cover image The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture

The Edges of the Civilized World: A Journey in Nature and Culture

. Picador USA, $23 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-312-19543-4

From the great-great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne comes a collection of eloquent, lyrical, meditative essays that weigh the high costs of civilization, particularly upon the natural world. Seeking ways to heal what she sees as our wounded relationship with nature, ourselves and the planet, Deming (Temporary Homelands) spent a year traveling to pristine spots, fragile refuges from the pressures of consumerist development. Among the exotic places she visited were ex-frontier towns perched in Colorado's Rockies; Seal Island, a bird sanctuary in the North Atlantic where puffins, auks and arctic terns nest; the Pacific Northwest; Hawaii; Punta Chueca, a parched, hungry Seri Indian village in Mexico's Sonoran Desert; Canada's Bay of Fundy; and villages and Zapotec ruins in Mexico's Oaxaca Valley. These far-flung travels enabled Deming not only to experience a sense of community she found missing back home (a 10th-generation New Englander, she has transplanted herself to Arizona, where she feels more connected with the power of the continent, its landscape and people), but also to catch glimpses of a hidden, spiritual side of reality that she feels is suppressed by our self-devouring civilization. One essay warns of the potential dangers of commercial eco-tourism; another ambitiously seeks common ground between poetry and science as ways to grasp the cosmos. Combining a naturalist's graceful precision with a cultural anthropologist's perceptiveness, her travelogue is punctuated with luminous epiphanies, as when she visits five forested mountaintops in Mexico, where the entire population of monarch butterflies living east of the Rockies spends the winter. Author tour; U.K., translation and dramatic rights: Curtis Brown Ltd. (Nov.)