[Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky] is, in fact, the most intelligent,
thoughtful, original, challenging, and highly entertaining work of
nature writing since Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams. . . . It is her
broad scope of contemplation, combined with her fiercely beautiful
and detailed renderings of passion, natural and human, that give
Trudy Dittmar's first but fully mature book its remarkable
originality and considerable power. --Robert Finch, Los Angeles
Times Book ReviewHonest self-scrutiny is irresistible, especially
when told with a knack for diction of place, as this author
demonstrates on every page. She is both of the landscape and an
informed observer of it, willing to examine her conflicts between
the experiences that play in her imagination and the scientific
knowledge she's gleaned through training and reading. --The
Bloomsbury ReviewTrudy Dittmar is an elegant stylist and an acute
observer. She's read everything there is to read about the physics
of rainbows, the habits of the porcupine, the winter survival
skills of the moose and the orbits of the planets, but even her
learning is outdistanced by her patient powers of looking,
smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. Her originality arises out
of this patience. And, magically, she is able to read into and out
of the rich, endangered natural world an Emersonian understanding
of self. This is at once the most objective and subjective book I
have ever read. --Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own StoryDittmar
writes about life with the precision of a scientist and the
introspective lyricism of a poet, illuminating for us those parts
of the world we barely remember to notice...from the complex
emotional lives of cows and pronghorns to the dazzling leaves of a
silver maple to the teeming hidden pools of bright salamanders.
Reading this book is like finding a geode in a stream bed--crack it
open and it sparkleso--Jo Ann Beard Dittmar, who won a Rona Jaffe
Foundation Writer' Award in 2000 and whose writings have appeared
in numerous publications . . . provides a fascinating look at
natural and personal history in these ten essays on animals,
plants, and other natural phenomena. . . . An excellent choice for
both public and academic libraries. --Library JournalIn essays with
settings that range from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, to
the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, to the Pine Barrens of
New Jersey, Trudy Dittmar weaves personal experience with diverse
threads of subject matter to create unexpected connections between
human nature and nature at large. Life stories, elegantly combined
with mindful observations of animals, plants, landscape and the
skies, theories in natural science, environmental considerations,
and touches of art criticism and popular culture, offer insights
into the linked analogies of nature and soul. A glacial pond
teeming with salamanders in arrested development is cause for
reflection on the limits of a life that knows only bounty. The hot
blue lights of celestial phenomena are a metaphor for fast, flashy
men--he loves of a life--and a romantic career is interpreted.
Watching a pronghorn buck battling for, and ultimately losing, his
harem leads to a meditation on a kind of immortality.Fauna and
Flora, Earth and Sky is testimony to the bearing and consequence of
nature in one life, and to the richness of understanding it can
bring to all human lives.Trudy Dittmar was born and raised in New
Jersey farm country. In addition to holding an MA in English
literature from the University of Chicago, she is a graduate of
Columbia University's MFA program in writing and the founder and
former director of a writing program at Brookdale Community College
in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in such publications as The
Norton Book of Nature Writing, Pushcart XXI, Georgia Review, and
Orion. She divides her time between her family home in New Jersey
and her cabin in Wyoming
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