The ten most popular book reviews of 2023
As we enter 2024, here is a brief recap of the most-viewed book reviews in 2023:
book review
The Goose: Issue 20.1 is now available
The Canadian environmental arts journal The Goose just published their latest edition under the theme “Moving on Land.” And it includes an article by EcoLit contributor Nicole Emanuel! This issue is one of the biggest issues to date in The Goose! With three (3) editorials; eight (8) articles; fourteen (14) poems; fourteen (14) creative non-fiction pieces …
Nature’s Best Hope
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 …
Book Review: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Set on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in the span of the twelve days before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina makes landfall, Salvage the Bones is the story of 14-year-old Esch and her family, who live on the outskirts of the fictional town of Bois Sauvage on a patch of land they call the “Pit.” …
Book Review: The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun
Eco-tourism has become increasingly popular in recent years, travel intended to help conserve and contribute to remote communities and delicate ecosystems, but…disaster tourism? We’re all familiar with rubbernecking drivers, and South Korean novelist Yun Ko-Eun escalates our morbid curiosity with catastrophe into a full-blown industry in The Disaster Tourist. This is Yun’s second novel to …
Book Review: The Great Derangement
With the future state of the planet in question, Amitav Ghosh explores the roles of literature and history in terms of their place in the climate crisis in his book The Great Derangement. Ghosh, a fiction writer who has experienced climate catastrophes in South Asia, structures his argument in three parts: Stories, History, and Politics. …
Book Review: Deb Olin Unferth’s BARN 8
It’s rare to find a novel whose plot centers around animal rescue, and rarer still to encounter one that is deftly written and gets it (mostly) right—which is among the many reasons Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8 is both a terrific and important book. Barn 8 is not necessarily an animal-rights novel—the animals themselves come second to many …
Book Review: Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures
It’s been wonderful to see new books about animal minds and emotions, from Barbara King’s How Animals Grieve to Virginia Morell’s Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures (Crown, 2013), which offers a fascinating look at the emotional lives of a wide range of animals. Morell writes that it was in part due …
