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A Song for the River

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Southwest Book Award, BRLA

Notable Book, Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award

Amazon Book Review Best Nonfiction of 2018

2018 Publisher's Weekly Best Books of the Year, Nonfiction

2018 Southwest Books of the Year

Outside Magazine Pick for Best Adventure Books of the Season

NPR Summer Reading List Pick

From one of the last fire lookouts in America comes this sequel to the award-winning Fire Season—a story of calamity and resilience in the world's first Wilderness.

A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the wildfire he had always feared: a conflagration that forced him off his mountain by helicopter, and changed forever the forest and watershed he loved. It was merely one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood but illness, divorce, the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident, and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

At its core an elegy for a friend he cherished like a brother, A Song for the River opens into celebration of a landscape redolent with meaning—and the river that runs through it. Connors channels the voices of the voiceless in a praise song of great urgency, and makes a plea to save a vital piece of our natural and cultural heritage: the wild Gila River, whose waters are threatened by a potential dam.

Brimming with vivid characters and beautiful evocations of the landscape, A Song for the River carries the story of the Gila Wilderness forward to the present precarious moment, and manages to find green shoots everywhere sprouting from the ash. Its argument on behalf of things wild and free could not be more timely, and its goal is nothing less than permanent protection for that rarest of things in the American West, a free-flowing river—the sinuous and gorgeous Gila.

It must not perish.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from June 15, 2018

      As a fire lookout at New Mexico's Gila National Forest, Connors (Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout) spent summers working in the Gila River wilderness, getting to know the region and its inhabitants intimately. This moving memoir recounts a trio of tragic events that impacted him deeply at a time when he was recuperating from several significant life changes. The mountain he calls home burns, another lookout he has grown close to dies suddenly, and a plane containing a group of optimistic students and their teacher working to save the river crashes. In the style of Annie Dillard, Anne LaBastille, and Aldo Leopold, Connors interlaces all of these stories into a poignant plea for change--of our attitudes toward nature as well as to all forms of life. VERDICT Readers who enjoy personal narratives and nature writing will be drawn to this book, which is a nice companion to the author's earlier work, Fire Season.--Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY

      Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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  • English

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