The Inner Coast: Essays

by Donovan Hohn

Overview

Prize-winning essays on our changing place in the natural world by the best-selling author of Moby-Duck.

Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an “adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer” (New York Times). Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects ten of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, which feature his physical, historical, and emotional journeys through the American landscape.

By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, the lost art of ice canoeing, and Americans’ complicated love/hate relationship with Thoreau. The Inner Coast marks the return of one of our finest young writers and a stylish exploration of what Guy Davenport called “the geography of the imagination.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324005988
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/02/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Donovan Hohn, a former editor at GQ and Harper’s Magazine, is the author of The Inner Coast and Moby-Duck and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Knight-Wallace Fellowship, and a Whiting Writer’s Award. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Table of Contents

Introduction xiii

Snail Picking 1

A Romance of Rust 3

Revival of the Ice Canoe 50

Watermarks 75

Midwest Passage 94

The Zealot 103

Mammoth Fever 126

Four Lights 134

Evan S. Connell 134

Marilynne Robinson 138

Matthew Power 145

Henry David Thoreau 154

Falling 173

And Yet 217

Acknowledgments 225

Credits 231

Editorial Reviews

"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."

Tom Bissell

"One of our very best contemporary essayists."

Rivka Galchen

"A collection of perceptive essays…[Hohn] has a charming attraction to quixotic characters."

San Francisco Chronicle - Kevin Canfield

"[The essays] are connected by Hohn’s passion, his intelligence and the evocative style of his prose…Fascinating."

Michigan Quarterly Review - Keith Taylor

"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."

Wyatt Mason

"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."

Los Angeles Review of Books - Gregory McNamee

"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."

Charles Baxter

"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."

Lewis H. Lapham

"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."

Wall Street Journal - Heather McAlpin

"Engaging, thoughtful, and marked by [Hohn's] sparkling wit and boundless curiosity…A title to treasure."

Booklist (starred review)

★ 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.

Kirkus Reviews