I have been reading all the books by Trevor Herriot at my local library. I discovered how great a writer he is. He explains the prairie flatlands so beautifully that I definitely want to visit very soon!
This book is I believe one of the best of the three books that I am reading, despite the fact that River in a Dry Land is a bestseller. It is a true pilgrimage through nature, desire and soul. If you love nature, you will truly love this book. It is open, honest, and raw. It is a book that I have purchased for my collection at home.
We hear every day how we are messing up the world–melting glaciers, destroying forests, and eating our way toward empty oceans and grasslands. It is the road we have been on for a long time, and it looks to be the road ahead.
In this new book, Trevor Herriot suggests that while you and I may not be able to change that road by ourselves, we can choose in our individual lives how we walk it.
Three months after a serious accident, Herriot sets out along an ordinary prairie road, to sort through the questions that rushed into the enforced stillness of healing. Unfolding over three September days, this enchanting narrative reconceives our modern map of desire, spirit and nature.
Meeting farm people who stop to talk, detouring along rail beds and into fields, sitting next to sloughs or waiting for a sparrow to sing to the dusk a second time, we enter a territory where imagination and experience carry us beyond the psychological imprint of our transgressions, coming at last to the soul’s reconnection with a broken land.
Attended by a pair of hawks and remembered conversations with an old friend, the author takes an honest look at the intersection of the moral and the ecological in his life, ultimately facing his own part in the spiritual failures of men, and how they play out in family, community and landscape. before the trip is over, we find ourselves considering afresh the possibility that changing how we move through life may be the best way to influence the larger social, political, and cultural forces that shape the human path in the wild world.
This book is beautifully told in the characteristic style of Herriot’s bestseller River In a Dry Land. It is a loving account of one man’s journey which is by turns irreverent and meditative, lyrical and analytical. I just loved the book because I love the blend and balance of the emotional and analytical in this book. It is just like a well-balanced symphony.
Rating: 5 stars
Reviewed by: Irene S. Roth
