JoeAnn Hart 
By Tom Comitta Coffee House Press, 2023 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart “No words of my own can be added anywhere in the novel,” writes The Nature Book’s author, Tom Comitta, with a nod to the Oulipo group[1] and a whiff of Sol LeWitt[2], as he defines the constraints and rules of this extraordinary novel. Every …
A tRaum Press and Night Beats book, 2023 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart Query, a Novel, is snack-sized, but it took me a while to read because I kept laughing coffee out of my nose and onto the page, the best recommendation I can give for a book. When I wasn’t cleaning up coffee or phlegm, …
When the U.S. Army set out to eliminate Native Americans, they first “eradicated the web of life that sustained them,” most notably by slaughtering all the buffalo that they depended on, then depleting the land itself with herds of imported cattle. “The genocide of the Amerindian peoples was the beginning of the modern world for Europe – bringing vast wealth to those countries.”
(NYU Press— April 4th, 2023) Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart Q: How do you know when you’re in a room with environmentalists? A: Oh, they’ll let you know. Like feminists in the 70s, environmentalists are often portrayed as being too strident, too serious, and having no sense of humor. In the entertaining and informative Stay Cool: …
By Mary Roach W. W. Norton & Co, 2021 Review by JoeAnn Hart “Like a deer in the headlights,” we say about someone who freezes in the face of impending doom. Why is that? Why don’t deer jump out of the way when they see us coming in our speeding metal machines? Mary Roach will …
DEFENSIBLE SPACES, stories by Alison Turner Torrey House Press February 2023 Fire! It’s everywhere in Alison Turner’s tightly knit collection of stories, from fireworks to a flaming ham, “a pink plastic hunk the size of a baby.” Everyone in the small post-mining community of Clayton, Colorado, elevation 8,236 feet, seems to have a lit cigarette …
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2022 (Published in the UK as The Sea is Not Made of Water) Life Between the Tides is my kind of book. British author, Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West, sets out to write about tide pools and the intertidal zone, but those subjects turn out to be just launching …
Notes on Wonder By Brian Doyle Little, Brown and Co, 2019 During that small window of time this year when it seemed safe enough to travel abroad, this book was given to me by a friend to take along on a cruise down the Danube River. Get it? One Long River of Song. But the …
A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard By Douglas W. Tallamy Timber Press, 2019 As a gardener and garden writer, I thought I knew all about native plants, but Tallamy in his excellent book Nature’s Best Hope was an education. He writes from the grim perspective that we will not survive the …
