Vote for the Orion Readers' Choice Award

My candidate for best book of the year is not on on the list. It’s “A Keeper of Bees: Notes on Hive and Home” by Allison Wallace (Random House). It is a truly gorgeous book, a demonstration of the kind of heart we will need more of in the face of coming changes.

No doubt, this is a great list of books.  The two that I believe would have made great finalists at David Gessner’s “Soaring With Fidel” and Bill McKibben’s “Deep Economy”.  Both, I think, embody the spirit of hope and respect for place and community that Orion values. “Soaring With Fidel” has changed the way I look at birds and people and cycles in the wild.  “Deep Economy” has changed the way I look at everything…

How about the Bible ????

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

I loved Bill Plotkin’s book -
Nature and the Human Soul… it gives up a new perspective on our relationship with nature and the human soul.

I was sure that I would find The Snoring Bird by Bernd Heinrich on your list.  What an honor to be able to have such personal insight into an exceptional writer and man.  A family who spent their lives dedicated, some may think to a fault, to nature in the often most raw, albeit truest(?) form.  It speaks deeply to the human relationship with the natural world—100 years worth.

I laughed, I gasped, my eyes welled with tears. I will (re)read all of Heinrich’s books through a new set of lenses.

Is the first green Bible on the list?  It came out this year i think…

(the first green Bible, from publisher Thomas Nelson. The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Daily Bible)

A fine selection, to be sure.  I must say Alan Weisman’s contribution to the list is my slamdunk nominee - I found it to be a compulsively readable and topically engaging work.  This is one of those works of non-fiction which has, and will continue, to generate discussion and debate...a hallmark of a fine piece of writing.

What about these popular evangelical books:

Saving God’s Green Earth—Tri Robinson

or

Serve God, Save the Planet—J. Matthew Sleeth

Craig Child’s “House of Rain” is a dreamlike account of his personal journey across the landscape of the Colorado Plateau in search of answers to what happened to the Anasazi 600 years ago. This is a book to revisit and treasure again and again.

As usual Dianne Ackerman comes through in an Amazing way. I know of no writer who combines the skills of poetry and journalism better. This time she has gone beyone the usual realms of creativity, biology, poetry and psychology and added history to her repertoire.

David Gessner’s Soaring with Fidel was my hands down favorite. After I read it I purchased a few more copies and gave them as gifts to my family who love Ospreys they way I do. I became a fan of Gessner’s some time ago after reading an article in Orion about the relationship between Pelicans and and a surfer. I love the way he writes about his relationship between himself and the birds.

I wish we had a way to respond to the comments that are being posted about these Reader’s Choice Award favorites!

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is by far one of the most brilliantly creative and yet truthfully realistic books written - especially in the face of so many political, environmental and economic disasters - climate change and peak oil combined.

A book that transcends all of the great books nominated is A new Earth by Eckhart Tolle. It attacks environmental apathy and disrespect from a different perspective than the others- very holistic perspective.  This book champions the wonder and divinity of nature as a tool to connect each of us with each other and with the divine.  IF we do this, the entire earth and all of nature is treasured in such a way that we would all become the caring stewards of nature that we were inteneded to be.  The degradation of our habitat by humans for the sake of individual greed, short term expediency and the growth of corporate “entitites” who are veiled from legal consequences would no longer occur.

This was a tough one. My first choice is Blessed Unrest. However, there are so many excellent choices it made it difficult to choose only one.

Lindy in AZ

I nominate Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan for the list and cast a vote for it.

I enjoyed Bob Pyle’s book, because he has a great nack of making you feel like you are taking the walk around his property with him, and finding all the little things you would have probably missed if you had been exploring on your own.  It took me much longer than most books, simply because I only read a chapter a day, looking forward to either a early morning or evening stroll with him--it was a great visit.

I second Chuck Schultz on “Omnivores Dilemma” by Pollan AND recommend the follow-up “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan.  Both masterfully written, insightful and screamingly factual. By seeking to answer the questions in back of what we commonly accept to be true, he lays bare our ignorances and the complicity of corporate/government duplicity.

I was sorry not to see listed among the nominees for the award Slow Fire¸ the fourth book of poems by Pamela Alexander, a frequent contributor to Orion. As I said in an earlier statement, the book explores the earth and its elements with an urgency that is both expansive and deep. Always a careful and informed observer and namer of the natural world, in this book Alexander has looked at things until they have looked back at her, familiarizing the non-human even as she defamiliarizes the human:  “I am the earth that waits. / You are the earth that walks” is one part of “What the Trail Says.” Informed by biology, Slow Fire is deeply conscious of time, reminding us that “The past burns,” and that there’s “Nothing firm / about terra. We’re on a roll.” It’s impossible to read Slow Fire without being jolted from easy assumptions about the centrality of human beings; in a typically transformative line break, Alexander shows us that “we cannot live in a community of one / species.”

My wife, Elaine, and I have been working for almost 14 years trying to build a local food system in and around Black Mountain, NC.  Our local tailgate market is a clear success, but our year-round indoor market for local food is still struggling.  Ms. Kingsolver’s book has given us a nearby story to which our friends and neighbors can truly relate.  It also models wonderfully behavior that resonates with young people in our area. 

Finally, we had the pleasure of having Ms. Kingsolver, her husband and daughter read their book to us.  By listening to it rather than reading the words ourselves, we were unable to hurry things along.  We were pulled into their experience in a way that the written word never could had we not heard it first.  We urge everyone to try to locate audio versions of the nominated books through your local library.