Customer Reviews

The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston

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As the title suggests, Mitchell's book traces the natural history of the Shawmut Peninsula, better known today as downtown Boston and hardly recognizable as such a distinctive landform. In his singular "walkabout" style, Mitchell walks and drives around the metropolis, leading us through its geologic origins and survival of the ice ages to the eventual arrival of various animal species. Anyone who looks at Boston today will be amused at comparing the contemporary scene to its volcanic beginnings or as a playground for roaming woolly mammoths. (Whether or not the place was wilder back then, than it is today, is a matter of opinion.)

Among the new residents was the "bipedal primate" who had made its way across the North American continent from its ur-home in Siberia. Of course, that animal's presence gradually altered much about the land, even as the creature itself changed in appearance and nationality. The familiar story proceeds from those natives to British colonists and a wide assortment of immigrants. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought new ideas and requirements to Boston residents; and the city became a home for both land preservationists/reformers and city planners/developers. Thus began a push-me-pull-you relationship of tearing down, building up, and saving green. That trend continues today.

Mitchell is an expert at reading clues in the landscape and interpreting the printed histories. He also shows no fear by daring to chat with the locals he meets along his semi-circular journey. He puts so much of himself into the writing that each chapter is a subtle memoir as well. The bottom line is that some form of Nature continues on the landscape, no matter how much concrete is poured and no matter how many highways and high-rises are added. "Nature is life," reads the inscription Mitchell finds on a granite boulder in a park in East Boston. Indeed, it is so.

Readers who enjoy John Hanson Mitchell's books and this kind of scrutiny of an urban setting may also appreciate John Tallmadge's "The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City" and Marie Winn's "Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park." A longer geologic road trip can be taken with John McPhee in "In Suspect Terrain."

I dream of books that will explain to me the specific geology and natural history of the Boston area and other places I know well, and this book comes as close to doing this as any book I know. Unfortunately the geology remains a bit vague, with handwaving about volcanoes and the ice age, and the natural history is presented as a descent from a pristine paradise to a modern disaster of roads and buildings and *people*. He much prefers birds, and clearly despises cars, although he drives a clunker. I find Boston to be a beautiful city, where people have cared to preserve and restore a considerable portion of the land as open. But it seems it could never be enough, or pure enough, for the author. It was great to learn about some parks that are new to me in East Boston and near Franklin Park to explore. But I found his constant harping on the development of Boston into a city as a terrible thing depressing. Much of the history was of great interest, and with that huge caveat I recommend the book to everyone who loves Boston and is curious about how the city developed. But I can't believe there's no index or bibliography!

This is a very engaging story. John Hansen Mitchell takes us on the most interesting walk triggering imagination along with factual natural history dispersed with the nation's history. What lies beneath the cacophony of any city makes its evolution so much more intriguing and the fact that Boston is explored this way gives a unique opportunity to really know the city I took for granted when growing up there. If my early education included some of this offering, would have enjoyed learning that much more. The approach and subtlety of style invites the reader to walk with the author as if a wise grandfather speaking of wisdom without preaching. Being engaged with this book we can know more of where we have been and maybe have more clarity about where we may be going.