These two books have something to say to one another.
| |
|
|
| |
The Thread's Must-Read | “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer “The Road Back to Sweetgrass” by Linda LeGarde Grover Buy these books Earlier this month, a group of intrepid book lovers and I put ourselves in the trusty hands of our wilderness guide, Heidi, and entered the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for four glorious days. It was my first time in the BWCA and it fulfilled everything I’d imagined. We paddled pristine lakes and portaged when we couldn’t paddle. We sharpened our senses, identifying bird songs, flowers and ferns on the forest floor, catching glimpses of furred animals who hid from our footfalls. We were explorers — together — in the best sense of the word. But this was an adventurous reading retreat so when I created the itinerary I thought hard about the books that could feed our imaginations and observations during the day and give us paths to new awareness and self-knowledge at the campfire each night. And I found two exceptional books published by Minnesota presses that I believe are in a kind of conversation with one another if you know where to look. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” published by Milkweed Press, is a masterful meditation on the interconnectedness of our natural world. Kimmerer is a scientist and a botanist. In vivid language that just makes you pause and marvel, she writes of bison herds whose saliva slips into the roots of the grass they’re grazing and stimulates the regrowth of that grass once they’ve moved on. And she reveals the “gift economy” of pecan groves. “They give and give again,” she writes. “Such communal generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution...but we make a grave error if we try to separate individual wellbeing from the health of the whole.” That ethic of interdependence is where the second book I assigned for our adventurers comes in. Linda LeGarde Grover’s book, “The Road Back to Sweetgrass,” published by the University of Minnesota Press, also asks us to reflect on the interdependence of extended family, of a community with shared trauma and history, of ancestral traditions that deepen contemporary experience. But I found that these books were also joined in another way: Each is urgently calling us to think about extinction and termination: Kimmerer’s in the accelerated disappearance of plant and animal species in our dangerously warming world; Grover’s in the attempted extermination of a people and the survival of Native Americans in spite of it. So, I’m sharing the two books that I asked my adventurous travelers to read and I hope you’ll read them in tandem too: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” and Linda LeGarde Grover’s “Return to Sweetgrass.” And please don’t miss my Big Books & Bold Ideas interview on Friday with the astonishing Richard Powers about his new book, "Bewilderment," which is also a meditation on extinction in the natural world. — Kerri Miller | MPR News |
|
| |
|
|