Overstory - BookWyrm.de

Kein Titelbild — Richard Powers: Overstory (2022, Cengage Gale, Thorndike Press Large Print)

Sprache: English

Am 2022 von Cengage Gale, Thorndike Press Large Print veröffentlicht.

ISBN:: 978-1-4328-9780-2

(1 Rezension)

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful …

The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by trees, are brought together in a last stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

11 Auflagen

Sally Strange hat The overstory von Richard Powers besprochen

This book is so over-rated.

3 Sterne

I guess, since I already paid a lot of attention to trees, and already considered them more or less to be people, and was already familiar with some of the research into how trees communicate with each other, it didn't impact me as much as some other readers.

I also really disliked the fact that Powers has a large cast of characters, whose stories span a century and most of a continent, and not a single one of them was Black or Indigenous. To not mention the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in a book that's about the nature and ecology of North America seems disrespectful at the very least. Then again, if Powers were to mention Native Americans, he would have to grapple with the fact that many Native American societies were quite successful in consciously stewarding and co-evolving with trees and other species, which would then detract from …

I guess, since I already paid a lot of attention to trees, and already considered them more or less to be people, and was already familiar with some of the research into how trees communicate with each other, it didn't impact me as much as some other readers.

I also really disliked the fact that Powers has a large cast of characters, whose stories span a century and most of a continent, and not a single one of them was Black or Indigenous. To not mention the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in a book that's about the nature and ecology of North America seems disrespectful at the very least. Then again, if Powers were to mention Native Americans, he would have to grapple with the fact that many Native American societies were quite successful in consciously stewarding and co-evolving with trees and other species, which would then detract from his anti-human message.

Much of Powers' interesting information about tree science can be found in "The Hidden Life of Trees" by Peter Wohlleben (note, he has the same initials as the tree scientist character), so, if that's what you're after, maybe read that first.

Themen

American fiction (fictional works by one author)
Fiction, political
Fiction, nature & the environment