false 151796 3 0 259713 1594482365 9781594482366 24 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173217832m/259713.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173217832s/259713.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/259713.Lost_Mountain_A_Year_in_the_Vanishing_Wilderness_Radical_Strip_Mining_and_the_Devastation_ofAppalachia 4.18 104 151796 4.10 129 29 2006 6378825 1594488592 9781594488597 4 http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/63/825/6378825-m-1256162065.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/63/825/6378825-s-1256162065.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6378825-an-american-gospel 3.83 18 From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring, inspiring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry—a dazzling chronicle of a personal and national identity reclaimed.

Erik Reece’s grandfather was a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. He loved to hunt and fish and explore the Kentucky woods, but for him, existence on this earth was about denying the pleasures of this life in preparation for the next. Erik’s father was a Baptist minister, too. But at the age of thirty-three—not coincidentally, Jesus’ age when he was crucified— Erik’s father violently took his own life, and Erik ended up spending much of his childhood in the care of his grandparents.

So, while Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he also grew up with an acute awareness of a part of the country suffering ongoing economic, environmental, and even spiritual collapse. When he himself neared age thirty-three, he found unexpected comfort and guidance in his intellectual hero Thomas Jefferson’s famous Jefferson Bible, especially when he began to track similarities between it and the Zen-like message of the Gospel of Thomas. Inspired, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest—to identify an “American gospel” coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. In synthesizing that gospel—one that prizes the pleasures and glories of this earth—Reece began to find a way to a spiritual and intellectual peace with his own American soul.

The result of Reece’s journey is a deeply personal but also deeply thought out, inspiring, and stirring book, delivered almost like a secular sermon, about personal, political, and historical demons—and the geniuses we can and must call on to combat them.]]> 151796 4.10 129 29 2009 2474730 0813124972 9780813124971 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2474730.Field_Work_Modern_Poems_from_Eastern_Forests 3.50 2 Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, Erik Reece spent a great deal of time studying strip mining and its effect on the environment and surrounding communities. After a year of exploring the ugliness of a rapidly disappearing landscape, Reece felt a strong need to celebrate the wonder the Eastern broadleaf forests still have to offer. The result is a collection of poems by individuals who share Thoreau’s belief that the natural world is “an unroofed church, a place of reverence.” Field Work: Modern Poems from Eastern Forests seeks an answer to Frost’s question, “What to make of a diminished thing?” by contemplating work from some of the twentieth century’s greatest nature poets. </P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Reece frames contemporary American poems with a rich selection of Chinese poetry from the T’ang Dynasty, written by poets who produced what many consider the first great nature writing. More than 1,300 years ago Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, and Han Shan described a landscape in southern China remarkably similar in landscape and ecology to the forests of Appalachia. Consequently, their work has inspired many of the American poets featured in Field Work, including Hayden Carruth, Mary Oliver, A. R. Ammons, Jane Kenyon, and Denise Levertov. The modern poets in this collection share the eastern reverence for the natural world— they desire to create a poetry of belonging, of elemental contact with something much larger than the self. </P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P><P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">These poems ask the reader to turn away from urban landscapes in an effort to better understand the natural world as a spectacular, profound organism. Wendell Berry, for example, praises the quiet and solitude of nature, inspiring the reader to experience each poem in the setting for which it was written. In Field Work, Reece brings together a collection of poetry that calls readers out of doors as these poems become gateways to a natural world we are often too distracted to see. </P></DIV> (11/26/2007)]]> 151796 4.10 129 29 2008 6586924 0 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6586924-an-american-gospel 0.0 0 From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring, inspiring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry—a dazzling chronicle of a personal and national identity reclaimed.

Erik Reece’s grandfather was a Bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. He loved to hunt and fish and explore the Kentucky woods, but for him, existence on this earth was about denying the pleasures of this life in preparation for the next. Erik’s father was a Baptist minister, too. But at the age of thirty-three—not coincidentally, Jesus’ age when he was crucified— Erik’s father violently took his own life, and Erik ended up spending much of his childhood in the care of his grandparents.

So, while Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he also grew up with an acute awareness of a part of the country suffering ongoing economic, environmental, and even spiritual collapse. When he himself neared age thirty-three, he found unexpected comfort and guidance in his intellectual hero Thomas Jefferson’s famous Jefferson Bible, especially when he began to track similarities between it and the Zen-like message of the Gospel of Thomas. Inspired, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest—to identify an “American gospel” coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. In synthesizing that gospel—one that prizes the pleasures and glories of this earth—Reece began to find a way to a spiritual and intellectual peace with his own American soul.

The result of Reece’s journey is a deeply personal but also deeply thought out, inspiring, and stirring book, delivered almost like a secular sermon, about personal, political, and historical demons—and the geniuses we can and must call on to combat them.]]> 151796 4.10 129 29 2009