THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: How We Made the Wilderness, poetic and beautiful subject and discussion

THE SAVAGE LANDSCAPE: How We Made the Wilderness
CAL FLYN
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A lyrical exploration of the world’s wildest, most forbiddingly remote places—and the humans who have always been there, by an award-winning and critically acclaimed writer

From the blacksand beaches of Iceland, to river crossings deep in the Amazon jungle, to the barren beauty of Antarctica, wilderness is a powerful, ancient concept, lying at the intersection of landscape, philosophy, and ecology. And for thousands of years, people have sought out uncontrolled, unknown, or uncharted nature in search of religious epiphany, self-actualization, and an escape from modern life. More recently these “pristine” places have been seen as the subject of a last effort to repair a planet imperiled by humans.

But as award-winning writer Cal Flyn traverses the most forbidding, untamed and inhospitable wild lands—the supposedly uninhabited wilds of the world—she finds that such truly untouched lands don't Nearly every wilderness has been or is actively inhabited by humans. Here we meet ascetics in search of theophany in the desert; lonely shepherds running off wolves under the stars; missionaries preaching from shacks deep in the jungle; wise lamas meditating under lofty mountain peaks.

The Savage Landscape takes us into these breathtaking wilds—deep into dark forests, to the tops of mountains, and into the hearts of deserts—asking provocative questions about the nature of wilderness, its preservation, and its meaning.

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My Review: Travel writing in the poetic mode:

Wolves, bears, the wild beasts of all kinds: those that frighten us, thrill us, go bump in the night. It's what's missing, they say, from the tight-leashed land: those lamplight eyes in the dark. Without them, without that element of fear, however faint or unformed, our relationship with the land is incomplete.

"If wildlife is removed," the environmental historian Roderick Nash has argued, "although everything else remains visibly the same, the intensity of the sense of wilderness is diminished!"

In other words: the fear is a part of it.

In the course of seeking out wilderness, Author Flyn makes the not-new case that "wilderness" is a societal construcy, it's about defining who gets to go where in the end..."wilderness" is reserved, apart from daily use for the great mass of people.

It's beautifully written...see quote above...but peculiarly impersonal. It's her musings, it's entirely about her responses to and thoughts about places the majority can never access. And, as the world shrinks and we humans use more and more of it for ourselves, a privileged subset of us have decided to define pieces of the world as "wild" thus off limits to the likes of you. You happen to live there? Move. This is wilderness now. I didn't see a lot of depth in her presentation of the responses to these diktats from indigenous people, but those stories are huge, deep, and outside this impressionist work's scope. I was sent off to look for the displaced's voices elsewhere—and a salutary reminder it was.

Auhor Flyn goes deep enough to present the inevitable, fundamentally irresolvable tension between the needs of humanity and the requirements of the planet's flora and animalia. It's not the first time I've read this story...Annie Dillard was my own first encounter with poetic prose telling nature's side of the story...but it is very well-made indeed.

Anyone who rethinks the relationship of human and nature has taken on an immense task, one that can't be finished, or even really grasped, in one book. Or one lifetime. We're always in need of people who look over the edges, across the horizons, under the fences, and tell us about what they saw and what they think it means. It's a perspective check...it's never possible for one person to see through all the other eyes there are looking at the world, perceiving it as we don't, even can't. It's the ultimate purpose of reading, acquiring those other perspectives in the best (albeit necessarily incomplete and skewed) way we can.

You know the lore of the woods in the 21st century, you most likely consume the stories about the denizens of the wild places on your TV. You most likely are watching vampire and werewolf media all the time. That mode of seeing these spaces has roots. Let Author Flyn show them to you, describe their planting and limn their growth for you; it will likely change how, even what, you see.

That's the point of reading, after all.

MIDDLE SPOON, enjoyable novel of throuplehood's pains and problems

MIDDLE SPOON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Viking Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A whipsmart, blazingly funny novel about heartbreak, unconventional love, and the way society could be, from National Book Award finalist Alejandro Varela

The narrator of Middle Spoon appears to be living the dream: He has a doting husband, two precocious children, all the comforts of a quiet bourgeois life—and a sexy younger boyfriend to accompany him to farmers markets and cocktail parties. But when his boyfriend abruptly dumps him, he spirals into heartbreak for the first time and must confront a world still struggling to understand polyamorous relationships. Faced with the judgment of friends and the sting of rejection, he’s left to wonder if sharing a life with both his family and his lover could ever truly be possible.

With a big heart and just the right dose of the anxieties that define the modern era, Middle Spoon skewers the unspoken rules we still live by—from taboos around intimacy to the shortcomings of Oscar season, pop culture, and gluten-free food—offering a surprising perspective on love, loss, and reinvention. Equal parts heart-wrenching and uproariously funny, Middle Spoon is for anyone who has longed, nursed a broken heart, or grappled with love at its messiest.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: You know that break-up letter you never sent? The one you found a while later when you were calmer? You remember how that felt, reading the minute-by-minute lavage of your just-lanced boil of hurt and anger?

Now it's a récit! A really long one, but that's what it is. Everything, not just the narration but every thought, feeling, event, opinion, is entirely the (unnamed, how much more evidence of it being a récit can one have?) narrator's. This is not entirely a good, or a bad, thing. It's fun when the narrator is processing why the departed party of the third part in the dissolved throuple, Ben, would just...dump him. (I have thoughts on this.) It's fun when he processes his rage at and hatred for the same groups I hate and rage over. Gluten-free food IS a satanic scheme to immiserate the planet further.

It is also, as a result of being so much up the narrator's tailpipe, a longer read than one would first think. I took a week to finish it. The intense angst, the ongoing anxiety issues...all are real, honest, told to us with sensitive thought before presenting them; and I want to shake this self-absorbed yutz until his eyes roll in opposite directions for being clueless and insensitive.

Well done, Author Varela! He evokes a very powerful reaction. Like The Town of Babylon, I had to reach into my reactions to fully experience the events portrayed...no surface-skating will do. Effort put in generates pleasure offered up, though. Ben never responds to these emails, written at the behest of the narrator's therapist but never sent; yet his text suggests he's either spoken to Ben or to his therapist to think through what Ben's reasons might be. I get it. It's the narrator's head, it's not meant to be in shared space. It's a récit!

But it's also the narrator. He is very much the guy you know who really doesn't realize how self-absorbed he is. He writes scathing letters to the Oscars showrunners because of things he doesn't like. Okay, he doesn't send them but—dude! I'm aware it's perceived as a man thing to be self-absorbed, but it's really a cultural universal far as I can see; still, what was Ben thinking? (We never find out.)

What else happens as a result of spending over 300pp in the narrator's head is that it feels like a hundred pages shoulda been condensed out of the count. It's a lot. It's fun, and the ending worked for my grinchly heart, but this is a time when a bit less would've said more.

A story I liked, a narrator I didn't much, and an ending I enjoyed. I call it another win for Author Varela.

HEART, BE AT PEACE gave me agita

HEART, BE AT PEACE
DONAL RYAN
Viking Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them

“I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise…”

In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the the jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold.

But a new, insidious menace creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of this community. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this small town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way.

A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to weather the storm of betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, towns, and entire generations.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I got a copy of Steerforth Press's hardover of Author Ryan's debut, The Spinning Heart, years ago. I was not a fan. It felt to me like a lightened up, shallowed out, misery porn oratorio. This novel-in-stories (though Viking would not like that description, stories being anathema on the US market) is the thematic and setting follow-on to the first book. It isn't really a sequel because it makes perfect sense, nuance and all, to someone who has never read the first book.

It is, I'm unsurprised to say, written in the same style as the first book, and that is not greatly to my taste. It's not incompetent, or poor, or clumsy. It just...is. For barely over two hundred pages, it's fine, unexciting but fine. Any longer, though, and I'd be mental for need of some kind of verve, some hint of passion for or prejudice against. Like this: “That was always the way in Ireland, he said. You’d be hung for robbing an apple and made king if you robbed a castle.” Or this: “That’s what young ones do once the madness starts coursing through them. It’s a dangerous place in a person’s life, that shadowy path between childhood and adulthood, and it’s pocked and hexed with all sorts of traps and trials.” Or this: “Pokey had a friend from Malta or one of those quare places who was living down near the lake, just back from the foreshore, in one of those big low houses that was built on a foundation of bribes and bullshit back in the eighties.”

No one's ever said, thought, or written that before, have they.

So I found the execution wanting, and was not excited by the extremely short chapters that change viewpoints and function as slighly underdeveloped stories. If you're telling stories making them wgolly their own thing is best...but these are interdependent fragments of a narrative, I think, so neither fish nor fowl. If this was a deliberate choice, an intentional development of storytelling, it did not hit the mark for me. Too much slid past the PoV switches for me to feel fully satisfied.

Others will disagree, and will thoroughly relish all my cavils as features. I'm not warning anyone away from a poor product; your own tastes be your guide, and Kindle up a sample to see what you think of the writing.

For me, this is my last foray into this bit of Irish literature.

CAHOKIA, or Take THAT Euro-exceptionalists!

CAHOKIA: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi
TIMOTHY PAUKETAT
Penguin Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five
WATCH THIS HISTORY VIDEO ABOUT CAHOKIA! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5MB5_KlOOQ

The Publisher Says: Almost a thousand years ago, a Native American city flourished along the Mississippi River near what is now St. Louis. Cahokia was a thriving metropolis at its height with a population of twenty thousand, a sprawling central plaza, and scores of spectacular earthen mounds. The city gave rise to a new culture that spread across the plains; yet by 1400 it had been abandoned, leaving only the giant mounds as monuments and traces of its influence in tribes we know today.

In Cahokia, anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat reveals the story of the city and its people as uncovered by the dramatic digs of American corn-belt archaeologists. These excavations have revealed evidence of a powerful society, including complex celestial timepieces, the remains of feasts big enough to feed thousands, and disturbing signs of large-scale human sacrifice.

Drawing on these pioneering digs and a wealth of analysis by historians and archaeologists, Pauketat provides a comprehensive picture of what's been discovered about Cahokia and how these findings have challenged our perceptions of Native Americans. Cahokia is a lively read and a compelling narrative of prehistoric America.

My Review: Where today sits St. Louis, Missouri, there once sat a huge Native American city we call Cahokia, absent any other name for it, relating it to a creek that flows through the five-square-mile extent of the known city and suburbs. There are Indian mounds galore here, and there even is a state park over on the Illinois side of the river. Serious archaeology has been done mostly in front of the bulldozers and the plows of farmers, developers, and the highway builders. Pauketat is one of the region's many dirt archaeologists, the guys who go out and trench interesting sites and keep uber-meticulous notes and drawings and samples of stuff. (GOD doesn't that sound like a painful bore?) Thanks to him and his colleagues, we now know that some sort of major urbanization kick hit the area in 1054 and ended in tears about 1250. Why? (On both counts.) Who? What the hell? Those are the questions raised by the archeology, and treated in concise chapters in this book.

I am not joking when I say concise. This entire book comes in at 170pp of author's text, plus 15pp of notes and an index. Not a challenging read, right? Wrong. The information conveyed in these pages, with about the expected level of grace from an academic writing about his pernickety, obsessive specialty, is rich and deep. I found myself taking week-long pauses at times, not "oh god what a slog" pauses but "...wait...what...no...wait..." pauses while my inner Bill and Ted tried to work out the IMMENSE and IMPORTANT implications of what I was learning.

Immense indeed. Native Americans are all-too-frequently hagiogrpahized as natural-world-lovin' harmony seekers. Oh really? Explain then, if you please, the six separate sites with as many as seventy sacrificed women buried in the trenches in front of which they were clubbed to death in this MATRILINEAL society? In ranks, meaning the next row stood there while the first row was clubbed to death. Why did the different-genetic-stock neighborhoods outlying Cahokia show the signs of poor diet and overwork that one expects to see in the lower classes, and that are absent from the downtowners? Why is there evidence from as far away as Wisconsin that the Cahokian religion was being proselytized and effectively forced down the throats of the locals via economic might?

Why are these Living Saints, as many counterculture woo-woos have it, suddenly shopping for shoes in the feet of clay department?

I confess that I am uber-gleeful about this. I do not subscribe to a worldview that, once upon a time, before icky-ptoo-ptoo Men got hold of things, there was a beautiful wonderful peaceful womanly world, and matrilineality is the last teensy vestige of that demi-Paradise. Ha! All these sacrifices, hugely overwhelmingly female, in a matrilineal society? Oh dear, got some blood on those girly-hands, don't we?

I also don't for a second buy the "living-in-harmony-with-Mother-Earth" story either. These folks stripped the local landscape bare and planted what supported their chosen life-style. No European involvement possible. When it all came to a halt, the violence of the Plains eternal wars began, and never ended. Massacres (google "Crow Creek" just for giggles), colonization, oh the fun that people have when the lid of powerful neighbors is lifted...all here, present and accounted for in the archeaological record!

So should you read this book? Not unless you're already interested in archeology. If you're a leftover hippie, it's likely to hurt too much. If you're wanting an overview, this ain't it. Definitely for the serious-minded reader.