Articulate Earth: Adventures in Ecocriticism - Softcover

David Rains Wallace

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941624006 ISBN 13: 9781941624005

Publisher: Backcountry Press, 2014

Synopsis

Articulate Earth is a collection of 23 provocative essays spanning the past 30 years of Wallace s career. Through meticulous research and hands-on experience, he explores American culture's relationship with nature particularly that of the West in its literary, scientific, and political dimensions.

Selected essays include:
--The Nature of Nature Writing
--The Real John Muir
--The Klamath Surprise
--Bristlecone Forest
--California Landscape and Literature

About this title

About the Author

DAVID RAINS WALLACE was born in Virginia and grew up in New England but has spent most of his life in California. He published his first book, The Dark Range, about northwest California s Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness, in 1978. In 1984, his third book, The Klamath Knot, received the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing and a Commonwealth Club Silver Medal for Literature. The book was later included in the San Francisco Chronicle s list of the 20th century s 100 best non-fiction books west of the Rockies. In 1991, Wallace Received a Fulbright Grant to write a history of the Costa Rican National Park System, published in 1992 as The Quetzal and the Macaw in 1997, he published a natural history of Central America entitled The Monkey s Bridge, which became a New York Times Book of the Year. A book about mammal evolution, Beasts of Eden, also was a Times Book of the Year in 2004. In 2012, his book about the California Desert, Chuckwalla Land, received a Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for Literature. Wallace s other publications include two eco-thriller novels, The Turquoise Dragon and The Vermilion Parrot, the companion volume to an Audubon PBS-TV series on wildlife conservation, Life in the Balance, and the official handbooks to Redwood, Yellowstone, Mammoth Cave, and New River Gorge national parks. Wallace has also published many magazine and newspaper articles, and has taught or lectured at a number of colleges, including the University of California, the University of Ohio, the University of Oregon, Carleton College, and the University of Alaska. He lives in California with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Kendall.

Review

If Wallace's name is less familiar to the general reader than that of other naturalists, it may have to do, oddly enough, with the very strengths of his writing. His work displays an independence of mind which remains as wary of environmentalist cant or eco-theology as of overzealous developers or clear-cut loggers... Wallace's willingness to take risks in exploring 'new ways of connecting,' new ways of communicating his own 'deep vision' of nature, stands as testimony to the creative improbabilities he so admires in the natural world. The elegance and mythic insight of his work have already earned it a place of lasting importance in American nature writing. ----Michael Kowalewski, Carleton College

Wallace is as meticulous in his examination of books as he is in his examination of nature: he sees only what is there, not what he would like to see. ----Wallace Stegner

Edition details

• Publisher: Backcountry Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1941624006
• ISBN 13: 9781941624005
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 174