Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

This final collection of Barry Lopez’s essays displays his passion, intelligence, curiosity, and empathy. He brings the natural world vividly to life and holds his deep concern alongside an abiding faith in the way that place survives in some fundamental way regardless of the way humans change the landscape. He recognizes and communicates clearly and poignantly how humans are connected to place, the ability we have to commune with our home if only we will be present and observe, listen to what is has to say and feel the way that heals us.

His love of Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, where he spent much of his childhood, and his home in the Cascade Range in Oregon shine through brightly. He takes us alongside him to track and tag wolves with Bob Stephenson, to take snow samples in Antarctica and go the doors of the research facility in the South Pole, to the Weddell Sea on a research vessel, to travel with Native Americans through the woods, to an Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory of Australia, through the dangers of the Drake Passage and the Lamaire Channel, to rural Alaska during walrus-hunting season, to the Majave Desert, on a dive under sea ice in McMurdo Sound, to the northern part of the Galapagos archipelago where he helps rescue sea lions caught in an illegal net, to the deep woods and river beside his house where he watched the salmon spawn every year for 50 years.

He also provides us with a vulnerable and heartbreaking story

of his childhood sexual abuse and the way that nature served as his escape, as his promise that there was more to life than the trauma being inflicted on him, and through his journey to finding peace. He opens up to us about his evolving relationship with faith, and about the ways he has learned to adapt and appreciate life differently as he ages and his body is capable of less.

He talks about the role of art in making meaning and bringing about change, about what there is to learn from non-Western perspectives, ones that value stability over progress, that understand land not as something to exploit, own, and profit off of, but as something which is an integral part of us, while also remaining untamed despite our illusions of control.

In the essay “In Memoriam of Wallace Stegner,” Barry tells us, “What I want to know, what I look for in a writer, is what goodness a person is capable of, how did love flourish around him or her? how did what they do help?” (29). He goes on to say , “If love is to discover and rediscover life, to encourage and protect it, to marvel at it and serve it…..It is the best we can do for each other, to remember, to say it all again” (30). In the afterward to the book, his wife gives a touching tribute to Barry that concludes, “My husband often said that his profoundest desire was to live a life that helped. Barry, from those of us who loved you, your life helped” (322). I didn’t know Barry, but love —of place, of animals, of people in all of their brokenness—shines through every page and it is impossible to read this collection without feeling in your bones how much a voice like Barry’s helped everyone it reached.

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avisreadsandreads's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

3.5

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airazedy's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative inspiring sad tense medium-paced

3.0

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litlistening's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

4.5

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