THE INNER COAST

A professor of English and former magazine editor lends literary stature to science writing and the exploration of interior landscapes, including his own.

Collected here are 10 of Hohn's distinctive essays, many originally appearing in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. Throughout, the author weaves dissections of environmental issues through meditations on culture and family. Other essays—e.g., "A Romance of Dust," featuring unlikely but fascinating observations on antique tool collecting—are elegies for (and critiques of) a misremembered past. While providing antidotes to romanticism and nostalgia— "Memory, after all, is a kind of dream"—he unfailingly finds the magical or mysterious where it does exist. Some essays are set in the American Midwest (the “Inner Coast” of the title), others in New York, Quebec, California, or Thoreau's Walden (with a riposte to the poet's critics). A few have the flavor of expansive book reviews. There are echoes of Barry Lopez here, but Hohn's voice—reflective, trenchant, often eloquent—seems all his own. He has an almost unerring ability to choose just the right word or phrase to enrich a line of thought. His descriptive passages, whether amusing, pithy, or lyrical, will capture readers' imaginations. He is a poet of the prosaic, as on the subject of water, reminding us that the Great Lakes are actually a river. He also possesses an admirable way of presenting ecological or cultural problems without lecturing. He evaluates and argues, sometimes strenuously, but seldom judges. Hohn suggests his mindset from the start: "We are surrounded by a multitude of facts whose significance is neither stable nor self-evident." The world can be an amorphous place, and clarity elusive, but there are havens of the rational if we wish to inhabit them. Hohn finds some of those havens in the work of Thoreau, Evan S. Connell, Marilynne Robinson, and Matthew Power.

Settle in and savor a keen mind with a laudable moral compass.