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Title: Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water by Kathleen Dean Moore ISBN: 1-55821-408-9 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1995 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Wet feet again.
Comment: Although I first read this collection of essays nearly five years ago, Derrick Jensen's recent interview with Moore in "The Sun" magazine prompted me to get my feet wet in this river again. "I have come to believe that all essays walk in rivers," Moore writes in the Preface. "Essays ask the philosophical question that flows through time--How shall I live my life? The answers drift together through countless converging streams, where they move swiftly below the reflective surface of the natural world and mix in the deep and quiet places of the mind. Tthis is where an essayist must walk, stirring up the mud" (p. xiii).
There are reflections of love, loss, motherhood, and happiness in these twenty river essays, which tend to run deep. We find Moore river-camping on the Willamette, wondering "What will draw our children back home?" (p. 8); contemplating happiness and sorrow on the John Day River; discovering "love can lead people to beauty" (p. 27), while night-skiing along the headwaters of the Rogue River with her husband, Frank; poking around Winter Creek (my favorite essay in the book); contemplating erosion in the Little Stoney River; "keeping house in the woods" (p. 54) while camping near the Smohalla River; identifying plants at the McKenzie River; spending time with her father under a full moon at the headwaters of the Metolius; walking barefoot up Bear Creek; camping among Sonoran Desert arroyos; country-western dancing to songs about rivers; travelling in the jet stream to see her dying father; contemplating motherhood, loss, and aging by the Puget Sound; studying newts at Klickitat Creek; fly-fishing on the Deschutes River; soul searching on the Salish River; encountering a rattlesnake near Alamo Canyon Creek; and looking at the Maclaren River under the midnight sun in Alaska.
RIVERWALKING shows that we can never step in the same river twice, and will appeal to those who have ever had seeds in their socks, or rocks in their pockets (p. 31).
G. Merritt
Rating: 5
Summary: Walking in the rivers with Kathleen Dean Moore
Comment: Writing with clarity and purpose is difficult, but Kathleen Dean Moore has mastered the craft in Riverwalking. Her essays are both simple and complex as they mix her experiences in the natural world with her philosophical questions about life.
She is at her best in the essay, "The John Day River", where she questions a universal balance between happiness and despair. She wonders if the joy of cowboys who park their trucks in wheat fields and turn up their radios "to dance in the headlights" (page 20) enjoy themselves at another's expense. In her casual, but eloquent style she questions the possibility of Nature collecting a debt, payable by sickness or sorrow charged to one (her own father's hospitalization, perhaps) to cover the cost of happiness for another.
Kathleen Dean Moore is a gifted essayist. She has found a beautiful confluence where her philosophical questions empty into the deep ocean of nature writing. She has earned her place as one of the genre's very best.
Rating: 3
Summary: Life, rivers and a philosopher
Comment: In the essay in which the author describes her initial encounter with graduate level philosophy, Kathleen Moore gave away a major distinction between herself and myself ... her first paper topic was on Descartes - as a undergraduate philosophy major, I thought Descartes marked the point at which Western philosophy became a waste of time. Admittedly my view has mellowed, but Kathleen Moore's essays lack the almost mystical quality one finds in the essays of Kim Stafford, Annie Dillard etc.
Several of the essays, however, are charming especially her meditations on poking around, on her elderly neighbor, and on the funeral arrangements for her father. From her essays as a whole, one gets a sense of life fully lived in the details.
This is a book I enjoyed, am glad to have read but am unapt to read more than one or two essays again.
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Title: Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World by Kathleen Dean Moore ISBN: 1558217800 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The End of Nature : Tenth Anniversary Edition by Bill McKibben ISBN: 0385416040 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 05 August, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Writing the Sacred into the Real (Credo Series) by Alison Hawthorne Deming ISBN: 1571312498 Publisher: Milkweed Editions Pub. Date: 23 February, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Age of Missing Information by Bill McKibben ISBN: 0452269806 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: May, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood by Sandra Steingraber ISBN: 0425189996 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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