A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir - Donald Worster

Donald Worster, one of the preeminent modern voices of American conservation, has written a well-researched and at times insightful biography of the greatest voice in the history of American conservation - John Muir. Worster recounts Muir's roots in Scotland and forging in Wisconsin and tries to dig into Muir's intellectual development to better understand how and where his passion for the wild and untamed places developed and changed over the course of Muir's long and very active life.

As Muir moved across the states and eventually came to the hills of California, we see how his rambling and his faith forged a wilderness ethic through which he would come to view not only his relationship to the land, but also his relationship to the universe, to his work and to society. Worster does a wonderful job of grappling with these complexities and communicating that even for Muir, such questions of human's proper relationship to the natural world is never simple. One of the more revolutionary of Muir's ethos was that he extended morality to living biota beyond the narrow confines of human society: for Muir plants and animals were as worthy of care, notice and rights as any person.

Given that Muir's life revolved around wilderness, and that Worster is a historian by training, Worster treats the notion of wilderness in Muir's and the American mind in a surprisingly ahistorical manner. What Worster gives, at best, passing mention to, is that Muir and most Americans in the 19th century were experiencing "wild" landscapes that were very much a construction of their society and their predecessors. This is not to marginalize Muir's very real feelings about "big outside"and his foundational beliefs concerning divinity, however, as Worster tries to skip between 19th and 21st century morality, it is something that could have stood a bit of examination.

What Worster has accomplished is a fluid and easily consumable biography that gives a reader a better sense of Muir as a man and as a mind. Worster's call at the end, though a touch simplistic, is very appropriate: would that we could live out Muir's vision on Earth.

Islam: The Straight Path - John Esposito

With the death of Osama Bin Laden an awareness was reawakened within me that I know frightfully little about Islam. I have long meant to read a sort of introductory text on the faith and history of the Muslim people and I think John Esposito's work served that purpose quite well. Esposito gives a very basic - 250 pages, roughly - rundown of the history of Islam into the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most important thing he accomplishes is a cogent tying together of sectarian separations across time in Islam and how those continue to have very real implications for how people identify themselves and groups of Muslins interact.

Two takeaway points that I found particularly illuminating. First, because of where I grew up, Christianity is the baseline of comparison for how I conceive of religions. Thus I always analogized the Quran with the Bible. But that is not really true. If we think of the Bible as the foundation upon which Christianity is built, it is more accurate to say that the Quran is the house of Islam. The forced equivalency of the Bible and the Quran does a disservice to the role of the Quran. Second, because the Quran has a much stronger proscriptive history in Islam, much of what westerners see as conservativism is really a more public grappling with the intersections between western-style modernity and the role of morality in society. Certainly there is much wrestling among all people between morality and modernity, however, the western world likes to unfairly focus on the seeming disjuncture and clashes it has with Islam. Rather, we should turn the lens on ourselves and see what we cannot learn from any person who struggles to better understand their relationship to the world around them.

This provided me a much needed introduction to historical Islam and I will certainly follow this up with further reading.

Cod - Mark Kurlansky

My second time reading Mark Kurlansky's pithy recounting of the role cod has played in the settling of the east coast of North America and how the market for it has developed since the 1500s. Its been a couple of years since I read it the first time and my impressions have not changed terribly much. Kurlansky recounts the discovery of the northern fishing grounds named the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland and how, with the changing of fishing technology and policy over the years, they have come to be drastically depleted. Indeed, he explores the trend of diminishing fishing stocks across much of the northern hemisphere.

Though a bit over-reaching and episodic, Kurlansky makes a cogent and moving case for people to rexamine our tacit and often stated assumption that nature is virtually inexhaustible and can recover from human exploitation. What Kurlansky unfortunately does not fully explore is the strain between trying to protect natural resources and the manner in which so many industries are tied up with notions of national identity and the ever-present need for governments to provide employment. The book is ably written and accomplishes a very tricky proposition, to introduce a complex problem to people who may have little to no acquaintance with it. Certainly a good introduction to the issue but often not enough information to fully satisfy.

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 - Taylor Branch

Part one of Taylor Branch's three-part magnum opus, Parting the Waters is a dramatic and in-depth retelling of the rise of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. Powerfully written, Branch's work brings the reader both to the front lines and into the back rooms of the years that would become the crucible of the American century. In Washington and globetrotting across the planet are Eisenhower, Robert and John Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Yet government, Branch allows us to see, is so much more than elected officials. Here we can hear the story of John Doar, a white country lawyer from Wisconsin, and all that would bring him to Jackson, Mississippi to represent the Justice Department and quell an incipient riot following the assassination of Medgar Evers. Or, Sheriff Laurie Pritchett, who would try to forestall integration for years in Albany, Georgia.

Across the picket lines we see the political baptism of not only the Fred Shuttleworths, Diane Nash Bevels and Ralph Abernathys, but also of hundreds of thousands of nameless black (and white) Americans who would walk, ride, march, sit-in and stand-up to demand equal rights and justice for all Americans, regardless of race. By taking a broad sweep, yet maintaining crucial details, Branch brings to life the struggle and strife, the joys and pains and sometimes the abject horrors of that were an everyday reality for men and women demanding their rights across the south.

And, of course, their is King. At its core the work examines the life and times and rise of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the March on Washington and perhaps the most famous speech ever given by an American. When, as a reader, you reach that day in August 1963, one feels the tension within King and the movement. Because Branch has pulled no punches in his depiction of the strengths and weaknesses, both of the man and the Civil Rights Movement, it is hard to not get swept along with the passion and emotion as he calls out to the "snow-capped Rockies of Colorado" and down to the sweltering injustices of Mississippi. One cannot but feel the bottom fall out as a bullet takes Medgar Ever on the very night that President Kennedy would finally stand up for Civil Rights legislation. And you cannot but be overcome with awe, joy and wonder when Rev. Charles Billups calls out to Bull Connor, "Turn on your hoses. Turn loose your dogs. We will stand here 'til we die!"

Gripping, beautiful and inspiring, Branch's first part makes me all the more excited to continue the journey, even if we know that it will end most unceremoniously one April day in Memphis.

The Natural Contract - Michel Serres

French philosopher of technology Michel Serres examines how humans have become a global force on the level of the ice caps or the atmosphere. Serres writes that this "equipotency" demands that our moral world now extend beyond the social sphere to the world of things. Given our still-evolving relationship to the sciences we exist in a world that is at once more known to us and more widely understood to possibly be contrary, because of our doing, to the continuance of the human prospect. With this in mind, what are the steps to take to re-imagine a relationship to the natural world that is not premised upon "mastery and possession?" By retracing the manner in which the social sphere has come together and is premised around contestations of law and knowledge, and the differing legacies antecedent to modernity, The Natural Contract is a short volume focusing on redrawing a world in which non-humans have a voice.
For Serres, this future is one that must be understood in the light of our relationships to reason and its extension, scientific knowledge. Of primary concern is the development of an objective morality in which the natural sciences claim total authority to speak within the realms of rights and morals. Tracing the historical relationships between emergent knowledges and civil society, Serres tells us that a tension between orthodoxy (law) and heterodoxy (novel knowledge) has and always will be a realm of judgment. This is a crucial notion because it allows us to understand that there is not now, nor can ever be, a complete settled-ness to the manner in which we construct the world. Rather, knowledge and law will continue to ebb and flow in relation to one another. Further, rather than casting these two as incommensurable opposites, Serres explores how reason, which, once again, is the backbone of science, rests on exactly the same foundation as law - that of judgment. When we see these two can operate in concert, a new pathway opens up for human society to explore a future in which judgment (the realm of the social) interacts with the natural world (the realm of knowledge). Clear and very concise, The Natural Contract is highly recommended for anyone who wishes to think more deeply concerning our relationships between one another and the world around us.

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen

The most recent magnum opus in American popular fiction, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom asks us how we organize our lives in modern America? In a society in which we are seemingly loosed from geographical, societal and class chains, how does a person, with the world theirs for the taking, make sense of their lives, themselves and their place in the world around them?

Tracing the coming of age of two generations of a midwestern family, Franzen's work provides keen insights into how families make sense of themselves and how people grow and change in relation to one another. The work is at its strongest illuminating the metal growth and complexities of the Burglund family; by the end we feel these creations exist, fully-formed, in the world around us. Franzen is able to achieve this characterization while incorporating it into the modern condition of american post-9/11 fears and disconnections. An strong statement about where Franzen sees us and resonant with the broader themes of our concerns and our condition.

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

From a misty graveyard, to the empty lot where a once great mansion stood, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations is a novel of punctuated equilibrium, where years will pass and then, in a flash, everything will change. All that has been written on even Dickens' least dissected of works could, surely, fill my room many times over.Thus I won't make an dead-on-arrival attempt to illuminate some heretofore shadowy aspect of this classic - though, that is not really what I am going for in any of these reviews.

One of the things that pervades this work is characterization as sense. Regardless of what Pip or Provis or Jaggers says about themselves of what others say about them, the reader is given an innate feel for who we like and who we detest. This is most clear in Pip and, what is truly remarkable about him, is that we are given the emotional space to feel differently about him as he grows up and changes. At differing times he is scared, insightful, daring, honest, jaded, pig-headed and gentle and the reader is given access to this, less by what he does and says and more in his prejudices and reactions. Often he gives the reader cause to be proud of him, but just as often he is an object of frustration. In this way it seems that Dickens has truly created the feeling of how we grow up and change and or constantly in the process of becoming the people we are.

Once again, Dickens is writing about the process of growing up and what we think we want versus what we really desire. One aspect of this I found interesting throughout was how happy Pip remembers his time with Joe and living outside the confines of dreary London. Of course some of this is tied-up in innocence and the rural character, but I couldn't help but thinking that maybe our more cosmopolitan urban character, isn't better off focusing on a world that is concerned with him and that allows him to be invested in it?