The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

Book Description

The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God

In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."

A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

Customer Reviews:

The Life You Save May Be Your Own.......2007-10-02

An excellent read, the livesof Merton,Day,Percy and O Connor beautifully melded and yet distinct. I highly recomend this book for all lovers of literature as well as Christians.

"Predicament shared in common".......2007-05-28

Inevitably, the attempt to merge four writers into one narrative that reviews their correspondence, books, essays, pronouncements, talks, and travels makes for an ambitious if uneven journey. Percy's Christian existentialism by contrast with his determinedly contrary if congenitally eccentric fellow Southerner O'Connor's keen eye and bitter comedy comes off as aloof, bookish, and not that interesting if by no fault of his own. His novels nearly all pale by comparison with her best fiction, and Elie has difficulty making some of his lesser novels even minimally engaging.

Day, by contrast with Merton, herself suffers from asceticism! While the two converts and one-time near counterparts in NYC progressive political and au courant literati circles in the years between the wars (albeit at some remove from each other's direct influence and circles of friends) share roots in what we'd call the typical avant-garde movements of Modernism and experimentation that generally any bright young thing in an urban East Coast environment has wandered into over our past decades, Day comes across as markedly more inflexible, so as to anchor her pacifist and anarchist commitment to individual choice to live the Gospel as "fools for Christ" must. Merton learns by contrast to adjust whether to his moral shifts before he entered the Trappists, his infatuation with the Abbey of Gethsemani and his sudden fame after he wrote his memoir, his diagnosis by a shrink as a "narcissist hermit," and his love affair with a nurse in the mid-1960s just as so many of his clerical colleagues were reneging on their vows and falling in love themselves with women rather than, or as well as, their calling to separate themselves from the ties that bind most of us, or used to.

Elie makes the best out of the enormous secondary criticism that has accrued around O'Connor, and of the correspondence and previously censored material now available to Merton scholars. He gives instructive close readings of "Wise Blood" and "Everything that Rises Must Converge" as well as contrasting the letters to Elizabeth Hester that show her public manner as preserved for posterity vs. hints of a more combative and much less PC Jim Crow-era attitude in her letters to Maryat Lee. The hints of what happened to Robert Lowell as a result of his manic visions of God and Caroline Gordon's own descent into a rigid form of Catholic scrupulosity needed more detail, however. Percy's life fails to emerge, and his family and career shimmer only vaguely throughout. Also, we have almost no sense of what Flannery did in college or during her MFA years in Iowa City, not to mention her own NYC stint prior to her diagnosis for lupus. I wanted more connection of her own urban flourishing to tie in to Merton's previous trajectory there, and Day's own movement away from the secular boho to the Catholic boho contigent, but perhaps such tracks remain too vague for serious biographers to retrace or imagine.

Well-chosen photos: young Percy strolling a German rustic trail, Day in the Bob Fitch snapshot of her sitting defiantly as two sheriffs loom to arrest her at a UFW rally, O'Connor radiant as she holds a new copy of "Wise Blood," Merton slouching in a straw hat and kicking back against a bench on the day of his ordination. These enliven these writers, too often reduced to small book jacket photos we have seen perhaps too often.

Percy appears genial if gloomy. The loss of much of his correspondence, unlike the stacks of carbons that fill up the enormous epistolary collection "The Habit of Being " for O'Connor and the letters and diaries for Merton posthumously published may explain Percy's diminished presence vs. his other two rivals for literary and spiritual audiences. Day seems not to be much interested in writing even though she dutifully published her memoir, carefully glossed as was Merton's for a more reticent era, "The Long Loneliness." Day early on appears to have chosen a lifestyle and a manner committed to renunciation of her own early fling, her sexual adventurism (although by our standards she and Merton are the norm, more or less, for those raised less religiously at least today), and her flirtation with Marxist and leftist movements. I like Merton's advice around the time of the grandstanding Berrigan Brothers agitprop: "I think the best thing is to belong to a universal anti-movement underground." (qtd. 396)

Elie is at his best in this section, as he shows how Day separated herself from the peacenik hippie priests and those playing to the camera while "the whole world is watching" in the later 60s for revolution that made Jesus a proto-Che. Elie explains that Day took pains to empathize with the other side, always, and not to place any dogma or manifesto between her and her identification with those who may have not wanted war in Vietnam but who could not be led to sympathize with guitar-strumming hippies and angry clerics spilling napalm and blood on shredded draft documents as cameras rolled. Merton, too, as Elie takes great care in documenting, struggled to be a leader of the Catholic reformers and the progressive left from his hermitage on the Abbey grounds where civil rights organizers and leftist luminaries made their own pilgrimages to meet with him and where he attempted to stay in touch from behind the monastery walls with a world that he knew needed his advice even as he vowed to stay faithful, at terrible and necessary personal cost, to his promises to remain a loyal priest and obedient monk. Merton too shrank from the violence that inspired young people to immolate themselves as burnt offerings against the war, and soon enough he too would meet in his sudden death "the Christ of the burnt ones" to whom he ended his memoir "The Seven Story Mountain".

O'Connor, being like Merton the more familiar of the four writers, comes across like him as the one you might like to meet and chat with, although unlike Fr. Louis I would fear reading about myself in her letters after the fact. Day's harder to make appealing, as her severity and devotion to seeing the Lord in the shattered ones kept her focused upon the less prosaic and less easily dramatized side of life that eschews sentimentality and exalts the utterly assured recognition of the Messiah in the poor and the crazed and deluded ones. Her choice, despite the convulsions of the Catholic Worker Movement and the fact that she could rarely find the time alone that Percy, Merton, and O'Connor needed to become speakers to the rest of us, "making oratory out of solitude," does make her active apostolate all the more admirable.

I conclude with a couple of passages. Elie compares O'Connor with Merton, Day, and Percy. Discussing an admittedly unlikely essay anthology in the tumultuous days of '69, "Mystery & Manners," Elie describes how she combined "objectivity and fierce personal conviction," speaking out of "aloneness and absoluteness," and how her Southern allegiance in the North, as "a believer in a disbelieving literary society," as "an artist in a church of philistines," transcends loneliness or alienation. What she and her fellow writers share is what all believers today share: "the aloneness of the religious believer generally." (426) She knows faith, the "substance for things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," as I paraphrase the old Baltimore Catechism (as Elie I recall did much earlier in his book).

If O'Connor derived her power from her inflexibility, Elie continues, Merton by his sudden death escaped the end-time days of rage constant upendings of the 60s. His fluidity enabled him "to represent and call forth the aspirations of others." (427)

Elie finds his appeal in his "radical identification of himself with another" that evoked in his readers a similar identification. Merton was able to mature and recognize that his smarts, his charism, his desire for the spotlight could be used to turn attention from himself as the bestselling contemplative, the talkative monk, the literary talent submitting his work to censors (well, at least most of the time--the love letters he sent his nurse Margie notwithstanding, and showing the humanity that endured and made him ultimately a better monk and a kinder Christian at again what must have been enormous sacrifice and, at fifty-two, having to "grow up" even more). He had the gift of getting us to feel as if we were in his sandals, observing wryly and compassionately and righteously what he could see from beyond the walls around his hermitage, and beneath his own defenses within himself, schooled as he was in all the trends of the literati at the shrink.

A year and a half before his death, Merton in the thick of the antiwar campaigns addressed his brothers outside the monastery. Reading Camus, Merton came to realize the existential predicament for the believer mattered as much as for those like Camus who could not return to believe what they had left behind. Merton reflects in the letter to his superiors that he has moved beyond the "answers" that his early years in the monastery once led him to think that he had gained.

"Can a man make sense of his existence? Can a man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? [. . . .] I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man' s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and which one learns that only experience counts." (qtd. 402)

This journey into the arid regions impels the monk. He leaves the world's distractions to concentrate upon the battle within, and behind the defenses of the cloister he stands vulnerable "to remain open to God wholly and directly." Whether God answers is not up to the monk. Merton finds God must be known, not proven. "To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes."

Elie on the last page sums up how these four writers' predicament is now that of any believer, half a century and more now since these four writers thought and argued and prayed. Elie insists that they all knew what any believer or unbeliever today knows: authority lies not on the institutional Church or a social monolith commanding conformity to the Magisterium. Elie imagines a reform of today, for assimilating or uncertain Catholics, or anyone "quasi-religious," might be abandoning the idea of a true faith. Elie tells us now that "clear lines of orthodoxy are made crooked by our experiences and complicated by our lives." (472)

All of us look for signs. Readers, we are trained to and thrive by our own pilgrimage for meaning. Elie notes that "the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs." Now we have the testimony of Day and O'Connor, Merton and Percy, who all had to balance their unwanted label as "Catholic writers" or intellectuals in thrall to the Vatican with their own real tensions and longings and upsets. They imagined their own afflictions and some made poems and fiction out of it, others and other times these became editorials, letters, diaries, and conversations. And, the four new evangelists all witness to us, as evangels, messengers, of the pilgrimages they too stumbled through as their narratives ended.

A Lifeboat for Catholics drowning in the sins of the Church.......2007-01-05

What a joy this was to read! My personal thanks to Paul Elie for showing me how these four exemplary literary figures of my generation managed to live out a life of love and creativity within their constant struggle for faith. Such a universal story of people moored by the faith, but beset by the pityful human sinfulness of the institutional Church. Elie shows us how Merton, Flannery O'Connor,Dorothy Day and Walker Percy, renegades all, pursued their art and intellectual/spiritual quests in such different ways. Though I have read almost all of Merton and O'Connor and much of Day and Percy, it was with particular joy that I learned how much these figures overlapped in time and space, knew each other and were often correspondents. Elie's weaving into the text much of their correspondence gave me new perspectives.

A Wearying Pilgrimage.......2006-09-23

This attempt to link Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy doesn't work. While it's true they were Catholic writers whose lives overlapped to some degree and who read each other's work to some extent, it's also true that their lives were extremely different and that they rarely had contact with one another--a few meetings, some small bits of correspondence.

Also, the Publisher's Weekly reviewer is incorrect: the book is ponderous, and the prose is the very definition of workmanlike. The author was evidently attempting a self-consciously literary style--lofty, philosophical--alas for his readers. The writing reaches a particular crescendo of blandness in the pages when these Catholic writers come to the end of their lives. In fact, I couldn't quite make out how Merton had died from the account here and had to look it up on Wikipedia.

Perhaps because of the detached prose style, I felt that the author had little if any affinity for either the writers or their writings. The New Yorker says O'Connor is his favorite, but Day comes off best in the book, as the author sympathizes with the Catholic Worker movement and with Day's pacifism. He also seems to have found value in Wise Blood and the Moviegoer.

In general I wondered if the author's own pilgrimage in writing this book had left him fatigued and simply glad to be finished with it. I know that's how I felt by the end.

On the positive side, I did find some of the details of these writers' early lives fascinating. If you have not read such details in other biographies or autobiographical writings, you might find it worthwhile to check out the first half of this book.

Life-Saving Literary Criticism.......2006-05-25

This book is undeniably a classic of literary criticism and biography. Paul Elie gets it just right--he takes the spiritual concerns and the religiosity of the four authors very seriously while demonstrating a careful concern for the complexities and ambiguities of their faith. And he has a real knack for analyzing how all of this informs and undergirds their writings in ways that aren't necessarily straightforward and obvious. Furthermore, he accomplishes all of this in clear, jargon-free prose that is almost literary in its own right.

Certainly other biographies and autobiographies of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy are out there (sorry, Barthes, "the author" is not dead), but "The Life You Save" accomplishes something a little different. Elie weaves in and out of their different lives and in so doing both suggests commonalities and similarities shared by them (the chapter titles are usually a reliable clue to these) as well as differences and contrasts that mutually highlight their characteristic particularities. Developing along these lines, later as the book progresses and our foursome become aware of each other Elie discusses their communications with each other and impressions of each other, which sheds invaluable light on all four of them and their concerns.

All of this could easily fly out of hand, especially in so large and substantial a book, but Elie holds it together and keeps the story/stories flowing along together, using the metaphor of the "pilgrimage" on multiple levels as a sort of common theme smoothing out his narrative while adding meaning and significance to it. At the end, appropriately enough, the image of the pilgrimage symbolizes his own involvement with the four authors and the writing of this book itself.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the relation of literature, religion, and social history. If you take the spiritual dimension of literature seriously while knowing full well that literature is more than just a disguised form of preaching, this book will definitely be right up your alley.

The Life You Save may Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

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The Life You Save may Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Paul Elie , and Lloyd James
Manufacturer: Blackstone Audiobooks
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Book of the Year Award.(Conference on Christianity & Literature): An article from: Christianity and Literature

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Book of the Year Award.(Conference on Christianity & Literature): An article from: Christianity and Literature

Manufacturer: Conference on Christianity and Literature
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Christianity and Literature, published by Conference on Christianity and Literature on January 1, 2004. The length of the article is 614 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Book of the Year Award.(Conference on Christianity & Literature)
Publication: Christianity and Literature (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2004
Publisher: Conference on Christianity and Literature
Volume: 53 Issue: 2 Page: 281(2)

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The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Unabridged)

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The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Unabridged)
Paul Elie
Manufacturer: audible.com
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Download
ASIN: B000ECWZPM

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage.(Book Review): An article from: Christianity and Literature

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The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage.(Book Review): An article from: Christianity and Literature
J. Robert Baker
Manufacturer: Conference on Christianity and Literature
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This digital document is an article from Christianity and Literature, published by Conference on Christianity and Literature on September 22, 2003. The length of the article is 1827 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage.(Book Review)
Author: J. Robert Baker
Publication: Christianity and Literature (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2003
Publisher: Conference on Christianity and Literature
Volume: 53 Issue: 1 Page: 123(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Seekers and Finders.(The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage )(Book Review): An article from: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life

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Seekers and Finders.(The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage )(Book Review): An article from: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
Wilfred M. McClay
Manufacturer: Institute on Religion and Public Life
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This digital document is an article from First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, published by Institute on Religion and Public Life on December 1, 2003. The length of the article is 2036 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

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Title: Seekers and Finders.(The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage )(Book Review)
Author: Wilfred M. McClay
Publication: First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2003
Publisher: Institute on Religion and Public Life
Issue: 138 Page: 41(4)

Article Type: Book Review

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The story precedes us: an interview with Paul Elie on faith, writing, and the "School of the Holy Ghost.".(Interview) : An article from: Sojourners

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The story precedes us: an interview with Paul Elie on faith, writing, and the "School of the Holy Ghost.".(Interview) : An article from: Sojourners
Danny Duncan Collum
Manufacturer: Sojourners
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This digital document is an article from Sojourners, published by Sojourners on December 1, 2004. The length of the article is 1805 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The story precedes us: an interview with Paul Elie on faith, writing, and the "School of the Holy Ghost.".(Interview)
Author: Danny Duncan Collum
Publication: Sojourners (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 1, 2004
Publisher: Sojourners
Volume: 33 Issue: 12 Page: 22(5)

Article Type: Interview

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Uncommon pilgrims.(Book Review) (book review): An article from: New Criterion

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Uncommon pilgrims.(Book Review) (book review): An article from: New Criterion
Mary Ellen Bork
Manufacturer: Foundation for Cultural Review
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This digital document is an article from New Criterion, published by Foundation for Cultural Review on June 1, 2003. The length of the article is 1438 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Uncommon pilgrims.(Book Review) (book review)
Author: Mary Ellen Bork
Publication: New Criterion (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2003
Publisher: Foundation for Cultural Review
Volume: 21 Issue: 10 Page: 82(4)

Article Type: Book Review

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The Life You Save May Be Your Own: an American Pilgrimage
Paul Elie
Manufacturer: Farrar Straus Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N78AVQ

Book Description

From deep inside Moscow's infamous Center, the Soviet Union directed an espionage network of unprecedented size and sophistication.

Customer Reviews:

Lack luster at best.......2007-08-21

I would not recommend this book for anyone to read. I am greatly surprised that an author with two pulitzers to his credit would write a work that is so without basis in fact. It has long been established that 'Werther,' was infact the code name for a series of sources the Soviets had inside the Nazi camp. For anyone wishing to learn of the remarkable true story of 'Werther,' and Soviet wartime penetrations of Hitler's Reich I would highly recommend that one read noted historian V.E. Tarrant's: The Red Orchestra.

Not particularly well written spy story.......2007-03-10

I found that the author did little to explain Bormann's motivation for undermining the Third Reich. The explanations of the strategic issues facing Germany will shallow and weak. The section on Russia leans heavily on Manstein's and Von Mellenthin's books so I suggest anyone interested in this topic read it straight for the horses mouth. All in all an unconvincing, unsatisfying book.

There's just no motive !!.......2006-03-12

I just finished this book and found it to be missing what should have been its most basic premise: WHY would Bormann turn traitor on Hitler?

Kilzer summed it up in about one page -- ONE PAGE -- at the end of his book. He theorized that since nazism was basically a form of socialism, and communism was basically a form of socialism, then Bormann wouldn't have cared which side won. Well then...why not at least stick with the side you're already on? Where you're virtually the second-to-the-top?!

To make this theory -- and the book -- work, Kilzer needed to do a "biography" of Bormann, providing a psychological profile and background (if his motive was political or personal), maybe tracing a money trail (if his motive was profit), or explaining how he could have planned a better escape (c'mon -- rushing out of the bunker with your hands up? Into the middle of low-ranking Soviet infantry who wouldn't know you were on their side?! If the Third Reich wasn't "onto him," then surely someone as high-ranking as Bormann could have arranged a safer and more clandestine escape than that.)

Instead, Kilzer spent at least half of the book just rehashing the battles of Operation Barbarossa and the Eastern Front. Which, as other reviewers here have already noted, wasn't done entirely accurate anyway (note: maybe this was all just "filler" for the book since he didn't/couldn't research Bormann's profile and motives?). Indeed, this material would have been better left to more credentialed and accurate sources.

I bought this book used for $2. And I STILL feel ripped off !

Read it again........2002-11-12

In my opinion none of the other reviewers who unfavorably reviewed the book read it carefully. In any case, they didn't address the problem posed by Mr. Kilzer, namely who had daily and intimate access to the discussions carried on in Hitler's HQ for more than 3 years? Only Bormann with his stenographers qualifies. Are they afraid of the implications of the revelation that Stalin may have a hand in the Holocaust?

A Flawed Page-turner.......2002-08-31

I really enjoyed this book. It reads like a second-rate spy novel and as such is very entertaining. My gripe about this book has to do with the conflicted theme of Joe Stalin- demon or "realpolitik" master non-pareil? The book weighs in with those who credit Stalin with scores of millions of deaths but as is usual with such claims the scource is Robert Conquest- Joseph Goebbels' little brother. (I challenge anyone to PROVE the outlandish figures given for Stalin's victims- 30, 40 or sometimes even 50 million people! Its mathematically and historically impossible) In a new bizarre twist Stalin is even given credit partially for the "Holocaust" because through Bormann he may have encouraged it! In real life most of us in the West ESPECIALLY college professors, writers and investigative reporters would be living a far different existence if it wasn't for Joe Stalin and the Red Army's defeat of the Germans. Ironically, the full extent of that victory is brought out in this same book because the amazing exploits of the Red Orchestra and "funkspiel" gave the Soviets superior intelligence; better even than the much-vaunted Ultra. Also exposed is the duplicitous evil of Winston Churchill, lurching through history like a perverted old uncle. The trouble with this book is that it is hard to know what to believe in the end. Like the real-life spying it depicts, the truth is murky at best.

Book Description

Carl Schmitt was the most famous and controversial defender of political theology in the twentieth century. But in his best-known work, The Concept of the Political, issued in 1927, 1932, and 1933, political considerations led him to conceal the dependence of his political theory on his faith in divine revelation. In 1932 Leo Strauss published a critical review of Concept that initiated an extremely subtle exchange between Schmitt and Strauss regarding Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. Although Schmitt never answered Strauss publicly, in the third edition of his book he changed a number of passages in response to Strauss’s criticisms. Now, in this elegant translation by J. Harvey Lomax, Heinrich Meier shows us what the remarkable dialogue between Schmitt and Strauss reveals about the development of these two seminal thinkers.

Meier contends that their exchange only ostensibly revolves around liberalism. At its heart, their “hidden dialogue” explores the fundamental conflict between political theology and political philosophy, between revelation and reasonand ultimately, the vital question of how human beings ought to live their lives.

“Heinrich Meier’s treatment of Schmitt’s writings is morally analytical without moralizing, a remarkable feat in view of Schmitt’s past. He wishes to understand what Schmitt was after rather than to dismiss him out of hand or bowdlerize his thoughts for contemporary political purposes.”—Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books

Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue

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Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue
Heinrich Meier
Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OPJRA0

Book Description

A passionately intelligent, exquisitely illustrated guide to the native trees of the North American continent that offers an informative and entertaining blueprint for rebuilding the biosphere

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Celebrates a diversity of trees and plants.......2003-11-09

In Arboretum America: A Philosophy Of The Forest, botanist, medical researcher, and agricultural expert, Diana Beresford-Kroeger celebrates a diversity of trees and plants including how they can counteract the effects of pollution and global warming; which native plants complement the "bioplan"; how to plan them with ideas and tips; the medicinal uses trees and plants have had from the inception of aboriginal cultures down to the modern day, and so much more. Inviting, full-color photography by Christian H. Kroeger and an informative Foreword by Edward O. Wilson nicely embellish this informed and informative presentation which vibrantly reflects the Diana Beresford-Kroeger's love of nature and enduring passion for scientific inquisition. Arboretum America is an especially recommended addition to Ecological Studies reference collections and Botanical Studies supplemental reading lists.

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