On the Dark Side of the Moon - Softcover

Mike Medberry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 087004513X ISBN 13: 9780870045134

Publisher: Caxton Press, 2012

Synopsis

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press

In the spring of 2000, Mike Medberry, a longtime advocate of conservation with American Lands, the Wilderness Society, and the Idaho Conservation League, suffered a stroke in the remote wilderness of the Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. He was rescued after nearly a full day lying alone and contemplating death in one of the harshest yet most beautiful landscapes in the lower forty-eight states.

Medberry was flown to a nearby hospital about the same time that Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, on behalf of President Clinton, came to Craters of the Moon to support protecting three-quarters of a million acres as a unique national monument, a conservation effort in which Medberry himself had already been personally involved. 

This story interweaves Medberry’s own struggle to speak, walk, and think with the struggle to protect this brutal, lava-bound, but for him gentle landscape. Medberry’s recovery from the stroke and his struggle to protect Craters of the Moon is a story of renewal, restoration, accommodation, and, ultimately, of finding workable compromises to some of life’s most difficult problems.
 

About this title

About the Author:

Mike Medberry has served as a senior environmentalist for several local and national conservation organizations and holds an MFA from the University of Washington. Over the past twenty-five years he has written nonfiction for Northern Lights Journal, High Country News, Black Canyon Quarterly, Hooked on the Outdoors, Wilderness Magazine, and the e-magazine Writer's Workshop Review, as well as short fiction.

Review:

"In On the Dark Side of the Moon, Medberry launches readers into a captivating account of the chilling, solitary moments of a devastating stroke in the middle of a cinder-coned wilderness, then carries them through the rediscovery of his consciousness and the desert he loves."—Rocky Barker, Idaho Statesman (Rocky Barker Idaho Statesman 2012-11-28)

"Mike Medberry has written a slim volume of a memoir that's a victory in many ways. This environmentalist and writer—in his first book—offers to the reader a story of debility and recovery, a journey he experienced following a stroke in April of 2000 that left him helplessly lying on the rocks of Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. But On the Dark Side of the Moon: A Journey Toward Recovery is more than just a book about a man struggling to regain health."—Andrew C. Gottlieb, terrain.org (Andrew C. Gottlieb Terrain.org)

About this edition

• Publisher: Caxton Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 087004513X
• ISBN 13: 9780870045134
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150