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Review:
Winner of a Parents' Choice Honors award, this book is a powerful collection of true stories that demonstrate the hope and renewal that can be found in interactions with the natural world. Reynolds' lucid descriptions tell of surprises, of wonders, of transformations sparked by unexpected yet fitting "catalysts."
For example, glimpse a boy as he meets an injured owl and learns about living with his own physical challenges. Hear an adolescent girl finally start to speak - while playing with a dog. An elderly blind man touches a leather harness and shares a memory suddenly wakened.
Stunning photography, woven throughout the book, subtly creates an awareness about our connections with the natural world. Reynolds has written a book that quietly embraces the human spirit.
Robert Coles, Pulitzer-prize winning author, comments: "A wonderfully suggestive and entrancing collection of stories that tell us how a naturalist can connect with and help nourish vulnerable human beings - a gift to all of us."
Excerpt:
We arrived at the hospital with spring and began planting violets, Johnny-jump-ups, and geraniums indoors with the elderly residents.
Bill, eighty years old, quietly dug his hands into the soil, planting violets in pots....
"I once had a farm. I built all the stone walls on my one hundred acres, built them all myself. I ran fifty head of dairy cows, milked them every day for forty years. I planted fields....It was hard work. I loved my cows." For the next half hour, he re-created his farm for us.... As he talked, he planted, gently pushing the earth around each set of roots.
Behind him, Lori, a staff member who had known him for ten years at the hospital, wept quietly. She knew what medicines he needed, knew what he would and wouldn't do in the hospital, but she and the other staff had not known about his farm, about his stone walls, about his cows.
