The East Country: Almanac Tales of Valley and Shore - Softcover

Pretty, Jules

Softcover

ISBN 10: 150170933X ISBN 13: 9781501709333

Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates, 2017

Synopsis

The East Country is a work of creative nonfiction in which the acclaimed nature writer Jules Pretty integrates memoir, natural history, cultural critique, and spiritual reflection into a single compelling narrative. Pretty frames his book around Aldo Leopold and his classic A Sand County Almanac, bringing Leopold’s ethic―that some could live without nature but most should not―into the twenty-first century. In The East Country, Pretty follows the seasons through seventy-four tales set in a variety of landscapes from valley to salty shore. Pretty convinces us that we should all develop long attachments to the local, observing that the land can change us for the better.

(Steve Russell East Anglian Daily Times)

About this title

About the Author:

Jules Pretty is Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Essex. He is the author of many books,including The Edge of Extinction and This Luminous Coast, both from Comstock Publishing Associates, and The Earth Only Endures. He is coeditor most recently of Green Exercise.

Review:

"The East Country, like all accomplished works of close ecological focus, moves cleverly between the intensely local and the universal. Jules Pretty unites his two distinguished careers―as a biologist and as a writer in the broad fields of nature, place and landscape―to encourage ‘long attachments to the local’ as profoundly valuable undertakings."

(Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways and Landmarks)

"The East Country is a marvelous book. There is something mystical about it, coming perhaps from the sense of reverence that Jules Pretty accords the natural world. It gives the sense of a prose poem, a song of praise for a world that is vanishing."

(Astrid E. J. Ogilvie, coeditor of The Iceberg in the Mist)

"The East Country is a brave and visionary book. Jules Pretty’s writing is clear and strong, and the questions he raises about our relationship with the natural world and our capacity to cultivate a real sense of place are of the greatest importance."

(Douglas E. Christie, author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind)

"Jules Pretty has created a new literary form within nature writing. ‘Murmuration Realism’ might be the term that captures his technique of using words to create place-based shapes, patterns, and rhythms in the mind of a reader. Readers can dwell intimately in the time and spaces of a place they may never have actually seen. Concatenations of words and concepts take to the air like a thousand starlings, and Pretty orchestrates them so that they form organic unity and come alive. In the heartbeat of a full calendar year, he creates a phenology of place for us, yet, at the same time, we know it creates him. To be able to walk on the bridge between the objective and the subjective is a rare treat. Jules Pretty, in The East Country, gives you the opportunity to stand on that bridge and drink in the wonder of it all."

(Glenn A. Albrecht, University of Sydney)

About this edition

• Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 150170933X
• ISBN 13: 9781501709333
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 158