Practice of the Wild [Paperback]

Gary Snyder (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Essayist and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Snyder ( Turtle Island ) offers nine sensitive and thoughtful essays blending his personal Buddhist beliefs, respect for wildlife and the land, and fascination with language and mythic tradition into a "meditation on what it means to be human." In "The Place, the Region, and the Commons," he relates the old English concept of the common to publicly held U.S. forests, expressing concern that Americans, who lack an intimate familiarity with the land, "are not actually living here intellectually, imaginatively, or morally." "Tawny Grammar," referring to a Spanish phrase for knowledge of nature, examines this knowledge through a school curriculum in northwest Alaska that combines traditional native values and marketable skills. "Ancient Forests of the Far West" contrasts Snyder's experience as a logger in the 1950s, when the industry still exercised restraint, with the current depletion of American woodlands. And "The Woman Who Married a Bear" comments on relations between bears and humans through a Native American myth about a girl who is carried off by a grizzly that assumes the form of a man.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

More people should read this book than will. Snyder is, of course, an important writer, a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry, and a spokesperson for the wilderness. Here in spare, eloquent prose, he presents a series of essays that probe the essence of humanity, nature, and their symbiosis. Sometimes Thoreauvian, sometimes way out past Thoreau, he argues, "Nature is not a place to visit, it is home . . . ." "I want to talk about place as an experience," he proposes, and he really does. This is an important book for anyone interested in the ethical interrelationships of things, places, and people, and it is a book that is not just read but taken in. It is lamentable that many readers will spend their time taking in much lesser writers. Essential for all serious collections.
- Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: North Point Press (September 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865474540
• ISBN-13: 978-0865474543
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #166,444 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful collection from a national treasure, October 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Practice of the Wild (Paperback)

When asked to recommend one book for young people, writer Jim Harrison picked "The Practice of the Wild" for its poetic sanity. I read Snyder's unpretentious collection while commuting on the train every morning one summer into downtown Chicago. The epiphanies came fast and furious as I sped through the city's West Side. The wisdom of Snyder's thinking is that he doesn't blindly differentiate between the "human world" and "wilderness"--people bad, nature good--but helps us see the beauty in everything. Like his poetry, Snyder's prose is funny and illuminating, capturing the rough texture of the world. "The Practice of the Wild" is a treasure.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a challenge to become native to your place..., January 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Practice of the Wild (Paperback)

Snyder's "The Practice of the Wild" is an exciting challenge to all of us to reconnect through myth, song, stories, culture, to the places we live and take for granted. It is accessible, fun, and enlightening. Snyder questions basic assumptions that we have, and examines the idea that listening to the land and its spirits will help us develop a new ethic. "It is appropriate to feel loyalty to a given glacier; it is advisable to investigate the whole water cycle; and it is rare and marvelous to know that glaciers do not always flow and that mountains are always walking." Tying together science, politics, and poetry, Snyder has asked each of us to discover what it is about our self that yearns to be whole, and points out that this wholeness can come through the wild.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars what a life he led, July 8, 2001

By 

Frank Bierbrauer (Cardiff, Wales, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practice of the Wild (Paperback)

In much the same way as other reviewers I found Gary Snyder's book "Practice of the Wild" a very enjoyable read, I was originally pointed to it through the amazing work of Jack Turner's "The Abstract Wild" where he refered to it. Although nowhere near as intense or so purely full of power as Turner's book it is fluid and poetic. One of the first things that strikes you is Snyder's astonishing grasp of just about anything, his knowledge of foreign languages is acute, the width of understanding boggles the mind. It must also be remembered that he spent some years in Japan studying as a Zen monk, this would of course have introduced him to Japanese and through it Chinese characters, poetry etc. Snyder seems a remarkable man, this book as well as illuminating the human condition and its need for true wildness, not in the ordinary sense of the term but as native peoples perceive it or rather live it, is a kind of autobiography, maybe I should say a telling of the story of Snyder himself. You become intimately connected to his life, which is really quite incredible, the sort of life where he could no longer say in old age that "I never did what I wanted to", Snyder has really lived, a lumberjack, a monk, an anthropologist, poet etc etc.

The book is interspersed with scientific detail of the living world and then up comes a very poetic passage somehow interconnected without one feeling it is incoherent as he slips from poetic to hard science. What a life he has lived, what experience that simply cannot be ignored, "The Practice of the Wild" is written by someone who must be heard, whose message is human in every way, an ecologist, conservationist, logger, rancher. Too bad other people : politicians, law makers, company executives etc etc haven't lived like this, maybe their own similar experience could really change the world, maybe through this book they will decide to live at least in more than an abstract way when it comes to the natural world.