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The Book That Changes Everything
Dr. Westerford’s masterpiece in ‘The Overstory’
Hoping to have a wider impact than she could ever have with academic writing, Dr. Westerford sets out to communicate everything she knows about trees, eventually writing The Secret Forest, a seminal book that draws the disparate characters in The Overstory together.
Even in his description of her at work in the book, Powers manages to show how she is not only connected to nature but also inspired by it.
“The smell of her red cedar pencil elates her. The slow push of graphite across paper reminds her of the steady evaporation that lifts hundreds of gallons of water up hundreds of feet into a giant Douglas-fir trunk every day. The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she’ll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.” (Richard Powers)
