John Walters's Blog, page 3

Book Review: The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life by Suleika Jaouad

In a literary marketplace that is surfeited with imitations and imitations of imitations, The Book of Alchemy is a startlingly original book. It concerns the value of journaling, both as a therapeutic device and as an art form. However, it is not a mere explanation of how valuable journaling is to writers; instead, it takes a practical, hands-on approach. Besides writing an introduction to the overall book and to each of the ten sections, Jaouad has assembled one hundred authors, musicians, artists, and other fascinating contributors, each of whom not only provides an essay, but also a prompt to stimulate the imaginations of fellow journalists.

As Jaouad explains, she began keeping a journal when she was diagnosed with life-threatening leukemia at the age of twenty-two and told that she had only a thirty-five percent chance of survival. There followed years of torment as she suffered through multiple rounds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant. As her hair fell out and her body became more and more emaciated, as she lost friends, her then boyfriend, and her previous dreams and ambitions, journaling was a creative outlet that helped her cling to her sanity and her hopes for the future.  She writes that “journaling through illness gave me a productive way to engage with my new reality. Rather than shutting down or surrendering to hopelessness, I could trace the contours of what I was thinking and feeling and gain a sense of agency over it.” It was a long and difficult path to healing, which she recounts in her awesome book Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. And when she was deemed cured, she made a solo road trip around the country in a camper van to visit many of the people she had corresponded with during her illness.

Jaouad began the project that became The Book of Alchemy shortly after the COVID lockdown in 2020. She says: “I launched a project that combined all of the elements that had helped me: a daily journaling practice, done communally, with a short essay for inspiration and a prompt to get started. I reached out to the most remarkable people I knew, asking them to contribute an essay and an accompanying prompt.” Besides compiling material for the book, she also started a newsletter on Substack called the Isolation Journals.

Some of the contributors to The Book of Alchemy are celebrity authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert, George Saunders, and Pico Iyer, while others are cancer survivors, professional surfers, and even convicts. All have stories to tell, and they use these stories as springboards to prompt you, the readers, to become storytellers as well.

I would have been content to read and absorb and be inspired by the book without the prompts, but the prompts provide immeasurable added value. As I read through the book, I made notes on the prompts that I thought I could use for personal inspiration, and when I had time I made a paraphrased list. (In my penurious state, I got the book out of the library so once I returned it I would not have it to refer to later. Besides, I find that having the prompts in a list works well for me. If I am ready to begin a writing session and I need an inspirational nudge, I can skim the prompts until one leaps out at me, clings to my psyche, and won’t let go. From there I can take it anywhere my mind and heart lead.)

In short, I highly recommend this book, not only for writers who need story and essay ideas, but for anyone who wants to attempt journaling for fun and therapy.

As an afterword, I should share that Jaouad confides that while preparing The Book of Alchemy, she had a relapse and had to undergo another bone marrow transplant. The point is not that journaling in some magical way takes away the pain, but it enables you to make sense of it and convert whatever you are going through into art.

Minimalism

This week in my newsletter The Perennial Nomad: For Those Who Wander with Intent I discuss the importance of minimalism for someone with a nomadic mindset.

Since I became a perennial nomad, downsizing has become a frequent concern. I don’t want to own more belongings than necessary because I never know when I might decide to take off and leave everything behind.

Thus is the life of a perennial nomad. It is better to remain lean and ready than to have to undergo major purging when it is time to journey onward.

Click on this link to read the rest.

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (Part Two)

This is a tragic story of greed and betrayal, certainly a black spot and cause for shame in the nation’s history. As I read it, I wondered whether humankind was capable of truly evolving. Sure, we can come up with more and more sophisticated methods of killing each other and of redistributing wealth into the hands of the most avaricious, but where is the ethical and moral progress to go along with the technical achievements? All the toys and gadgets mean nothing if we remain rapacious beasts at heart. Have we learned nothing during our centuries upon centuries of so-called civilization? These questions and others like them assailed me as I read this masterful work. It is slow-going and complex, yes, but the details of what really happened in our nation’s past are crucial if we are to avoid the mistakes of our forebears and create a better world for our progeny.

It’s fun to watch movies about cowboys and master spies and superheroes that stand up for the downtrodden and save the day, but at some point we need to ask ourselves what is really going on. Who are the true heroes and the true villains? To answer questions like this, we need to dissect the past with a view to mitigating the social maladies that have caused us to inherit a dysfunctional, violent, hate-filled world. Only then can we make the changes that will help us alleviate past disasters and avoid future ones. This is the value of The Rediscovery of America. It causes us to confront the truth so that we can use the insights we gain to change things for the better. Allow Blackhawk to guide you step by step through this revised version of American history not with a vision to merely condemn past deeds, but to use what you learn to make the world of today and tomorrow a better place.

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The story Blackhawk tells of America’s indigenous population ends, in the book, inconclusively. There was a time during the Cold War when government policy favored so-called termination. That meant that Indians would be absorbed into the mainstream of American life and would cease to exist as separate nations and cultures. However, in the sixties and seventies an Indian rights movement, Red Power, arose concurrently with the Black Power movement. Activists were at least partially successful in clawing back concessions from the government that were guaranteed in centuries-old treaties. These concessions included hunting and fishing rights, gaming rights, schools, health centers, and language programs. Blackhawk writes that “by the end of the century, the dark days of termination had faded.” However, he adds that “language loss, continued ecological destruction, and innumerable legacies of colonialism endure, making the challenges of Native America among the most enduring.” It would have been nice for the author to be able to wrap up the narrative with a happy ending in which the government has learned its lesson and Native tribes are allowed to coexist with the rest of the American people in peace and dignity, but as proved by centuries of history, the reality is much more complicated than that. The impacts of outside events and shifting governmental priorities and attitudes seem to bring America’s indigenous peoples alternatively extreme trauma and then measures of relief in uneven cycles. Blackhawk concludes with these ominous words: “As the twenty-first century began, continued challenges to those sovereign gains reappeared as congressional law makers, court justices, and other concentrations of power again took aim at Indian lands, jurisdiction, and resources.”

Near the end of my reading of The Rediscovery of America, I made a visit to the Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus to peruse its display of arts and crafts from Northwest American indigenous tribes and other indigenous cultures around the Pacific Rim. I was impressed once again by the emphasis on the importance of attachment to land, community, and ancestry. These core values often go missing in our modern urban culture with its emphasis on the accumulation of money, property, fame, and individual accomplishment. Too often the results of such strivings are stress and alienation instead of serenity and camaraderie. And it is too easy to label Native American tribes and nations as primitive or anachronistic instead of appreciating their complex, multifaceted societies and cultures. Before European explorers “discovered” America, it was already populated with multiple nations that had their own lands, customs, and lifestyles. The violence by which the newcomers subdued the indigenous inhabitants of the land is certainly, as I mentioned above, a dark stain in American history. However, this stain should not be bleached out of our memories. One of the overriding values of a book like The Rediscovery of America is that it reminds us of the truth. Europeans were not the first ones here, and it is a moral imperative to manifest continuing respect for the original Americans that dwelled on the land before us.

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I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories. To send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. You can also donate via my Patreon account. Thanks!

Book Review: The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (Part One)

One of the enduring friends I made when I attended the Clarion West science fiction writing workshop in 1973 was the late Russell Bates, a Kiowa Native American who’d already sold several indigenous-themed stories to magazines and anthologies and went on to win an Emmy for the Star Trek Animated Series for the episode he co-wrote with David Wise: “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth.” Russ and I spent some time in Los Angeles working on a TV script that in the end didn’t sell; when he got fed up with L.A. another Clarion graduate and I drove him home to the rez in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where Russ’s family treated us royally. Decades later, while raising my family in Greece, due to the newfound wonders of email I got back in touch with Russ. I knew that he was very fervent about his advocacy of Native American rights and traditions, and amidst our communications I asked him for a list of books he would recommend by and about indigenous people. He was strict in his appraisal of qualifying literary works, but I’m fairly sure that if it had been around then that The Rediscovery of America would have made the cut.

Ned Blackhawk is an indigenous Western Shoshone author who is also a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Most histories of the United States tell the story from the perspective of Europeans, but this book focuses on the story from the viewpoint of Native Americans. I hesitated before I plunged into this thick, heavy, seemingly formidable tome, but once I started I found it fascinating, well-written, and startlingly original in its retelling of events that we think we know so well. As Blackhawk says: “To build a new theory of American history will require recognizing that Native peoples simultaneously determined colonial economies, settlements, and politics and were shaped by them.” His work asks “whether there is potential for building an alternate American story that is not trapped in the framework of European discovery and European ‘greatness.'”

The facts are the same in Blackhawk’s history, but it is the perspective that is all-important. In his accounts, Blackhawk moves from the Spanish borderlands in the south, to the northeastern conflicts between Native Americans and the British, to the Inland Sea area where the Iroquois dealt with the French, and to California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Midwest. He progresses through the American Revolution, the westward odyssey of settlers and how it disrupted indigenous life, how the Civil War affected the relationships between settlers and Native Americans in the Midwest and Far West, and how Union victory affected Federal attitudes and policies toward indigenous peoples.

From the beginning of outside contact with Europeans, indigenous populations suffered from diseases, violence, and forced servitude. The Puritans, for instance, in the name of religion, were savagely violent. As Blackhawk writes: “The lethal combination of disease and warfare remade the human geography of North America and defined an entire century of American history. By 1776 there would be fewer living souls on the continent than in 1492.”

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American history as retold by Blackhawk becomes increasingly uncomfortable. He emphasizes that the struggle to build the new nation was predicated upon the concept of white male supremacy. After pointing out that “the generation after 1815 witnessed a growing commitment to excluding all non-whites from the American body politic,” he goes on to stress that “for African Americans, Indians, and other peoples of color, the claim that all men are created equal found immediate counter-assertions.” There were few national histories to counter this, and “nearly all the institutions of higher education were near the Atlantic.” This left much of the national mythology up to the imagination, and as a result “the violence and dispossession that structured American expansion became discounted and erased.” During the Civil War era, animosity toward Native Americans increased, and state militia, especially in the west, took to hunting down and slaughtering entire communities.

After the war, indigenous communities became squeezed onto smaller and smaller parcels of land as Congress shattered and reshaped treaty promises. “With new reservation land policies and a continental-wide system of schools, the United States entered the twentieth century committed to eradicating Native Americans. Officials targeted Indian lands and children in a campaign designed not to exterminate Native peoples but to eliminate their cultures.”

(To be continued)

Book Review: We Do Not Part by Han Kang

Han Kang is a South Korean author who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. This novel is my first exposure to her work, and I should clarify from the outset that We Do Not Part is well-written, atmospheric, poetic, and fantastic, but it is not an entertaining book. The effect, at least in me, is similar to how I feel while reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writing about the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. I know that it is important and that people should be aware that these things happened, but at the same time it leaves me disheartened, uneasy, pessimistic, and somewhat depressed.

The story is told in first person by an author, Kyungha, who resembles Kang. She suffers from nightmares after completing a novel about human atrocities, as Kang did after writing her previous novel, Human Acts, which she has referred to as a pair with We Do Not Part. She receives a summons to a hospital from her friend Inseon, who has suffered a serious injury while working on backdrop materials for a film based on the author’s nightmares. Inseon pleads with Kyungha to go to her home on Jeju Island and give food and water to her budgie, a white bird, before it dies. Kyungha sets out in the midst of a snowstorm and after an arduous journey makes it to the isolated house. The budgie has died, and Kyungha buries it.

The power goes out, and as Kyungha waits out the storm alone in the lonely cottage, surrealistic events transpire. The dead budgie returns to life and flies around the sitting room. More significantly, her friend Inseon, who remains bedridden in the hospital far away, appears to Kyungha and tells the story of the massacres that took place on the island in 1948 and 1949, specifically as they related to members of her family. To corroborate her story, Inseon pulls out books, documents, and newspaper clippings that her mother compiled in the years after the massacre. By candlelight, as snow continues to fall outside, Kyungha is drawn deeper and deeper into the account of the terrible atrocities that befell Inseon’s relatives and many other islanders.

In truth, during the Jeju massacres it is estimated between fourteen thousand and thirty thousand people were killed, especially by government troops. Other accounts place the death toll much higher. Kang tells the tale in ominous, poetic prose that immerses readers in the snowstorm, the darkness, and the much deeper darkness of the senseless slaughter of whole families, of old people, young people, and mothers with their children and infants.

Kang’s resemblance to the narrator reminds me of the work of another recent Nobel Prize winner, Annie Ernaux, whose novel The Years I read not long ago. Ernaux also writes autobiographically of her experiences, making the novel read like a memoir. It is a literary device that if well done can be greatly effective, as it is here in We Do Not Part. We are drawn into the narrator’s sense of urgency as she travels to the remote location to save the bird, and when the spirits begin to manifest, we are deeply immersed in the protagonist’s perspective.

This is a sincere, heartfelt, well-written book, but it is not light reading. It is, however, important reading. Just be sure you are in a quiet, secure place so you can give it the full attention it deserves.

What Children Teach

This week in my newsletter The Perennial Nomad: For Those Who Wander with Intent I share a profound lesson I learned from a group of beggar children in India:

I have told this story before and I’m sure I will tell it again, because it involves one of the most profound and unexpected experiences of my life. You can read about it in greater depth in my memoir World Without Pain: The Story of a Search, but for now a more succinct version will suffice.

The motivation to retell it comes from a prompt I received: Write about a time a child taught you about, or reminded you of, something important in life. As a father of five wonderful, intelligent, and dynamic sons, I could fill volumes with lessons I have learned from being a parent, but this incident I’m about to relate involves strangers: children I had never met before and will never see again.

It happened on the epic journey I made from Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. to Goa, India.

Click on this link to read the rest.

Book Review: Poor Things by Alasdair Gray

I realize that the film version of Poor Things is highly acclaimed, but I started watching it not long ago and I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like the grainy black and white photography. It would be different if it was clear and sharp, but it wasn’t. I knew that after a certain point it was supposed to switch to color, but after about fifteen or twenty minutes I got fed up and stopped watching.

The novel, though, gripped me immediately. The story concerns a woman, Bella, who is almost nine months pregnant. She has a horrific home life, and after a particularly nasty incident, she jumps off a bridge into a river and drowns. A scientist named Godwin Baxter revives her by transferring to her the brain of her unborn baby. She then has to learn mobility and the ability to speak all over again.

The story is told through several viewpoints, each of which casts a different perspective on the events. The first section is by Archibald McCandless, a medical student and acquaintance of Baxter, who proposes to Bella soon after meeting her. She accepts, but before they can get married, she elopes with another man, Duncan Wedderburn; however, she refuses to marry him, claiming that she is already the fiancé of McCandless. This does not prevent her from having lots of sex with Wedderburn as she observes him succumbing to severe gambling addiction and effectively losing his fortune as they travel around Europe. The second perspective is Wedderburn’s, who blames Bella for his bad fortune; upon his return to Europe he is committed to a lunatic asylum. There is then a series of letters from Bella, which she sends to Baxter and McCandless as she travels around with Wedderburn; needless to say, her take on what happens is very different from Wedderburn’s. Along the way, she consorts with some English so-called gentlemen who attempt to educate her in the logic of empire and of the British class system.

When Bella returns to England, the husband she had run away from, a British admiral, shows up and attempts to claim her. During the course of his argument with Baxter and McCandless, Bella comes to realize, albeit abstractly, some details about her past. She eventually rejects the admiral, marries McCandless, and becomes one of very few woman doctors in England. McCandless finishes his narration, and this is followed by a letter Bella writes to her children and grandchildren after Baxter and McCandless have died in which she refutes much of the facts as McCandless has presented them. Finally, at the end, the author Alasdair Gray presents a series of “notes critical and historical” that add all sorts of interesting trivia (most of it fabricated) to the events in the book.

Besides the idiosyncratic text, Gray has illustrated it with sketches of some of the main characters and images of human body fragments from the famous reference work Gray’s Anatomy. Poor Things is altogether a brilliantly original novel full of insight into the foibles of the time, including the snobbish British sense of superiority that led to the conquering of poorer nations during the era of the British Empire, the distain the British aristocracy felt for commoners, and the subservient role of women in the society of the time. It is intense and intelligent and funny and highly entertaining. In fact, it is so good that I might go back and give the movie another chance, so I can compare it with this masterpiece of comedic satire.

Book Review: Zen Under Fire: How I Found Peace in the Midst of War by Marianne Elliot

After working for two years for a human rights organization in the Gaza Strip and six months for another organization in Kabul, New Zealander Elliott finds what she refers to as her dream job with the U.N. in Afghanistan. She is stationed in Herat, a city in the southeastern part of the country, and spends her time investigating rights abuses of women, children, prisoners, and other oppressed people. This book is an adaptation of the journals she wrote during the year she spent in Herat and in the nearby province of Ghor.  

At first she is unprepared for the atrocities and hardships she witnesses as she goes about her seemingly overwhelming daily tasks. For instance, there are accounts of women attempting self-immolation after being forced into abusive marriages and fathers murdering daughters who displease them. She has to live in a walled-in compound with armed guards, and she is only allowed to go outside, regardless of her destination’s distance, if she has an escort. However, Elliot also recognizes the flip-side: she meets many Afghanis of noble character who are willing to work hard and make sacrifices for the sake of the well-being of their people. A subplot concerns an American boyfriend with which Elliot has a complex on-again off-again relationship.

All of the above cause Elliott to frequently feel emotionally overwhelmed. To cope, she practices an early morning regimen of meditation and yoga. This helps to stabilize her in the midst of the chaos all around. When faced with so much injustice and tragedy, she has to be able to deal with intense feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and guilt about not being able to do more to help. Yoga helps her to accomplish this. She writes: “Ironically, my efforts to repress my own feelings have actually been keeping me from moving beyond them.” Through meditation and yoga she is able to give herself “permission to feel sad, guilty, or angry.” The yoga, she writes, “is transforming my ability to be in the midst of profound suffering without closing my heart or leaping too quickly into action.”

She soon discovers that there are no quick answers to the numerous difficulties facing Afghanistan and that the small amount of assistance she is able to provide sometimes seems utterly inconsequential. But she obtains great personal satisfaction from making the attempt, and in the end, when it is time for her to leave, she finds that she has developed great love for the country and its people.

I was partially drawn to this book because I have visited Afghanistan on two occasions in the mid-seventies, once traveling overland west to east, and once east to west. I found Afghanistan to be austere, formidable, and a little frightening. While I was there, I never felt entirely comfortable or safe. One of my sons, though, had an even more difficult time; he was a Navy Corpsman (medic) attached to a Marine Corps unit during a period of intense fighting in the southwestern part of the country not far from Herat.

Having been there and caught a glimpse of the difficulties that Elliott faced, I have great respect for her. What she encountered would have emotionally overwhelmed anyone, at least anyone like her with a wealth of vulnerability, empathy, morality, and compassion. She has a great story to tell, and she tells it well. Recommended.

Sword Circle Pen: An Announcement

I’d like to give a shout-out to my son: author, veteran, mathematician, and adventurer Nestor Walters, who has recently opened a new website called Sword Circle Pen. As his website’s “about” page says, he was born in Bangladesh, raised in Greece, and spent ten years in the U.S. Navy. After his discharge, he earned an M.S. in applied science with a minor in creative writing at Stanford. He has researched tsunami wave effects on Antarctic glaciers; studied Russian, Chinese, and Spanish; and conducted science diving in Monterey Bay kelp forests.

One of the new website’s features is a look at his environmentally-themed fantasy novella An Earth Day Eulogy, which you can find more details about at this link.

Nestor also introduces and provides a link to a series of tutorials that he created with Next Step Inbound. Although these are specifically crafted for veterans who want to pursue higher education, the tips are useful for anyone who needs to write personal statements, supplemental essays, and resumes that will impress college admissions officers. As of this writing, eleven tutorial videos are available, and more are on the way.

So stop in at Sword Circle Pen, have a look around, and maybe order a copy of An Earth Day Eulogy. You won’t be disappointed.

Book Review: Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door by Thor Hanson

If this book had been a type of gardening guide or something similar I would not have been interested. However, Hanson goes beyond merely extolling the beauties of nature you can find close at hand; in fact, his writings have a sort of Thoreau vibe, albeit without the frequent allusions to classical literature. Even there, though, Hanson is not completely remiss. Throughout his discussions of the wonders hidden in tangled underbrush, towering treetops, verdant soil, and ponds and other waterways, he often sites examples from naturalists from past eras: Darwin, of course, but also numerous others.

It should be clarified that when it comes to appreciating the natural beauty we can find close to home, Hanson has an unfair advantage. He lives on a widespread farm in the San Juan Islands, an archipelago in the Pacific Northwest. When he goes out to contemplate wildlife he doesn’t just have a small garden but acres and acres at his disposal. Still, he puts his opulent acreage to good use as he studies the many facets of the local ecosystem.

Hanson’s objective is to open our eyes to the intricacies of the natural wonders around us, and he does this by focusing on the microcosms I mentioned earlier: treetops, shrubs, the rotting detritus of fallen trunks and branches, the dirt under our feet, and the bodies of water that surround us. Most of the details, including the names, of the plants and creatures he discovers go over my head, but that’s all right. I realize when I read a book like this that I will not remember many of the particulars. Anyway, that’s not what I’m after. I want to grasp the philosophy behind what he is explaining, and this is presented clearly and simply and directly. He wants us to comprehend that we are surrounded by and part of a vast, complex ecosystem that most of us normally don’t pay much attention to, but if we open our senses we will become more aware of the amazing realities all around us.

One thing that struck me as I read Close to Home is that what Hanson is attempting in this book is similar to a concept of travel I bring out in my series The Perennial Nomad. I lived and wandered overseas for thirty-five years, and the exoticism of my surroundings provided constant stimulation. However, when I got back to the States, and eventually to my hometown of Seattle, I felt a significant letdown. After all, this was familiar territory. I was born and raised here; I went through my teenage angst in these locales. I eventually realized, though, that my perspective of Seattle had changed. I was still a nomad, and this was another stopover on the path to eternity. If I did not have the means to move on immediately, I could instead explore this city as if I were encountering it for the first time. And in recent months, that’s what I have been attempting to do. Similar to the way Hanson zooms in on the infinitesimal but elaborate dramas taking place on his farm, I have been focusing on getting to know various aspects of the city of Seattle as if it were a wondrous new land.

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The question inevitably arises: for a perennial nomad like me, the entire world is home, so how do Hanson’s principles apply? The answer is simple. If the entire world is your backyard, then it is essential to care for all of it. I have to admit that Hanson’s perspective made me realize that during my extended years-long travels overseas I should have paid much more attention to the natural world all around than I did. I think that part of the difficulty was that in places that were exotic, at least from my U.S. perspective, I often experienced sensory overload; I was surfeited with input. So when I came across, for instance, trees full of hanging fruit bats along a pedestrian street in Kathmandu, Nepal, or a large, venomous-looking snake whipping along the sidewalk in a suburb in Colombo, Sri Lanka, or an enormous iguana-like lizard running through a park in Southeast Asia, I was not as startled or as impressed as I would have been if these things had happened in my own homeland. Maybe now, after reading Hanson’s book, I might pause and take a closer look.

It certainly has caused me to pay more attention in my own neighborhood. On my daily walks I’ve come across squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and a proliferation of melodic birds. In fact, I can observe an array of different bird species from the vantage point of my apartment balcony. I live on the fourth floor, and I have a great view of the complex’s profusion of trees, a mix of evergreens, alders, and others. From my aerie I’ve seen an abundance of bird life, including robins, bluebirds, sparrows, ravens, seagulls, hawks, hummingbirds, and many more that I am unable to identify. I’ve seen birds whose feathers are such bright crimson or emerald or ultramarine that they seem florescent.

Hanson’s book has also helped me appreciate the backyard sanctuaries some of my neighbors have cultivated. Although a number of these have signs that indicate they have been set up as sanctuaries, I never understood or appreciated the significance. At first glance they often appear unkempt, with unmown grass, tangled bushes, and overhanging trees, but in fact these pockets of fecundity assist in sustaining rapidly disappearing local ecosystems. In contrast, neatly cropped show-lawns, often patched together with rolled out turf brought in from elsewhere, tend to damage ecosystems by eliminating the variety and profusion of growth that the local wildlife depends upon for survival. Sure, some neighbors neglect their yards with no clear vision of sustainability in mind, but they are inadvertently creating, or at least allowing for, habitats in which indigenous creatures can thrive. After reading Hanson’s book, I notice that my perspective is shifting. I find myself admiring the yards and gardens with lush, overflowing foliage, and disparaging yards where meticulously cut lawns lie like ostentatious carpets upon which one is not allowed to walk.

In conclusion, Close to Home is not only illuminating, but it is also well-written and entertaining. Don’t worry if, like me, you don’t grasp all the scientific terminology; just come along for the ride and have fun.