The Suburban Wild [Hardcover]

Peter Friederici (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 1999

Set in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, amid traffic, pollution, and ever-increasing neighborhoods of houses and apartments, these meditative personal essays explore the importance of our connection with the natural world, history, and memory. The Suburban Wild follows the seasons from one spring to the next, celebrating the natural miracles we frequently miss and revealing a territory less tamed than we might imagine. These essays offer the sights and sounds found on the outskirts of cities, just perceptible amid the clutter and din of crowded streets and sidewalks. From the constant humming of cicadas on summer evenings and the seasonal migrations of ducks to the myriad hues in a green heron's feathers, Peter Friederici reveals a complex place in which wild geese and morning commuters share the same habitat.

The essays honor our lost creatures and places, emphasizing the importance of history, memory, and consciousness. The author describes the varying shades and textures of a clay bluff near his childhood home, relating the gradual erosion and recession of this Ice Age-old landform. A description of spirogyra algae blooms on Lake Michigan merges with a discussion of the lake's once abundant native mussels and the imported zebra mussels that are threatening their existence. From recorded memories, Friederici re-creates the sight of the now extinct passenger pigeon. Though awareness of the destruction of the landscape and its creatures is never far from the wonders presented here, The Suburban Wild connects the tracks of wildlife and traces of our changing landscape with our own path through the world. The book explores how history--whether natural or cultural, collective or personal--shapes a landscape, and how human memory shapes that history. At heart, it seeks to forge a link between the world outside our windows and the one inside.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The North Shore suburbs of Chicago, teeming with housing developments, commuters and pollution, are also home to a wide variety of wildlife. Naturalist Friederici grew up in these suburbs, and, for this mixture of memoir and natural history, he returns to his boyhood home along the Lake Michigan shore to write of what he sees, what he remembers and the importance of our connection to the natural world. In 12 highly personal essays, one for each month of the year, Friederici captures the area's "fleeting scents on the wind, half-heard rustlings of birds among fallen leaves" while discussing how it has been transformed by the boom in residential development. In March, hearing the honking of geese flying overhead, he realizes that such a sound used to be a harbinger of spring. But no longer: now that hunting is banned in the neighboring "landscape of golf courses and corporate complexes surrounded by lawns and ponds," geese remain in the Chicago area all year long. Friederici does not just describe the beauty of nature; he also details the periodic cicada's 17-year life cycle, the decline of the freshwater mussel and why chickadees are less skittish in winter. In chapters on green herons, passenger pigeons, ducks and owls, he does a superb job of blending natural history, evocative description and environmental ethics. (Nov.)

Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

"The tattering of the great American wilderness is a source of lament, but this book offers eloquent witness to the beauty and complexity that live along the edges of urban life. Peter Friederici is an inspired guide to these half-wild places, combining heartful appreciation with scientific precision. His devotion to seeing and learning the significance of what he sees reveals once again the ancient lesson that the love of nature is one of the central organizing principles of human life."--Alison Hawthorne Deming

"Friederici's edge is that he combines beautiful writing with training as a field biologist. He comes up with a book that is both touching and intellectually engaging, a book that appeals to both the heart and the head."--Flagstaff Live

"These essays break our hearts with visions of what is gone, even as they encourage us to celebrate the many treasures that remain."--Arizona Daily Sun

"Celebrating the wildness that pervades the patches between roads, buildings and parking lots in urban America, The Suburban Wild addresses a question that gains increasing importance as more and more of the world converts to concrete jungle: How does wildness adapt to survive and thrive in a human-dominated world?"--E: The Environmental Magazine

"[Friederici] does a superb job of blending natural history, evocative description, and environmental ethics."--Publishers Weekly

"[Friederici] realizes that his sense of loss over the destruction of the wilderness (so eloquently expressed) is felt by many, a pervasive sorrow with profound implications."--Booklist

"[Friederici] enables readers to recognize the beauty and mystery of the most ordinary surroundings . . . and he makes the leap from the deeply personal to the universal as gracefully as a green heron poised in perfect stillness on a dead tree will suddenly take to the sky. . . . The Suburban Wild is close to poetry in its lyrical compression and imagery.”--Chicago Tribune

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 136 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press; First Edition edition (November 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820321346
• ISBN-13: 978-0820321349
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #480,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book for all, September 4, 2005

By 

Samuel Clemens "Sam" (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Suburban Wild (Hardcover)

In the traditions of Aldo Leopold and Gene Stratton-Porter, Friderici brings the ordinary to life - the invisible environment we pass through every day, mostly without a hint of awareness. A deep rendering of the remnants of nature that are left in the housing developments, corporate parks and fragments of moraine and ravine ecosystems that are the only reminders of the area's glacial past. I highly recommend this book to anyone familiar with the area - it will make you look aroun and more aware of your environment during your daily commute!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hidden treasures, May 9, 2005

By 

Don R. Lago (Flagstaff, Arizona) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Suburban Wild (Hardcover)

In a way it's a shame that this book has the title and blurb that it does, which imply that this book would be of interest only to suburbanites, or even more specifically only to Chicago suburbanites. But just as Chicago's Field Museum is a world-class natural history museum that draws and enlightens visitors from around the world, Friederici's book deserves a much wider audience than just suburbanites or Chicagoans. His eye and prose are just as poetic and informed as that of anyone at work today in the field of literary nature writing. This book contains some great writing and encounters and insights. The best nature writers are looking for the world in a grain of sand, and even though this book goes against the literary "grain" in not setting out for a remote and sublime wilderness, it still finds plenty of interesting grains of sand on the Chicago lakeshore.

4.0 out of 5 stars The Suburban Wild by P.Friederici, December 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Suburban Wild (Hardcover)

It was a real pleasure to read this slim volume of essays by Peter Friederici. The poetic style in describing his impressions while walking through the woods of Suburbia or while reminiscing about his childhood makes one relaxed and feeling good. His background of a naturalist makes some other essays very interesting and enlightening. I recommend this little gem to every suburbanite who likes to read, sitting in an armchair close to the window, occasionally peering out at the birds and the squirrels by the feeder, savoring the words of pleasant and knowledgable poet.