RaveEcoLit BooksArctic Traverse offers both a back country narrative and more than a few bear encounters, but these features mesh seamlessly with natural history notes, digressions on exploration, the words of writers who influenced the author, and the author’s own thoughts about what it is to spend life in untamed lands. It is a wilderness journal, prose poetry, a treatise in philosophy, a primer on northern ecology, and pure magic, all rolled into one seamless volume.
David Owen
RaveThe Wall Street JournalWhat Mr. Owen offers is a detail-rich travelogue, an amalgam of memoir and journalism and history, moving across a watershed that sustains 36 million people from Wyoming to Mexico ... But Mr. Owen’s book is no environmental manifesto. He makes room for nature and advocacy but embraces complexity and conflicting needs ... Mr. Owen writes about water, but in these polarized times the lessons he shares spill into other arenas.
Paul Watson
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsTo the extent possible, the book follows the historical timeline, but even with that approach the search can be difficult to track as it zigzags across personalities, geographies and cultures. Nevertheless, it's well worth the effort. Watson peppers the book with fascinating details ... Combining historical records with on-the-ground journalism, Watson handles the complexity of the search admirably well.
Richard Mabey
RaveThe Dallas Morning NewsThe Cabaret of Plants is not a plant identification book. Nor is it a treatise on ecology. Nor is it mere personal reflections. It is best described as a collection of related but not entirely integrated essays that draw from Mabey’s long career as an aficionado of the plant world, a botanical writer who does not feel constrained by the conventions of science.
Andrea Wulf
PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsWulf recognized not only a good story but also an important one. She has written a fascinating book about a fascinating man whose work influences our thinking even though his name is no longer widely remembered.
