Description
Book SynopsisAn engrossing memoir and eloquent portrait of place,
The Thunder Tree shows how powerful the relationship between people and the natural world can be. This reprint of the classic book, updated with a new foreword by Richard Louv and a preface to this edition, makes one of Pyle's important early works once again available.
Trade Review“As an adult, Henry David Thoreau may have had his Walden. Annie Dillard inhabited her Tinker Creek. But as a child, Bob Pyle became his High Line Canal—an accidental wilderness, he called it, surrounded by urban wasteland.
“A ditch, a ravine, a cluster of trees at the end of the cul de sac, an empty (filled!) lot; to an adult’s eyes, such nearby nature may seem insignificant. But to a child, these places can be doorways into whole galaxies. They’re as important to human experience as wilderness, and formative to nearly every conservationists’ consciousness.” — Richard Louv, from the new Foreword
“Pyle has written an engrossing story of at least two levels: a charming memoir of his youth on the canal and a sobering account of uncontrolled development and loss of habitat.” —
Publishers Weekly“
The Thunder Tree was a huge, hollow old cottonwood in which the author and his brother once found shelter as children from a life-threatening hailstorm. The tree grew along the High Line Canal, built in the late 19th century as part of a grand plan to bring river water to the Western plains for irrigation. Only a portion of the canal was ever built, but that portion happened to run through the city of Aurora, Colorado, where the author lived as a child and young adult … this book is about the relationship between people and natural areas and how each affects the other.” —
Library Journal“Never preachy, never cloying: a powerful and memorable example of place writing.” —
Kirkus Reviews
