Beloved author Rick Bass explores ecological, social, and personal landscapes through this collection that brings together his best-loved essays and brand-new pieces
For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us.
Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription, to inhabit, as deeply as possible, the greater depths of the beauty in each moment. With “Every Great Breath” range from the extremely local, a long-form essay about the community affected by the largest Superfund site in US history, in Libby, Montana, to the far-flung: the Galápagos, Namibia, and Alaska. Throughout, Bass offers a portrait of our planet that is always alert to its wonders, even in the face of environmental crisis.
Rick Bass delivers these essays--old and new--at a deliberate pace and a careful tempo. His voice sounds kindly and literary. Reared in Texas, he retains a slight twang and the long vowels of that region ("fi-er", "why l" and "e-quator"). That he is soulful, sincere, and aspirational matters more. A fiction writer and essayist, he is also an environmental activist, and a number of these texts cent
