Two good ones

The Last Wolf by Jim Crumley

I haven't given a book 5 stars for a while--but this is it.  Nature, history, travel and imagination pass on and off-stage so smoothly you hardly get a breath before one scene ends and the next jumps in.  It's near impossible to put down.

The writer lives in Scotland, a land where the last living wolf was killed in 1743...according to legend.  There's a lot of legend and not much fact.  He starts off with a quick reminder of just how accurate legend tends to be--especially legend associated with such a colossal subject of imagination as The Wolf.  He travels around his home land in search of the legend and finds many amusing variants of it, all of which happened right here.  But he also searches for the wolf's imprint on the land, the trees, the very winds that blow...I think he finds it.


Other chapters of the book take him to Yellowstone and Norway, places where wolf reintroduction is happening.  He tells an awesome account of the changes that the top predator makes on the food chain, the plant succession, and even the mist of the mountains--and those changes are powerful.   it's possible that man can keep a elk population under control.  But deer are a different story--they get fat and happy, overgraze and destroy whole ecosystems, even eating the little trees spawned from a brush fire.  And both get lazy, moving along only when one foraging ground is picked to the bare earth.  It's common knowledge that wolves keep a prey population healthy by weaning out the sick, the weak and the elderly.  But we're only just learning that wolves keep the population moving, too--it's how they find which animals to cull.   And that gives the earth time to replenish and regrow...thus the mist on the mountains.

I'm telling too much.  You need to read his words.






News From Heaven: The Bakerton Stories
by Jennifer Haigh

I both love and hate the kind of writing that makes me forget to read. Makes me forget to slow down and savor--forget that it's going to be over soon and I'll never be here for the first time again.  Forget to think, too--it's all story and feeling and then it's the end.

So that's this.  The stories are thoughtful, meditative--they unfold rather than happen.  The real action is in the heart and head.  The head thinks, but the heart, unknown and often unknowing, rules.  At least in the people you care about most--the ones who listen to the heart.