Book Description
The redwood tree has long been the national icon for nature and conservation, and few natural wonders has stimulated so much writing. This highly illustrated literary anthology, with diverse selections—stories, poems, natural history writing, and articles about contemporary conservation issues—that span more than 300 years, provides a unique and complete view of the tree’s place in history and the imagination. With over fifty photographs, paintings, lithographs, and other graphics.
About the Author
Peter Johnstone is a writer, researcher, and sixth-generation Californian who was raised in the “Gateway of the Sequoias,” Visalia. He has contributed to several other books, including The Ferry Building: Witness to a Century of Change, Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration and Jazz on the Barbary Coast. He currently lives in Berkeley.
Giants in the Earth: The California Redwoods FROM THE PUBLISHER
The coast redwoods and the giant sequoias of California have inspired an extraordinary body of writing. In Giants in the Earth, the carefully chosen words of storytellers, philosophers, poets, and journalists present an cloquent and engaging record of human history in the redwoods.
In 1849 L. K. Woods found the redwoods of Humboldt County to be a "dismal forest prison." By 1883, Frnest Ingersoll was extolling the "manly attitudes" and "muscularly graceful motions" of lumberjacks. In The Lands of the Sun (1927), Mary Austin wrote about the incommunicable majesty of the gigantic trunks of the big trees of the Sierra Nevada. Some forty years later, Tom Wolfe brought his sixties sensibilities to the San Eran cisco Bay Area redwoods: "Golden particles, brilliant forest green particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust."
From John Muir and Jack London to Joan Dunning and Armistead Maupin, and with a spectacular portfolio of historic photographs assembled by Peter Palmquist, Giants in the Larth is a stirting ode to California's most treasured asset
The tallest, the most massive, the most mystical, the most threatened California's coast redwoods and giant sequoias have always evoked superlatives, and with this anthology we can add still more. To describe the groves of redwoods and the emotions they inspire, generations of writers have had to expand their imaginations and stretch their language. In the process they have produced some of America's most stirring, thought provoking, and eye opening literature and, suprprisingly, some of its most varied.
The selections in this book range from tales of American Indians who saw these trees as ancient and permanent parts of their world to the anguished pleas of contemporary activists who have witnessed the devastation of the trees by chainsaws and saw mills, from awestruck reactions of early European explorers who wandered unexpectedly into almost indescribable grandcur to roiling tales of loggers and sawyers. In a variety of forms myth, poetry, fiction, essay, diatribe, and more Giants in the Earth presents multiple views of one of the world's great treasures and explores the many ways in which we humans have interacted with it.
Art & Photography
Book Info
