Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Like the coyote, whose return to northeast cities he records with his own discoveries in the urban wilds, David Gessner wants nature writing to turn up in unexpected places, eluding the quiet reserves set aside for it and unsettling its comfortably pious audience. Nature writing has become too earnest in tone, limited in range, domesticated in style and for that, impotent to counter the ongoing destruction of the field's own habitats. With something of the trickster in his own writing, Gessner's collection of essays variously perform the deeper, grittier romanticism he calls for: honestly personal, humorously attentive, and certain that environmental writing may have as much to do with Ultimate Frisbee as with semipalmated plovers. Letting moments of wildness appear in a range of occasions, Gessner's nature is allowed to dwell in his own stories, where we are licensed to let show how much we humanize our environments and yet how susceptible we can be to unexpected encounters, to wildness forcing us to continually rewrite our stories. Here is an environmental read with irreverent laughter and attentive awe both." Reviewed by Willis Jenkins, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
David Gessner's Return of the Osprey is among the classics of American nature writing, said the Boston Globe. So why does this critically acclaimed nature writer now declare himself to be sick of nature?
In diverse, diverting, and frequently hilarious essays, Gessner wrestles with father figures both biological and literary, reflects on the pleasures and absurdities of the writing life, explores the significance of place for both his work and his sense of well-being, and rails at the confines of the nature genre even as he continues to find fresh inspiration for his writing in the natural world. In the end, he learns to embrace--or at least tolerate--the label he once rejected.
Whether kicking at the limits of his category or explaining why he was fired from his job as a bookstore clerk; whether recalling his youthful obsession with Ultimate Frisbee or recounting an adventure in the jungles of Belize; whether lampooning his own writerly envy of Sebastian Junger or raging at the over-development of Cape Cod or searching for solace in nature in the wake of September 11, Gessner ranges from the personal to the natural in lyrical reflections on writing, self, and society.
In a powerful concluding essay, Gessner moves from the arrival of coyotes in the suburbs of Boston to the birth of his first child in an extended meditation on his characteristic themes of wildness, place, and creativity.