front cover of The Harvard Black Rock Forest
The Harvard Black Rock Forest
George W.S. Trow
University of Iowa Press, 2004

Originally published in the June 11, 1984, New Yorker, this lengthy essay is a sharp-edged inquiry into the generational institutions of our national life. With the same iconoclastic spirit and multilayered prose that he interwove in his classic Within the Context of No Context, George Trow tells the story of upstate New York’s Black Rock Forest—a thirty-eight-hundred-acre site overlooking the Hudson River—through the lives of the men who were connected to it and through the larger histories of Harvard University, U.S. conservation policies, and physics and biology.

The men: banker James Stillman; his son, Ernest Stillman, a medical doctor who inherited the land that would become the Black Rock Forest in 1928 and who wanted to make it healthy and useful; the legendary Gifford Pinchot, appointed chief forester of the U.S. in 1898; and Richard Thornton Fisher, for many years the head of the Harvard Forest and the man who suggested to Ernest Stillman that he turn his inherited land into another demonstration forest. Harvard University: a more financially focused, less collegial environment than the one that had accepted the gift of the forest in 1949, now looking to shed responsibility for the forest without shedding the money its sale would bring. The challenge: How to manage, how to value, a wilderness area of great biological diversity.

In his brilliantly elastic fashion, Trow maneuvers images, symbols, ambiguities, ethics, journalistic wordplay, advertising tricks, and corporate doublespeak to create an intensely perceptive analysis of the cultural, political, and scientific communities. His richly developed story of the Harvard Black Rock Forest is ultimately a symbolic tale that bears upon some of the most significant institutions, professions, and legacies in contemporary American life.

A publisher’s note reveals the fate of the forest.

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front cover of Hidden Natural Histories
Hidden Natural Histories
Trees
Noel Kingsbury
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Behind the cedar scent of fresh pencil shavings and the slightly bitter tang of orange in our marmalade are untold stories of human interactions with the natural world. Celebrating the human heritage of these and other natural phenomena, the new Hidden Natural Histories series offers fascinating insight into the cultivation and use of the bits of nature we take for granted in our daily lives. In Trees, noted garden writer Noel Kingsbury turns his pen—or pencil—to the leafy life-forms that have warmed our hearths, framed our boats for ocean voyaging, and provided us shade on summer afternoons. From the fortitude of the ancient ginkgo tree to artistic depictions of quince fruit in the ruins of Pompeii, Kingsbury explores the culinary, medicinal, cultural, and practical uses of a forest of tree species. Packed with informative and beautiful illustrations—both new and from historical archives—Trees will charm and enlighten anyone interested in our relationship with the natural world and will be a special delight for every gardener, chef, and climber of trees.
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front cover of Houses behind the Trees
Houses behind the Trees
By Mohamed El-Bisatie
University of Texas Press, 1998

Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present.

When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of history—his wife's sexual past, the war-torn lives of their families, and the personal allegiances of his friends and enemies. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mussad's wrath or to help Mussad track down and confront his nemesis.

In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."

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front cover of How Trees Die
How Trees Die
The Past, Present, and Future of our Forests
Jeff Gillman
Westholme Publishing, 2009
Lessons About Our Environment from the World’s Oldest Living Things
Trees have been essential to the success of human beings, providing food, shelter, warmth, transportation, and products (consider the paper you are holding). Trees are also necessary for a healthy atmosphere, literally connecting the earth with the sky. Once in wild abundance— the entire eastern North America was a gigantic forest—they have receded as we have clearcut the landscape in favor of building cities and farms, using up and abusing our forests in the process. Over the centuries, we have trained food trees, such as peach and apple trees, to produce more and better fruit at the expense of their lives. As Jeff Gillman, a specialist in the production and care of trees, explains in his acclaimed work, How Trees Die: The Past, Present, and Future of Our Forests, the death of a tree is as important to understanding our environment as how it lives. While not as readily apparent as other forms of domestication, our ancient and intimate relationship with trees has caused their lives to be inseparably entwined with ours. The environment we have created—what we put into the air and into the water, and how we change the land through farming, construction, irrigation, and highways—affects the world’s entire population of trees, while the lives of the trees under our direct care in farms, orchards, or along a city boulevard depend almost entirely on our actions. Taking the reader on a fascinating journey through time and place, the author explains how we kill trees, often for profit, but also unintentionally with kindness through overwatering or overmulching, and sometimes simply by our movements around the globe, carrying foreign insects or disease. No matter how a tree’s life ends, though, understanding the reason is essential to understanding the future of our environment.
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