Summer Reading Club: The Power of Nature Writing
Dr. Mark J. Schenker, Senior Associate Dean and Dean of Academic Affairs in Yale College
$7 (members $5) each session

Book #2: Desert Solitaire (1968) by Edward Abbey
Tuesday, July 11, 3pm
Hailed by The New York Times as a passionately felt, deeply poetic book, the moving autobiographical work of Edward Abbey, considered the Thoreau of the American West, conveys his passion for the southwestern wilderness. Desert Solitaire is a collection of vignettes about life in the wilderness and the nature of the desert itself by this park ranger and conservationist.

Book #3: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) by Annie Dillard
Tuesday, August 15, 3pm
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of “beauty tangled in a rapture with violence.” It’s a one year exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.

Book #4: The Primal Place (1983) by Robert Finch
Sunday, September 10, 3pm (Note change of day to Sunday)
Layered excursions into the natural and human environs of the author’s Cape Cod home. Finch begins at the window of his Brewster house, observing birds, ants, etc.–and then humans on his side of the glass. He mulls the continuity of life in an old graveyard, and discovers something about the human balance of compassion and violence in his garden.