Overstory: Zero : Real Life in Timber Country

"It's best not to look at the clear cut," Robert Leo Heilman writes, describing his grueling work as a tree planter in the timber country of Oregon. "You stay busy with whatever is in front of you because, like all industrial processes, there is beauty in the details and ugliness in the larger view. Oil film on a rain puddle has an iridescent sheen that is lovely in a way that the junkyard it's part of is not." Heilman's fine collection of essays, which gives the reader an inside look at the society of loggers, environmentalists, and people who never stop laboring while trying to survive, beautifully illuminates the details of the working life. Alternately joyous and heartrending, evocative of Thoreau and Whitman, these essays by a man who has lived the life he writes about, deserve to be read by a wide audience.