A gathering of new and selected essays spans Kathleen Dean Moore's distinguished career as a tireless advocate for environmental activism in the face of climate change.
... necessarily a serious book, but its moral insights are occasionally leavened with humor. Ms. Moore is a fervent nature lover, sometimes comically so ... An abiding insight of Earth’s Wild Music is that to save the world, we must truly see and hear it. 'How can we be fully alive,' she asks, 'if we don’t pause to notice, and to celebrate, all the dimensions of our being, its length and its depth and its movement through time?' ... Ms. Moore sees and hears much, and she writes about it beautifully. Even without Carson’s noble precedent, one gathers that Ms. Moore probably would have framed the planet’s ecological diversity as a feast for the ear. She professes a lifelong love of music—a passion that informs her appropriately lyrical prose ... Though much of the material is new, the scheme enables Ms. Moore to repurpose selections from previous books. Those reprises are welcome, since not all readers will be familiar with Ms. Moore’s earlier outings.
Kathleen Dean Moore’s collection of essays, Earth’s Wild Music catalogs (and therefore attempts to protect) the sounds of the natural world ... validating to read because she understands the corner we’ve been backed into. Her writing is lucid and present, able to log the momentary trills and warblings of birds on a morning hike as part of a larger story on the wonders of the interconnected natural world. Moore uses song as the great magic that ties life from ocean, desert, and forest together ... What she is able to communicate that is so terrifying is that the sounds of the natural world are in trouble of being silenced. Because true panic would be to wake up one day in a world without sound ... But it is Moore’s recognition of the music that lives on around us that makes this collection special. It’s affirming to read someone who gives credence to the granular parts that compose the larger whole ... The most successful essays in the collection manage to be both celebrations of life and stark warnings.
A heartfelt plea to save nature's cacophony ... n a series of essays, many previously published, nature writer and environmentalist Moore offers an ardent warning against the perils of climate change and species endangerment. Writing mostly from Alaska and the Sonoran Desert, the author focuses on sound, which she evokes in sensuous prose that reflects her 'deep love for the world’s music—the birdsong, the frog song, the crickets and toads, the whales and wolves, even old hymns and Girl Scout songs.' ... The author’s passion is evident, though the prose sometimes ascends into rapture. An enthusiastic argument that love, care, and defiance may still save the Earth.
