Synopses & Reviews
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 rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country.
Joy Williams sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects. Among Ill Nature's nineteen essays are: "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp" on the way we love what we love to death; "The Killing Game," her famous anti-hunting essay that caused a furor when it first appeared in Esquire; "Safariland," on the state of wildlife in Africa; "The Animal People," tracking the movements of the animal rights movement; "The Case against Babies," on the blithe determination of American women to continue to populate the Earth." Williams refuses to compromise as the lashes out at the greed of Americans and decries our own turpitude. It is not enough to mourn the passing of the natural world, Ill Nature shouts. Get out of our homes and our cars and our cubicles and do something ... now.
Review
"These howls, protests, and pleas for sanity are lacerating, brilliant, and necessary." Booklist
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"Joy Williams is now the most gifted writer of her generation." Harold Brodkey
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"Joy Williams is simply a wonder." Raymond Carver
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"Enormous pleasure awaits readers willing to enter her lush garden of literary delights." Cleveland Plain Dealer
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"Joy Williams's essays...manage to articulate with wit, elegance, intelligence, and appropriate disdain, the enterpirse in which we are all implicated." W. S. Merwin
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"Savage, serious, hilarious, passionate, loving, and lyrical."--
Kirkus ReviewsSynopsis
Williams tackles a host of controversial subjects in this collection of nineteen impassioned essays dealing mostly with humanity's abuses of the natural world.
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 rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country. Joy Williams does much more than watch. With guts and passion, she sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects. Razor-sharp, controversial, scathingly opinionated, and refreshingly unafraid of conflict, Williams refuses to compromise as she lashes out at the greed of Americans and decries our own turpitude. It is not enough to mourn the passing of the natural world, Ill Nature shouts. Get out of our homes and our cars and our cubicles and do something...now. (5 3/4 X 8 1/2, 228 pages)