and Michael Pollan to expanded consciousness, Richard Powers is something of a Johnny-come-lately to forest issues and what forests represent in the non-human web of life that, among other things, supports humanity. But like them he brings fresh passion and perspective, as well as a contemporary voice with some power and moment, so that people—including those in the lit biz—may actually pay some attention.

The 502 pages of The Overstory are structured in four sections: Roots, Trunk, Crown and Seeds. (Technically the crown or canopy is the “overstory,” though the title metaphorically suggests a meta-story, the story that makes all other stories possible.) This structure is a visually accessible metaphor, as the various strands of roots nourish a common trunk before branching out again in separate (if often interrelated) fates.

 "Roots" presents the backstory of the nine major characters, in some cases including several previous generations. In the next section, several characters participate in the protests here in Humboldt County in the 1990s, when a rapacious Texas company was clear-cutting as many of the last old growth groves as they could. The fates of these characters become especially intertwined. The actual history is somewhat fictionalized but given a depth and specificity that brings the experience alive. Especially the experience of being up a tree.

 Their transformations, at least as radical as those experienced by characters in other Powers’ books, move toward new relationships with the reality of the world, rather than only within a temporary human enclave.

Along with the stories of people over time and over generations, there are stories and histories of trees: of the American Chestnut, the eastern pine forests, and Johnny Appleseed. The scientist character commits temporary career suicide by showing that trees communicate with each other through the air, warning of predators and diseases, and that through their roots they nourish and protect each other.

 But what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the ground of the narrative is a very close thing. So the book is about people, some of whom are passionately involved with trees and forest, and others who stumble to their own recognitions.  “Our brains evolved to solve the forest,” says the one character who is a tree expert. “We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been homo sapiens.”

But it is also about trees, and how people relate to them. “This is not our world with trees in it,” says that same expert. “It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” The figure and ground shift back and forth, when they aren’t essentially simultaneous.

 Powers provides some hope for the relationship. But humanity can no longer just affirm life—it must commit “unsuicide,” by radically changing the terms, before its own slow murderous suicide is accomplished.

The novel depicts the context of our American society and world civilization in which obsessive and dogmatic human self-centeredness destroys forests and the natural context that supports all life, enslaved by a suicidal geopolitical and geoeconomic system which mandates continuous growth on a planet of finite resources. That vision of the world has previously been expressed mostly by ecologists, poets and science fiction writers like Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson. Powers becomes one of the few so-categorized mainstream literary novelists (Barbara Kingsolver and Jim Harrison come to mind) to marshal considerable literary skills to explore it.

“Life has a way of talking to the future,”a couple of characters observe. “It’s called memory.” The extreme self-centeredness of contemporary civilization is likely to become a bitter joke in the near future. Today’s news that is most likely to be ignored or unabsorbed--like the melting polar ice, or the depletion of wildlife in the world (by 60% in the past couple of human generations, according to the World Wildlife Fund today, mostly due to climate and the obliteration of tropical forests, practically the last on the planet)—will have consequences that are destined to dominate the news not more than a few decades hence.

But that self-centeredness, that absorption in social media passions within the nuclear grip of global capitalism, also extends to readers. Powers obviously anticipated this, and puckishly embedded an anticipatory review: “She remembers now why she never had the patience for nature. No drama, no development, no colliding hopes and fears. And she could never keep the characters straight.”

 There are colliding hopes and fears in this novel, though it is hard at times to keep the characters straight. Still, the theme is a challenge to readers in much the same way that climate news gets ignored in favor of the outrage of the moment. The familiar emotions and presence of the strictly human world obliterates perception of the rest of reality.

But as one character will say to another (while both are swaying on the branches of a redwood) “The best argument in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” (I’m not sure that’s universally true, but maybe true enough.) Apart from the usual suspects of likely readers, I suspect Powers’ time at Stanford, his understanding of the tech world and a direct pitch to its conscience and potential to make a difference will pay dividends.

Beyond that it remains to be seen. The first big literary prize since publication was the Man Booker in the UK, for which The Overstory was shortlisted, and was said to be the odds-on favorite to win.

Yet an article in the Guardian quotes booksellers complaining that the Man Booker is not much help to sales these days. They opine on the marketable book they hope will win. “ But the book I think will win is The Overstory by Richard Powers.” one unnamed bookseller is quoted as saying. It’s not clear whose voice it is but the paragraph continues: “In case you don’t know – I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s read it – The Overstory is an idiosyncratic and, in the words of one plucky critic, “valiant” 500-page epic that is supposed to do for trees what Moby-Dick did for whales. Perhaps this is why my contact is laughing.”

The Man Booker was also beset with criticism because it’s traditionally been a UK prize but American authors have won the last two. Also there was anticipatory nervousness that with a majority of women writers on the shortlist, giving the prize to another male writer would be unseemly. That Powers is an American male author may have contributed to why The Overstory did not win, though the subject that had a Guardian reporter rolling her eyes may also have played a conscious or unconscious part.

 The prize went to Northern Irish author Anna Burns for her “Troubles-era” novel “Milkman.” The jury seemed to stress that the selection was unanimous. Burns has a compelling personal story, and the novel is widely praised (and now, a best-seller.) But worthy but often repeated topics such as the Troubles, the slave trade, child abuse and various human relationship have such a visceral hold on readers and writers that reviving that crucial, vital deep connection with non-human life and its peril remains a hard sell.

Still, there are the National Book Award and the Pulitzers to come. Regardless of its upcoming prizes fates, the literary reach of The Overstory suggests it can have that longer, more persistent life of study: formal study in the groves of academe, informal study everywhere. It may not live as long as a redwood but the lifespan of a paper birch could still imbue a generation with its ideas and emotions. For that process, the impressive body of interviews given by its formerly reclusive author should help.  In the meantime, it repays reading and re-reading.

R.I.P. Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen was a friend and contemporary of Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron, but his writing career was amazingly different and very individual to him. His career began as an expatriate writer and part-time spy in Paris (where he helped found The Paris Review) and ended as a Zen Monk in upstate New York.  In between it took him to Africa, the high Himalayas, the Pine Ridge reservation and Antarctica.

 He became most noted for writing nonfiction about nature and travel, but at considerable personal cost (financial and otherwise) he wrote about the plight of Native Americans (and specifically what could well be the most conspicuous injustice of 20th century America, the continuing incarceration of Leonard Peltier), and then about his Buddhist practice.

He also wrote novels, the form of writing that was most important to him.  More than 30 books all told, in a long, rich and singular life that ended at the age of 86.

He left behind books that will be important for whatever uncertain future books may have.  Personally I revere his The Snow Leopard (and its companion Nine-Headed Dragon River), In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (and its companion Indian Country.)  He writes beautifully of North American shorebirds in The Wind Birds and of Antarctica in End of the Earth.  And the list goes on.  I first became aware of him in college when I read parts of The Tree Where Man Was Born in the New Yorker.  It was a daunting yet inspiring and instructive work in certain ways for a fledgling writer to read.

But he is such a unique writer that even the most ardent readers of some of his books may well be immune to others.  Of his novels, I've read and admired Raditzer and especially At Play in the Fields of the Lord.  But I have yet to yield to the charms of the Watson series of fictions he worked and reworked in recent years, including his National Book Award winning Shadow Country (which made him the only writing to win this award in both fiction and non-fiction.)

The official publication date of his latest and now last novel is this coming Tuesday.  It's called In Paradise.  

Here's his New York Times obituary. And here is a New York Times Magazine article with interviews during his last days. May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

Empathy: From Bench to Bedside
Edited by Jean Decety
MIT Press

Animal Thinking: Contemporary Issues in Comparative Cognition
Edited by Randolph Menzel and Julia Fischer
MIT Press

  Years of a rigid interpretation of Darwinian evolution tended to suppress study of qualities like altruism, compassion, cooperative behavior and empathy, since they didn’t fit into the model of an every-organism-for-itself struggle for survival and transmission of genes. Empathy was even an aberration, a human concoction of religion and—often enough by implication--silly women. But the evidence for the existence of these qualities were too obvious to ignore forever, and more nuanced interpretations of natural selection helped bring them into respectable scientific study. So much time has been lost however that this research is still just beginning.

The collection of scholarly essays in Empathy: From Bench to Bedside is such a wide-ranging beginning. Though even the term is still ambiguous, editor Jean Decety ventures a working definition: “...the natural capacity to share, understand, and respond with care to the state of others...” Even the word “natural” is a great leap forward. The topics range from the relationship of empathy to evolution and human nature (Allan Young) and its possible evolutionary role (Sharee Light and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler) to empathy and neuroscience (Abigail Marsh, Jamil Zaki & Kevin Ochsner, Daniel Terman), its role in childhood development (Amrisha Vaish & Felix Warneken; Nancy Eisenberg. Snjezana Huerta, Alison Edwards), to its role in social psychology (Stephanie Echols & Joshua Corell, etc.) and medical care (Johanna Shapiro, Charles Figley, Ezequiel Gleichgerrcht & Jean Decety.)

Beginning with C. Daniel Batson on his “empathy-altruism hypothesis,” some articles outline further tests and issues for future research. This volume demonstrates the current complexity in the field, which seems partly intrinsic to empathy itself, but also to an uncertain range of definitions. But the true significance here may simply be that all this research exists and is expressed and documented in one volume.

Evidence of just how “natural” empathy might be is found in the chapter on primates and other mammals by Frans B. M. de Waal, a pioneer of empathy studies in general. His work on primates has been instrumental in bringing these qualities into scientific discussion. Why hadn’t other researchers found such evidence in primates before? Because, de Waal has suggested elsewhere, they weren’t looking for it. Instead their assumptions about evolution and about animals prevented them from seeing it.

Animal Thinking is another topic that would have been laughed out of science not so long ago. As editors Randolf Menzel and Julia Fischer write in their introduction, studies have gone beyond the question of whether animals think at all, or whether they have any effective memory to more nuanced issues, like how animals might plan and decide for the future.

The first section attacks a topic for which there is much evidence: animal navigation, from honeybees (Menzel) to birds (Verner P. Bingham.) Animal communication is another topic, even more fraught with problems of definition. While all possible manifestations of animal thinking bear upon the human, and in particular the issues raised concerning empathy and cooperation, the final section of this book, on “social knowledge,” confronts these issues directly, inevitably involving group as well as individual behavior.

These studies raise questions about scientific disciplines and future research. J.R. Stevens calls for a synthesis of evolutionary and psychological approaches to decision-making issues, but that seems good advice in general. He notes the emergence of cognitive ecology and evolutionary psychology as pertinent fields. While Derek Penn suggests that folk psychology “ruined comparative psychology,” scientific research would do well to pay attention to the knowledge of indigenous peoples accrued over centuries of intimate relationships and interdependent culture-creation with animals.

These essays are the product of the Ernest Strungmann Forum, and each topic section includes a synthesis or summary authored by a number of scholars. Both volumes are sturdy, no-nonsense, durable books with clear type. They should stand up to frequent reference and repeated readings, as well they should.

Earth Day #40: Classics

Stewart Udall, Secretary of Interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died last month. A pioneer in environmentalism before and after the first Earth Day (and a major voice in the excellent PBS American Experience docu, Earth Days), he was the author of a mostly forgotten but very important book, The Quiet Crisis (1963). Following only a year after Rachel Carson's expose of chemical pollution, Silent Spring, Udall's book took a more historical view--chronicling American conservation efforts--and a wider view of the present: "In a great surge toward 'progress,' our congestion increasingly has befouled water and air and growth has created new problems on every hand. Schools, housing, and roads are inadequate and ill-planned; noise and confusion have mounted with the rising tempo of technology; and as our cities have sprawled outward, new forms of abundance and new forms of blight have oftentimes marched hand in hand."

Some books of bygone decades describe problems which the subsequent environmental movement addressed in America, while others--like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb--dealt in terms now obsolete with problems that are still with us, and have even grown worse. But there are other books, like Udall's, that are of more than historical interest: they are classics both in the sense of being among the first to break new ground, and of enduring value to us now, including as reading experiences. They are classics, not only or not specifically of "environmentalism," but of all that pertains crucially to Earth, and Earth Day.

Udall's book was one of the first public policy books to recognize the importance of Aldo Leopold and his essay on "the land ethic," in the now classic book, A Sand County Almanac. Another writer of that era was Loren Eiseley, and to pick out probably his best known title--The Immense Journey--is to give only one example of his enduring writing, in a number of books.

The next generation of indispensible writers begins with Gary Snyder, in his poems but also in his prose statements, especially the landmark The Practice of the Wild (1990) but also The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980) and A Place in Space (1995.)  These helped to inspire the bioregionalism and rehabitation movements that were and are especially influential in the western U.S.
One of the most important figures in establishing the breadth and depth of the ecology movement--and one of the most forgotten, was Paul Shepard. His essay, "Ecology and Man, A Viewpoint" was a foundation document. Many of the ideas now entering the mainstream through newer authors were even more fully and gracefully articulated in his books, considered radical in their time, particularly the crucial importance of nature to childhood and human development (Nature and Madness) and the idea that "animals made us human" (even the phrase is originally his) in Thinking Animals, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, The Others and other books.

Today we pursue a deeper understanding of the Earth through the ideas that coalesce around the powerful image of Gaia. Various elements of that understanding come out of books that are still classics, such as the best-selling essays of Lewis Thomas in Lives of A Cell, and Gregory Bateson's Steps Towards An Ecology of Mind. Learning more about the ways in which our human ancestors related to the natural world (another major subject for Paul Shepard), is informed by a deeper understanding of surviving Indigenous peoples. A classic in this regard is Make Prayers to the Raven by Richard Nelson, who used this experience with the Koyukon elders to inform his own intense experiences in The Island Within.

We all have our favorite authors and their books describing their experiences in the natural world, but among the essential authors who combines description of experiences with a greater context, Gary Snyder is one of my favorites, and I revere especially his book, The Practice of the Wild.

Another book that was particularly important to me but which I feel is a classic that fills in an important conceptual area is the relatively unknown Ceremonial Time by John Hanson Mitchell. It is the history of a single square mile of New England, over 15 thousand years. It gives the dimension of time to place, and vice versa.

Finally, there are much more recent books on the most important topics concerning the Earth and its future, particularly in two areas. First is biodiversity and our understanding of both the deep interrelationship of life and the understanding of other species, particularly as we overcome the bias of the mechanistic interpretation of Darwinian evolution. I don't know if there are any classics in these areas yet, though landmark books would likely include Acquiring Genomes by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, and Evolution in Four Dimensions by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb. Books like Beast and Man by philosopher Mary Midgely and books by Elaine Morgan like The Acquatic Ape and The Descent of Woman are exciting to read and shake things up.

The other topic is the climate crisis, and in this area I have more definite choices: An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore remains the classic survey of the subject, Forecast by Stephan Faris is the best account of the present consequences, while Down to the Wire by David Orr is the best book so far on the climate crisis future.

And now that I've been so definite, I have to take it back--these are my choices, books I would recommend as classics, but I haven't read everything so I'm sure I'm missing plenty.

Gift Books: Nature and Environment

Some books I've seen, evaluated for gift-giving potential:

On the literary side, The Maine Woods by H.D. Thoreau has been reissued, annotated by Jeffrey S. Cramer (Yale University Press.) Like Cramer's 2007 annotated selection from Thoreau's journals (I to Myself, also Yale) and perhaps his edition of Walden (which I haven't seen), this is comfortably large-sized book that presents the text in two center columns of facing pages, with lots of white space and annotations in columns on both sides, of equal size. So essentially the facing pages are divided into four columns, with the text in the center two. This format may appeal to some people but it doesn't appeal to me. The text feels squeezed, and I find it hard to read. It's puzzling as well, because a lot of pages have only one or two annotations, and a lot of white space. There are no illustrations. Of course, these matters of format may not matter to hardcore Thoreau fans.

Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems by John Felstiner (Yale) is an attractive and useful book, though it is about how to read poetry more than about the relationship of poetry to nature. But it does discuss that as well. It's nicely illustrated, and the poems alone are worth the price of admission. More here.

Water edited by John Knechtel (MIT Press/ Alphabet City) is an eclectic and perhaps eccentric collection of pieces on the subject of water, with some art, some science and a lot of urban planning. The book is about as tall as a paperback and a bit wider. There are a lot of illustrations, of varying quality and interest--some of them are really eccentric. If you or your gift recipient is a fan of Alphabet City or books similar to this published by MIT, this one may interest you. It does nothing for me.

Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka by Adele Barker (Beacon Press) is a pretty straightforward account concerning a part of the world where a lot has been going on but little has been reported. This book is for someone motivated to know more about Sri Lanka. The travelogue writing can be oddly revelatory: "We ate on a beach that the police assured us had been de-mined..." The author makes brave attempts to understand the country's conflicts from the various cultural perspectives in play. She also describes the effects of the 2004 tsunami, which happened at Christmastime. However, this book is available only for preorder for the holidays, unless your bookstore gets early copies. It's officially available Jan. 1.

Green Intelligence by John Wargo (Yale) is an expose of the long-term effects of chemicals, from the effects of nuclear bomb testing to industrial and consumer chemicals in the environment that the author believes are hidden causes of some of the childhood disabilities and epidemics that characterize our times (obesity, asthma, learning and developmental problems) as well as dementia in the elderly. So it's not a cheerful holiday book by any means, but there may be someone on your list who would like to--or might need to--read it.

Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future by Saleem H. Ali (Yale) offers a carefully worked out, big picture view, serving an approach to future policy. It links confronting poverty to dealing with environmental problems, in an argument with a philosophical point of view about human nature as reflected in society. This book is for someone who wants to grapple with big ideas, argue with the author and possibly come away convinced that this is a new and useful way to see the interlocking problems that threaten the future.

While the easy choice for a Climate Crisis book would have to be Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore (Rodale Press), I'm still a big fan of Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley by Stephan Faris (Henry Holt). While Gore's book is about what we can do in the present to save the future, Faris is a journalist who covers what is happening right now, which more than suggests what is likely to happen in the future. There's a concrete quality about his reporting that can illuminate the topic for those who aren't quite sure what it's really all about, plus the quality of his writing keeps you reading. More here.

Finally, here are a few books I'd put on my Wish List--books I've read something about but haven't seen myself: James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin (Princeton University Press) sounds fascinating and useful, as described by Tim Flannery in this review. Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse by David Orr (Oxford University Press), Nature's Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology by Mark V. Barrow, Jr. (University of Chicago Press), Seasick: Ocean Change and Extinction of Life on Earth by Alanna Mitchell (Chicago), Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand (Viking), look intruiging. None too cheerful, but if this season is about heritage and the human future, then for the right readers these can be appropriate choices.

A Trinity from Trinity

Barbara Ras is one of those friends it is sometimes hard for me to believe I haven't actually met. I may have spoken to her once on the phone, but almost our entire relationship over the past 8 or 9 years has been through emails and through our respective writing.

Barbara was the editor in chief at University of Georgia Press back then, and has since taken over and, as far as I can tell, essentially transformed Trinity University Press. Trinity specializes in her two chief areas of interests, the natural world and literature, as well as specifically Texan topics (it's in San Antonio.)

She is also a widely published and award-winning poet, and she recently sent me her new collection, One Hidden Stuff (Penguin). It reflects those Trinity concerns as well, in the context of her life and our times. She works with long lines, so it helps that she has a sure sense of rhythm. As a reader as well as a writer, rhythm is very important to me, in prose, in dialogue and especially in poetry. Appropriately then, the book begins with "Rhapsody Today." The first lines flow melodically, until a slight pause in the fourth for a fine effect, a fawn on gawky legs with "some leftover dazed grace," and so we see the fawn's motion standing still.

My current favorites among these enticing poems come towards the end of the book, like "Late Summer Night" which seems to have been written soon after her move to Texas, and reminds me of the surprising dislocation I felt after my latest move, to California. "Sometimes Like the Ocean" makes poetry from the poetics of a dream, and "Elsewhere" merges the horror of distant war with more personal loss, within the theme of motherhood. "Our Flowers" seems to contain all the elements of previous poems in the book, and contains a favorite line: " Failure is such a beautiful word for something/lousy..." I'm glad for the opportunity to read these poems, and to have them around to read again, and I'll bet you will be, too.

As it happened, two books from Trinity Press itself arrived soon after. In A Special Light by Elroy Bode is a book of essays heavy on reminicence and observation of the Texas hill country. That's not a landscape that frankly attracts me much, but I found myself beguiled by Bode's prose and his memories of times if not places we've shared. The conversational style is most obvious in the very short chapters but its flow, and Bode's way with the particular, can keep you reading despite yourself, or the call of supposedly more urgent matters.

The mail occasionally brings a treasure, and that's the word for Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez. It's a kind of dictionary of terms pertaining to the landscape, with definitions by a number of distinguished writers, including William Kittredge, Greta Ehrlich, Bill McKibben, Barbara Kingsolver, Linda Hogan and Charles Frazier. Some 45 writers participated, in a three year first draft process with managing editor Debra Gwartney, and another year with Lopez.

My first thought was quite practical--at last a companion to reading the likes of Jim Harrison, only instead of a few line definition of "swale"in the standard dictionary, here is a full page--with history, examples and an illustration! But besides ignoramuses like me, I'm sure people who know these words from familiarity with what they denote will find something in these definitions to light them up as well. There are regional terms and words from folklore that have fallen out of use, plus examples of their use from literary works.

Start at any page and there's something interesting. Barbara Kingsolver provides a precise definition of "derramadero" right after she defines "derelict land" as "Land that has been used, ruined, and consequently abandoned by humans is peculiarly described as derelict--as if the land itself had become careless of its duties." The San Francisco Chronicle review goes into more detail. This volume becomes an instant reference resource, while itself being a connection to place and a portrait of the American landscape.

Springing Forth: Notes on Four

“So many books, so little time” says a sweatshirt I sometimes wear in public, and it elicits rueful nods and grimaces. Despite the tons of bad books published every season, there are still more good books coming out than any one person can read. Here are a few that may have got away from the attention of many reviewers and potential readers this spring.

Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth Century English Fiction by Patricia M. Spacks (Yale) is readable scholarship that fills a gap for readers curious about early novels and how the novel developed. The English novel was born in the 18th century as a popular form that mixed drama and epic with such everyday forms as sermons, accounts of travels, journals and journalism, in an era of expanding literacy. Every early novel was an experiment but many approaches got lost in the rush to a mainstream form. Spacks looks at novels of adventure, development, consciousness, sentiment, manners, gothic fiction and political novels, ending with a lengthy consideration of Tristam Shandy. This book is filled with rich delights and delightful possibilities.

Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth I. Helphand (Trinity University Press). From a French soldier’s flower bed on the Western Front in the Great War to an American soldier’s bed of grass near Baghdad in 2004, Helphand considers the impulse and result of creating gardens in the midst of mechanized violence and terror. Growing life in the shadow of death extends to ghetto gardens and gardens in POW camps in World War II. This is a unique history, with a section (“Digging Deeper”) that explores meaning. Nature and beauty versus the worst of machines and human ugliness are some of the stark contrasts that inhabit these human stories. With black and white photographs.

Conversation: A History of A Declining Art by Stephen Miller (Yale) is a history (with particular reference to the “age of conversation” and 18th century British coffeehouses) with a point. In his latter chapters, Miller decries the decline of conversation in an age of cell phones and “anger communities.” But he doesn’t define good conversation as humorless—wit and raillery were once essential. It can be, as Virginia Woolf maintained, a result of “showing off.” But if we can’t converse with Cicero, Montaigne and Defoe, we can at least read about their conversational expectations. I don’t endorse all of Miller’s conclusions, especially about recent decades, but at least it’s a conversation-starter.

Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, Edited by Laurel E. Savoy, Eldridge M Moores, and Judith E. Moores (Trinity University Press.) Our modern sense of time and change began with geology. Rock strata revealed by mining and canal digging, along with fossils discovered in the same digs, led to an expanded sense of the earth’s age, and inspired Darwin in his consideration of biological evolution. This anthology takes a very wide view of the subject, including excerpts from writers like Mark Twain, James Joyce, Lucille Clifton and Michael Ondaatje as well as Darwin, Loren Eiseley, John McPhee and Paul Shepard in sections titled “Of Rock and Stone,” “Deep Time,” “Faults, Earthquakes and Tsunamis,” “Volcanoes and Eruptions” (where Ursula Le Guin appears along with Pliny the Younger), “On Mountains and Highlands,” Rivers to the Sea,” “The Work of Ice,” “Wind and Desert” and “Living on Earth.” These pieces add up to senses of where geologic matters fit into the web of life, including how humans interact with these objects and forces—neither animal or vegetable but in some sense, so many clearly feel, alive—in many times and cultures.

Holiday gift books from 2005: Nature, Environment and Science

Encounters with our given world
by William S. Kowinski

THE LAND’S WILD MUSIC
by Mark Tredinnick.
Trinity University Press.

Mark Tredinnick calls them “encounters,” with the kind of care for parsing both words and experience that characterizes this author’s approach to what others might just call profiles of four prominent “nature writers” (another troublesome term, especially to these writers): Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams and James Galvin.

In a lovely essay called “The Job is To Pour Your Heart Out,” Edward Hoagland writes, “I believe, incidentally, that those of us who care about bears and frogs haven’t much time left to write about them, not just because---among the world’s other emergencies---a twilight is settling over them, but because people are losing their capacity to fathom any form of nature except, in a more immediate sense, their own.”

These four writers grapple with both problems, which pushes them to more public roles as advocates and activists. They (and the author) also rebel against the usual notion and sometimes past practice of nature writing as being pretty and ornamental, or even as separating humanity from the active context of nature. They are all engaged in “Encounters with Nature” (the title of a collection of Paul Shepard essays.)

Tredinnick’s style is recursive and meditative. He burrows into his subject. But he is also journalistic enough to keep the magazine-fed reader focused on the issues that concern him and the writers involved. The result is a thoughtful book of pith and moment, a good winter’s read, with the emotional seeds of a regenerative spring.

It’s too bad that Tredinnick couldn’t include his planned profiles of Native author Linda Hogan and anthropologist Richard Nelson, with his intensive experience in one of the last remaining indigenous peoples still living close to their traditional lives in nature, because the Native perspective is too often missing from nature/environmental writing. Still, including Peter Matthiessen, with his books on contemporary Indians of the American West and his experience and practice in Tibetan Buddhism as well as his exemplary books on birds and other naturalist subjects, covers a lot of good ground.

These are writers, insistent on literary encounters in the context of their lives with nature, who produce novels and poetry as well as memoir and nonfiction, which these days is often categorized with the redundancy, “creative.”

“A writer’s job is to pour his heart out,” Hoagland concludes, "and whether his immediate concern is the death of whales and rhinos or the death of civilization, there will be plenty of chances…to do so.” These writers, including Tredinnick, do just that.


TERRA ANTARCTICA: Looking into the Emptiest Continent
by William L. Fox.
Trinity University Press.

It’s the Ghost continent, not only because its peculiarities induce hallucinations and its solitudes inspire humans like Peter Hillary to converse with the dead (as he relates in his recent, peculiar book on an Antarctic trek, “In the Ghost Country”). Besides its forbidding yet beckoning white immensities where explorers have died, and the tantalizing sense of its own brilliant mysteries at the heart of things, this continent gains new notoriety as the place where civilization’s fate is sealed in the ice: if this eternally frozen fastness were to fail, the ice thundering down will rush instant Armageddon to most of the world’s seaside capitals.

Even with Greenland’s ice melting and the Arctic threatening to dissolve, the major fear for global heating’s instant cataclyism is if the Antarctic’s mighty Ross Ice Shelf were to split and partly drop into the ocean, immediately raising the global sea level high enough to drown the coastal cities of the other continents.

But even before this possibility started to sink in, Antarctica existed for most people as stories and images, changing over time. So vast and strange was this continent that mid-19th century explorers didn’t even try to capture it in primitive photographs, Fox writes---only the scope and perspective of drawings could hope to convey a sense of the place. Even with today’s technology and the resulting mountains of information, Antarctica resists being captured. It still slips away like a phantom. Yet we know better than ever that it is not a dead place, even without penguins marching.

William L. Fox brings formidable credentials to this huge place. He’s won institutional approbation as a writer and scholar, but he also walks the walk, as a climber and Himalyayan guide, and a scout in the Arctic for NASA.

It all pays off in this book, which is at once an account of three months spent in several areas of the Antarctica, the lives and work there of other researchers, and a survey of the history of human exploration and other encounters with the Antarctic, physical, scientific and artistic. For once the adspeak cliché is appropriate: if you read only one book about Antarctica, you won’t go wrong choosing this one.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

EVOLUTION IN FOUR DIMENSIONS: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral
and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
By Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb
With illustrations by Anna Zeligowski
MIT Press.

BEFORE DARWIN: Reconciling God and Nature
By Keith Thomson
Yale University Press.

Darwin's theory of evolution remains the most socially important and scientifically generative theory in the 21st century so far, as it was in the 20th and 19th. These two excellent books that advance knowledge of Darwinian evolution and Darwin himself. Full reviews HERE.

WISDOM FOR A LIVABLE PLANET
by Carl N. McDaniel
Trinity University Press.

So it's been 35 years since the first Earth Day and the world is still a mess. It's not that we haven't learned a lot and done a lot, just not enough. How far we've come in understanding the extent and nature of the problems, in devising and carrying out solutions, and especially in communicating that understanding and getting politicians and the public to listen, can be gleaned from this book consisting of profiles of eight environmental visionaries. Full review here.

THE GENESIS OF ANIMAL PLAY: Testing the Limits
by Gordon M. Burghardt
MIT Press

Professor of psychology and ecology Gordon M. Burghardt examines and analyzes the "mysterious" and "enigmatic" phenomena of animal play. A fascinating way into the realities of our fellow animals, and inevitably a comment on ourselves. Full review here.

AFTER THE ICE: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC
by Steven Mithen
Harvard University Press
Among other things, Mithen skillfully sums up the various discoveries and controversies over the settlement of the Americas. This wideranging approach to the latest research updates in an engaging way a broad overview of how humans became human and engaged the whole planet.
Review here.

BIG BANG: The Origin of the Universe
By Simon Singh
Fourth Estate/Harpercollins.

Despite its title, this book is not about the Big Bang or the origin of the universe. It is a history of some of the major discoveries, theories, personalities and controversies that contributed to the basic Big Bang explanation and its present acceptance. It is essentially a textbook on cosmology in Western science from before Copernicus, and a conservative one (in a scientific sense) at that. Simon Singh, best known for his TV documentary ("Proof") and best- selling book ("Fermat's Enigma"), has written a decent chronicle of the making of this theory,with an interesting through-line is the story of how science works in the real world context of personalities, professional relationships and political, economic and religious interests. Good choice for high school and college students. My SF Chronicle review here.

You can use the Powell Bookstore box on this page to search for new or used books. If you buy something after linking from here, this site gets a cut. Thanks.

We've Had Thirty-Five Years of Earth Days and the World Is Still A Mess

by William S. Kowinski

So it's been 35 years since the first Earth Day and the world is still a mess. It's not that we haven't learned a lot and done a lot, just not enough. How far we've come in understanding the extent and nature of the problems, in devising and carrying out solutions, and especially in communicating that understanding and getting politicians and the public to listen, can be gleaned from this new book: '>WISDOM FOR A LIVABLE PLANET by Carl N. McDaniel (Trinity University Press. )

We come to this view of the relative successes and failures of the environmental movement through profiles of eight "visionaries," half being pretty well known at least within enviro circles (Dave Foreman, Wes Jackson, Stephen Schneider the climate scientist and David Orr) and the other half deserve to be better known for their work: Terri Swearingen, whose revealingly unsuccessful and achingly long attempt to shut down a toxic garbage-burning plant in Ohio raised national awareness of this previously ignored air pollution problem; Werner Fornos, president of the Population Institute in Washington, whose new ideas may help counter the bad impressions made by the 1970s "don't have those kids, especially you poor people" activists; economist Herman Daly, adding practicality and a little poetry to the more-is-less philosophy; and Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of the International Society for Ecology and Culture.

The chapter on Norberg-Hodge caught my eye first. Beginning with a disquisition on language as a distinguishing human characteristic, and how it developed in small human groups, McDaniel describes N.-H.'s first visits to the Shangri-la of Ladakh in isolated Tibet, where she found a culture that proved to her that "the widespread expression of human traits such as greed, selfishness, and acquisitiveness in Western culture are not innate but culturally elicited, as are expressions of traits such as cooperation and generosity."

The people of Ladakh had such a cooperation-based culture, with habits of dealing with conflict that avoided violence. But Norberg-Hodge also was around to see this society transformed by tourism and trade. Innocent of the impact the money economy would have, the people yielded easily to the globalized culture of consumption. But she didn't fade away from this challenge. Instead she helped people understand what was happening to them, and helped them devise strategies for retaining their culture while still enjoying benefits of the modern world. They had little heat in their homes in the old days, but found themselves going away to work to earn money for kerosene, which gave them heat and also pollution. Norberg-Hodge found appropriate methods of renewable solar energy that would provide heat without pollution or the extra step of working elsewhere to pay for it.

So the chapter moves from language and local culture to the impact of globalization on economics and culture, and the political efforts on a global scale as well as local projects to address these problems. The prose is not especially exciting, but it is direct and informative, and the apparently disparate ideas and activities are organized to illuminate the kinds of organic connections that need to be made.

This is a useful guide to the state of environmental action and thought, as it becomes more truly ecological, recognizing such important relationships as economics and culture. It deserves a wide readership.


Childhood teaches us that language and culture both arise, at least partially and potentially, from play. As humans we have perhaps forgotten our species' childhood, when we learned most of what we now think we invented, from animals.

In '>THE GENESIS OF ANIMAL PLAY: Testing the Limits (MIT Press), professor of psychology and ecology Gordon M. Burghardt examines and analyzes the "mysterious" and "enigmatic" phenomena of animal play. Inoculated against the unscientific specter of anthropomorphism (we just think those kittens are playing because they look like children who we know are playing), animal play has been ignored, if not taboo. So Burghardt is careful to include lots of graphs, tables and charts, showing (for example) the "Phylogeny of avian orders and occurrence of different kinds of play." So it turns out that flying really is fun, at least sometimes.

Did dinosaurs play? How about turtles? (How would you know?) Burghardt will tell you, as he evaluates the reasons for playful behavior, the benefits and the costs (you can hear your mother now---don't play with that stick, do you want to put an eye out?) The prose gets a bit thick, but fortunately Burghardt can be, well, a little playful, so even the non-scientist can have some fun here, and learn a bit more about how deeply embedded in our natures is animal play.

And now for something completely different... '>AFTER THE ICE: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC by Steven Mithen (Harvard University Press) is getting noticed, and though it's been out for several months, it's another appropriate Earth Day read. It's not environmentalism exactly, but it sure is about the Earth, and some fascinating phenomena on and in it, including the interaction of early humans with the changing environment.

For example, Mithen skillfully sums up the various discoveries and controversies over the settlement of the Americas. After evaluating the archeological claims, he concludes that human occupation began far earlier than previously accepted, some 33,000 years ago, although he doesn't really know how. (For an entertainingly detailed account of the craziness of the controversies, with grown scientists acting like medieval church dogmatists, I recommend '>THE FIRST AMERICANS by J.M. Adovasio with Jake Page (Random House, 2002.)

"To my mind," Mithen concludes in this section, "the First Americans, those who must have traveled from Alaska to southern Chile within less than a hundred generations, were the most extraordinary group of explorers ever to have lived on this planet. I suspect that the mystery of the peopling of the Americas can only be resolved by invoking those peculiar human qualities of curiosity and thirst for adventure that in recent times have taken men to the poles, to the deep oceans, and to the moon."

Except for that "peculiar human qualities" bit---he should read Burghardt---it's a welcome notion in a field that seems to favor materialist explanations too often.

This is only one small part of a book of multi-epic sweep, full of fascinating information and surmises, with terrific illustrations throughout. It was a great idea, and Mithen makes it work beautifully. Mind-expanding. Remember that? We used to say that a lot, on the first Earth Day.

THE LOVE OF NATURE AND THE END OF THE WORLD by Shierry Weber Nicholsen.
MIT Press, 2002.


Why do people destroy the environment that sustains them is a psychological question as well as a political one. This book probes the ways our feelings and past experiences can help or hinder our relationship with the natural world. Nicholsen does this through stories and meditations on the work of authors in many areas who have much to say on this subject.

She teaches environmental philosophy, and this book lays groundwork for a better and deeper understanding of human thought, feelings, culture and human relationships, based on our collective and personal relationships with nature. Most of us feel so distant from nature in everyday life that we no longer realize how deep our feelings are, and how important nature is to how we live in the world.

Just as importantly, understanding our relationship to nature can be a key to addressing many problems that seem to be impenetrable barriers to a better future. For example, empathy, altruism, even heroism as well as "why can't we all get along" make much more and much deeper sense when we reflect on our complex place within nature, and our relationship with the rest of life.

Many readers will find themselves reflecting on their own feelings and experiences with the natural world-and we all have them, wherever we are. Nature writers usually inspire us to experience our positive feelings about nature and to add to them, which this book also does. But as Jung wrote, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious."

It is now very important to dig into our unconscious fears and unconscious barriers to allowing the truth of our place in the natural world to determine our behavior. This book also gently explores some of that darkness.

Last but not least, the writers that Nicholsen quotes on nearly every page-including Paul Shepard, Jack Turner, Gary Snyder, James Hillman-are writers from different "fields" who have read and admired each other's work. Now their insights are combined, and the reader who doesn't know them has the bonus experience of being introduced to a host of powerful writers and original minds.
By bringing together so many other voices, including the perceptions that modern artists like Cezanne and Klee share with indigenous peoples, she brings to light many hidden relationships to nature we all have in common.

Although some elements of the following come from pieces published in Orion and the Wild Duck Review, this is the first appearance of this essay.

THE HOME OF POWER, THE POWER OF HOME
copyright 1999
by William Severini Kowinski


COMING HOME TO THE PLEISTOCENE by Paul Shepard. Island Press, hardcover and paperback.
THE ROAD HOME, A Novel by Jim Harrison. Paper: Washington Square Press 1999, 464 pages.
GAIN by Richard Powers. Paper: Picador, 1999. 388 pages
POWER by Linda Hogan. paper: W.W. Norton, 1999. 248 pages.



What is 'home' and where is it? What is power, what is gain? And what's to be gained by considering these four books together--will it make you more powerful? Will it tell you how to get home?
How important these concepts are to our lives and times is clearer when we consider the opposites they imply: loss, helplessness; exile, homelessness, alienation. These are obsessive themes of the 20th century that remain disturbingly relevant as we begin the 21st, though in different ways, raising different issues. These ways and issues that will likely dominate debate as well as our lives for years to come are cogently defined in this trio of novels by three of our better fictionists, and a summary work by a scholar whose reputation is still growing.

I
If there are any historians in the late 21st century, looking back to find the most important thinkers of the 20th, they'll likely move quickly past one-noters like Einstein, pause for awhile at Jung, nod appreciatively at a few scientists, artists and social critics, and then settle with great interest on Paul Shepard. Their attitude towards his obscurity in his own time will either be amused or dour, depending on how the 21st century is turning out. Are these historians huddled in abandoned malls, refugees from a botched civilization, scribbling with the last manufactured ink and wondering how to actually make the stuff? Are they gazing down at a devastated planet from Bill Gates' space station? Then they are rueful and bitter that humankind again ignored the threads of answers they had. Or are they confidently chronicling the vague beginnings of the ongoing transformation to save humankind and revive the remnants of the planet? Then they are reading Shepard as a cogent prophet. In any scenario save the least likely (that 2099 looks pretty much like 1999 but with faster toys) Shepard's work will be of supreme relevance.

One of the founders of the ecology movement in the early 1970s, Paul Shepard almost immediately disappeared down his own path of inquiry and advocacy. At the time of his death in 1996,almost none of his books were in print, despite their acknowledged influence on heavy-hitters in many fields such as James Hillman, Gary Snyder, E.O. Wilson, Theodore Roszak and Kirkpatrick Sale. As the new century starts, all of his books are available, thanks largely to Island Press and the University of Georgia Press. Two have been published posthumously: an essay collection (Encounters With Nature) and Coming Home to the Pleistocene, the last book he completed, which is edited for maximum clarity by his wife, naturalist and essayist Florence R. Shepard. It serves well as an introduction to Shepard's major lines of thought as expressed in the thousands of pages of earlier work, with their sweeping and subtle ideas derived from obsessive scholarship, boldly and poetically expressed.

The title sums up the main premise of his work: that we became fully human, in body, mind and as societies, in the 5,000 centuries--half a million years--of the Pleistocence, and that this subsequent brief period of what we call history and civilization has been a grand and tragic botch, contrary to our natures and the necessary relationships we had achieved with the rest of nature.

We're familiar with the standard view of the Caveman, of the ignorant, cruel and superstitious primitive living nasty, brutal and short lives of noisy desperation. This view has accumulated its own superstitions, as the repository of our projections about the worst we dread and fear in ourselves and fellow humans, which we mythologize as the savagery and selfishness of human nature, controlled only by force and civilization. But Shepard doesn't see the modern world's destruction of the natural world as a product of human nature. Our ills are caused precisely by the opposite: by the systems we have created in the period we call civilization, resulting in entrenched behaviors and ways of thinking that are not only anti-nature but contrary to human nature as it was formed in the vastly longer period of the Pleistocene.

But this is no rewarmed resurrection of the noble savage: as Shepard demonstrates in the elaborate mosaic of his work, these are complex societies evolving along with the human genome in intimate relationship with the rest of the natural world. These relationships shaped our genetic makeup. This is how our ancestors developed social structures and ways of life that were human, not utopian. Nature was not a collection of objects: neither "natural resources" nor cute and cuddly symbols. Human relationships with other life included learning through close examination, imitation, respect, fear, cooperation, awe and the paradox of killing creatures for your sustenance that you know deeply, deeply admire, even worship--a living paradox apparently too complex for modern minds to accommodate.

It's no creative leap or comic coincidence that in our time "prehistoric man" became mythologized as the Flintstones, a family based on the sitcom version of Ralph Kramden and the urban working class. This preconceived bias links stereotypes that are little more that symbols of what we think we're better than: caveman, peasant, immigrant, country bumpkin, redskins, bush babies, Polacks, Joe Six-pack. According to fashionable mythology, they are all poor, boorish and ignorant. But Shepard turns the tables in a sentence from a previous book: "Modern men are no smarter, kinder, or more creative than their forebears of a quarter of a million years ago." In many ways hunter-gatherer humans were more sophisticated and complex, and lived better, too. In other hands, this assertion could be wishful thinking, a sentimental projection as egregious as the opposite stereotype. But Shepard's work is thorough and complex. In this book, he finds more contemporary examples in traditional Native cultures, which lends further weight to his model.

"The cruelest form of modern criticism of primal peoples depicts them as stingy and greedy as anybody else,"Shepard writes, "implying that to be human is to be selfish." Yet as Shepard shows, our reflexive notion of what constitutes human nature is of human beings in one basic meta-system that underlies everything from medievalism to consumer capitalism: the centralizing force of agriculture.

Hunter-gatherer bands went to where the food was at any given time, usually on a landscape they intimately knew. Dependence on farming meant that people stayed in one place, and ample crops had to arrive on time or they would starve. From this simple fact arises all that we know as history: the religions and their leaders and bureaucracies that existed to guarantee crops by direct link and propitiation of the gods (or goddesses) and later by the quasi-religious leader and his bureaucracies who rule the land, guarantee the crops will grow and be efficiently distributed: the king, the government, the state. Animals are domesticated, wars are fought, civilizations rise and fall, all over protein and carb. Soon comes the hunger for the chimera of guaranteed personal abundance and its gleaming symbols, such as gold.

This dependence on One Crop necessitates everything from one true God and one central authority to the science and machinery to guarantee it. It is behind all our social and cultural systems that, Shepard maintains, stunt our growth and twist our 'human nature' as individuals as well as societies. Mostly we don't mature in synch with nature, but stay dependent. (He works the individual aspect out most carefully in a prior book, Nature and Madness.) It's a profound reversal of all we've been taught: the 'primitive' human is not so simple, and we, it turns out, are arrested in adolescence, psychotically oversimplified.

Just as farms necessitate the state, the production of crops is the model for all economic production. Industrialization is just farming by other means. You can see this clearly on the great American highway--on Route 101 north of San Francisco, for instance: the fields of grapevines around Somona become the fields of new Fords and Toyotas and the fields of identical office buildings approaching Petaluma. Of course, the huge factory farms and livestock factories we never see are visibly clearer examples. A single pig factory, ecologists claim, creates more toxic waste than Los Angeles.

Shepard shows that on a global level the monoculture begins with agriculture. Everything becomes a crop, subject to control, and what grows fastest and best drives out all else. Farmers don't need diversity; nomads do. As we deplete diversity, we end up as global cultivators. The entire world becomes a farm (including our "wilderness areas."). Yet wild nature is part of our nature, and we have not evolved beyond that interdependence. We are losing what made us: the complexity, integrity and reality of wild life. So few of us feel truly at home in this world because we aren't. Our feeling of lostness, loneliness and longing can be traced back to the lost home of the Pleistocene, and Nature as our necessary Other.

We can't go back to being hunter-gatherers, at least not voluntarily and not in the same form, though Shepard's apparently pale hope that "we may recover some social principles, metaphysical insights, and spiritual qualities from their way of life by reconstructing it in our our milieu" may not be so far-fetched, especially if world population steeply declines in the 21st and 22nd centuries, as some demographers expect. In the struggle to control or at least influence our destinies we might reflect on the possibility that we long for a lost home because we were indeed at home in the world once, and for a long time. This home is not only a place in nature, it is our nature. We have met the home, and it is us. It is what we are made for, because it is what we were made with.
In this book and in the totality of his work, Shepard suggests what forms of culture fit our human form, the kind of society in the natural world in which we still struggle and strive and make collosal mistakes, but we are always at home--or perhaps as in the title of Ursula LeGuin's novel suggests, Always Coming Home.

While LeGuin's novel is set in a future which is something like Shepard's vision of the past, Jim Harrison writes about journeys to a home in our own time, yet not in its centers of commerce and control. Here on the margins his characters get glimpses, pieces of pictures, of home.

II

JIM HARRISON's literary voice has always been unique and entertaining, and this aspect of his craft reaches something of an apotheosis in The Road Home. Partly it is the off-center language, a combination of the contemporary and antique (to my knowledge he is the only well-known novelist to regularly employ the words "otiose" and "captious", which to me are so arcane that I still have to look them up whenever I read him.) Partly it is the construction and cadences: while his sentences are logical and perfectly formed, his paragraphs are as wild as river rapids. Within them sentences tumble from one subject to another, changing geographical locations and sometimes centuries, linked by rhythm and their own particular logic.

Harrison typically builds his stories with an ongoing narration that links recollections of the main action, often as written in journals or letters. In this book, almost everything is presented as having been previously written down by the characters. Still, Harrison's prose always has the sound of speech, even if no one actually speaks that way, except maybe Harrison, at least in interviews. This voice is heard most clearly in the many cogent, witty and epigrammatic observations and asides his characters make. All of these elements coalese somewhere near perfection in this novel, making every page a pleasure to read (especially after the first 100, which seem a bit awkward compared to the 350 that follow.) Perhaps Harrison's years of meditation inform this exactness, along with his reading of classic Zen poets who can be as least as ribald, tortured and funny as any American Beat.

Harrison's subjects and the elements of contemporary life are also odd, when compared to the dominant urban-centered and Zeitgeist-minded fiction. In his last novel, Dalva, his unhinged heroine came home to the family homestead, a sprawling ranch in Nebraska, established by the progenitor John Northridge in the mid 19th century. Dalva is a Northridge, a multigenerational family of Euro-Americans with several points of alliance and intermarriage with the Lakota Sioux of these plains. The Road Home is a kind of sequel, moving the narrative forward a little in time, but basically adding more breadth and depth to the same events, concentrating on the perspectives of Dalva and her family: her grandfather ("a prairie Lear" as Harrison describes him elsewhere), the son she put up for adoption and first meets as a young man ,her uncle (and surrogate father), and her mother.

There is a remarkable sense of continuity in these four generations, and it is predicated on the land. (In his non-fiction collection, Just Before Dark, Harrison notes that even today Nebraska reminds him of "what America was supposed to look like before it became something else.") Life on the Northridge ranch is simple and yet highly cultivated. Here the Northridge generations hike, ride and hunt, eat and drink gloriously, read books and talk and write about them, keep journals and read past journals of others, so the past is a considered part of their present. Of course it wouldn't be a Harrison narrative without swales, dogs and garlic, so these too are part of his most integrated vision of home.

There is one self-conscious wanderer in this book, whose journey to find a lost home is actual. Dalva's son Nelse, who as a young man read a magazine article about nomads (likely an excerpt of Bruce Chatwin's book, The Songlines)and set out to be a deliberate nomad, traveling the west with no fixed address, trying "to understand the world, especially the natural world as I seemed to draw up short on human beings." But Nelse was adopted and he doesn't know his mother's identity. His wandering takes on another purpose when he seeks and finds Dalva and his ancestral home, repeating Dalva's own journey in the previous novel, the last section of which was called "Coming Home." This is another function of home in this novel: as a place where journeys begin and end, and where lives can be recollected in tranquility in between.

The characters are torn from home by their own passions and obsessions (principally love and art); and their lives, particularly those of the men, are permanently distorted by war (from the Indian wars through World War I, Korea and Vietnam.) The road home is everyone's life's journey. And so this novel--this two-volume saga--presents the births, dreams, marriages, sex, misunderstandings, regrets, brawls, tantrums, brushes with the law, even some gun-play of characters that live over a century of American history. The real-time events in the novel are mostly the rhythmic activities of daily life, and the big events are mostly remembered. Because of this considered, precisely expressed observation and thought, each event has texture and density. In turn, memories and the thoughts and emotions they evoke give more weight and dimension to the simple acts of living, which become rituals of affirmation and grief.

Harrison is rightly praised for his vivid evocation of the natural landscape and the values embedded in it, although here the landscape is also cultivated. This isn't wilderness or the Pleistocene--it is the Midwest formed from the frontier by stubborn Scandinavians, who provide Harrison with some piquant and McMurtryesque minor characters. Still, everything about this family refers ultimately and deeply to the land, including their name. Home is a place of grounding, and therefore it is vital that it be a home that sits in nature, that partakes of timelessness in the modern age. Like the homes of the foragers, it's a place to go away from and come back to, yet unlike the Pleistocene foragers, the contemporary forager is never quite sure where he is or what she's looking for, or why they wander. ( Though Paul Shepard is not among the many writers Harrison generously names in the text, it's hard to believe Harrison hasn't read and been influenced by him.)

Dogs and horses are as individual and perhaps as important as people in this novel, and contact with the land is the lifeblood of these characters. It's when people can no longer ride or hunt that they know it's time to die. The deaths, both violent and natural, are prominent, and several are described at length, giving this book an elegiac tone as well as an epic scope. The Road Home also leads to death, the home where the journey ends. The sense of elegy extends also to the land, which the characters often fret about, whether it is on the ranch or on the backroads. When one is faced with imminent loss, the only creative act is careful remembering. Memory is another home.

This pair of novels offers unusual possibilities--reading and re-reading each in relation to the other, reading parts of one that match up with the same time or event in the other, finding the symmetries that might be fate or beauty or both, and otherwise discovering the literary rendering of the hypertext of life.

There is a sense here not of an ending but of a kind of completion, as well as in the coincident publication of Harrison's new and collected poems, The Shape of the Journey (Copper Canyon Press). "To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime," Harrison asserts in his preface to a series of Zen inspired poems, included in this substantial and revelatory volume. The Road Home is the work of a lifetime, in that sense and more.
The home where these roads lead is not ideal, but the best there is now. Harrison's achievement is to do so well what he observes in music of birds, as he writes in the last line of the last poem in The Shape of the Journey: "They sing what and where they are."

III

GAIN is one of what author Richard Powers calls his 'bottom up' books, (like Operation Wandering Soul) that begin with the characters and their stories, rather than his more popular and praised'top down' books (Goldbug Variations, Galatea 2.2) that begin with a structural premise. Yet it is the structure that dominates Gain: a contrapuntal narration of more than a century of a single corporation's history juxtaposed with the course of one contemporary woman's cancer, which was likely caused by exposure to chemical byproducts released by that corporation.

The ironies, poignance and, in a fairly large sense for our civilization, the tragedy, is embedded in this scenario through the corporation's chief product: soap, to make us clean and white, to purify us from disease and the dirt of the earth. What product could be more benign, more helpful? It is among the most intimate of products, redolent with the smell and security of home. Yet the cancer that it indirectly causes smashes the safety that home represents. Powers gives this another literal edge, as the costs of cancer mean that Laura--the woman with cancer--might lose her home, which she thinks of as a kind of being: "She must have been mad. Had some crazed idea that the house would be her safe haven. Would always take care of her. She's spent years taking care of it, keeping up her end of the deal. But now, at the first called debt, the house gets ready to renege."

Read the first pages of a Powers book and be dazzled--nobody, not even DeLillo or Pynchon--can dance like this: fancy footwork, bouncing references, slant puns and daring patter. This breathtaking dazzlement isn't sustained, as it probably can't be, though it flares often enough in pages and passages. So it goes in Gain, though in more muted tones. Beside the prose of his other novels, Gain is stark, sometimes even awkward. Perhaps one of the major themes demands it: No author can tapdance with cancer, even if the sufferer who is described is trying to do so, putting up a brave but ultimately empty defense.

For me the major weakness of this book is this contrapuntal structure. A popular structure these days--from Stoppard plays and earlier Jim Harrison fictions to TV dramas--it seems ready-made to contrast the corporate with the personal, the big accidental cause with the deep effect of the accident. Here, after a hundred pages or so it seems to bleed the energy out of both halves of the story. But I read this book over a long period; a faster reading might redeem the structure. Personally, I couldn't read it more continuously. In addition to my note-taking for themes, referents and felicitous phrases, I had to stop rather often for anguish. It was the hardest novel for me to read that I can remember, because of the cancer sections.

Not just the echoes of my mother's long bouts of treatments, crises, remissions before her cancers killed her (the hardest parts to read were the things I didn't realize at the time that she was likely going through)but in the very specific contemplation of my own future and of those I love. For American women at this moment, the chances of manifesting cancer are one in three. For American men it's one in two--the flip of a coin. It is our slow-motion plague, none the less destructive for forms of it being less fatal these days, as it still surrenders us to the humiliations of hospitals and the arbitrary power of insurance companies. Cancer evokes the fear not only of death and pain but of powerlessness, and exile.

Regardless of its structure, however, Gain is rich in themes and subthemes that illuminate American history and current dilemmas. Few other novelists have been brave enough to directly explore the meaning of corporate power. (Though Jim Harrison refers to effects of business on the landscape, his characters rarely even work for a living.) Powers describes the curious status in the law that allows corporations the legal privileges of a person without commensurate responsibilities, so that each business becomes infinitely more powerful than actual individuals, and it need never die. "The limited-liability corporation: the last noble experiment, loosing an unknowable outcome upon its beneficiaries. Its success outstripped all rational prediction until, gross for gross, it became mankind's sole remaining endeavor." The growth of a kind of organism that overwhelms and ultimately threatens the life of the larger organism it inhabits is of course the model for both cancer and the corporation.

Corporations as persons have made the earth their home and property,changing the relationship of mere humans to the natural world. In the end, " The earth had become a factory. Humankind scrambled to emulate the productive reliability of its machines."

"Gain" is a concept from applied science as much as business or, for that matter, religion. As usual, Powers deals meticulously with the science, though this time it is not the clean abstraction of higher physics and computer chip-inspired theories of mind, but the practical chemistry of making us clean. He really does tell the story of soap and its manifold uses (to clean the rubber to make tires to win World War II, for example)with such richness as to make a corporate history hack green with envy. In fact he also chronicles corporate p.r. from early advertising to greenwashing and the management of desire; for this also he has the perfect industry, since the cliche everyone seems to use when decrying the inappropriate application of business principles to, say, art or medical care, is that they're "selling it like soap."

Yet this book is not anti-business, any more than it (or any of Powers' books) is anti-science. What happy ending the novel has posits a corporate science solution to the painful death this corporate and science alliance causes, though too late for the woman whose life the narrative follows. So, too, would the corporate hack's hackles be soothed at the novel's conclusion. As its protagonist, nearing her last check-out, totes up her personal balance sheet, she decides that corporate science has given her more than it is now taking away. "The world is her spent purchase," she mused, and noted that life--that ultimate industry--goes on without her, maybe without anybody ("Lovely lichen will manufacture soil on the sunroofs of the World Trade," she speculates.)

There is a certain unflinching bravery in Powers ability to look all the implications in the face and express them (something he shares with Shepard.) Does Powers say that we have gained the world only to lose our souls? I don't think so. Readers, like reviewers, may be tempted to find only support for their ideology in this unflinching exposition and rumination. Yet the biggest joke pulled by pun-conscious Powers may be that his evaluation of gain versus loss in the soap industry turns out to be a wash.

On the one hand, corporations cause cancer, and in a sense they are the cancer of the earth. But they are responding to human wants. Powers' history doesn't provide the long context that Shepard does; perhaps he's hinting that this is human nature, rather than a long inbred reaction, expressed as greed, to the fear of want if the crops fail. In Powers' formulation, cancer is the price we pay for our way of life, for our desire. These are Laura's last words: "People want everything. That's their problem."

IV
A man's home is his castle, the saying goes, linking domicile with dominion over it. Castle walls protect from outside invasion, safeguarding as well the king's power over the land. Moving the metaphor to the individual, making and keeping a true home depends upon power over one's life and land. In Gain, our power is diminished by corporate power, which in Shepard's terms is essentially an extension of centralized agriculture and its belief system expressed by the monotheistic desert religions and a science that sees the world as essentially made of dead objects to manipulate for apparent short-term gain. What happens to individuals in the modern world as a result, has happened to entire indigenous cultures, including those of our hemisphere. "Would it have been a different world if someone had believed our lives were as important as theory and gold?" wonders Omshito, an American Indian, the 16 year old narrator and center of Linda Hogan's new novel, Power.

To complete the circle back to Shepard, after journeys through the very different contemporary landscapes etched by Harrison and Powers, is to confront the world's surviving indigenous peoples, whose deepest living traditions provide the strongest remaining link to the Pleistocene way of life that made humans human.

Harrison's saga is deeply involved in the confrontation and relationships of Euro-Americans and Indians on the Plains. His heroine Dalva has Lakota blood and has her son with a young Lakota man, the love of her life. The late 19th century events surrounding Wounded Knee are central to the first volume, and near the end of the second there is a ritual affirmation that expresses both the kinship and the distance between the Northridge clan and the indigenous peoples.

A thread that runs through Powers' book is the destruction of Native peoples, their cultures and worldview, necessitated by the cancerous spread of corporate business. He notes in several places the shameful ironies of a dominant power that destroys the Indians as it buys up and uses their images, compounded in the devilishly ironic name of his soap company's first big product, called Native Balm.

But increasingly now, we can hear the stories of these confronting cultures, the effects of those confrontations, and the nature of what was destroyed and is still being lost, from Native writers themselves. From the illuminating analyses of Native languages by Jeannette Armstrong to the witty and trenchant commentary on science and history by Vine Deloria, Jr., these writers are expressing what one Native activist calls the"Native paradigm," the counterpart to the so-called New Paradigm and its concepts of deep ecology, sustainability, biodiversity,and biophilia, all of which are basically abstracted aspects of traditional Native cultures.

The Native Paradigm emerges not from theory but from untold centuries of experience, study and revelation. Though this paradigm survives in the traditions of peoples who have made this land their home for millennia, much of it is still so foreign to the dominant monoculture as to be very difficult to comprehend. "The study of native cultures tends to lead you far afield from all you have learned, including much more that you have perceived and assumed was real." Jim Harrison observes in an essay. "At first this is disconcerting, but there are many benefits to letting the world fall apart."

Perhaps cushioning the fall for non-Indian readers, and opening up access points to Native sensibilities, are the fictions and poems of contemporary Native writers, from the "grandfather" generation of N. Scott Momaday through the "grandchildren"--the Sherman Alexie generation of writers in their 30s and 20s. It is especially among the writers of the middle generation who came of age in the 1960s that mastery is growing in the novel form, providing a larger and deeper portrait of Native cultural legacy by using the novel's potential to embody complexity, and to express emotional, moral, intellectual and cultural contexts simultaneously in an involving and enriching reading experience. This European form has become the most widespread, rich and accessible means of storytelling in our era in almost every culture on earth.

Though they are still often ignored by the literary establishment, today's mature Native novelists-- such as Craig Lesley, Louise Erdrich, James Welsh and especially Leslie Marmon Silko-- have created contemporary classics as exciting and various as the novelists of any period, anywhere.

High on this list is Linda Hogan, self-consciously a Native American writer of Chickasaw heritage,and a literary artist in the "western" sense as well, of poems, essays, stories and plays. She has written three novels, each magically absorbing, and each more formally accomplished, while doing what the novel allows and cherishes--expanding the possibilities of the form to illuminate in new ways. In this case, to suggest a radically different notion of power than non-Native world is used to.

The artistry of this relatively short novel is astounding. Hogan grows stronger in what was already her strong suit: combining the sensory/sensual and the mystical/mysterious to create unique descriptions that are intensely alive. There is also a robust plot, with enough action for several feature films, and social relevance for several TV movies. Yet it is also a personal story: mesmerizing moment-by-moment description in a classic adolescent coming to awareness tale. Holding it all together is a strong narrative momentum and a conceptual structure of classic simplicity that opens the door to the kind of complexities that blow the assumed world apart.

Though the story is clearly and beautifully told, nothing here is simple or completely resolved. There are surprising plot turns and paradoxes, and even minor characters are more than one dimensional. Hogan's writing is sensate, lyrical and at times hypnotic. Omshito's voice is at once oracular and realistic and wholly likeable. All of this makes Power (along with Hogan's very different previous novels) not only a multidimensional glimpse of Native life and belief, but a contemporary classic of American literature. For imaginative power and literary artistry, Linda Hogan is unsurpassed by any living author.

A crucial example of this artistry is found in Hogan's explorations of doubleness. It has become something of a cliche to describe today's American Indians as "walking in two worlds," and Hogan explores the complex combinations of this reality through one girl's life, but she also expands it to encompass the themes of history and of humans in nature--the obsessions as well in Shepard, Harrison and Powers.

The novel's narrator, the 16 year old girl, is ambivalent about her life as the novel begins. Omshito is a member of the fictional Taiga people, but she lives in a poor Florida swampland town with her mother (who gave up the old ways to seek salvation in Christianity and in trying to pass for white middle class), her pretty sister and the stepfather who beats her. She keeps her distance from the Old Place, the last outpost of Taiga to live a traditional life in an enclave beyond the swamp, but is drawn to Ama, an elder Taiga woman who lives in a house alone between these two worlds. Omshito likes listening to Ama's stories, but claims, "I'm not a person who believes the way she does, because it's a different world what with houses and highways."

But the order of these worlds is shaken up, first by a fierce storm ( Hogan's long narration of it is a breathtaking tour de force), and then by the central event of the novel: Ama's deliberate killing of a Florida panther, member of an endangered species, with Omshito as a witness. While this act is universally condemned by the non-Native community (which likely would have applauded it a decade earlier, and was largely responsible for the panther nearing extinction) it is a morally and culturally complex act for Omshito and her Taiga people, who identify themselves with the panther. Their stories say the panther taught them the mysteries of life.

By this time however, the few surviving panthers are all diseased and starving. Omshito is also aware that the Taiga people are as few and as endangered as the panthers themselves, and that like the panthers, they are valued only as mascots while considered inconvenient and dangerous in the modern world, while the world that sustains them is inexorably destroyed. The meaning of the panther kill cannot be separated from the clash of Native and modern worlds. The modern world objectifies nature and insists on simple answers. Indigenous cultures live in and with nature, and struggle with the complexities of the relationships.

Omshito's fated double view is embedded in her two names: at home she is Sissy, but her Taiga name is Omshito, which means the one who watches. The two worlds of non- Native and Native are mirrored in the two worlds of transcendent and visible reality, with cracks and openings (and also doors closing) between them. Some characters live in one or the other world, Ama lives between them, but everyone is somehow divided. Of the panther killing (and the resulting two trials, by the county court and tribal elders) Omshito is of two minds, seeing two truths which contradict each other, and two sides which are both wrong and both right. Omshito is the most conflicted, both at home and a foreigner in each world, but her clear-eyed observation and stubborn journey to commitment is a remarkable and revelatory variation on the adolescent search for identity and meaning.

There is a doubleness to Hogan's notion of power as well (as, in the human dominated world, is Richard Powers'). The vividly described hurricane is the ultimate power of primal nature, but nature is also a victim of human power. The panthers are "protected" while their habitat is destroyed. They are often killed by cars and sometimes choked by the tracking collars placed on them by state biologists. The dramatic panther hunt includes crossing a highway, and takes place in wooded and swampy strips with houses so near that Omshito hears a radio playing. She can still fish for bass, but they are too poisoned to eat. The spring which the Spanish once believed was the Fountain of Youth is so polluted no one can drink from it.

The doubleness extends to double meanings and ambiguity, a powerful if recently neglected tool of poetry, and also in Hogan's hands the means to express a Native experience of reality. From the start, Omshito sees not just the ground-level world, but the mastodon bones and remnants of ancient seabeds below, and the forces that gather the clouds. Her here and now is inhabited by the cycles of time that brings past and future into the present. When Omshito says "the earth was bleeding" it is an observation of a sky reddening from the horizon, but also a literal description of a wounded being. Hogan is fleshing the bones of such often quoted and little understood concepts as "Everything is alive."

Implications of the earth as sacred are also explored, including a Native meaning to the fall from Paradise, and the story involves some of the most primal human mysteries, largely absent from contemporary fiction, such as the meanings of sacrifice and scapegoats, redemption and salvation.

The conflicting notions in Native and non-Native cultures of how power is manifested of course also plays a part. Though Omshito professes not to believe in the old ways, from the beginning she shows a healthy respect for the power of some elders to kill and to cure by somehow harnessing the earth's own magic. Her mother believes more forcefully--though not without reluctance and shame--that the power of money and non-Native culture is stronger now than what her traditions teach her is true power and knowledge.

In the end Omshito rejects her mother's Christian beliefs for the old ways of the Taiga elders, yet Christianity is part of her given world now, and she sees her world also in terms familiar to Christianity. In particular she gives a new Native meaning to the idea of the fall from Paradise, with new repercussions. "It was all fallen, this poisoned, cut world....Unloved and disgraced and torn apart. Fallen, that's what this world is. And betrayed."

What in a poisoned, cut world is power? What in a fallen world is home? In Omshito's story, home is a commitment, however imperfect. Even though her beloved Ama has been exiled by her own people, Omshito's journey leads back to the Old Place. Utopia is not a home, as writer Eduardo Galeano says in a little fable, but the walk to get to its ever-receding horizon. Home is not utopia--it's just home: where your heart belongs, and makes its stand.