SEX AND THE RIVER STYX

From the acclaimed essayist, novelist and travel writer, more deeply profound essays on the conditions of the natural world.

In this outstanding collection, 78-year-old Hoagland (Early in the Season, 2008, etc.) culls 13 years of magazine writing, published in stalwarts like Harper’s and Outside, for a result that, again, will draw comparisons to Thoreau. Another great naturalist, John Muir, once wrote, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” There might not be a more apropos line to describe this book, which not only finds Hoagland reminiscing on his many widespread adventures exploring the globe in years past, but also on the connectedness between the destruction of the planet, his mortality and aging, failed love relationships and his impassioned, sometimes polemical but always articulate, brilliant thoughts on humans’ abdication of responsibility to protect nature. Citing an unwavering allegiance to what’s alive, Hoagland believes that “heaven is here and the only heaven we have.” The author is less concerned with his own demise than with the larger unraveling of the world, and these glimmering essays avoid nostalgia or self-pity by focusing on his various entanglements, with past lovers and wives, Tibetan yak herders, a Ugandan family and the circus aerialists with whom he worked 60 years ago. Hoagland possesses the rare quality of being both thirsty to absorb knowledge and experiences and also, organically, to want to pass along what he’s discovered. It’s a wonder, too, that these writings, never pedagogical, allow for the world he’s witnessed to stand as the star of the show.