All told, I finished 133 books in 2020, almost the same as the year before (though, since some of these were real doorstoppers, no doubt I read more pages all told). But can we be wise enough to live that truth? Jul. Ones to watch out for (best debuts): Naoisie Dolans Exciting Times; Megha Majumdars A Burning; and Hilary Leichters Temporary. Like Border, To the Lake is at first blush a travelogue, with frequent forays into history, but closer inspection reveals it to be an essayistic meditation on the different experiences provoked by natural versus political boundaries. Johanna has forgotten English, has no memory of her parents, is devastated by the loss of her Kiowa family and its culture. Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Of all these documents, I was perhaps most moved by the life of Lilli Jahn, a promising doctor abandoned in the early war years by her non-Jewish husband, as told by her grandson Martin Doerry through copious use of family letters. Im reading more nonfiction with greater pleasure than ever beforethe surest sign of middle age I know; Im sure that will continue in 2021. Dr. Kimmerer serves as a Senior Fellow for the Center for Nature and Humans. Longest book (runner up): Dickenss Our Mutual Friend A mere 900-pager. (Kluger is a great hater and knows how to hold a grudge.) I had no idea, she says. Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the worlds wealthiest peoples. The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. Media / Positive Futures Network. Kimmerer is the author of Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (2003) as well as numerous scientific papers published in journals such as Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences and Journal of Forestry. Have I ever mentioned that Leichter was once my student? She is the author of numerous scientific articles, and the book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Now that I am an American I should know the literature better! And, like a stone gathering moss, Kimmerers success has grown over the past decade. I do still think of bits of it almost a year later, though, so its not all bad. Teaching is a way for me to be seenwhich for reasons of temperament and family origin has always been a struggle. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.Kimmerer lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples . But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond., This is really why I made my daughters learn to gardenso they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone., Even a wounded world is feeding us. Noras is the more successfulher combination of intelligence and wit and hurt and delusion comes through powerfully. 80 talking about this. How to push back against the idea of expertise as a kind of omnipotence? I do have quibbles with Braiding Sweetgrass: its too long, too diffuse. Anyway, the machinery of this formula hums along at high efficiency in this finely executed story of a schoolteacher who gets mistaken for a spy and then has only days to find out who among the guests at his Mediterranean pension is the real culprit. Even though Robinson writes fiction, he shares with Kimmerer and Jamie an interest in the essay. But also all those who insist on minimizing or relativizing her experiences. Robin Wall Kimmerer is the author of "Gathering Moss" and the new book " Braiding Sweetgrass". Ive heard many people say their concentration was shot last year, and understandably, but that wasnt my experience. Nicola expresses her own rage, in her case of the dying person when faced with the healthy. What makes the book so great is what fascinating an complex characters both Antigona and Clanchy are. Considering the fate of the Galician town of his ancestors in the first half of the 20th century, Bartov uses the history of Buczacz, as I put it back in January, to show the intimacy of violence in the so-called Bloodlands of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Together, we are exploring the ways that the collective, intergenerational brilliance of Indigenous science and wisdom can help us reimagine our relationship with the natural world. Rebecca Cliffords Survivors: Childrens Lives after the Holocaust skillfully combines archival and anthropological material (interviews with twenty child survivors) to show how much effort postwar helpers, despite their best intentions, put into taking away the agency of these young people. This makes sense to me. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. She holds a BS in Botany from SUNY ESF, an MS and PhD in Botany from the University of Wisconsin and is the author of numerous scientific papers on plant ecology, bryophyte ecology, traditional knowledge and restoration ecology. Robin Wall Kimmerer (born 1953) is an American Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology; and Director, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). But it is always a space of joy. An expert bryologist and inspiration for Elizabeth Gilbert's. Yet the problem is that the former seems the product of the latter instead of the other way around. By Robin Wall Kimmerer. As a writer and a scientist, her interests in restoration include not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land. The nature writer talks about her fight for plant rights, and why she hopes the pandemic will increase human compassion for the natural. She is particularly good on how we might teach poetry writingnot by airily invoking inspiration but by offering students the chance to imitate good poems. But a Twitter friend argued that its portrayal of a girl rescued from the Kiowa who had taken her, years earlier, in a raid is racist. Mast fruiting trees spend years making sugar, hoarding it in the form of starch in their roots. At one such gig near the Oklahoma border an old friend begs him to take charge of a ten-year-old girl who had been stolen from her family by the Kiowa four years earlier and has now been retaken by the US Army. A few of the titles below helped with that. It is true, though, that Kimmerer offers some practical advice for how to return our world to a gift economy. Kimmerer presents the ways a pure market economy leads to resource depletion and environmental degradation. Her first book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of . Robin Wall Kimmerer . Why not unplug for a bit, and read instead? Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Kimmerer explains how reciprocity is reflected in Native languages, which impart animacy to natural entities such as bodies of water and forests, thus reinforcing respect for nature. Paulette Jiles, News of the World (2016) Charming without being cloying. That moment could be difficult or charged and might not be fun. Having just completed War and Peaceguaranteed to be on this list in a years timeI might read more Russians. Board . Last week, I took a walk with my son out in the woods where he spends his spare time, and he offered to show me all the mossy spots he was aware of. The numbers we use to count plants in the sweetgrass meadow also recall the Creation Story. Notice the pronouns. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them.. Helen is resentful, too, about the demanding and disgusting job of taking care of Nicola (seldom have sheets been stripped, washed, and remade as often as in this novel). It is a way of seeing which feels more essential than ever in our current planetary crisis. But of all these persecutors the greatest is her mother, the woman with whom she experienced the Anschluss, the depredations and degradations of Nazi Vienna, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Christianstadt, a death march, the DP camps, and finally postwar life in America. 12. Such anxiety, such poignancy. Like a lot of literary fiction today Obrechts novel goes all in on voice. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. When I mention I'm interviewing Robin Wall Kimmerer, the indigenous environmental scientist and author, to certain friends, they swoon. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we dont have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earths beings., In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on topthe pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creationand the plants at the bottom. (Last week I had to be somewhere relatively crowded, for the first time in months, and boy am I going to be in for a rude awakening when this is all over.) Unfinished Business begins with an autobiographical chapter about Gornicks life as a reader, which riffs on and is itself an example of the distinction between situation and story she articulated in a brilliant book of that title several years ago (situation is something like experience, the raw material of our lives; story is the way we articulate that experience, the way we transform it through reflection/writing: I use this distinction in my writing classes all the time). What Ill probably do, though, is butterfly my way through the reading year, getting distracted by shiny new books and genre fiction and things that arent yet even on my radar. That aspect can only be thwarted or defeated by a purgation: rather than hoard we must give (back). Gaileys novel of a future run on Handmaids Tale lines is engaging but slight. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Something so endearing you cant help but smile? Sign up to receive email updates from YES! These generous books made me feel hopeful, a feeling I clung to more than ever this year. Pages. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. Not as gloriously defiant as The Door, but worth your time. One way that struggle manifests is through the relationships between men and women. Thinking about what a child might bring to her school reminds us that education is a public good first and not just a credentialing factory or a warehouse to be pillaged on the way to some later material success. I choose joy over despair. nut production). Kidd is prevailed upon to take the girl to her nearest relations, in the country near San Antonio, four hundred dangerous miles south. But if the idea that the self we so identify with is only a small part of what we are rings true to you, youll find Gornicks readings sympathetic. Im a Potawatomi scientist and a storyteller, working to create a respectful symbiosis between Indigenous and western ecological knowledges for care of lands and cultures. As a woman from the Balkans who no longer lives there, as a woman travelling alone, as an unmarried woman without children, Kassabova is keenly aware of how uncomfortable people are with her refusal of categorization, how insistently they want to pigeonhole her. But the genuine hopefulness of Kimmerers words sometimes had the contradictory effect of making me feel despair. In her novel Other Peoples Houses, closely based on her own experience as a child brought from Vienna to England on the Kindertransport, Lore Segal takes no prisoners. 'Were remembering what it would be like to live in a world where there is ecological justice'. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is a 2013 nonfiction book by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, about the role of Indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complementary approach to Western mainstream scientific methodologies. Emotions about which of course she also feels guilty. I responded that the novel is aware of the pitfalls of its scenario, but now Im not so sure. Select News Coverage of Robin Wall Kimmerer. (At not-quite ten she is already the house IT person.) TEK refers to the body of knowledge Indigenous peoples cultivate through their relationship with the natural world. In addition to reviews of the things I read, I wrote a couple of personal things last year that Im pleased with: an essay about my paternal grandmother, and another about my love for the NYRB Classics imprint. For years this [buried events, hidden feelings] was Durass mesmerizing subject, inscribed repeatedly in those small, tight abstractions she called novels, and written in an associative prose that knifed steadily down through the outer layers of being to the part of oneself forever intent on animal retreat into the primal, where the desire to be at once overtaken by and freed of formative memory is all-enveloping; in fact, etherizing. She is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, which has earned Kimmerer wide acclaim. Her characters are arty types or professionals who learn things they dont always like about what they desire, especially since those desires they are so convinced by often turn out later to have been wrongheaded (like Prousts Swann, they spend their lives running after women who are not their types, except women here includes men, friends, careers, family life, their very sense of self). In general, though, this was an off-year for crime fiction for me. I feel hopelessness at the ongoingness of the pandemic, the sense that we may still be closer to the beginning than the end. For good or for ill my response to bad times is the same as to goodto escape this world and its demands into a book. Best deep dive: I read four novels by Tessa Hadley this year, two early ones and the two most recent. 806 quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer: 'In some Native languages the term for plants translates to "those who take care of us.', 'Action on behalf of life transforms. Lurie has his moments, too, especially near the end, but I was always a little disappointed when we left Nora for him. Honorable mentions: Susie Steiner; Marcie R. Rendon; Ann Cleeves, The Long Call (awaiting the sequel impatiently); Tana French, The Searcher; Simenons The Flemish House (the atmosphere, the ending: good stuff). I didnt read much translated stuff: only 30 (23%) were not originally written in English. Here she is, having re-read Adrienne Richs conclusion about Dickinsonthat extreme psychological states can be put into language, but only language that has been forged, never in the words that first come to usthinking about Bowen: She had created stories and novels meant to acquaint the reader with the power of the one thingthe extreme psychological statethat she deeply understood: namely, that fear of feeling that makes us inflict on one another the little murders of the soul that anesthetize the spirit and shrivel the heart; stifle desire and humiliate sentiment; make war electrifying and peace dreary. I suspect a deep sadness inside me hasnt come out yet: sadness at not seeing my parents for over a year; at not being able to visit Canada (I became a US citizen at the end of the year, but Canada will always be home; more importantly, our annual Alberta vacations are the glue that keep our little family together); at all the lives lost and suffering inflicted by a refusal to imagine anything like the common good; at all the bullying and cruelty and general bullshit that the former US President, his lackeys, and devoted supporters exacted, seldom on me personally, but on so many vulnerable and undeserving victims, which so coarsened life in this country. If I receive a streams gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love itgrieving is a sign of spiritual health. So far Ive had the classroom in mind. She is also founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Robinson imagines a scenario in which dedicated bureaucrats, attentive to procedure and respectful of experts, bring the amount of carbon in the atmosphere down to levels not seen since the 19th century. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. But Kassabova seems more comfortable when the spotlight is on others, and the people she encounters are fascinatingespecially as there is always the possibility that they might be harmful, or themselves have been so harmed that they cannot help but exert that pain on others. A reading list of books about social media and how to limit screentime. Unlike Border, To the Lake is more personal: Kassabova vacationed here as a child growing up in 1970s Bulgaria, as her maternal family had done for generations. It was a deeply personal thing that I wanted to put on the page., Kimmerers intention when writing the book was to reflect the shared values of an indigenous world - she is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation - as well as the scientific learning she has trained in (her PhD in plant ecology followed a Masters at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and then she returned to her graduate alma mater SUNY, where shes taught for nearly 20 years). Trained as a botanist, Kimmerer is an expert in the ecology of mosses and the restoration of ecological communities. But sometimes, usually on my run, Ill wonder if Im mistaken in my assessment of the year. My husband challenged the other day. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. High-resolution photos of MacArthur Fellows are available for download (right click and save), including use by media, in accordance with this copyright policy. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Gerda Weissmann Kleins memoir All But my Life is worthwhile, with a relatively rare emphasis on forced labour camps. Reciprocity also finds form in cultural practices such as polyculture farming, where plants that exchange nutrients and offer natural pest control are cultivated together. What I read mostly seemed dull, average. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Have I got a book for you!). I am funny and warm and generous: the joy of teaching is that it allows me to unabashedly affirm these values of care and concern toward others. Kimmerer, a professor of environmental biology and the director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York in Syracuse, is probably the most. The maple trees are just starting to bud following syrup season and those little green shoots are starting to push up. Inspiring for my work in progress: Daniel Mendelsohns Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate. I read Robin Wall Kimmerers Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants last month for a faculty, student, and staff reading group organized by one of my colleagues in the Biology department. Robin Wall Kimmerer, 66, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi nation, is the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York. Gina is the willful teenage daughter of a general in the Hungarian Army during WWII. I am reader more than anything else, and I expect to be for as long as thats humanly possible. We must find ways to heal it., We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. To speak of Rock or Pine or Maple as we might of Rachel, Leah, and Sarah. I honor the ways that my community of thinkers and practitioners are already enacting this cultural change on the ground. Klugers persecutors are legion: the Nazis, of course, and all the silent Germans who acquiesced to them. In the past, students have felt intimidated by it, even a little shocked. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. She alternates between two first person narrators. Uri Shulevitzs illustrated memoir, Chance: Escape from the Holocaust, is thoroughly engrossing, plus it shines a spotlight on the experience of Jewish refugees in Central Asia. Its an idea that might begin to redistribute the social and economic inequalities attendant in neoliberalism. Maybe Ive read too much the last decade or so? Direct publicity queries and speaking invitations to the contacts listed adjacent. But what has really stayed with me in this book about a traumatized soldier on the run from both his memories and, more immediately, a pair of contract killers hired to silence the man before he can reveal a wartime atrocity is its suggestion that the past might be mastered, or at least set aside. We are only as vibrant, healthy, and alive as the most vulnerable among us. How to imagine a different relationship with the rest of nature, at a time of declining numbers of swifts, hedgehogs, ancient woodlands. But everything Ive said applies to less formal situations too: the conversation in the hall; the email exchange about a paper draft; the back-and-forth of a tutorial. Thoroughly enjoyed, learned a lot (especially about hair): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies Americanah. Articulating an alternative vision of environmental stewardship informed by traditional ecological knowledge. Its an adventure story and a guide to the Texas landscape. I suspect to really take her measure I would need to re-read her, or, better yet, teach her, which I might do next year, using Happening. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. Which is good because so far, social distancing is not given me the promised bump in reading time. But boy if you want to feel anxious and thirsty, Obrecht is your woman. And, of course, some reading. Good crime fiction: Above all, Liz Moores Long Bright River, an impressive inversion of the procedural. In Kassabovas depiction, violence and restitution are fundamental, competing elements of our psyche. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us., The land knows you, even when you are lost., Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. (I confirmed with some other readers that this wasnt just an effect of my listening to the audiobook, which, I find, makes it easy to miss important details.) Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant ecologist, educator, and writer articulating a vision of environmental stewardship grounded in scientific and Indigenous knowledge. Elsewhere, there are many rewilding projects, community gardens, horticultural and other nature-based therapies and, right now, in the pandemic, a huge surge in a desire to grow things and tune in to the living world again. She is the co-founder and past president of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge section of the Ecological Society of America. The pejorative term Indian giver arises, Kimmerer suggests, from a terrible and consequential misunderstanding between an indigenous culture centered on a gift economy and a colonial culture based on the concept of private property. She urges us to name people, places, and things (especially the things of the natural world), as if they had the same importance. YES! Longest book: Vikram Seths A Suitable Boy. Its the task of a lifetime to learn that what seems like a rule is in fact a fantasy, and a disabling one at that. Committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, State University of New York / College of Environmental Science and Forestry, 2023 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Plant Sciences and Forestry/Forest Science, Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
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