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book review
Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found and James William Gibson’s A Reenchanted World
Paradise Found ranges across five centuries of North America’s ecological history and narrates a striking diminishment of earlier natural abundance. Steve Nicholls offers copious evidence that even today our society is far from embracing as members of our “community” all of the earth’s living organisms. Yet, in recent decades, the sense of connection to the natural environment felt by figures like Leopold has swelled into what sociologist James William Gibson labels a “culture of enchantment” that is potentially broad, deep, and socially transformative. [...]
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination
Robert H. Abzug’s engaging study of nineteenth-century reform-movement figures, including those who agitated for temperance, abolitionism, and women’s rights, argues that their aims can only be understood in the context of their religious thinking. [...]
short take
My “Good Reads” selection
On May 4, I linked to the National Book Critics Circle’s Spring 2008 “Good Reads” list. Now my own nonfiction recommendation, Gordon S. Wood’s The Purpose of the Past: Reflections On the Uses of History, has been posted to Critical Mass, the NBCC blog. To read the recommendation, click here.
