ecology

Kimmerer has the scientific training--rational, evidence-based, data-driven--of a botanist; the indigenous culture, worldview, and beliefs of a Potawatomi Anishinaabe; and the language, spirit, and skill of a poet. In this book she wonderfully melds those three ways of seeing, of knowing, of understanding and communicating. She beautifully shares an ecological message of the possibility of harmonious co-existence with plants and nature, a perspective deeply supported by science. More than any other book I know, it spoke equally to my head, my heart, and my soul.

If there's a single concept at

The Good Life Lab is the kind of book that makes me suffer, torn between skepticism and hope. It’s the kind of title that draws my interest yet repels me at the same time. My biggest fear was that the author would come across as self-righteous: she does not. The thing I should have feared was the “radical” part. This book has the capacity to cause a watershed (or at least make you want to build a shed out of papercrete). There were times I wanted to run away and start a llama farm: I did not. But the seed has been planted.

Like I said, the title of the book intrigued me, but I wondered if

Ted Kooser is best known as one of the Midwest's -- indeed, one of the nation's -- best poets. The Nebraskan is a former U.S. Poet Laureate and also has won the Pulitzer Prize for verse.

Bag in the Wind, though, is a prose-and-pictures book for grade-schoolers. Kooser's charming tale focuses on an ordinary plastic grocery bag. First it is thrown away and ends up in a landfill, but a few gusts of wind blow it back out into the world. Thus begins a journey involving several people, all of whom use the bag for various purposes -- carrying crushed aluminum cans, for example.

Barry Root's