No library should be without this book in its reference section. And, if you have a serious interest in nature writing, it's well worth the purchase price. No other resource provides such a wide-ranging and accessible introduction to international writing about nature over the past two centuries. After years of reading mostly in the American and British nature writing traditions, I found the geographic and cultural diversity of this volume to be eye-opening and absolutely refreshing.

Each chapter is a treasure trove of new writers and new perspectives to explore. If you've read Henry David Thoreau, you'll find references to the works of other great walkers, such as England's George Borrow. If you've read Rachel Carson, you'll want to read about the life and activism of Japan's Tanaka Shozo. If you've read Toni Morrison, you'll want to explore the effects of white colonialism on Africans in Peter Abraham's Mine Boy. A true sourcebook, Literature of Nature contains information of interest to every reader, including nature writers and environmental activists, as well as those travelers who want to learn more about the geographic, cultural, and historical aspects of the lands to which they journey.

The first section of the volume is devoted to valuable information and insights about lesser known writers and topics associated with the United States and Canada, but the collection's real uniqueness rests with the numerous chapters in the following sections on Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and the Arab World, and Latin America and the Poles. I learned something new with each chapter (often with every page!), and as I read, I felt an increasing sense of humility about my own place-based identity as a U.S. citizen, scholar and writer, and life-long resident of the Midwest. I found the chapters on environmental and activist writing in Russia, Taiwan, India, Japan, and South Africa to be particularly useful because these rich traditions, previously unknown to me, provide international contexts for my reading in U.S. environmental history and activism.

As an educator and writer, I know that teachers and students will refer to this volume over and over again as part of their research and studies. The final section of the volume, which provides several provocative topical essays on environmental literature, will prove particularly useful to students and newcomers to this literature. Finally, because this volume offers comprehensive overviews of a range of national literatures and topics, Literature of Nature is a welcome complement to the nature writing anthologies often used in undergraduate courses. I look forward to supplementing it with Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook, edited by Robert M. Torrance (1998), an anthology of international nature writing that focuses on oral traditions and writing from the ancient periods to the early 1800s. While these books differ in the time periods they cover, they share a mutual focus on world literatures about nature. Literature of Nature offers lucid introductions to international literatures of nature, while Encompassing Nature offers many full and excerpted selections from earlier periods in these traditions.

What can literature do for us? This unique and precious source book will give you an answer. Literature of Nature is recomened for anyone interested in nature, literature and environment.

I bought this book after hearing a lecture by Edward Renehan at the Union League Club in NYC. Renehan is the biographer of Muir's friend and associate John Burroughs, and in the course of his lecture he recommended this edition as a good, solid, representative volume of Muir's prose. That it is, and I'm happy to join Renehan in recommending it. -- Alfred Roosein