Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. Volume 1: The West

Edited by Kim Wyatt and Erin Bechtol
Bona Fide Books, 2011
Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

If you’re like me, you’ve visited a number of National Parks, you’ve been enthralled by the beauty and variety presented by that great national resource, but your personal list of parks-to-see is long. What to do to ease the craving in between trips to our national parks? One answer: read about them.

Bona Fide Books, a young press out of South Lake Tahoe, has put together for a first anthology a rich collection of essays by writers who’ve not only visited our parks but have spent time working and living in them, in some cases for whole careers. Thirty-plus years. That’s the beauty of Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. Volume 1: The West . These essays present the lives, insights, and secrets of people who’ve not only visited the parks but have experienced them from the inside. A handsomely produced volume, it’s readable, fun, and small enough to shove in a backpack.

I’ll admit: I’m biased. I had the luck to once be the writer-in-residence on Isle Royale National Park, and those three weeks gave me my own taste as a National Park Service insider. But as this anthology illustrates, one park, or one experience, is not like the other. There are stories here you won’t find in any parks guide book. The beauty and appreciation you’ll expect; the dark side of working in the parks may be a surprise.

Joseph Flannery writes about encounters with grizzly bears, secret back roads and buffalo carcasses, the differences between grizzlies and black bears, and the way Yellowstone employees pride themselves in experience: “To have a close encounter with a grizzly is to wear a sort of badge of honor around the park.” Troy Davis, a ranger and biologist at Yellowstone for nine years, tells of the management of the famous Elk Number Six, and losing sleep one night while the animal circled his cabin, bugling. “I spent more time, eyeball to eyeball, with Elk Number Six than did any other human being.” Ruth Rhodes, now a professor of English, spent three seasons working at Denali National Park, and writes of the Dash, the end of summer ritual in which park employees strip down and run three miles, naked, in the frigid midnight air of Alaska, from one bar, the Golden Spike, to another, the Chalet.

There is the beauty and the wildlife: sunsets and sunrises, lush forest, snowy wilderness, elk, bear, wolves, big horn sheep, and brook trout. The geology: mountains, petrified forest, volcanoes, canyons. The process: tents, cabins, employee housing, hiking, climbing, summiting, and river-rafting.

But there’s also the rote work, the let-down, the exhaustion of underpaid drudgery, and the drugs and alcohol, the car accidents and deaths, the dark side of the Park Service, the symptoms of young people together in isolation, working in a dream wilderness but with few other outlets. Melanie Dylan Fox talks about escape during five seasons of work in Sequoia National Park: “It’s easier to rely on the feelings alcohol and drugs evoke than it is to recapture that sense of wonder we all felt at the beginning. We keep searching for the intoxication that the forest itself once brought.” Nicole Sheets, for this essay perhaps appropriately named, writes of changing bed linens, pleating sheets and tucking edges, of being a “lowly drone.” For Sheets, the adage “leave no trace” takes an unexpected angle. “My work succeeds . . . if . . . each guest can maintain the illusion that they are the first people to ever stay in their room.”

Like all anthologies, some essays are stronger than others. The best here tell more than one story, using lyrical prose to reveal something personal. Cassandra Kircher tells of a difficult relationship with her aging father, attempting to understand his quiet, his isolation. During one of his visits while she works in Rocky Mountain National Park, “my father arranges pieces of bark with his foot like he’s playing a game, creating a whole world that is more real to him than the one he is in.” By the end of the essay, caught trout slowly dying in a bucket become a larger metaphor for the reader, for the essay’s narrator. Mary Emerick writes of escaping relationships with men, traveling from park to park, a vagrant seasonal worker with a fear of commitment to anything but her “ancient road atlas.” Janet Smith writes about working in the parks to escape feelings of inadequacy, ugliness: “living—literally—in the shadow of Half Dome equated to a better life.” This type of writing is at once painful, revealing, and gratifying.

Other national parks represented include Mount Rainier, Wrangell-St.Elias, Grand Teton, Petrified Forest, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Yosemite. A highly recommended collection that will make you want to ditch your job and pack your gear for a nearest or favorite national park, but with a new appreciation for many of the seasonal and full-time rangers, naturalists, and workers helping maintain the incredible National Parks System that most of us will only briefly get to visit.

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Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook Halflives (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com

The Moral Lives of Animals
by Dale Peterson
Bloomsbury Press, 2011

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

When I was a teenager, my family had a dog named Buddy, a German shepherd-beagle mix who was taught to stay off the living room couch. Except that more than once, my mother — usually the first one awake on any dark, sleepy morning — walking down the hall toward the living room, only thinking of turning on the heat, the lights, and the coffee, would see the dog slip off the couch to the floor, catching him at the tail end of his deception. He occasionally overslept in that soft couch, failing to move in time in response to her shuffling, slippered footsteps. And he’d get caught.

As a pet owner, I know that many animals — at least the larger mammals — experience emotion and live by some form of a moral code. I take that for granted. Buddy not only understood right from wrong, but that what also mattered was simply if he could get away with it. He engaged in deceptive practices, and we had many a laugh about his human-like assumptions. If I don’t get caught, it’s okay, right? Sometimes it was as if Buddy had two emotions: joy and guilt. But of course there were more: fear, excitement, curiosity, to name a few.

I approached Dale Peterson’s new book thusly: as a member of the choir, an animal fan, an environmentalist, someone who’s comfortable around strange dogs, who can put an animal at ease. Peterson, a dog owner himself — his dogs Smoke and Spike make frequent appearances — tells us this book originated from a dinner-party argument, and one can imagine it starting: “Clearly animals don’t have emotions or morality — they act on instinct. Neural reflexes only, dear chap.” The sort of statement that makes pet owners roll their eyes. Yet, the suggestion of the book’s origins belies the structure, and the way Peterson makes his case. I expected a lucid rebuttal with a resounding conclusion: hypothesis presented, points made, confirmed, concluded. Dinner party over. It’s not to be: The Moral Lives of Animals is more than that.

Peterson’s book is a thoughtful, semi-academic, and well-researched tome that examines the meaning of morality from many angles — linguistically, socially, behaviorally, emotionally — and across a number of animal species, including Homo sapiens. Domestic dogs, chimpanzees, and bonobos make an appearance. As do whales, bats, and kangaroos. Gerbils, penguins, and wolves. To clarify, what Peterson’s done is present specific, observed cases of animal behavior, illustrate the ways the identical behavior exists in humans, and use these examples to try to map out the complex geography of what we mean by morality. While attempting to hammer out the ways in which humans often attribute intelligence and value systems to themselves while minimizing the same for an animal species.

The backdrop for the overall arc of the book is Melville’s Moby Dick, the great novel that offers an animal’s tale (based in reality — the Essex sinking) while presenting a variety of human attitudes toward animals. With Melville’s backing, Peterson asks: Are we Ahab? Or are we Starbuck? Are we hunting the malevolent White Whale? Or are we rationally human-centered, recognizing the whale is just one beast in the sea, and that the lives of the crew take precedence.

Peterson’s answer is of a Buddhist nature, and we realize this more when he takes on human behavior and morality. Humans are stripping the world of its mineral and animal natural resources. They are polluting the elements that both humans and animals need to survive. They are warring and killing. Deforesting. Pursuing situations in the world — deep water drilling, nuclear energy — that can cause irreversible damage on a large scale when accidents occur. Peterson’s nutshell: in fact, animal populations may act in a way more balanced and more conducive to overall survival of a group than humans do.

Peace: the answer and the challenge. Respecting others. Forgoing speciesism, the narcissism of the human. Peterson closes with the image of a large whale lifting a dinghy and its two occupants clear out of the water on its large tail. Putting them down without hurting them. We’re close to the Buddhist mantra: do no harm. Hurt no living thing. Can humans learn to coexist with animals in the world before it’s too late? Can we learn to respect animal populations as not simply there for the sport? For whim? For abuse? For management? Peterson shows us the human race fails at this when we objectify animals. When we foreground pure economics. And his examples show us that animals are far from objects; in fact, they’re remarkably similar to humans, and perhaps more moral, more rational in their ability to allow their environment and species to persist, where human populations can seem so determined to annihilate themselves. We share the world with these creatures. One hopes that Peterson’s book will be read by more than people like me: the choir. The ones who are already on board. There’s a lot to learn here.

I’m a reader who loves to peruse footnotes, citations, references, bibliographies. That’s my quibble with the book’s set up. There’s a great notes section, and a thorough bibliography, attesting to Peterson’s hard work. But the notes section doesn’t have full references, only page numbers and author’s last names. The reader is forced to go first to the notes section, then carry the last name to the bibliography to learn a book’s title. Too much unnecessary work for the reader.

But that’s a formatting issue and in no way undermines the hard work of the author and the arguments. Peterson is examining morality in animals, but his point — my paraphrase — is striking and ironic: animals are not only moral, but perhaps more so than humans. The title of this book could be The Immoral Lives of Humans. We are Starbuck, not Ahab, Peterson shows us. That’s the danger: we’ll act rationally, turning from the white whale, resuming the voyage to kill 100 more whales in order to light our lamps. We’ll do always what’s best for us, now, in this moment. And in the long run, that may be the craziest, most amoral thing of all. Peterson purports to write a book about morality in animals, but in reality he holds up a mirror for humans. The reflection is uncomfortable.

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Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook Halflives (New Michigan Press.)

What’s Gotten into Us?: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World

by McKay Jenkins
Random House, 2011
Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

McKay Jenkins new book is the Fast Food Nation of the toxic chemical world, and he’s written an eye-opening, scary, and potentially impactful text. He’s broken the book into chapters with titles including The Body, The Home, The Tap, The Lawn, and The Big Box Store, and this is a clue to the content: Jenkins is educating readers about chemical dangers lurking in the most common of places: your basement, your kitchen, your water, your green lawn, your favorite mall.

Importantly, Jenkins reveals that the chemicals corporations have been developing and selling in past decades—polyvinyl chloride (PVC), petrochemicals (think: thousands of consumer products like plastics, cosmetics, food storage containers) flame retardents, pesticides and herbicides (think: 2,4-D or 2,4-dicholorphenoxyacetic acid)—hundreds of which are unregulated and commonly in use today,  have the ability to migrate into our bodies, accumulating in potentially disruptive, carcinogenic, and/or lethal amounts.

Jenkins worries not about the single exposure to a chemical but a lifetime’s accumulation, and his research points out potential links to increases in cancer, autism and other diseases. As Jenkins indicates in his prologue: “most of the tens of thousands of chemicals used commercially have been around…far too short a time for researchers to figure out…what impact they might have on our health.”

Jenkins’s own health scare prompted this book. Doctors cut a benign tumor out of his hip. Prior to surgery, he was asked all kinds of questions about his prior chemical exposure, making him realize that we have only a vague understanding of the links between most toxic chemicals and the health consequences.

The political ramifications are that change only occurs at the corporate level when populations of people get scared about what’s in their or their children’s bodies. Thyroid & hormone disruption, autism, cancer: a sixty year old may shrug, but when a mid-thirties new mother finds out that her breast milk may contain flame retardants, lead, phthalates, or other toxic chemicals, all of which may have the potential to disrupt a child’s hormonal, reproductive or other bodily system, she listens. And can adjust spending habits, spending money on organic or other products free from toxic chemicals. As Jenkins points out, corporations worry less about federal regulations: for many chemicals, regulation is nonexistant, and lobbyists in Washington can deter most changes. But losing consumers and revenue is a different story.

This is a scary book, but not without optimism and suggestions for change. After Sweden prohibited PBDE’s (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or flame retardant compounds) in late 1999, levels in Swedish breast milk dropped 30 percent in immediate years following. The book’s appendix is a solid resource of ideas, how-tos, and names or URLs to companies selling healthy non-toxic products. Change is possible, Jenkins tells us.

Jenkins’s research is impressive: the notes alone for the book are a healthy 50+ pages. My only quibble is the text could use an indicator to tell the reader when to refer to a reference in the notes section. None exist in this edition.

It’s a small quibble. If you have any interest in your body, your house, your physical enviroment, and the potential for toxic chemicals moving between the two, get a copy of this book now.

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook Halflives (New Michigan Press.)

It’s never too late to review a great book. As we approach the announcement of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winners, it’s worth remembering the little book that could. Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A real Cinderella story, this short novel does what great literature should: it makes the reader work.

I originally received the book through a subscription to Powell’s Indiespensible. I’ll be honest, I didn’t sit down and tear through Tinkers in a single sitting. I started and stopped, then started again. By the time I finished the book, it was hard to believe the page count. But it made me remember the notion that patience is a virtue, and in this world of rush, click, send, maybe we all need a slow, contemplative book to help us realign our stories.

Here’s my review:

Tinkers
By Paul Harding
Bellevue Literary Press, New York
191 pages
Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Tinkers opens with this sentence: “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.” Over the course of these eight days, Harding takes us on a journey through consciousness and memory, tracing the experiences of a dying man whose physical world begins to unravel.

George’s family attends to his needs while he is confined to bed. While hallucinating, the house he built cracks and shudders, collapses in an avalanche, and George finds himself surrounded by old photos, wood, glass, newspaper clippings and, most importantly, “The mangled brass works of the clocks he had been repairing.”

George was a meticulous repairer of clocks, working endlessly in his dimly lit basement. This sets the structure for the metaphorical use of clocks to examine time, timekeeping, and the dissolution of time in many ways throughout the novel. From the very first sentence time begins to wind down (eight days is typically the number of days a clock will operate before it needs to be wound), yet as George faces his impending death, the story opens backward through time, through the memory of George’s father, Howard, and then further still to Howard’s memory of his father.

While the novel is written in third person, there are several places where the point of view seems to shift into first person as the narrative enters the thoughts of a character. Harding also gives us a narrative without the use of quotation marks, allowing spoken words fit more seamlessly into the idea of the story as collected memories.

Early in the novel, George’s grandson, Charlie, begins speaking to George. It seems we have entered an entirely new section of the book written in first person. Instead, we are listening to Charlie tell his grandfather about a book he found in the attic. Even George, with his fading consciousness, is unsure of who is talking to him. Finally, Charlie tells George, and thus the reader, who it is.

In chapter three (out of four), the story appears to shift to first person again. This section of the book is suspended in the past as Harding takes the reader into Howard’s thoughts and the memories of his father. We remain with Howard and the stories of his youth for the rest of the chapter.

For some readers, these craft choices will be confusing. Coupled with a hyper sensitive focus on language and poetic description, many will choose to put the book down before finishing. Those who prefer action, elaborate plots, and a wide cast of characters will be disappointed.

Only two characters in the novel are developed completely — George and Howard. We get a glimpse at the kind of man Howard’s father was, and we come to understand some of the women in the novel, but their presence is limited in terms of story. Whether Harding intended it or not, Tinkers is about fathers linked through time and the effects of choices and upbringing on future generations.

As the end of George’s life approaches, we learn that he has no sons of his own. He speaks primarily with his grandsons. He is still married and his sister is present, as well as his daughters, but their purpose in the story seems to be one of convenience, a way to present a man who is not entirely alone.

The narrative is dominated by the story of the past, the memories of three generations of men who are helpless and disconnected from the present, unable to establish a legacy, unable to connect to the possibilities of the future.

Despite the character and plot limitations, this is the kind of book that must be finished in order to appreciate its symphonic resonance. In many places the novel reads like a long prose poem, keeping the reader close to the main characters, their inner workings, the experience of epilepsy, the precise knowledge needed for repairing clocks, and the intimate connection to nature.

This novel will not satisfy everyone, nor should it. What work of art, be it sculpture, painting, song, poem, or story can satisfy the senses of everyone who engages with it?

The great accomplishment for this book is that Harding allows the reader into the thoughts and psyche of the main characters not by writing abstractly, but by writing with such concrete detail that it creates a rich, mesmerizing tone for the work. The prose approaches poetry throughout much of the book, and Harding creates beautiful, lasting images that are luminous and impressionistic and in many instances draw the reader into a kind of stillness.

Tinkers demands a persistent effort by the reader. The sentences and description require attention. Every word must be read, preferably slowly. And the work as a whole must be allowed to resonate after the last page has turned, just as the memories of our grandparents and ancestors linger in the periphery, in the selective haze of memory that connects us to the past even as we tumble toward the future, toward our inevitable end.

Paul Bunyan Lives! And Other Tales from the Natural World
By Michael O’Rourke
Plain View Press, Austin, TX, 2010
173 pp.

Reviewed by Tom Saya

We all remember the Paul Bunyan tales: how he formed the rocky Mountains from the shovelsful of dirt he threw over his shoulder while digging the Mississippi, which he would use to transport the logs from his prodigious industry—felling vast forests with one swoop of his axe; how he ridded the land of animals he considered pests or “dangerous to man,” such as the “Agropelter,” “Hugag,” and “Splinter Cat.” Michael O’Rourke, in his essay “Paul Bunyan Lives!,” from his book, Paul Bunyan Lives! and Other Tales from the Natural World, revisits the Bunyan tales, seeing in them, as they promote and glorify the practices of geographic creation and manipulation as well as the belief in humankind’s dominion over nature, the very stuff of the American consciousness—big, powerful, in charge, and valuing action over thought and the consideration of consequences.

Many of these essays explore such actions: the damming of rivers, the desertification of fertile lands, the destruction of ecosystems and species, the displacement of indigenous peoples, the misuse and despoiling of millions of acres of Western public lands. These American stories are as tall as any of Bunyan’s exploits. But they aren’t tales we want to tell our children at bedtime. And, unfortunately, they aren’t tales.

O’Rourke’s prose style is unaffected, uncomplicated, yet subtle. Often poetic, as in this passage from “Desert Ships” describing the agave plant:

His essays progress in a meandering sort of way. Like the creek in his essay “Little Creek,” they sometimes digress, pursue tributaries, dive beneath city structures, resurface as springs, but always, in the end, reach their sea.

The book consists of fourteen essays about some aspect of the natural world. Some are short, meditative pieces. In “This Rock,” O’Rourke ponders why we bring rocks, from landscapes we visit, into our homes:

In “Laughing Gulls and Chameleons,” after describing laughing gulls as gregarious and raucous, and chameleons as quiet and contemplative, he wonders how the world might be different if these two creatures, instead of eagles and snakes,

These meditations, as seen above, are not without their humor.

Indeed, even the longer, more heavily researched essays maintain a lightness of tone: “I believe it was Voltaire who said, ‘If irony did not exist, it would be necessary for the Western cattle industry to invent it.’ (Or something like that.)” “Cattle Country,” like “Wrecklamation,” “Fish Story,” and “Paul Bunyan Lives!,” is a study in irony and injustices. After explaining the who, what, where, and when, he concludes with the why.

Why is the “ranching” of Western public lands allowed to continue when it is devastating those 360 million acres (trampling and defecating them into oblivion, ruining countless habitats, and using up a large percentage of the available water in the process) for the sake of 2% of our nation’s beef supply? Why are a very small number of people (mostly rich wannabe cowboys) allowed to control and dominate our public lands? “Why aren’t they being used as preserves for our native species, preserves for biodiversity, preserves for our last wilderness areas?” Perhaps he answers these questions in the last paragraph of “Pocket Wildernesses, and the Good Dr. Pepper Defiled”:

As we all bear witness to the influence the Bunyan mentality has had on our imaginations, maybe it is these essays that we should be reading to our children at bedtime.

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Tom Saya’s essays and poetry have appeared in such journals as Midwest Quarterly, Poetry East, Sonora Review, and Southern Humanities Review.

Desert Psalms
Poems by Seth Jani
Seven CirclePress, 2009

Reviewed by Christopher Woods

When we are taken from familiar surroundings, we are often left confused, even lost. But there is another aspect to being separated from what is a usual routine, a favorite room in a comfortable house, or even a steady and sound relationship. When we set out on our own, for whatever reason, we must contemplate the meaning of being separate and apart. Often this is a time to reconsider the relationship we have with ourselves. If we are lucky, we have this experience at least once in our lives.

So it was for Seth Jani, a young poet from the Northeast, whose chapbook of poems, Desert Psalms, details the time he spent living and working in the Mojave desert, a place where “there can be no names.” With a reference to the experience of being somewhere new and quite apart from familiarity, Jani describes his way of seeing himself in a fresh way in his poem, “Back To Basics.”

There are poems about leaving old loves and hurts behind, and in “Around Again” Jani attempts to speak for us all and our communal sorrows of the last century. In doing so, he appeals to the reader to return to the elemental.

What are psalms if not songs or hymns, exaltations of faith, and sometimes doubt? Psalms reach to the core of experience. They are spiritual in nature, but these days spirituality seems to change from one person to the next. Seth Jani does not profess to understand all the mysteries of God in these poems. Instead, his poems are studies of self and surroundings, landscapes with a traveler who happens to be a poet. These poems are sometimes Whitmanesque in their sense of a common humanity. The descriptions of the desert world have the sensitivity of Gary Snyder. The spiritual depth of the poems reminded me of Thomas Merton.

Jani is young, so it is uncertain which direction his new poems will take. But I imagine that this desert period will never be far from the edge of his thoughts. A desert lasts and lasts, and once we encounter it, we are never the same again. In “Psalm V,” he seems ready to continue the journey into new places, just as we all must.

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Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Houston and in Chappell Hill, Texas. His play, MOONBIRDS: A Play in the Desert, was produced in New York City by Personal Space Theatrics.

The Hermit’s Place
By Bernard Quetchenbach
Wild Leaf Press, New Haven, CT
88 pages

A quick look through the contents of Bernard Quetchenbach’s book The Hermit’s Place might leave you overwhelmed by the use of the word “hermit.” All 63 poems in this collection use the word in the title, but that establishes a sense of character and story for the collection even before reaching the opening, untitled piece on page seven. Here we are introduced to the mystery of this man, the hermit, a man who we will come to learn more about while also being reminded of the hermit lore, the lone man in the woods and that lingering question – is he still there?

These haiku-like poems are sparse and tightly wound, giving us a vivid glimpse into the life of a man who abandoned his car and ventured into the wilderness on his “first long walk.” No poem is longer than forty words or so, and despite that kind of sparse language, Quetchenbach successfully pulls the reader into the story and the life of the hermit. I was repeatedly impressed by how much story could be packed into a few well-crafted lines. One of my favorites:

That says a lot about this man, his resourcefulness, patience, and planning. And early in the collection the story is cohesive and grounded in a believable reality. There’s no room for the story to lag, and it never gets stuck in a place of fantasy.

The layout of the book also complements the poetry. Each poem is set on its own, wide page featuring lots of white space, as though the poem has been dropped there simply for the sake of contemplation. And then, in contrast to these bleak pages, the book features eleven black and white illustrations by Christopher Engstrom, each of which fills a page with Rorschach-like (though not symmetrical) images that seem to capture the very essence of the hermit’s lonely life.

And so it is a modern story, one set in the time of satellites, where some men still consider leaving the car on the side of the road and heading into the dark woods to become, and remain, a mystery. The story gives us quite a bit more than the hermit’s place. We come to understand his frame of mind too, though we might never understand what led him to the solitary life.

There is a lingering timelessness in this collection, as though what the hermit seeks is something that we all seek — maybe a place where we can come to grips with who we are without the distracting buzz of the modern world. But as the reader considers this man who has left the world behind, one thing is certain:

Imperfect Solitude
A Novel by Tom Mahony
Casperian Books, Sacramento, CA
209 pages

Environmental preservation and economic development go head-to-head in this short, briskly paced novel. Evan Nellis is a greenhorn biologist, a young man, confronted with a host of complications in his life, including the recent death of his father. Working full-time, earning wages that won’t cover his expenses, and caring for his seemingly hypochondriac mother, Nellis strives to get ahead while wrestling with the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father’s death.

Nellis is the sole heir to a 500-acre coastal property near San Mateo, a rare, pristine wilderness that has been in the family for many generations. Nellis cherishes the property, was raised there, and learned to surf in the challenging waters of Solitude Beach. But Nellis comes to realize that he and his mother are land rich and cash poor, a situation that is compounded by his mother’s medical bills and the threat of losing his job.

Rather than live with his mother, or sell the property for a hefty sum, Nellis sleeps in his car or on the beach while working for PDT Biological Consulting with the nasty, ill-tempered Gordon Shaw. Nellis is unable to break the Curse of Biologist One – Shaw’s unbearably high expectations for new staff – and is soon fired. But things start to look up when Shaw’s boss at PDT, Peter Trumble, asks Nellis to return and begin working on land assessments for a wealthy businessman named Richard Headley.

Written with a limited, third person perspective, we get a close look at the dilemmas Nellis faces, his decisions and struggles in the face of mounting obstacles. The narrative is driven by steady action and stripped down, sometimes terse, language. With a penchant for taking risks, Nellis is tempted by Headley’s luxurious lifestyle and soon finds himself choosing easy cash to cover gambling debt, repairs to his mother’s house and, why not, a new wetsuit and surfboard. But these decisions further complicate things for Nellis, forcing his hand in every aspect of his life – his pursuit of Sarah Janss, Shaw’s former fiancé, his personal quest to establish right and wrong, and his desire to solve the mystery of his father’s death.

As the lives of the multi-faceted characters in this novel become more deeply intertwined, the plot takes the reader on twists and turns filled with suspense. Headley is convincing when he says that the land he owns must be put to work in order to justify owning it. And with every acre of land he develops, he preserves many more. Or so he says.

Imperfect Solitude forces the reader to consider the gray areas, the subtle lines between preservation and development, raising the question of who must make choices that permanently affect natural resources and the community at large. A field biologist, perhaps, an overworked city regulator, or a developer that has to turn profits to keep the company afloat.

Nellis spirals downward into Headley’s world for long enough to leave Solitude Beach behind. But early in this novel the reader will begin to wonder what lines must be crossed for him to return.

Click here to read an interview with the author at Boston Literary Magazine.

Naked In Eden: My Adventure and Awakening in the Australian Rainforest
by Robin Easton

Health Communications, September 2010

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

In this adventure-laden memoir, Robin Easton shares a period of her life when she traveled to Australia, in her 20-somethings, lived off the grid in a remote rainforest, and began to understand her connection to the deadly and mysterious world around her.

Easton meets and marries a native Australian and together they decide to travel to the Daintree Rainforest and live bare-bones beyond the scope of modern convenience. Sleeping in tents, on cots, in the back of a truck, and on the ground next to a crocodile-filled river, the couple slowly develop a natural rhythm and find their place among poisonous snakes, tentacled jellyfish, and paralyzing ticks.

Over the course of Naked in Eden, Easton makes observations about herself as a person, and ultimately overcomes what she calls her “autistic state.” Through regular interactions with rocks, trees, and rain, Easton tells the story of how, by developing awareness of her rainforest home, she learned to find her way as a member of what she now describes as a loving community.

Naked In Eden is accessibly written and its deep, almost mystical intensity at times, encourages readers to keep turning pages – an indication of how Easton grew mentally, physically, and spiritually, facing and embracing her rainforest fears throughout her time in the Daintree.

~~~

Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done
By Peter Miller

2010, Avery (Penguin Group)

What ants, bees, fish, and smart swarms can teach us about communication, organization, and decision-making…

The modern world may be obsessed with speed and productivity, but 21st-century humans actually have much to learn from the ancient instincts of swarms. A fascinating new take on the concept of collective intelligence and its colorful manifestations in some of our most complex problems, The Smart Swarm introduces a compelling new understanding of the real experts on solving our own complex problems relating to such topics as business, politics, and technology.

Based on extensive globe-trotting research, this lively tour from National Geographic reporter Peter Miller introduces thriving throngs of ant colonies, which have inspired computer programs for streamlining factory processes, telephone networks, and truck routes; termites, used in recent studies for climate-control solutions; schools of fish, on which the U.S. military modeled a team of robots; and many other examples of the wisdom to be gleaned about the behavior of crowds–among critters and corporations alike.

In the tradition of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and the innovative works of Malcolm Gladwell, The Smart Swarm is an entertaining yet enlightening look at small-scale phenomena with big implications for us all.

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I’ve only just started reading The Smart Swarm, and am already enamored with it. Peter Miller writes in a pleasurable, intellectually stimulating manner. I’m not certain if we’ll be able to include a full  review in Terrain.org, but you shouldn’t wait for that, anyway. This is a book that should be on your list.

SB