The Inner Coast: Essays
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
Prize-winning essays on our changing place in the natural world by the best-selling author of Moby-Duck.
Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an “adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer” (New York Times). Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects ten of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, which feature his physical, historical, and emotional journeys through the American landscape.
By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, the lost art of ice canoeing, and Americans’ complicated love/hate relationship with Thoreau. The Inner Coast marks the return of one of our finest young writers and a stylish exploration of what Guy Davenport called “the geography of the imagination.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this penetrating collection, Hohn (Moby-Duck), a former editor at GQ and Harper's, offers keen insight on subjects ranging from ice canoeing in Quebec City to the Flint, Mich., water crisis. Taking a New Journalism approach, Hohn's essays fuse the personal, historical, and cultural. In "A Romance of Rust," he accompanies his tool-collecting uncle to a series of auctions across Michigan, while ruminating on the evolution of tools and their symbolic association with manliness. In "Watermarks," Hohn considers writings about water, including both Genesis and Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck," and incorporates snapshots from his own life droughts during his 1970s California childhood, a more recent scuba diving expedition in Lake Michigan. The strongest piece is "Falling," about his mother, who suffered periods of mental instability during his youth. His memories of her vary wildly at one point she's rising early to organize a complicated scavenger hunt for his birthday party, at another abandoning her husband and young children to live in a hotel for nine months. This essay is tender and poetic, and a genuine feat of empathy. With his close sense of connection to nature and knack for quietly moving prose, Hohn reveals himself to be a valuable new name in narrative nonfiction.
