Reviews tagging 'Fire/Fire injury'

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

14 reviews

readingwithkaitlyn's review against another edition

informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Minor: Excrement, Pregnancy, Alcohol, Misogyny, Fire/Fire injury, Animal death, Forced institutionalization, Animal cruelty, Racial slurs, Death, Colonisation, Suicide, War, Genocide, Blood, Car accident, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, and Murder

residential schools, trail of death, carlisle, pollution.

novella42's review against another edition

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation and Forced institutionalization

Moderate: Animal death, Fire/Fire injury, and Classism

bashsbooks's review against another edition

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. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief and Colonisation

Moderate: Animal death, Racism, Misogyny, Sexism, Violence, Genocide, and Religious bigotry

Minor: Cannibalism, Cultural appropriation, Fire/Fire injury, and Suicide attempt

Graphic descriptions of environmental disasters, pollution, and other eco-destructive activities.

eden_autumn's review against another edition

emotional hopeful informative inspiring slow-paced

4.75

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Colonisation, Forced institutionalization, Genocide, Grief, Hate crime, Death, Physical abuse, Cultural appropriation, Fire/Fire injury, Child abuse, Child death, Emotional abuse, and Racism

Minor: Ableism and Violence

the_reading_wren's review against another edition

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. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: War, Death, Forced institutionalization, Grief, Religious bigotry, Fire/Fire injury, Animal death, Colonisation, Cultural appropriation, Racism, and Kidnapping

Minor: Alcohol, Alcoholism, Vomit, Pregnancy, Suicide attempt, Cannibalism, Addiction, Slavery, Stalking, Cancer, Misogyny, Religious bigotry, and Sexual content

achingallover's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Grief, Genocide, Colonisation, Fire/Fire injury, and Religious bigotry

betag1013's review against another edition

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Minor: Fire/Fire injury, Animal cruelty, Child death, Animal death, Death, Forced institutionalization, Grief, Child abuse, Classism, Colonisation, Genocide, Xenophobia, and War

karcitis's review against another edition

emotional informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Animal death, Colonisation, Genocide, Fire/Fire injury, and Xenophobia

Minor: Vomit and Cannibalism

lizziaha's review against another edition

hopeful informative inspiring

5.0

This book made me deeply reflect on my own life and the ways that I interact with nature. I hope it changed me for the better. I also was pleasantly surprised to see how narrative-based this book was. It made the read faster and more interesting. And Kimmerer’s language is so beautiful, while maintaining a simplicity that kept everything easy to understand. Especially to hear it in her own voice, I felt like I was floating along these words. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Forced institutionalization and Genocide

Moderate: Colonisation, Grief, Racism, and Religious bigotry

Minor: Fire/Fire injury

dhiyanah's review against another edition

challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

There's a profound heaviness we feel about our collective wounds and responsibilities in how the planet is changing, suffering, and asking for help during these times. I'm grateful this book doesn't shy away from that, giving language to the overwhelm we're navigating, tracing it back to our ruptured connection with land and the patterns upheld to keep us in constant states of struggle, survival, and forgetfulness.

By sharing her lived experiences in reclaiming, remembering, and honoring practices kept alive by her own and other indigenous lineages (US-based), the author invites us to reflect on our own capacities and efforts of being in right relationship with the living world. In this book, I found reflections of how my own struggles of unbelonging and loneliness are linked to a sense of feeling orphaned from land, from wider community. I found deep queries and burning desires within me - not having much framework for being local to anywhere - to embody a more reciprocal and grounded approach to the natural world, to this planet who still feeds and tends to us through all this chaos. 

For this and so much more, I feel this is a crucial read to help situate and cultivate hope, courage, and determination within as we journey through these giant waves of grief and renewal with our Mother Earth.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Forced institutionalization, and Genocide

Moderate: Racism and Grief

Minor: Animal death, Fire/Fire injury, Suicide, and Violence