Reviews

Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals by Deena Metzger, Brenda Peterson, Linda Hogan

fantasticmeteor's review against another edition

5.0

This is a favorite to take camping with me. Every experience written by very different women with very different experiences and yet all of them connect and resonate so deeply with me both as an animal and nature lover.

octavia_cade's review against another edition

5.0

This was excellent. It's an edited collection of writing themed around women's relationship with nature, and its strength is in its variety. Most of the pieces included here are essays, but there's a handful of poems and the odd short story, come from scientists and poets and everything in between. Really, glancing down the table of contents is enough to lure anyone in - Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Ursula Le Guin, Temple Grandin, Leslie Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Diane Ackerman, Denise Levertov, and more. And what's most striking about all the pieces together is how personal they are. This is especially true of the naturalists, who (almost to a woman) seem to have disdained the typical scientific approach of rigid objectivity and lack of emotion. Indeed, as several of them point out, they've been able to succeed so well at what they do precisely because they aren't as wedded to the narrative of nature-as-something-to-be-controlled as some of their male colleagues are. Again and again the theme of interconnection comes up, the idea of human as part of the natural world and not the head of it, and a focus, too, on interconnection between species, and the ability to communicate with them.

This is one of those books you could have on a shelf and pick up every so often, flip to a random page, and read. A lot of what's been included here are excerpts from other works, and I really want to go look a lot of them up, because the writing is generally so approachable, and so polished, that it would be a pleasure to read more of it.