The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O’Connor
If you’re anything like me, the phrase “I Want to Believe” summons visions of flying saucers, extraterrestrial visitors, and the intrepid renegade government employees who tirelessly track them across the United States. If you have the good fortune of not being especially like me, and your psyche is organized around something other than an undying preoccupation with Fox Mulder, the phrase might draw your thoughts to entities loftier even than UFOs. But of all the things we might long to believe in, perhaps the most uniquely, bizarrely American is Bigfoot. With The Secret History of Bigfoot, journalist and self-declared cryptid agnostic John O’Connor serves up a jaunty, impressively comprehensive popular history of the hirsute hominid said to prowl the darkest reaches of forests from Oregon to Maine’s own Hundred-Mile Wilderness. O’Connor not only reviews the folklore and literature of the Bigfoot phenomenon, he also seeks out firsthand encounters for himself, tagging along with seasoned trackers and attending conventions organized by the legendary creature’s hardcore devotees. While this book is very much about Bigfoot, it is equally about the nature of faith, what it means to believe in the unknown and unknowable—and why it is that we so badly want to.
For believers and skeptics alike, along with fans of the International Cryptozoology Museum, weird Americana, and offbeat travelogues. Special shout-out to my dad, a true believer.
Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World by Patrick Joyce
Although the average person you meet today may be more tuned in to what’s trending on TikTok than the basics of subsistence farming, for the larger part of our species’ history, humans lived off the land. And in reality, of course, we still do. Yet this is a reality we denizens of the digital-age industrialized world can all too readily forget, because we tend to have others doing the ‘dirty work’ of actually touching that land for us. For millennia, however, the agrarian way of life dominated, such that wherever our families may hail from, the majority of us are descended from peasants. Irish social historian Patrick Joyce urges us not to forsake these earthier ancestors in his new book, Remembering Peasants. Although careful to avoid romanticizing his subject – the peasant life comes with hardships too unpleasant to be discounted (famine, anyone?) – Joyce poignantly laments the fading out of the values he ties to the agrarian cultures of Europe’s past, from neighborliness to a high-spirited, slightly anarchic aversion to centralized authority. A thoughtful homage to disappearing lifeways and an understated critique of their technologized modern successors, Remembering Peasants is worthwhile reading for anachronisms of all stripes.
For fans of Wendell Berry, European history, folk culture, and Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Good Life.
The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself by Robin Reames
Do you ever suspect that the media pundits, politicians and influencers aggressively vying for our attention have an unspoken agenda, that as these talking heads go on talking and talking they’re angling to sell us on something rather than straightforwardly setting out the facts at hand? How terribly cynical of you! But also: how perceptive, since you are altogether right. To remedy the migraine-inducing mind warp of omnipresent spin, Robin Reames has gifted us with a helpful guide to sharpening our rhetorical chops. As the art and study of persuasive language, rhetoric deals with the how’s and why’s of wielding words to shift and shape people’s thinking. With a healthy grasp of rhetoric, Reames writes, we can better equip ourselves to sift through the deluge of brain-hijacking babble/babel that comes pouring out at us from every screen. This is an invaluable skill in our media-soaked, ultra-polarized age, and one bound to be a true mental life preserver as the election season haze continues to thicken.
For independent thinkers, commonsense logicians, chatter-addled minds seeking a detox, and everyone already exhausted by 2024.
The Book of Wilding: A Practical Guide to Rewilding, Big and Small by Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell
When contemplating the state of the living earth and the legion of ecological crises that seem to grow graver by the day, it is difficult not to tumble headlong into the proverbial abyss of despair. The trouble with the abyss of despair, however, is that there’s not an awful lot one can do about anything from way down there (I say this with the confidence of a regular visitor to some of the abyss’s bleaker recesses). If you’re looking for more than yet another reason to feel terrified and despondent, hence paralyzed, about environmental cataclysm, I submit The Book of Wilding. Following up on author Isabella Tree’s popular Wilding, in which she chronicled the transformation of her family farm into a flourishing ecosystem, The Book of Wilding is a fantastic resource for everyone seeking to restore and nurture the biosphere here and now, wherever we live, in whatever time we may have. Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell offer a bounty of detailed information on the many ways we can be proactive in our care for the earth, complemented by a passionate appeal to rethink our relationship to, and place within, the natural world.
For my fellow dwellers in the abyss, as we fumble through our eager striving to crawl up and out. Never forget we can still plant flowers, still feed the birds.
