Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town |  | Author: Susan Hand Shetterly
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $9.99
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Seller: trmdurhamnc
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 223224
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 1565126181
Dewey Decimal Number: 508.741
EAN: 9781565126183
ASIN: 1565126181
Publication Date: January 26, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Whether we live in cities, suburbs, or villages, we are encroaching on nature, and it in one way or another perseveres. Naturalist Susan Shetterly looks at how animals, humans, and plants share the land—observing her own neighborhood in rural Maine. She tells tales of the locals (humans, yes, but also snowshoe hares, raccoons, bobcats, turtles, salmon, ravens, hummingbirds, cormorants, sandpipers, and spring peepers). She expertly shows us how they all make their way in an ever-changing habitat.
In writing about a displaced garter snake, witnessing the paving of a beloved dirt road, trapping a cricket with her young son, rescuing a fledgling raven, or the town's joy at the return of the alewife migration, Shetterly issues warnings even as she pays tribute to the resilience that abounds.
Like the works of Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold, Settled in the Wild takes a magnifying glass to the wildness that surrounds us. With keen perception and wit, Shetterly offers us an education in nature, one that should inspire us to preserve it.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
 A Tender Witness March 26, 2010
Story Circle Book Reviews
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
In this spare, elegant, and compassionate little book, Susan Hand Shetterly takes us with her into the wild world at the unsettled edge of a small village in Maine. She and her husband went there in the back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s, "idealistic, dangerously unprepared, and, frankly, arrogant." But when others moved on, they stayed, having brought with them the willingness to do hard physical work, the desire to practice patience, and--perhaps most importantly--"the ability to pay close attention."
It is the paying attention that accounts for so much of the quiet grace of this book, for Shetterly passionately wants us to see and smell and touch and taste what she is paying attention to: the daily small affairs of birds, periwinkles, green crabs, and clams; a porcupine stripping tender young branches from her willow tree in an April night; a rescued raven; a baby snowshoe hare threatened by a bobcat--the wild things that populate her life on the edge of what's left of wildness in this rapidly urbanizing world.
But it is not just the wild things that Shetterly brings to us from the margins: it is the people who live in the village and share the "hard, dangerous gift" of this place. Danny, who doesn't believe in throwing things away. Clarence, who died upside down in the water, weighed down by a trap he'd thrown overboard. Jack Dudley, counting loons, living a sense of place. Settled in the wild, Shetterly is also settled in community, a small community made up of a few utterly unique human individuals, dwelling in a "neighborhood of millions of lives, depending on how and whom you count."
In some important ways, the community itself, long ago settled on the shore of the wild bay, remains an unsettled place. When Shetterly helps to create an association to protect the surrounding wetlands, many of the villagers are threatened and antagonistic. Living in a world of private property, where land is worthwhile only when it can be "developed," they find it hard to believe, as does Shetterly and her conservation colleagues, in the "self-renewing community between wild land and human beings," in the "wild commons."
But at its heart, that's what this book is about: the need that we all have to be a part of the wild commons, to recognize and share the bonds that exist between species, ours and all the others who live in our neighborhoods, inhabit the wild hours of the night, roost in the trees, and hide in the grass and plants in our gardens. It is also about our need to watch and listen and observe for a long time, for a very long time, until, as Shetterly says, we become, "instead of watchers, witnesses, heavy with the gravity of what is revealed to us and what we have chosen to carry of it."
I love this book because it teaches what I take to be the most important thing a human being can do to be at home in the world: to simply watch, and look, and listen--to become witnesses.
by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Living with nature May 13, 2010
Patricia Kramer (Madison, WI USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book was a joy to read and dove tailed with the animal nature exploration kit I just gave my 6 year old grandson. Shetterly describes her experiences in the wild with all the pleasure, sadness and sense of not having to tie everything up in a neat package. Everything can't be known, we can only be observers.
The following passage takes place when Susan is following a coyote's track which had carried off all traces of a dead calf.
"When we had followed the tracks quite far, when we had exited our territory and seemed, eerily, to have entered theirs, without more than a few words between us, we turned around and came back. And that was all."
I am looking forward to exploring Shetterly's numerous books for children.
Each essay a small, wonderful gift April 27, 2010
P. Bergh (NH)
I read a lot of nature essays and have to say I was pleasantly surprised by this writer--who I didn't know of, even though she lives in my part of the country. Most of her essays are short -- 3 - 6 pages-- very well structured, and easy to read. She takes on big themes underneath the layers of nature that she may be talking about, and she covers rural issues (in this case Maine, but could be anywhere) very well. I read one or two essays a night, and finished the book in a couple of weeks.
Blown away by the writing June 23, 2010
MW (Portland, ME)
And not just the writing...Susan Shetterly creates whole worlds from just a few well-considered strokes, taking us deep inside her experience of rural Maine. She writes sometimes as an outsider, sometimes as an insider; sometimes about animals and their mysteries, sometimes about people and their mysteries; and always with such humility and insight. I love memoirs that look OUTWARD as well as inward; in other words, this book is not about the writer, it's about all of us. I adored this book. Wow.
Bought as gifts July 31, 2010
Carol A. Kyte (Beulah, CO)
The book was given to me and I loved it and knew of other nature loving friends that would appreciate it's simple day to day living among nature. I've bought it for them and they in turn had the same reaction as I did. A lovely life in Maine, that can translate to any country life!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 6
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