Reviews with content warning for Cannibalism - La meravigliosa trama del tutto: Saggezza indigena, conoscenza scientifica e gli insegnamenti delle piante

I really enjoyed the combination of memoir style writing infused with nature writing providing lots of interesting info. The writing is beautifully descriptive and moving. As someone who grew up in the area (outside Syracuse) she writes about a lot, there was a nostalgic factor for me as well.

My one qualm (and this could be indicative of this being published a decade ago) is I think Wall Kimmerer shies away a bit from giving any real solutions besides to become "closer to nature" which reads a bit naive considering where we are as a world right now. Unfortunately we are just so far past the way indigenous people used to live that I struggle to see a path that leads anywhere near back there.

Content Warnings

turidt's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective relaxing sad slow-paced

5.0

Content Warnings

bashsbooks's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective relaxing medium-paced

4.25

I buddy-read Braiding Sweetgrass with my dear and beloved friend @emakay... which means I've already commented on it extensively in a private setting. So I will do my best to summarize my thoughts, but apologies if this review reads a little more scattershot than some of my others.

All-in-all, Braiding Sweetgrass is a fantastic personal essay collection about nature, culture, and our interpersonal (person here including nonhumans!) connections. I can understand perfectly why it is so popular and widely recommended. My friend and I listened the audiobook, so we not only appreciated the descriptions as written, but also, Kimmerer's steady and soothing voice as she read through the text she so lovingly crafted. My favorite takeaways from Braiding Sweetgrass were: the obvious and unabashed love Kimmerer has for the natural world, her willingness to combine traditional wisdom and hard science, her gentle encouragement to consider the world from a different perspective (especially that of a plant or an animal), and her fierce love and appreciate for her Potawatomi culture and heritage. I was also deeply compelled by her rumination on how to become indigenous to place and what obligations we have to others (both human and not). What I liked less was relatively minor by comparison; I thought she was a little uncomfortably committed to gender roles as 'natural' from time to time, and I wished that she came out and actually expanded on her issues with 'technology' rather than taking vague pot-shots at it here and there. Adjacently, my friend pointed out that the anecdote about an ex's attempted suicide in his car to make a point about human disconnectedness with nature was... messy, at best. But those were small moments, and with a book as long and expansive as this one, there were bound to be hangups here and there. Overall, fantastic book, and I highly recommend listening to the audiobook.

Content Warnings

wickedgrumpy's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional hopeful informative lighthearted reflective relaxing slow-paced

3.25

The way the author talks about their connection to nature is truly evocative and beautiful. There’s a familial component to it that, at first, was comforting in that you can find a community all around you if you would but care to look. But then it began to center motherhood and the assumption that if female, you too will be a mother and experience these things, which was unfortunate. It became a repetitive narrative that dragged itself to the finish line.

Content Warnings

the_reading_wren's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

5.0

Genuinely a life-changing book. Inspires me and shows me new way for me to return to studying and practicing ecology.

I highly recommend the audiobook because it is read wonderfully by the author.

Content Warnings

maeverose's review against another edition

Go to review page

4.0

This is a collection of essays about Indigenous peoples’ relationship to plants and what we can learn from it to have a better relationship to the earth, and help heal the damage that’s been done to it. As well as some cool plant science sprinkled throughout.

I think this book should be required reading for every non-Indigenous American. I’ve always loved nature, but this book really helped me appreciate elements of nature that I took for granted or never really thought about. Who knew cattails were so cool? This book shows how amazing and intelligent plants are. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing is very vivid and beautiful, and the plant science is written in an easy to understand way.

I did have two small issues with it:

Some of the language she uses when talking about women made me a bit uncomfortable. She talks a lot about motherhood in relation to womanhood, which is always a bit of a terfy red flag for me. Not to mention it’s also just regressive even when talking strictly about women. This isn’t about the parts where she writes about her own experience as a mother, of course, she’s more than allowed to do that in her own memoir lol. I understand that this could also be a matter of cultural difference, as I’m a white, so I’ll leave it at that.

Because this is a collection of essays, a lot of them are a bit repetitive. I ended up putting myself into a reading slump by reading too much of this in a short span of time, as I’m really sensitive to repetition and it started to feel tedious to read. I really should’ve read an essay a week and just gone through the book really slowly. That likely would’ve worked better for me.

Those things aside, I still think this book is really good and would strongly recommend it.

My favorite essays:
•The Counsel of Pecans
•An Offering
•Learning the Grammar of Animacy
•Maple Sugar Moon
•Witch Hazel
•Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass
•Sitting in a Circle
•Defeating Windigo

Some of my favorite quotes:

“Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.”

“When we tell them that a tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into “natural resources.” If a maple is an it, we can take up a chainsaw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.”

“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires.”

“What would it be like, I wondered, to live with that heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect?”

“Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings.”

“It is an odd dichotomy we have set for ourselves, between loving people and loving land. We know that loving a person has agency and power—we know it can change everything. Yet we act as if loving the land is an internal affair that has no energy outside the confines of our head and heart.”

“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”

Content Warnings

More...