Unsolaced
Along the Way to All That Is
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis.
Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse. “Sentience and sunderance,” Ehrlich writes. “How we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all.” As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan, and an uninhabited Alaskan island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I've moved too much something like twenty-eight times since I came of age," writes Ehrlich in this expansive recollection of her travels. She writes that this is a bookend to her 1986 classic The Solace of Open Spaces; here, she recounts the places she's called home and confronts differences caused by climate change. Ehrlich describes her time on a cattle ranch on California's Channel Islands in the late 1990s where "wind was our constant companion and its attendant, the fog," and a game ranch in Zimbabwe, where she worked with a local ecologist to "stop the desertification of the planet." She also muses on her time witnessing melting ice and the disappearance of traditional hunting practices in northern Greenland, writing: "Climate is culture. As soon as the ice in the Arctic began to disappear, so did the lifeways of Greenland." Erlich ruminates on loss both personally (her husband's brain cancer) and climatologically, and has a knack for capturing the lives of those she's met on the road. These include "Mike" Hinckley, the woman who taught Erlich how to cowboy; Allan Savory, who works to fight overgrazing and land degradation in Zimbabwe; and Rifat Latifi, a surgeon from Kosovo working to bring health services to war-ravaged areas. Erlich's memories, rendered in rich, lyrical language, make for a moving ode to a changing planet.
