Book Club: "Goodbye to a River: A Narrative" by John Graves
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All the meetings have been well attended and there have been engaging conversations at all of them. In September, we will be meeting to discuss the book, "Goodbye to a River: A Narrative" by John Graves. I'm excited to read this and it comes very well reviewed.
The following is copy/pasted from Amazon.com:
"In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth.
Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication,
Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment."
Our next book for October is going to be Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac". This book got the most "likes" when people voted in the comments section. Many say that it's some of the finest nature writings since Thoreau. He is the father of Wildlife Biology and coined the term a "land ethic". His essays are some of the best on nature and man's relationship with it.
November and December's books are To Be Determined. I'm thinking either Cadillac Desert about water scarcity in the American SW, or Braided Sweetgrass about Native American interactions with plants, or On Trails about the history of trails and how they relate to the human experience, or a biography on John Muir due to his involvement with Sierra Club.
VOTE by clicking like by the books in the comment section you'd like to read. Do your research if you feel so inclined, they are all great books!