Ill Nature - Softcover

Williams, Joy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375713638 ISBN 13: 9780375713637

Publisher: Vintage, 2002

Synopsis

Most of us watch with mild concern the fast-disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution-related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched forests, and violence both home and abroad. Joy Williams does more than watch. In this collection of condemnations and love letters, revelations and cries for help, she brings to light the price of complacency with scathing wit and unexpected humor. Sounding the alarm over the disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created, she takes on subjects as varied as the culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, vanishing wetlands, and the determination of American women to reproduce at any cost. Controversial, opinionated, at times exceptionally moving, Ill Nature is a clarion call for us to step out of our cars and cubicles, and do something to save our natural legacy.

About this title

Review

Best known as a novelist, but also an accomplished journalist, Joy Williams has a great gift for inducing guilt trips. No one is safe: in the opening pages of Ill Nature, she implicates every First Worlder in creation for causing the death of the natural world, the victim of our material urges. She writes that the thousands of new digital television towers being erected today, for example, are responsible for the deaths of millions of songbirds that unwittingly slam into them or their guylines in midflight; by extension, anyone who owns a digital TV set is partly to blame for this unforeseen episode in the larger ecological crisis, no matter how well-intentioned those viewers may be.

Turning a sharp eye on ecotourists, zoogoers, hunters, politicians, developers, expectant mothers, carnivores, conservatives, liberals, and just about anyone else who crosses her path, Williams decries the rapid loss of the wild, which in her eyes is no mere abstraction. Sometimes hyperbolic, but more often right on target, she argues that it will take more than a few cosmetic fixes to mend all the wounds that the environment has sustained. Dystopian to the last (as she writes, "You are increasingly looking at and living in proxy environments created by substitution and simulation," and not the real world at all), Williams brings plenty of heat to the page--and plenty of light, too. --Gregory McNamee

From the Back Cover

“Enchanting and explosive.” –The Washington Post Book World

“Glows with fire-and-brimstone passion.” –The Boston Globe

“Rise[s] above the din of dreary environmental writing and smack[s] us in the face with the sorry state of our natural affairs.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Joy Williams brings her fierce compassion to bear on subjects she holds dear: the vanishing Florida Everglades, the miracle of animals in our lives, why she writes. Her words are tonic, wholly original; she is a writer to reckon with.” –O: The Oprah Magazine

“Joy Williams’ essays . . . manage to articulate with wit, elegance, intelligence, and appropriate disdain, the enterprise in which we are all implicated.” –W. S. Merwin

“Joy Williams has been one of our best writers for ever so long, and now she has written a scorcher: a truth-teller’s expedition, and true to the heart.” –Edward Hoagland

“Reading Joy Williams . . . is like falling down into some deep blue subaqueous place of mesmerizing wonder.” –Rick Bass

“Funny, piercing and brilliant . . . Ill Nature destroys a number of our culture-wide illusions and exposes them for the cruel, cowardly and downright stupid attitudes and beliefs that we often have toward the natural world.” –Sun-Sentinel

“Williams makes her case with such wit and weight that her punch lands like a John Ruiz haymaker.” –Entertainment Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375713638
• ISBN 13: 9780375713637
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192