Tom Bissell
"Donovan Hohn’s prose is as immaculate and quotable as that of any writer of his generation. And while you always sense his outrage about ecological calamity, and never doubt his moral engagement, his advocacy never feels hectoring. There’s no writer living or dead I would rather read on the reliably distressing topic of environmentalism than Donovan Hohn."
Rivka Galchen
"One of our very best contemporary essayists."
San Francisco Chronicle - Kevin Canfield
"A collection of perceptive essays…[Hohn] has a charming attraction to quixotic characters."
Michigan Quarterly Review - Keith Taylor
"[The essays] are connected by Hohn’s passion, his intelligence and the evocative style of his prose…Fascinating."
Wyatt Mason
"Donovan Hohn has a diviner’s capacity to tap into the source and the flow of a story, whether the ‘story’ is narrative or argumentative. His attention to the appearances of things—the false; the true—tunes the reader’s alert-addled animal brain to the meaningful, and the terrible. As the Earth begins to resist us, to remind us that how we’re living will be our undoing, Hohn’s work is that sad, happy thing, glinting in the sand: evidence of what a human mind could do, and what a human heart could yield."
Los Angeles Review of Books - Gregory McNamee
"Donovan Hohn offers with The Inner Coast a humane view of a world that, as Ernest Hemingway said, is a fine place worth fighting for. And well worth reading about, too."
Charles Baxter
"Donovan Hohn has a genius for noticing the previously unnoticed and for writing about our environments with careful precision and a patient observer’s love of detail. He is a kind of contemporary archeologist, writing about what surrounds us, and he does so with uncommon grace and quiet eloquence. This is a wonderful book."
Lewis H. Lapham
"I’ve seldom encountered a writer with a better understanding of both the literary and the journalistic ways and means of telling a true story. Donovan Hohn thinks clearly; he writes with eloquence and force."
Wall Street Journal - Heather McAlpin
"The evocative title…reflects something of the nature of Mr. Hohn’s writing, the fertile ground on which his outward explorations meet up with his natural tendency toward intellectual reflection and interiority."
Booklist (starred review)
"Engaging, thoughtful, and marked by [Hohn's] sparkling wit and boundless curiosity…A title to treasure."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-02-24
A professor of English and former magazine editor lends literary stature to science writing and the exploration of interior landscapes, including his own.
Collected here are 10 of Hohn's distinctive essays, many originally appearing in Harper's, theNew York Times Magazine, and other publications. Throughout, the author weaves dissections of environmental issues through meditations on culture and family. Other essays—e.g., "A Romance of Dust," featuring unlikely but fascinating observations on antique tool collecting—are elegies for (and critiques of) a misremembered past. While providing antidotes to romanticism and nostalgia— "Memory, after all, is a kind of dream"—he unfailingly finds the magical or mysterious where it does exist. Some essays are set in the American Midwest (the “Inner Coast” of the title), others in New York, Quebec, California, or Thoreau's Walden (with a riposte to the poet's critics). A few have the flavor of expansive book reviews. There are echoes of Barry Lopez here, but Hohn's voice—reflective, trenchant, often eloquent—seems all his own. He has an almost unerring ability to choose just the right word or phrase to enrich a line of thought. His descriptive passages, whether amusing, pithy, or lyrical, will capture readers' imaginations. He is a poet of the prosaic, as on the subject of water, reminding us that the Great Lakes are actually a river. He also possesses an admirable way of presenting ecological or cultural problems without lecturing. He evaluates and argues, sometimes strenuously, but seldom judges. Hohn suggests his mindset from the start: "We are surrounded by a multitude of facts whose significance is neither stable nor self-evident." The world can be an amorphous place, and clarity elusive, but there are havens of the rational if we wish to inhabit them. Hohn finds some of those havens in the work of Thoreau, Evan S. Connell, Marilynne Robinson, and Matthew Power.
Settle in and savor a keen mind with a laudable moral compass.
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