| A REENCHANTED WORLD The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature James William Gibson New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2009 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8050-7835-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8050-7835-5 | 306p. | HC | $27.00 | |
| Page 3: | "People were touched by stories of bears who befriended humans, enthralled by the fluid grace of whales, moved to the depths of their souls by majestic trees, dark mountains, and flowing rivers, newly alive to the sense of mystery, of a world larger than themselves." |
| It's arguable, but I think this should read "to a world" — either that or drop the final comma. |
| Page 15: | "Marx and Engels, who lauded the potential for unprecedented social change released by industrialization, also realized that the subjection of nature had a price." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "subjugation". |
| Page 20: | "Neither Thoreau nor Melville were widely read at the time." |
| Number: S/B "was widely read". |
| Page 30: | "They brought with them a sign that in time became the very emblem of the youth movement: the upside-down y enclosed in a circle, meaning peace and unity, was derived from the footprint of the crane, a bird sacred to the Hopi." |
| Here we have another version of the origin of the peace symbol. Compare Cooke (2009), page ? |
| Page 41: | "When they finally parted from Amelia [a falcon], Tennant wrote, 'Soon the swiftly winnowing speck Vose and I had hardly ever seen would be all we would ever know of her.' " |
| Vocabulary: S/B another word, perhaps "dwindling". |
| Page 41: | More from Tennant: "And we had felt through our own fragile flight surfaces the same air currents, peered into the same mist and storm and rain that Amelia had known in every nerve, hollow bone, and fairy feather of her hard-muscled body." |
| Peregrine porn! |
| Page 49: | "Galbraith explains that back in the Eocene, the Dawn Epoch of some fifty-five to thirty-four million years ago..." |
| It's not clear why Gibson calls this period the Dawn Epoch, nor why he capitalizes it. |
| Page 64: | "When police in Palo Alto kill a mountain lion resting in a tree in a suburban neighborhood because it might hurt someone, the residents don't celebrate, they grieve." |
| I'm not sure this is true. In any case, it's a rare occurrence, so why is "kill" in present tense? And which Palo Alto is referred to — the one in California? |
| Page 69: | "But no such heritage existed in the United States." |
| Verb tense: S/B "exists". |
| Page 71: | "...remained open to what Roosevelt's secretary of the interior Gifford Pinochet called 'multiple use'..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Gifford Pinchot". |
| Page 86: | "In 1850, the whole of south Florida below Lake Okeechobee was a vast wetlands fed by a broad sheet of water..." |
| Vocabulary: S/B "wetland". The singular is permitted. |
| Page 195: | "Historically, popular interest in this theology, called 'dispensational millenarianism,' peaked whenever people threatened by societal changes sought refuge in promises of salvation and escape from worldly corruption." |
| Terminology: see pp. 202-3, where the term "dispensational premillennialism" appears. These are not the same thing; the former is more general. It's complicated, and I won't explain in detail. Those who wish to delve further may visit Competing theories of eschatology, end times, and millennialism. |
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