... a collection of perceptive essays about natural resources, nostalgia and vanishing ways of life ... Not all of Hohn’s essays are memorable. One, about extinct mammoths, is brief yet takes too long to get to the point. But most are excellent. He has a charming attraction to quixotic characters ... insightful.
A Virgil in strange and unwonted places, Hohn now emerges as not only trustworthy, but also just the sort of person you’d want spinning a yarn over a fire in some backwoods fishing camp, and likable, indeed, especially in his larger-hearted moments ... Deftly weaving literature, science, journalism, philosophy, the history of out-the-way locales, arcane skills like canoe building, and no small number of family secrets, Donovan Hohn offers with The Inner Coast a humane view of a world that, as Ernest Hemingway said, is a fine place worth fighting for. And well worth reading about, too, allowing for a few very unfortunate gastropods along the way.
The evocative title...reflects something of the nature of Mr. Hohn’s writing, the fertile ground on which his outward explorations meet up with his natural tendency toward intellectual reflection and interiority—his own inner coast ... powerful...reporting ... Some of the essays collected here feel like fillers or ballast ... Mr. Hohn’s best pieces here are deep dives into narrative nonfiction ... In Mr. Hohn’s lively telling [in 'A Romance of Rust'], all this is plenty riveting, but he takes his essay up a notch by pondering the allure of these outdated but inherently democratic, utilitarian, humble artifacts, which—again invoking Whitman—he dubs 'technological leaves of grass' ... boundaries—between meaning and sentiment, memory and nostalgia—are among the coastlines Mr. Hohn explores in this polished, limpid collection.
As a group, Hohn’s essays are engaging, thoughtful, and marked by his sparkling wit and boundless curiosity. His nimble technique takes him from name checks of Jesmyn Ward and Joseph Brodsky, the Bible and the Qur’an, DaVinci and Thoreau in a heady few paragraphs. His mastery of his subjects is evident, but it is the joy he exhibits when taking readers along on his discoveries of connections of ever-increasing complexity between literature, science, history, and geography that makes these pages sing. Comparisons to a host of talented essayists are obvious (Didion, Dillard, for sure), but perhaps none is more apt than John McPhee. Hohn has McPhee’s thrilling intelligence and single-minded dedication to finding deep truths in overlooked subjects; he has crafted a title to treasure.
There are echoes of Barry Lopez here, but Hohn's voice—reflective, trenchant, often eloquent—seems all his own. He has an almost unerring ability to choose just the right word or phrase to enrich a line of thought. His descriptive passages, whether amusing, pithy, or lyrical, will capture readers' imaginations. He is a poet of the prosaic, as on the subject of water, reminding us that the Great Lakes are actually a river. He also possesses an admirable way of presenting ecological or cultural problems without lecturing ... Settle in and savor a keen mind with a laudable moral compass.
... penetrating ... The strongest piece is 'Falling,' about his mother, who suffered periods of mental instability during his youth ... This essay is tender and poetic, and a genuine feat of empathy. With his close sense of connection to nature and knack for quietly moving prose, Hohn reveals himself to be a valuable new name in narrative nonfiction.
