A Song for the River
گزارش تخلف
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
Starred review from July 9, 2018
This slim but potent volume of essays from Connors (Fire Season) beautifully examines themes of fire and water, life and death, and wonder and grief in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. Connors begins with a litany of suffering—his own and his friends’—from disease, divorce, wildfire, and deaths. Among the last, Connors writes about John, a fellow fire lookout, who died when his horse slipped off a mountain path and fell on him, and three teens (including Ella Jaz, an advocate for an undammed Gila River) who died in a small-plane crash. As Connors tells of these deaths and the ways in which he honors them (Jaz’s death led him to get involved in her cause), he also tells of his own physical hurts and of Mónica, the woman who relieved his pain and became his wife. His sumptuous descriptions of the Gila’s natural wonders, from a lone mountain tree frog to roaring wildfires, enliven the entire work, as do his skillful turns of phrase and pointed observations (“Each of us, in the wake of a bullet’s destruction, had checked into the guilt suite at the Hotel Sorrow and re-upped for a few hundred weeks”). This powerful work belongs with the classics of the nature writing genre and is equally important as a rumination on living and dying.
Narrator Adam Verner seems miscast in his reading of essayist Philip Connors's dark memoir. Part elegy, part lamentation, part catalogue of ailments, this audiobook seems less a song than a requiem. Verner's reading style--airy and hopeful--is at odds with the seriousness of the content. Connors writes evocatively of his recently deceased friends, his lonely education as a forest fire lookout, and a tragic plane crash that killed students from the Aldo Leopold Charter School in Silver City, New Mexico. He also describes his personal trials: physical (his hip replacements and prostate disease) and emotional (his recent divorce) with restraint. He is a serious critic of the state of the republic and a champion of environmental issues, the Gila River especially. A different narrator was needed. A.D.M. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
دیدگاه کاربران