Susan Zakin, editor
Naked
Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth
An anthology

"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."

"We need an energy bill that encourages consumption."

"Just remember it's the birds that's supposed to suffer, not the hunter."

Is there a link between the abdication of writers and a defeated political movement? Susan Zakin thinks so. "Only in America is the intimate relationship between culture and politics so vehemently denied."

It will take more than the genteel meditations on a rock that have defined the literature of the natural world for the last decade to counter the likes of George W. Bush. Susan Zakin, an outspoken environmental writer, has assembled a dynamic collection of fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir that goes beyond the safe, gentle boundaries of the past and delivers wit, plot, passion, and punch — because it simply isn't permissible to destroy beauty: to drive another species into extinction, to drill in the Arctic, or to add more toxins to the air.

Naked brings together thirty-one pieces — many appearing here for the first time — by writers who examine and challenge the way people live with our environment. Edward Abbey's newly published correspondence with fellow writers Tom McGuane and Barry Lopez rants against passive nonresistance. Three-time Pushcart Prize winner Stacey Richter mines the questionable legacy of John James Audubon, while erudite wanderer Bruce Chatwin makes a case for nomadism. Lydia Millet rails against "environmental pornography" and T. C. Boyle suggests we are all wild at heart, and not particularly well-groomed. Naked addresses the foremost issues of today: suburban sprawl, wilderness preservation, globalization, and much more.

While Americans cope with a presidential administration that has amassed the worst environmental record in history, Naked sets out to make environmentalism and environmental writing hip and relevant again.

"These are writers with a different take on things.… Their passion is unmistakable, whether it is expressed by a hard-boiled detective at his wife's gravesite in the Louisiana bayou, a world class bout of diarrhea that made a little girl fall in love with Africa, or a weird tale of a Bible-thumping Georgia snake handler gone very, very wrong."

A nationally known environmental writer, Susan Zakin is the author of Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement. She is a regular writer on the environment for LA Weekly. She was a columnist for Sports Afield, where she wrote about national environmental policy for gun-toting guys with beards. Her writing on politics, the environment, media, culture, and the developing world has appeared in Vogue, Salon.com, Orion, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Field & Stream, High Country News, and Mother Jones. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

$14.00 | 376 pages | trade paper | ISBN: 1-56858-294-3
Nature

Order this featured book online at a discount from

---

© 2004 Four Walls Eight Windows
Home | Catalog | Subjects | Contact/Ordering | Internships | Submissions | Related | Search

Website design by JERRY ENGELBACH