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4.4 AVERAGE
4.4 AVERAGE
adventurous
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Disappointing, above all. I consider myself supportive of the rights of nature movement, and have read and thought a lot about ethical and legal questions regarding life, ecosystems, and personhood, so I was hoping to get a lot out of this book. Instead…
Macfarlane gives us 3 separate journeys he took to three different rivers, each with a diverse and mostly interesting cast of companions, but only tackles his titular question directly in brief bursts. The experiences themselves are apparently supposed to do most of the talking, and while the storytelling here occasionally soars (a paragraph about paddling down river rapids stands out), too often it feels pretentious and over-written, the dialogue he recounts unrealistically erudite and long-winded (or, if real, borderline insufferable). He never really defines what he means by “alive,” takes his own awe-inspiring experiences as a self-evident case for rivers’ life-force (spirit? divinity?), and more or less takes indigenous spiritual perspectives as fact. Which they may well be! But we don’t really even learn that much specific about those perspectives, just fed a vague pagan/animist/mystical worldview that I am not unsympathetic to but is not really argued for in any meaningful way.
Maybe I was just looking for something that Macfarlane wasn’t interested in giving, and others may like this book. But other than a few brief and suggestive reflections scattered haphazardly throughout, he fails to say anything coherent about in what sense(s) rivers are alive and why it should matter. At its worst self-indulgent travelogue, at its best scratching the surface of something important but not quite getting there, at least not in a way I could follow. I support the conservation and indigenous rights politics of his book, and the challenge to anthropocentrism, just the execution wasn’t for me.
Macfarlane gives us 3 separate journeys he took to three different rivers, each with a diverse and mostly interesting cast of companions, but only tackles his titular question directly in brief bursts. The experiences themselves are apparently supposed to do most of the talking, and while the storytelling here occasionally soars (a paragraph about paddling down river rapids stands out), too often it feels pretentious and over-written, the dialogue he recounts unrealistically erudite and long-winded (or, if real, borderline insufferable). He never really defines what he means by “alive,” takes his own awe-inspiring experiences as a self-evident case for rivers’ life-force (spirit? divinity?), and more or less takes indigenous spiritual perspectives as fact. Which they may well be! But we don’t really even learn that much specific about those perspectives, just fed a vague pagan/animist/mystical worldview that I am not unsympathetic to but is not really argued for in any meaningful way.
Maybe I was just looking for something that Macfarlane wasn’t interested in giving, and others may like this book. But other than a few brief and suggestive reflections scattered haphazardly throughout, he fails to say anything coherent about in what sense(s) rivers are alive and why it should matter. At its worst self-indulgent travelogue, at its best scratching the surface of something important but not quite getting there, at least not in a way I could follow. I support the conservation and indigenous rights politics of his book, and the challenge to anthropocentrism, just the execution wasn’t for me.
adventurous
inspiring
reflective
adventurous
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
reflective
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
I enjoy reading nature non-fiction and this is fine but I have a feeling it won't stick with me. It seemed a little too long for the topic.
informative
reflective
medium-paced