Sierra Club Book Club

From the Sierra Club –

All the meetings have been well attended and there have been engaging conversations at all of them. The meeting will be held at the Rock Garden picnic tables just uphill from the Zilker Theater. In September, we will be meeting to discuss the book, “Goodbye to a River: A Narrative” by John Graves.

The following is copy/pasted from Amazon.com:

“In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth.

Goodbye to a River is his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication,

Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.”

Our next book for October is going to be Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac”. Many say that it’s some of the finest nature writings since Thoreau. He is the father of Wildlife Biology and coined the term a “land ethic”. His essays are some of the best on nature and man’s relationship with it.