8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In 'River of Lakes' and 'Salvaging the Real Florida': Author Bill Belleville Illuminates the Land He 'Kens, April 26, 2011
This review is from: Salvaging the Real Florida: Lost and Found in the State of Dreams (Hardcover)
by David Lambert
North Florida's St. Johns River is a troubled water. It crawls slowly northward through the top half of a troubled state. The river took shape in the Pleistocene-era Florida, nearly 65 million years ago, but it has taken humans only 400 years to change its nature--to harness its energy, redirect its flow, dredge its depth, widen its banks, pollute it with wastes and runoff, fill its floodplains, and draw down its water. New threats to the St. Johns River seem to pop up daily, so keeping tabs is a full-time job for researchers, enviro groups, scientists, and writers like Bill Belleville.
About the only thing humans haven't managed to spoil is the character of the St. Johns. It's that special character that writer/naturalist Bill Belleville admires, and it's what he writes about with such grace and enthusiasm.
Belleville's 2001 book on the St. Johns, River of Lakes, brought readers a new understanding of Florida's longest river. Others have told us how much North Floridians depend on and love the St. Johns; Belleville's book shows us why. River of Lakes helps demystify, and in fact often clarifies, the interconnectedness of man, land, and water. Its evokative prose derives from the author's special understanding of place.
Belleville's words ring honest and true because he `kens' his subject, understands it at a nearly molecular level. One senses that he uncrated much about himself in the process of writing River of Lakes.
Belleville's newest book, Salvaging the Real Florida, is an equally compellingly read. It's more about love of place than any book in recent memory. In the 10 or so years since he penned River of Lakes, Belleville's relationship with the natural world seems to have taken on an almost spiritual side, as though he were seeing natural Florida through the eyes of paleo-Natives, the Timuqua or Tequesta, the Calusa or Creek. Other times he's a scientist, examining Florida with magnifying glass in hand. Still others, he's a poet, a wordsmith who articulates and illuminates the wonders of the natural Florida with a lover's eye, but without the flower and fluffery that usually accompany books of this sort.
Salvaging the Real Florida speaks of Belleville's understanding of the connectedness of man and the natural world. His is a near Shinto perspective of the benefits (and pleasures) derived when man immerses himself in nature, surrounding himself (or herself) with forests, sky, dirt, and water--forest bathing as the Shinto call it.
Belleville's Salvaging the Real Florida is a series of. . .do we call them essays? Narratives is more correct. Written mostly first person present, his prose is elevated imagery, subtle metaphor from a suitor's pen; he writes with an earnest clarity and a near obsession of place. His real Florida is as grand as a first magnitude spring, but it's also close at hand, like the backyard woods you played in as a kid. His narrative pieces are siren song, but note . . Belleville's temptress could as easily be a murky swamp as a crystal blue spring or saltwater cavern.
For those who love the natural Florida, or those who wish they did, there are simply no better books than these two from writer/naturalist Bill Belleville. Mind you though, after reading them, Belleville's obsession with place may become your own.
--David Lambert, Southerner's Journal, 2011
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sauntering on River time, May 8, 2011
This review is from: Salvaging the Real Florida: Lost and Found in the State of Dreams (Hardcover)
The title, Salvaging the Real Florida, is as layered as the collection of experiences contained within its pages. In one deft phrase, Belleville alludes to a diving excursion among the remains of the Stephen Crane shipwreck that inspired The Open Boat, the quest to save the remaining vestiges of the state's natural landscape, and a commitment to rescue the treasures of a dreamscape gone nightmare before it is too late.
His writing is engaging, literate, and steeped in an intimate knowledge of his subject. Belleville has hiked her woods, kayaked her waters, and dived deep into the heart of her springs to bring us these tales. He is informed by a naturalist's commitment to a scientific understanding of Florida's unique environment. Yet it is his heart and his passion for his subject that captivates our imagination.
Come along with a a modern day adventurer as he opens our eyes to the treasures that are literally in our own back yard. The collection of essays in Salvaging the Real Florida celebrate and explore a mythic world that we have the power to preserve. They also lament a world that is sadly passing before our eyes. We, just as the state, hang in the balance. The loss of Florida's wild spaces is in no small part, the loss of our selves. Belleville makes a powerful argument for their preservation through non-argument. He leaves the debating and parsing of words to the politicians. Instead, he takes us on a journey, and we emerge wiser for following his lead.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sense of knowing, August 12, 2011
This review is from: Salvaging the Real Florida: Lost and Found in the State of Dreams (Hardcover)
As I tried to make my enjoyment of Bill's newest book on Florida last as long as possible I saw that the jacket blurb claimed him as "our own William Bartram". Those of us who follow his unceasing effort towards gaining recognition of the importance of our natural world, and the need to "salvage" what is left of it, would agree. But I had a gleeful mental picture of Bill riding his bike down Sanford High Street toward Maya's Books and the Florida locals calling "Puc-puggee"after him, as they did to that other "Bill" in 1774.
This work, as eminently readable as all his others, offers a wide spread of differing essays about our natural word, and the threats that we ourselves pose to its beauty and sustainability. The work draws on the authors wide experience in the outdoors and reflects his love and sincere efforts to protect it by educating his readership to the dangers of development, sprawl and the downright stupidity of ecological abuses by those `boomers', developers, and our `nature-blind' politicos.
Bill dives the wreck of Stephen Crane's, The Open Boat the S.S. Commodore off Ormond Beach, and recounts the adventures of earlier dives in the Galapagos Islands and the Florida Keys. But it is when he is wading through the St. Johns River wetlands, strolling the RiverWalk around Lake Monroe or kayaking the wilder reaches of our waters that he is most `local' and at home. Bill has adopted the St Johns River into his own sense of place, as did Bartram, and is truly now one of the river's Keepers.
This book attempts to salvage our own, perhaps waning, regard for this gorgeous State of Florida and tempts us to engage in the efforts to protect and appreciate what there is left of that 1774 paradise found by the original "Puc-puggee".
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