books

This week in the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Charles Siebert wrote one of those articles you want to point all your best friends toward: "What Are the Whales Trying to Tell Us?"

Siebert is one of my favorite environmental journalists, one interested in writing about the hastily constructed, ever dissolving lines between our species and the millions of others we share the planet with.

I've been reading a book called THE LAST HARVEST by Witold Rybcznski. It's the story of the building of a new subdivision in rural Pennsylvania. Simply stated, Rybcznski follows the development of 90 acres of cornfield from idea to completion, but it's more. In 200 pages THE LAST HARVEST tells the story of real estate development in America. What could be more relevant for our region?

I'm a sucker for "end of the earth" stories like the Bible's "Revelations," Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds," Walker Percy's LOVE IN THE RUINS, and Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, but here's a new one with a twist: THE WORLD WITHOUT US by Alan Weisman.

This week, drought and high August temperatures pushed my chance to paddle to the sea from the upcountry back into the planning stages. I’d planned to leave this week my borrowed boat from a put-in at Cliffside, N.C., and arrive 14 days later in the Santee delta.

This week I started to teach the last novel of the semester, Sue Monk Kidd's THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES.  This is the story of a young motherless girl who lives on a South Carolina peach farm and throughout the story, bees are a significant symbol, first of the young hero's fears and fantasies, and then later for the health of her community and the hope for her own future.