Ill Nature
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Joy Williams |
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| Subtitle | Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals |
| Publisher | The Lyons Press |
| Honors | |
| Most of us watch with mild concern the fast disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution - related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country.
Joy Williams does much more than watch. With guts and passion, she sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects. Razor-sharp, controversial, scathingly… | |
Most of us watch with mild concern the fast disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution - related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country.
Joy Williams does much more than watch. With guts and passion, she sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects.
Razor-sharp, controversial, scathingly opinionated, and refreshingly unafraid of conflict, Williams refuses to compromise as she lashes out at the greed of Americans and decries our own turpitude. It is not enough to mourn the passing of the natural world, Ill Nature shouts. Get out of our homes and our cars and our cubicles and do something…now.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Best known as a novelist, but also an accomplished journalist, Joy Williams has a great gift for inducing guilt trips. No one is safe: in the opening pages of Ill Nature, she implicates every First Worlder in creation for causing the death of the natural world, the victim of our material urges. She writes that the thousands of new digital television towers being erected today, for example, are responsible for the deaths of millions of songbirds that unwittingly slam into them or their guylines in midflight; by extension, anyone who owns a digital TV set is partly to blame for this unforeseen episode in the larger ecological crisis, no matter how well-intentioned those viewers may be.
Turning a sharp eye on ecotourists, zoogoers, hunters, politicians, developers, expectant mothers, carnivores, conservatives, liberals, and just about anyone else who crosses her path, Williams decries the rapid loss of the wild, which in her eyes is no mere abstraction. Sometimes hyperbolic, but more often right on target, she argues that it will take more than a few cosmetic fixes to mend all the wounds that the environment has sustained. Dystopian to the last (as she writes, “You are increasingly looking at and living in proxy environments created by substitution and simulation,” and not the real world at all), Williams brings plenty of heat to the page—and plenty of light, too. —Gregory McNamee
