Book Roundup Wednesday: Books About Finding Meaning

Every Wednesday, we review a selection of new and upcoming books addressing a specific aspect of environmentalism. Today we're recommending books about finding meaning in the natural world.

Wild Comfort (by Kathleen Dean Moore, $16, Trumpeter, Mar. 2010): Setting out to write a book about happiness, nature writer and philosophy professor Kathleen Dean Moore’s life was interrupted by the deaths of  one friend after another. In her grief, she set out to find comfort in the forests and wild places of her beloved Northwest. With attention to the smallest details of the natural world, this very personal book unites our emotional world with the world that surrounds us.

A Paradise Built in Hell (by Rebecca Solnit, $28, Viking, Sept. 2009): Rebecca Solnit has made a career out of finding connections where others saw only individual elements. Her latest book looks at how individuals and communities respond to disasters. From the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, Solnit sees communities coming together after hardship in solidarity for meaningful work. The book is sure to provide lessons for those thinking about building community and facing a climate catastrophe.

I Want to be Left Behind (by Brenda Peterson, $25, Da Capo, Feb. 2010): This memoir tracks Peterson’s youth as the daughter of an environmentalist with Southern Baptist relatives. While her relatives talk about the end of times, the author learns to find rapture in the natural world. But when environmentalists start speaking of their own apocalyptic theories, she starts to wonder if the two groups have more in common than she had first thought.

The Nature of Being Human (by Harold Fromm, $35, Johns Hopkins University Press, Apr. 2009): Fromm, a scholar, tackles some very difficult subjects like how place affects our thought and consciousness, and how our creativity is related to our environment. Both academic and personal, this challenging book unites several disciplines in search of our place in the world. 

Finding Beauty in a Broken World (by Terry Tempest Williams, $16, Vintage, Oct. 2009): A book of fragments, phrases, and diary entries, Williams's new work looks for meaning in a world fragmented and broken by social and physical change. From the loss of prairie dogs in Utah to genocide survivors in Rwanda, the author sees pain and horror, but also beauty and resilience.

--Kyle Boelte