A Song for the River

By Philip Connors
Out of Stock

The mountain he loves goes up in flames. His friend and fellow lookout dies. He falls in love. Wilderness endures.

Description

From one of the last fire lookouts in America comes this sequel to the award-winning Fire Season–a story of calamity and resilience in the world’s first Wilderness.

A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the wildfire he had always feared: a conflagration that forced him off his mountain by helicopter, and changed forever the forest and watershed he loved. It was merely one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood but illness, divorce, the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident, and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

At its core an elegy for a friend he cherished like a brother, A Song for the River opens into celebration of a landscape redolent with meaning–and the river that runs through it. Connors channels the voices of the voiceless in a praise song of great urgency, and makes a plea to save a vital piece of our natural and cultural heritage: the wild Gila River, whose waters are threatened by a potential dam.

Brimming with vivid characters and beautiful evocations of the landscape, A Song for the River carries the story of the Gila Wilderness forward to the present precarious moment, and manages to find green shoots everywhere sprouting from the ash. Its argument on behalf of things wild and free could not be more timely, and its goal is nothing less than permanent protection for that rarest of things in the American West, a free-flowing river–the sinuous and gorgeous Gila.

It must not perish.

About the Creators

Philip Connors

Philip Connors was born in Iowa, grew up on a farm in Minnesota, and studied print journalism at the University of Montana. Beginning in 1999 he worked at the Wall Street Journal, mostly as an editor on the Leisure & Arts page. In 2002 he left New York to become a fire lookout in New Mexico's Gila National Forest, where he has spent every summer since. That experience became the subject of his first book, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout, which Amazon named the best nature book of the year in 2011. It won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, and the Grand Prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition. His essays have appeared in Harper's, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, the Nation, High Country News, Lapham's Quarterly, and n+1. His second book, All the Wrong Places, a memoir of life in the shadow of his brother's suicide, was published in 2015. He lives in the Mexican-American borderlands.

Awards

  • Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Awards Notable

    Northland College

  • Southwest Book Awards

    Border Regional Library Association

  • Southwest Books of the Year

    Pima County Public Library

Reviews

  • * "This powerful work belongs with the classics of the nature writing genre and is equally important as a rumination on living and dying."

    - Publishers Weekly
  • * "Readers who enjoy personal narratives and nature writing will be drawn to this book, which is a nice companion to the author's earlier work,Fire Season."

    - Venessa Hughes, Buffalo Library Journal
  • * "Intensely intimate, Song feels written for the Gila, the souls lost and those who love them, but ends up a beautiful, voyeuristic experience that brings the reader into the fold."

    - Shelf Awareness
  • "A heartfelt, well-written volume of vignettes and reflections of a man who--much like his long lineage of fire lookout forebears--gladly chooses to escape civilization for the natural world."

    - Kirkus Reviews
  • "Connors apportions the essays and arranges them so that the reader is able to grow with him--to watch as, despite all those losses, he extends past his naturally lonesome self. . .In essay after essay, he struggles to come to terms with the changing landscape and the death of friends. By the end, Connors has become a more symphonic self--no longer isolated in his solitude, unafraid to speak of and for those he has lost, capable of hearing music in the river, capable of sharing it. --Beth Kephart"

    - Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 73
  • "Connors' wonderfully digressive musings offer thoughtful glimpses into the more sociable aspects of fire-watching, such as they are, and expresses longing for a bygone era of nature conservation."Jonathan Fullmer,

    - Booklist
  • "Produced by the award-winning independent publisher Cinco Punto Press, Philip Connors' A Song for the River is a much-needed balm in our current age of fever-pitched distraction and tumult. It is an urging toward silence, stillness, and reflection. . . It is a song in the name of looking closer, looking harder. . . And, ultimately, it is a supplication to not turn our backs against the wild, or against each other, which, as Connors' beautiful, understated writing intimates, are really the same thing."

    - Books We Love by Books & Books
  • "A Song for the Riverblends a poetic voice with a naturalist's knowledge and a journalist's determination to document continued threats to the Gila River and its massive surrounding acreage, which became the nation's original wilderness area in 1924."

    - New Mexico Magazine
  • "[A] singular book, resistant to categorization. Is it nature writing or confession? Obituary or farce? Consult Walden all you'd like, but Thoreau never wrote any side-splitting descriptions of backcountry prostate massage. Nor, in a canon dominated by stoics, are you likely to encounter vulnerability this naked. . .--Ben Goldfarb"

    - High Country News
  • "This book is essential."

    - Pages of Julia

Paperback

  • ISBN 9781941026915
  • Publication Date Sep 18, 2018
  • Trim Size 9 × 6 in
  • Weight 0.6875 lbs
  • Page Count 246
  • Hardcover

  • ISBN 9781941026908
  • Publication Date Sep 18, 2018
  • Trim Size 9 × 6 in
  • Weight 1 lbs
  • Page Count 246
  • Interests

  • Audience Adult
  • BISAC Category 1 NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection
  • BISAC Category 2 NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / Wilderness
  • BISAC Category 3 NATURE / Essays
  • Themes Coping with Death, Environment / Nature, Exploring Ecosystems, Fiction, Human Impact On Environment / Environmental Sustainability, Informational / Expository Nonfiction, Nature / Science, Nonfiction, Water
  • Reading Levels

  • Guided Reading Adult
  • Interest Level Adult
  • Reading Level Adult
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