A soulful journey of self-discovery
In her first book of nonfiction, a collection of 17 essays accompanying the popular title piece, “The Crane Wife,” novelist CJ Hauser takes the reader along on a soulful journey of self-discovery as she brings together smart, astute observations on modern love and life.
The title essay, published in the Paris Review in 2019, reached more than a million readers worldwide and went viral on the internet.
The piece focuses on the fallout from Hauser’s breakup with her fiance, who had been unfaithful and unavailable to her emotionally. She’s both heartbroken and unhappy with herself for sticking with him as long as she did — a double whammy.
The essays in this volume offer a fascinating blend of relationships and breakups, colorful family stories, and cultural and literary influences. In fluid prose, she pursues more fulfilling ways to find happiness.
In “The Lady and the Lamp,” Hauser brings together her account of a robotics challenge that tests robots programmed to perform jobs too dangerous for humans — “robot-saviors” — with thoughts on Florence Nightingale and her own habit of dating difficult men and trying to fix them. “For years, I convinced myself that to love is meant to be an act of extreme and transformative caregiving,” she writes. “And so I’ve become more savior than partner. More robot than girl.”
“The Two-Thousand Pound Bee,” a meditation on grief, conflates Hauser’s trip to Martha’s Vineyard to scatter her grandmother’s ashes with John Belushi’s comedic genius and the strange circumstances of his burial.
“Siberian Watermelon” captures a tender father/
daughter relationship in the guise of gardening.
What a pleasure it is be in the company of this writer. With clear eyes and an open heart, she finds her way and discovers that unmasking mistakes and vulnerabilities is one way of being strong. — Elfrieda Abbe, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Cruising past farmlands in America
— and elsewhere in the world — it’s hard to imagine that so much green could be so damaging to the Earth. But author George Monbiot makes a compelling case that it often is.
Consider the following statistics cited in the book:
Raising a pound of beef releases 113 times more greenhouse gases than raising a pound of peas.
One million plant and animal species are on the verge of extinction.
Monbiot’s book starts as a hymn to the soil. He finds a handful of healthy earth so fascinating in the variety of life it harbors that the reader starts thinking the book is a love story — a scientist/farmer and his beloved earth. “The soil might be the most complex of all living systems,” Monbiot writes. “Yet we treat it like dirt.”
The book then turns into a powerful case against
industrial farming with cows, pigs and chickens as chief villains but indictments also handed down to practitioners of commercial agriculture, with their fertilized fields swiftly degrading the soil.
Our crop-growing systems are becoming less resilient, the author says, and are increasingly vulnerable to external shocks. He quotes a United Nations report that says the world’s crops have lost 75% of their genetic diversity since 1900.
So what to do about this? One easy solution: Become a vegetarian. Doing so will cut your personal greenhouse responsibility by 60%. Good luck trying to persuade Americans who can’t agree on anything to eat more veggies.
Monbiot also advocates planting more diverse assortments of crops because that will support more diverse insect and soil life. Some experts say farmers are making more progress in adopting climate-friendly practices than they get credit for.
And on generating more microbial activity in the soil, Monbiot says more knowledge is needed if we are to feed the expected 8 billion people on the planet by 2022’s end.