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BOOKS I READ: The Overstory (2018) by Richard Powers.
A five-hundred-page reveal on the critical importance of trees to the Earth ecology. Told through an uneven collection of characters, Powers chronicles their enlightenment upon recognizing the wonders of trees, advocating for our bole, branch, and bough friends. It is a story about how our short and disconnected lives allows us to stand by, mostly unaware, while we, collectively, destroy a habitat billions of years in the making. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” This is a good story sure to change some minds.
That I read this book at the time my mother had entered hospice care, only made the book more poignant. I have written elsewhere of her love of trees and plants. Her dwellings, more like little jungles, where her thriving personal relationships, some including deeply felt conversations, were reciprocated. Her potted companions blooming in beautiful displays of love. That was indoors. Outdoors, her eyes took in the stature of trees, the reach of bushes, and the shades of verdant growth as if she had arrived from another place where none of it existed. Of course, that is not true. She lived many years in places where nature was dominant, yet she never lost a naiveté and earnest gullibility in the presence of nature’s potency and eloquence.
NB: using Medium’s shortform posts to chain recent reads. Go to previous book:
