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This award-winning collection moves from the dark and technically astonishing title essay—on growing up within the confines of a huge Army arsenal in Ohio—to reflections on mountain hikes, limestone quarries, and fathers teaching their sons.
Writing from the Center is about one very fine writer's quest for a meaningful and moral life. The center he seeks and describes is geographical, emotional, artistic, and spiritual - and it is rooted in place. The geography is midwestern, the impulses are universal. Where and how do we find meaning? Where does a writer find inspiration? How can personal, artistic, family, and community needs be blended to create a harmonious life? What aids exist in such a ""located"" life against despair? How should a writer relate to and represent his place? Twelve interrelated essays probe these questions from different perspectives. ""Buckeye"" examines the resonance of objects and the mysteries of relationships and death. ""Imagining the Midwest"" surveys how other writers have seen and related to their region. ""The Common Life"" makes an eloquent case for community values. ""Sanctuary"" is an eloquent and painful consideration of environmental degradation. ""Writing from the Center"" and ""Letter to a Reader"" deal with Sanders's decisions to locate in the Midwest, to know his place, and to write about it in both fiction and nonfiction.
With round-the-clock drugs, games, and eros parlors to entertain them and virtual weather to sustain them, humans live inside a global network of domed cities known collectively as "the Enclosure." Having poisoned the biosphere, we've had to close ourselves off from the Earth. The cities of the Enclosure are scattered around the globe on the land and sea, and are connected by a web of travel tubes, so no one needs to risk exposure. Health Patrollers police the boundaries of the Enclosure to keep the mutants and pollution out. Phoenix Marshall decodes satellite images for a living. He has spent all 30 years of his life in Oregon City, afloat on the Pacific Ocean. He busies himself with work a...
“Eloquent . . . a must-read for anyone committed to taking care of the natural world and passing it along to future generations” (ForeWord). As an antidote to the destructive culture of consumption dominating American life today, Scott Russell Sanders calls for a culture of conservation that allows us to savor and preserve the world, instead of devouring it. How might we shift to a more durable and responsible way of life? What changes in values and behavior will be required? Ranging from southern Indiana to the Boundary Waters Wilderness, and from billboards to the Bible, Sanders’s 40-point blueprint for ecological health extends the visions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Rach...
Prize–winning essayist turns to the imagination as a spiritual guide and material method of living through climate disruption, as climate change and broad extinction forever alter our place on the planet and our lives together. Scott Russell Sanders shows how imagination, linked to compassion, can help us solve the urgent ecological and social challenges we face. While reflecting on the conditions needed for human flourishing, he tells the story of his own intellectual and moral journey from childhood religion to an adult philosophy of life. That philosophy is tested when his first wife and then their son fall ill. Compelled to leave their beloved old house, they design a new one, and then transform their vision into a home and their raw city lot into a garden.
An original and searching memoir from "one of America's finest essayists" (Phillip Lopate) When Scott Russell Sanders was four, his father held him in his arms during a thunderstorm, and he felt awe—"the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and everything." He says, "The search for communion with this power has run like a bright thread through all my days." A Private History of Awe is an account of this search, told as a series of awe-inspiring episodes: his early memory of watching a fire with his father; his attraction to the solemn cadences of the Bible despite his frustration with Sunday-school religion; his discovery of books and the body; his mounting opposition to the...
There's always something happening at Crawdad Creek. That's what Lizzie and Michael call the stream that runs behind their house. Come pan for gold, hunt for fossils, find an arrowhead in the mud or a crayfish under a stone. Watch whirligig beetles and water striders skate across the water, teasing the fish below, and count the turtles sunning themselves on moss-covered logs. Follow tracks along the bank, then sit in quiet amazement as deer, raccoons, and other animals visit the creek. There's a wild and beautiful world here waiting to be discovered. Take the time to look!
This is a book on how to read the essay, one that demonstrates how reading is inextricably tied to the art of writing. It aims to treat the essay with the close attention that has been given to other literary genres, and in doing so it suggests the beauty and depth of the form as a whole. At once personal appreciations and acute critical assessments, the pieces collected here broaden our perspective on the essay as a major literary art, tracing its history from William Hazlitt to Joan Didion.
After traveling from Connecticut to Ohio in 1800 to start a new life in the settlement of Aurora, the Sheldons find that they are the first family to arrive there and realize that they will be staring a new community by themselves.