Welcome to the website I've constructed for the two 5-week courses I will offer this fall. And as usual, I'm offering both online and in person:
First 5-week session (NON-fiction)
Wednesdays, 10:45-12:00--online Zoom (H345-06)
Thursdays, 10:45-12:00--in person Arsht, room yet to be determined (H345-01)
Second 5-week session (Fiction)
Wednesdays, 10:45-12:00--online Zoom (H349-06)
Thursdays, 10:45-12:00--in person Arsht, room yet to be determined (H349-01)
So, yes, this is a slight modification of the courses I usually teach that focus on novels, specifically mystery, historical, and literary. But over the last couple of years, we've discussed a couple of novels that focus on life in this ecosystem earth.
There are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak--yes, there are rivers in the sky, and rivers that mankind have damned up, polluted, and buried underground.
Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt--with Marcellus, the incredibly intelligent giant Pacific octopus. Also a hugely popular novel.
And then there was Damo, the elephant, and rivers, in Abraham Verghese's Covenant of Water.
This transition is also a logical dialectic. When I first started teaching novels, I focused on mysteries because an article in The Atlantic magazine announced that women had taken over the genre. Women read the most books, bought the most books, and wrote the most mystery novels. So, what did they do with that genre when they adapted it?
They added a new perspective on the old hard-boiled detective novel; they even modified the traditional cozy novel patterned after Agatha Christie's work. They created a new perspective on an old novel genre, and made it their own. Their protagonists were independent single women who found justice for underrepresented populations that the law didn't recognize. And they added social issues, like the power of corrupt politicians, or like the social implications of the shift from agriculture to factory production and technology, and with it, their impact on our environment.
But they took this new perspective to additional heights with the historical novel. They wrote about the role of women in major national events, when traditional historical accounts marginalized, forgot, or closeted their contributions. Kate Grenville, with The Secret River, fought the "history wars" and transformed the understanding of Australia's colonization. Kate Quinn has documented the contributions of the Bletchley Park women who solved the enigma code in World War II. And Marie Benedict has told the stories of several woman, including Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan’s personal librarian who had to hide her identity as a Black woman. The list of historical novels written by and about women is large, and long; each one adding a new perspective to traditional historical accounts. For both of these genres, women have offered a new perspective, another way of looking at life that is more inclusive, more tolerant, more understanding.
So I thought I would take a new perspective myself, and in these days of Climate Change, focus on exactly what was happening to this planet we inhabit, in fact share, with numerous plant and animal species. And that's really the question. Are we sharing this planet with animals, oceans, and forests? Or have we tried to dominate and control rather than share? That's the issue we'll explore with both fiction and non-fiction. And what can we do to enable a new perspective ourselves.
BOOKS (note: all of these books are relatively short)
NON-Fiction--first 5-week session
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (Won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2015) 336 pps.
New York Times Book Review's: one of the 10 best books of the year
New York Times bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner, 2014
Amazon blurb: Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino.
A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.
Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
My Note: this is not dry science; she's a story teller with fascinating information and personal insight into the story of plants and animals, the evolution of the idea of extinction (relatively recent), of paradigm shifts, Darwin, the asteroid responsible for the demise of dinosaurs, the discovery of the American mastodon, all in individual chapters easy to read one by one.
Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (384 pps.)
Amazon blurb: From the best-selling author of Underland and "the great nature writer…of this generation" (Wall Street Journal), a revelatory book that transforms how we imagine rivers—and life itself.
Hailed in the New York Times as “a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler,” Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.
Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada—imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane’s house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.
Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers—and always has.
My Note: again, not dry science but storytelling. This book is, more or less, a follow-up to the historical fiction, There are Rivers in the Sky, that we read at the end of spring term. And rivers are one of the critical elements in Climate Change.
Fiction--second 5-week session
Raising Hare: A Memoir, by Chloe Dalton (304 pps)
New York Times bestseller
Finalist for the 2025 Women's Prize
BEST Book: New York Times, The Economist, ELLE
Amazon blurb: A moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.
“A philosophical masterpiece ruminating on our place as human beings in nature.”
“A perfect testimony to the transformative power of love. In learning to love an orphaned hare, Chloe Dalton learned to love the whole wild world. The great gift of this remarkable book is the way it teaches us to do the same.”
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and bounded around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, more than two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.
In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how difficult it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, weasels, feral cats, raptors, or even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.
Raising Hare chronicles their journey together while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness firsthand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.
Wolfe Island, by Lucy Treloar 360 pps.
Winner of the Barbara Jefferis Award, 2020
Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, 2020
Shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, 2020
Shortlisted for ABIA (Australian Book Industry Awards) Literary Fiction Book of the Year, 2020
Longlisted for the Voss Literary Award 2020
Short-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2016 for Salt Creek
Short-listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, 2016 for Salt Creek
Amazon blurb: 'Atmospheric...evocative...important.' Tom Keneally
Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island (because of Climate Change) sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation...
Until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept herself to herself - with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl - unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her granddaughter, no one is more surprised than Kitty to find she will fight to save her as fiercely as her name suggests...
A richly imagined and mythic parable of home and kin that cements Lucy Treloar's place as one of our most acclaimed novelists.
'A capacious talent' The Australian
'This lovely, atmospheric book sings of the inherent human drama, rising fragility of home-country and the recurrent need to flee and to protect. The journey told in this book is so evocative it will stay with the reader as an important literary fable of our period of history, in which a fraught world threatens all of us with flight, exile and bewilderment.' Tom Keneally
'A work that is more than powerful: it's transformative.' Australian Book Review
'Disturbing but beautiful' Susan Wyndham
My Note: I'm ecstatic that this book is finally available in the US, at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, very probably because it sailed with a boatload of prizes. For those of you who have taken the novels course in previous semesters, you may remember that we read and discussed Lucy Treloar's Salt Creek about the early colonization of Australia. That book is one of my favorite, memorable, "sticks with you" novels. In the years since, I have looked for this book to arrive on America's shores, and it's finally here.
That said, it's also a dystopian novel about Climate Change and its impact on a fictional island in the Chesapeake Bay, which is being submerged by rising oceans. It's not a particularly long novel (360 pps.) but it's also not a quick read. On the other hand, Raising Hare is short, fun, light.
Lots of themes in this novel; perhaps a quote from John Donne would be appropriate: "no man is an island."