Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist's Observations from Prison (Paperback)

~ (Author), Richard Shelton (Foreword) "Working with prison inmates tends to channel one's thinking in extremely specific ways..." (more)
Key Phrases: inmate park, visitation park, landscape crews, Santa Rita, Mount Wrightson, Meadows Unit (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Incarcerated naturalist Lamberton's strange and compelling debut examines the flora, fauna and microecology of an Arizona prison while describing the author's life before and during his sentence. Lamberton is a former biology teacher who has now spent over a decade behind bars for his relationship with a teenage student. After his conviction, he became a prolific nature writer, publishing largely in literary magazines. (A year free on appeal saw him become a nonfiction editor of the Sonora Review.) Lamberton's measured and exemplary prose follows the interactions among the prisoners, their built environment and the birds and plants they encounter there, tracing connections disturbing and consoling, ecological and metaphorical. Africanized killer bees arrive and depart, as does a terroristic guard; brittlebrush and goldpoppy's tough seeds (adapted to Arizona droughts) imply Lamberton's own need for endurance. The overcrowded facility's on-site disposal of toilet water ironically "turned this bleak place into a wildlife island, a rest stop and refuge for wings and beaks and talons." A few chapters near the end of the book put the desert biology on hold for straightforward accounts of Lamberton's recent travails. Usually, though, the book's two genresAfirst-person prison journal and third-person nature-descriptionAcomplement each other. (Lamberton is especially good on insects, on ground-level flora and on the sometimes brutal criminal justice bureaucracy.) Arizona poet and essayist Richard Shelton (Going Back to Bisbee) offers a warm, persuasive introduction. Lamberton suggests that "I learn more by walking across this same plot of ground again and again than if I had the whole world to explore": his deeply moved readers are likely to believe him.(Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Short, unbuffed essays that shuttle restlessly between natural history and prison life, and the unexpected moments of interpenetration, from inmate Lamberton. A few years back, Lamberton made a real bad move. Married and with three children, a respected high school science teacher, he ran off with a 14-year-old student. It was love, he says, consensual if stupid beyond utterance. He got 12 years in jail. There he has toiled imaginatively to avoid death by boredom (and by fist and boot, as sex offenders get little respect in-house or out): he has turned to the natural world, and writing, to escape into his head. ``My wilderness is a prison,'' he acknowledges, but one that experiences the seasons, the weather, and, though not teemingly, plant and animal life. It is not solace that Lamberton seekshe is ready to suffer for his crime and the pain it has causedbut a chance to keep his brain and soul from atrophying, and to chew on small ironies: As a harvester ant scuttles across the prison yard, he realizes that ``in subterranean (at least partially) masonry cells, a single-sexed, non-reproducing horde of workers . . . unwillingly serve a colony much like his own. These are are quick essays, for the encounters are perforce brief and circumscribed: on the seasonal migration of birds through the yard, where they would overnight in the few spare trees that existed before prison officials cut down as being too civilized for inmates; on a tarantula hawk shadowing its prey; or on the spider itself, its fangs piercing the armor of a beetle ``with a primeval sound, a sound out of the Devonian.'' The writing is stony and unmediated with humor, though warmed by Lambertons remorse, and cautionary; unless youve been there, you can't begin to imagine how bad prison life is, even in medium security. ``I'd rather watch bugs,'' says Lamberton of all prison amusements, for the moths and bees and jimsonweed are his communicants, if not his salvation. (50 line drawings) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 218 pages
• Publisher: Mercury House (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1562791168
• ISBN-13: 978-1562791162
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,114,173 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A LYRICAL VOICE FROM THE DESERT, July 17, 2000

By	William J. Fields (Richmond,, VA USA) - See all my reviews

Early reviews dwelled on the fact that Ken Lamberton has written this book from prison. Obviously his incarceration has provided him with an observation point that is foreign to most of us.

But, in my view, the quality of his writing has yet to be given its due. Here is a lyrical voice that unfolds the wonders of the desert in a fresh and wondrous way. The rythmn of his writing reminds me of Cormac McCarthy--certainly good company to be in!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A unique perspective, July 16, 2000

By	Gene Gorter (Allston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

To see the universe in a grain of sand...to see infinity in an instant...and to see nature in a prison. The first two have been contemplated by philosophers and laymen alike for years. Now Ken Lamberton brings us his insights on the third.

In honesty I only bought the book because I had known the author in the time leading up to his incarseration and wasn't even sure if I would read the whole thing. I wound up reading it twice. The perspective is unique and the insights are thoughtful.

As a transplanted Arizonan the descriptions of the desert of southern Arizona brought back wonderful memories for me as did the tremendous illustrations.

As we get pushed further from nature this book is a wonderful reminder that even in the harshest most 'un-natural' environments we are never very far from the wild wonderfull natural world - we just sometimes have to look a little harder.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Writing as a Way of Surviving, April 7, 2005

By	Madeline Kiser "rivergoddess" (tucson, arizona) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Buddhists say that wisdom, at least a form of it, comes to those who gain access to a plane of imagining beyond hope and hopelessness. To be able to see clearly, witness openly and without prejudice, is to enter this imagining. To be able to see for seeing's sake.

"Wilderness and Razor Wire" is an opus and an opera of seeing. Written during the author's twelve years of incaceration in the Arizona State Prison, the essays in this book focus the eye and the ear, sense of scent and touch, on the fragile bits of wildness which entered prison cell and corridor, walkway and window. The heat of the desert, the gaze of the owl, the aroma of spring's bounty of flowers in a barren place, inside a landscape seen as barren, but isn't, are beautiful, and defiant. This is a book to read when contemplating, to borrow from Bill McKibben, The End of Nature. The only end of nature, the book implies, is when we stop looking for and imagining it.
This is a triumphant book.