My Story As Told By Water - Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-watchings, Fish-stalkings, Visions, Songs...

by David James Duncan

Paperback, 2001

Status

Available

Publication

Sierra Club Books (2001)

Description

In this remarkable collection of essays, David James Duncan, award-winning author of The River Why, braids his contemplative, activist, and rhapsodic voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. The twenty-two essays in this collection swirl and eddy around the author's early-forged bond with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their endangered native salmon. With a bracing blend of story, logic, science, and humor, Duncan relates mystical, life-changing fishing adventures; draws incisive portraits of the humans and wild creatures who shaped his destiny; attacks the corporate greed and political folly that have brought whole ecosystems to ruin; and meditates on the spiritual and practical necessity of acknowledging our dependence on water in its primal state.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member wwlw
Esssays on the environment, in particular the trout streams of Montana and the Pacific Northwest. What makes this book memorable is the incandescent, extraordinarily moving prose -- the best writing I've encountered in a long time.
LibraryThing member JanesList
This book was way better than I was expecting. As with many river writers I've run across, Duncan is definitely "male" in his metaphors, and if that bothers you you'll miss out on a good book. Sometimes his raving-to-the-point-people-stop-listening activist gets going, but you can skim past it.
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This book is a non-religiously affiliated (although aware of many religions) meditation on the tension between being a contemplative and an activist. Duncan tells stories of rivers losing, winning, and still at risk, in the fight against industrialism. He tells of the spiritual and human joy of fishing. And it just randomly gives you idea after idea to think about. Thought-provoking, meditative, at times horrifying, quite often beautiful.
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Awards

National Book Award (Finalist — Nonfiction — 2001)
Western States Book Award (Creative Nonfiction — 2001)

Local notes

inscribed by the author

Barcode

5707
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