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Title: A Sand County Almanac
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
List Price: $12.95
Our Price: $5.97
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| A Sand County Almanac by Oxford University Press, USA 5 Stars Indeed | I knew I would enjoy this book right from the start, when I found the following passages in the Foreward: "There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot..." and "For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television..."
If you can relate to those statements, you will love this book. Guaranteed. Aldo Leopold was a conservationist, but he was so much more. He was a visionary. Read those statements again, and when you realize that he wrote them back in 1948, you might be amazed. But as you read the book, you will come to understand how special he was. Facts or knowledge that we take for granted today (e.g., predators play an important role in a healthy ecosystem), Leopold was talking about them over 50 years ago. Time and again I found myself checking the copyright because I could not believe someone was actually thinking this way so long ago.
However, it's not just the ideas of Leopold that made him special. The way he wrote was special, too. His talent drew you in, even though he was writing about something that, by the sound of it, might be kind of dry. For example, in a section called "Good Oak," he connects the passage of years to the rings of a fallen tree that he is cutting for firewood. Starting with the 1940s he relates one environmental tidbit after another for decades or years: "Now our saw bites into the 1890s...when the last passenger pigeon collided with a charge of shot near Babcock." By the time Leopold is done cutting the fallen tree, the reader has received a fascinating and sobering account of what had transpired to the environment in the area of this oak tree for the previous 80 years. The way he used the backdrop of cutting the tree rings as "markers" of environmental mishaps was masterful. It is Leopold at his best, but fortunately, the book is full of writing like this.
It is divided into three sections. The first one follows a calendar year on his farm in Wisconsin, with Leopold relating little vignettes about chickadees, skunks, flowers, or whatever else he comes across. It is probably the most charming part of the book. Part two ("Sketches Here and There") contains short remembrances of Leopold's travels to different parts of North America. Unfortunately, the story usually has a "bad" ending - at least, for the environment or for a species (like the now-extinct passenger pigeon). But Leopold had a reason for that. He moves to part three, "The Upshot," where he spells out his ideas for saving the land and the wild things that live there. It is too much to discuss here, but Leopold again hits the mark. His goal was to try and change how Americans think about the use (and abuse) of our environment. Pehaps his biggest lament then, and mine now, is that not enough people care about what we are doing to the land.
That's why this book was published. The hope of this book was to change the hearts of the average American. It still is. Over fifty years later, it's still in print, and it's still relevant.
Five stars. Absolutely the best nature/environment book I've ever read.
| | A Sand County Almanac by Oxford University Press, USA A Breath of Fresh Air | | Life got you down? Live in a big city? Take a refreshing break and escape to the Wisconsin countryside in this beautifully written little book about the land and the plants and animals that live and grow there. Aldo Leopold's writing is more compelling than John Muir's,and more knowledgeable than Thoreau's. In a series of short sketches you follow the cycle of the land from January to December. Along the way you learn about history, meet amazing plants and animals, and experience the drama of both the destruction and the rebirth of our land. | | A Sand County Almanac by Oxford University Press, USA A sublime experience, but not for everyone | I keep this book on my nightstand and read an essay or two after my pj's are on and before going to bed. My bookmark is a pencil for making notes in the margin when particularly wonderful passages are encountered. The margins are very full.
Aldo opens our eyes to worlds in our own backyards which have always existed but which have remained undiscovered due to our own dull-sightedness. I considered myself an avid nature-watcher, but the extent to which Mr. Leopold carries this hobby is humbling. He inspires any true fan to learn the names and habits of every tree, shrub, weed, thistle, bird, insect, and critter native to one's home county, and to hone one's journaling skills and master the talent of imagery and metaphor.
But, this book is not for everyone. I've read favorite passages to friends only to watch their eyes glaze with disinterest. If you're the outgoing, life-of-the-party, must-always-be the-center-of-attention type, then perhaps The DaVinci Code would be of interest. But if you enjoy solitary walks in the woods, canoe paddles on distant foggy lakes, or reading prose with your pj's on, then this is required reading.
| | A Sand County Almanac by Oxford University Press, USA The first of its kind, and still the best | "Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish." (from "Marshland Elegy")
"It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear." This, from reflections on being caught on horseback during a lightning storm, is a comment on the "civilized" mindset that wanted all to be safe, and so feared and destroyed wildness.
These essays were written mostly in the 1940's, although some of them are about earlier times in the author's life. In a way, reading Aldo Leopold is like watching Humphrey Bogart in those old movies, with his smoking and tough-guy sexism. We understand these as disreputable today, but can put them in context. Likewise, Aldo Leopold was in many ways a typical countryman of his time and place. He loved to hunt and fish, and even reflexively shot wolves, like everyone else. He came to regret that, and in fact to realize that in the new era, where hunting and fishing have become mass recreations, that the old ways just don't work anymore. But they did in his day, and he does not retrospectively apologize for having been, in a sense, just another predator.
But he was also a college professor, and an expert naturalist and ecologist. In this book he is a poetic writer about nature and a loving reporter of all things wild. No matter where I lived I would love this book, but having lived not too far from his sand counties and walked his restored prairies makes it the sweeter. | | A Sand County Almanac by Oxford University Press, USA Wonderful | | Read Walden, then read Sand County Almanac. They might just change the way you think about the world. | | A Sand County Almanac by Oxford University Press, USA Product Description | First published in 1949 and praised in The New York Times Book Review as "a trenchant book, full of vigor and bite," A Sand County Almanac combines some of the finest nature writing since Thoreau with an outspoken and highly ethical regard for America's relationship to the land.
Written with an unparalleled understanding of the ways of nature, the book includes a section on the monthly changes of the Wisconsin countryside; another part that gathers informal pieces written by Leopold over a forty-year period as he traveled through the woodlands of Wisconsin, Iowa,
Arizona, Sonora, Oregon, Manitoba, and elsewhere; and a final section in which Leopold addresses the philosophical issues involved in wildlife conservation. As the forerunner of such important books as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Robert Finch's The
Primal Place, this classic work remains as relevant today as it was forty years ago. |
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