Day

June 23, 2016

Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

McIntyre Amy
Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Hubert Zapf, Editor. DE GRUYTER MOUTON: Berlin, April 2016.

The Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology features essays by ASLE members Scott Slovic, Kate Rigby, Hannes Bergthaller, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Louise Westling, Suzaan Boettger, Catrin Gersdorf, Christa Grewe-Volpp, Nancy Easterlin, Axel Goodbody, Serpil Oppermann, Greg Garrard, Serenella Iovino, Elena Past, and Sylvia Mayer.

Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in ...

My Last Continent

McIntyre Amy
My Last Continent (A Novel)

By Midge Raymond. Scribner: New York, NY, 2016.

An unforgettable debut with an irresistible love story, My Last Continent is a big-hearted, propulsive novel set against the dramatic Antarctic landscape.

It is only at the end of the world—among the glacial mountains, cleaving icebergs, and frigid waters of Antarctica—where Deb Gardner and Keller Sullivan feel at home. For the few blissful weeks they spend each year studying the habits of emperor and Adélie penguins, Deb and Keller can escape the frustrations ...

An Ecology of Elsewhere

McIntyre Amy
An Ecology of Elsewhere (Poems)

By Sandra Meek. Persea Books: New York, NY, 2016.

Following her mother’s death, nearly twenty years after her time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Sandra Meek, a writer of “dazzling, intimate poems” (Library Journal) began traveling frequently through southern Africa. During this same period, she and her sister traveled the American Southwest with their declining father, confronting and healing from a difficult family history before his death. Whether describing a Namibian baby seal hunt, 1500-year-old Welwitschia plants living ...

Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents

McIntyre Amy
Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents (Essays)

By Kurt Caswell. Trinity University Press: San Antonio, TX, 2015.

Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl chronicles over twenty years of Caswell’s travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through ...

The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide

McIntyre Amy
The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide

Edited by Christopher Cokinos and Eric Magrane; Illus. by Paul Mirocha. The University of Arizona Press: Tuscon, AZ, 2016.

A land of austerity and bounty, the Sonoran Desert is a place that captures imaginations and hearts. It is a place where barbs snag, thorns prick, and claws scratch. A place where lizards scramble and pause, hawks hunt like wolves, and bobcats skulk in creosote.

Both literary anthology and hands-on field guide, The Sonoran Desert is a groundbreaking book that ...

Ocean’s Laughter

McIntyre Amy
Ocean’s Laughter (Poems)

By Tricia Knoll. Aldrich Press: Hemet, California, 2016.

Ocean’s Laughter combines lyric and eco-poetry to look at change over time in a small town on the northern Oregon coast. The poems pay homage to the raw beauty of the Pacific Ocean — and also record Knoll’s 25-year history of witnessing to dwindling shorebird populations and loss of habitat, increasing “non-wilderness” uses of the six-mile beachfront in Manzanita including driving on the beach and burning driftwood that stabilizes dunes for bonfires. Each Fourth ...

Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture

McIntyre Amy
Peak Oil: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and Libertarian Political Culture

By Matthew Schneider-Mayerson. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2015.

In the last decade, the concept of “peak oil”—the moment when global oil production peaks and a train of economic, social, and political catastrophes accompany its subsequent decline—has captured the imagination of a surprisingly large number of Americans, ordinary citizens as well as scholars, and created a quiet, yet intense underground movement. In Peak Oil, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson takes readers deep inside the world of “peakists,” showing how their ...

Greetings from SES-J!

McIntyre Amy

Greetings to the members of ASLE from Shoko ITOH, the chair of The Society for Ecocriticism Studies in Japan. SES-J is an academic community devoted to studying Ecocriticism and exploring cultural and literary connections to the environment. We have been active since 1995, when a renewed interest in nature writing and its criticism spread to Japan and the world. Our members study the Environment from various fields of inquiry including literature (American, Asian American, Australian, British, Canadian, Japanese, multicultural, comparative, and nuclear); education; ...

John Burroughs Medal Awarded to Sharman Apt Russell

McIntyre Amy

The John Burroughs Association selected Sharman Apt Russell for her book Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World, published by Oregon State University Press.

In the exploding world of citizen science, hundreds of thousands of volunteers are monitoring climate change, tracking bird migration, finding stardust for NASA, and excavating mastodons. The sheer number of citizen scientists, combined with new technology, has begun to shape how research is conducted. Non-professionals become acknowledged experts: dentists turn into astronomers and ...

Howl: of Woman and Wolf

McIntyre Amy
Howl: of Woman and Wolf

By Susan Imhoff Bird. Torrey House Press: Salt Lake City, UT, 2015.

Commemorating twenty years since the wolf’s return to the American West, Howl explores passions and controversies surrounding nature’s most fascinating predator. At a crossroads in her own life, Bird travels the West uncovering both a common love for the land and conflicting beliefs about wildlife among people who work with, for, or near wolves. Unleashed herself, she learns to howl.

Susan Imhoff Bird finds inspiration in Utah’s stunning canyons, ...