With Every Great Breath: New and Selected Essays, 1995-2023

by Rick Bass

Overview

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award
Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards

"Master craftsman" (Los Angeles Times) and beloved author Rick Bass explores ecological, social, and personal landscapes through this collection that brings together his best-loved essays and brand-new pieces

For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us.

Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription, to inhabit, as deeply as possible, the greater depths of the beauty in each moment. With Every Great Breath ranges from the extremely local—a long-form essay about the community affected by the largest Superfund site in U.S. history, in Libby, Montana—to the far-flung: the Galápagos, Namibia, and Alaska. Throughout, Bass offers a portrait of our planet that is always alert to its wonders, even in the face of environmental crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640096301
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.33(w) x 9.24(h) x 1.09(d)

About the Author

RICK BASS is the author of over thirty books. He is a winner of the Story Prize, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He has served as contributing editor to Sierra, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Big Sky Journal, Amicus Journal, Outside, Orion, Field & Stream, The Contemporary Wingshooter, and many other publications. He currently serves on the editorial board of Whitefish Review. He was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana’s Yaak Valley for almost forty years.

Editorial Reviews

2023-10-13
Amiable tales from a natural-born storyteller.

In his latest, the prolific writer and passionate environmental activist gathers wide-ranging, previously published essays, along with a few new ones. Bass, the author of more than 30 books, begins with a rather tepid piece on fighting fires, which he did once with a friend, exploring how it heightens the senses and “altered” his friend. Then it’s on to a profile of Fred Hatfield, “Dr. Squat,” informed by the author’s own experiences with weightlifting. Bass discusses the film Cracking the Humpback Code, a “work of luminous mystery and reverence,” chronicling his time with the director in Maui swimming with singing whales in the “most bottomless blue imaginable.” Next up is an account of the author’s ice-fishing trip in Montana with his daughter and a good friend. A 2010 piece on the Deepwater Horizon’s “toxic gush into the heart of the Gulf” is rife with anger and emotional devastation, but he’s much more positive in his reverential essay on the larch tree, “every bit as glorious in life as in death.” Bass is thrilled by the return of the wolves to Yellowstone—“It’s all more tangled and wonderful than we may ever know”—and he’s typically enthusiastic about his trip to the Galápagos, where he swam with the whale shark, “not a whale, not a mammal, just a cold-blooded gilled thing, a giant.” After a discursive ode on the moon, the author returns to familiar territory with an admiring paean to the African elephant and an energetic piece on an Alaskan polar bear. Whether it’s a lamentation for his many dead dogs or a new, insightful piece on how Hemingway’s hunting and fishing helped shape his writing, the congenial Bass always delights.

Readers will enjoy dipping in and out of thoughtful, heartfelt essays oozing with sentiment and affability.

Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award
Longlisted for the Reading the West Book Awards
The Orange County Register, A 2024 Highly Anticipated Book

"These essays attempt to step away from lamentation and prescription (so often tenants of environmental writing and activism in the face of crisis), to inhabit and celebrate, as deeply as possible, the greater depths of our world’s natural beauty—from Libby, Montana, to the far-flung Galápagos, Namibia, and Alaska." —The Write Question, Montana Public Radio

"Amiable tales from a natural-born storyteller . . . Whether it’s a lamentation for his many dead dogs or a new, insightful piece on how Hemingway’s hunting and fishing helped shape his writing, the congenial Bass always delights. Readers will enjoy dipping in and out of thoughtful, heartfelt essays oozing with sentiment and affability." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher