Overstory: Zero : Real Life in Timber Country

Heilman, Robert Leo

ISBN 10: 1570610843 / ISBN 13: 9781570610844

Published by Sasquatch Books, 1996

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # S_483942679

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Overstory: Zero : Real Life in Timber Country
• Publisher: Sasquatch Books
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1570610843
• ISBN 13: 9781570610844
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

This is a collection of personal essays by an author who knows what it means to be a logger, tree planter, mill worker and roofer in the "marginal population" of the Umpqua Valley in Oregon. In honest, gritty prose, Heilman writes about the complex relationships between work, nature, family and community at a time when community itself is as endangered as any job or tree.

Review

"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.