A Song for the River

by Philip Connors Narrated by Adam Verner

Overview

From one of the last working fire lookouts comes this sequel to the award-winning Fire Season-a story of calamity and resilience in the world's first wilderness.

A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the blaze he had always feared: a megafire that forced him off his mountain by helicopter and forever changed the forest and watershed he loved. It was one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood but the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

Beginning as an elegy for a friend he cherished like a brother, A Song for the River opens into a chorus of voices singing in celebration of a landscape redolent with meaning-and the river that runs through it, whose waters are threatened by a potential dam.

The ways of water and the ways of fire, the lines tragedy carves on a life, the persistent renewal of green shoots sprouting from ash: these are the subjects of A Song for the River. Its argument on behalf of things wild and free could not be more timely; the goal is nothing less than permanent protection for that rarest of things in the American West, a free-flowing river-the sinuous and gorgeous Gila.

It must not perish.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/09/2018
This slim but potent volume of essays from Connors (Fire Season) beautifully examines themes of fire and water, life and death, and wonder and grief in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. Connors begins with a litany of suffering—his own and his friends’—from disease, divorce, wildfire, and deaths. Among the last, Connors writes about John, a fellow fire lookout, who died when his horse slipped off a mountain path and fell on him, and three teens (including Ella Jaz, an advocate for an undammed Gila River) who died in a small-plane crash. As Connors tells of these deaths and the ways in which he honors them (Jaz’s death led him to get involved in her cause), he also tells of his own physical hurts and of Mónica, the woman who relieved his pain and became his wife. His sumptuous descriptions of the Gila’s natural wonders, from a lone mountain tree frog to roaring wildfires, enliven the entire work, as do his skillful turns of phrase and pointed observations (“Each of us, in the wake of a bullet’s destruction, had checked into the guilt suite at the Hotel Sorrow and re-upped for a few hundred weeks”). This powerful work belongs with the classics of the nature writing genre and is equally important as a rumination on living and dying. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

* "This powerful work belongs with the classics of the nature writing genre and is equally important as a rumination on living and dying." — Publishers Weekly, starred review

* "Readers who enjoy personal narratives and nature writing will be drawn to this book, which is a nice companion to the author's earlier work,Fire Season." — Venessa Hughes, Buffalo Library Journal, starred review

* "Intensely intimate, Song feels written for the Gila, the souls lost and those who love them, but ends up a beautiful, voyeuristic experience that brings the reader into the fold." — Shelf Awareness, starred review

"A heartfelt, well-written volume of vignettes and reflections of a man who—much like his long lineage of fire lookout forebears—gladly chooses to escape civilization for the natural world." — Kirkus Reviews

"Connors apportions the essays and arranges them so that the reader is able to grow with him—to watch as, despite all those losses, he extends past his naturally lonesome self…In essay after essay, he struggles to come to terms with the changing landscape and the death of friends. By the end, Connors has become a more symphonic self—no longer isolated in his solitude, unafraid to speak of and for those he has lost, capable of hearing music in the river, capable of sharing it. —Beth Kephart" — Creative Nonfiction, vol. 73

"Love for the wilderness is compellingly conveyed. In moving snapshots of those touched by the Gila, A Song for the River shows the myriad ways that naturalists and nature touches othConnors' wonderfully digressive musings offer thoughtful glimpses into the more sociable aspects of fire-watching, such as they are, and expresses longing for a bygone era of nature conservation." — Jonathan Fullmerers, Foreword

"Connors' wonderfully digressive musings offer thoughtful glimpses into the more sociable aspects of fire-watching, such as they are, and expresses longing for a bygone era of nature conservation." — Jonathan Fullmer, Booklist

"[Connors'] prose is simple, yet eloquent and elegant, and reminds you, amid talk of walls, of the powerful forces of nature." — Alfredo Corchado, Texas Monthly

"It is no ordinary song and no ordinary river." — David Steinberg, Albuquerque Journal

"Produced by the award-winning independent publisher Cinco Punto Press, Philip Connors' A Song for the River is a much-needed balm in our current age of fever-pitched distraction and tumult. It is an urging toward silence, stillness, and reflection… It is a song in the name of looking closer, looking harder… And, ultimately, it is a supplication to not turn our backs against the wild, or against each other, which, as Connors' beautiful, understated writing intimates, are really the same thing." — Books We Love by Books & Books

"A Song for the Riverblends a poetic voice with a naturalist's knowledge and a journalist's determination to document continued threats to the Gila River and its massive surrounding acreage, which became the nation's original wilderness area in 1924." — New Mexico Magazine

A new book from Connors is always welcome, and A Song for the River—both an elegy for lost friends and a "biography of New Mexico's beautiful Gila river—delivers more of what made his previous efforts so compelling: humanity, lyricism, and top-notch nature writing. — Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review

"An evocative nature writer, Connors takes the reader into the aerie of his perch over the wilderness and meditates on the need for and nature of fire. And — although his occupation is by definition solitary — this is also an elegy for lost friends, a paean to the importance of human connection, and a lyrical encomium to the restorative powers of nature." — Christine Wald-Hopkins, Southwest Books of the Year, Pima County Library

"[A] singular book, resistant to categorization. Is it nature writing or confession? Obituary or farce? Consult Walden all you'd like, but Thoreau never wrote any side-splitting descriptions of backcountry prostate massage. Nor, in a canon dominated by stoics, are you likely to encounter vulnerability this naked…—Ben Goldfarb" — High Country News

"Edward Abbey meets funeral pyre in this dirge by Connors…His is an important voice in the fight for the soul of the West." — Michaela Riding, The Inkslinger, The King's English Bookshop

"This book is essential." — Pages of Julia

"[N]othing short of spectacular. With deep, clear-eyed honesty, Connors weaves the tragic story of friends gone too soon within the tale of a region, its haunting wilderness, and a meandering river. He sets out on a quest for answers, only to remind us of our common humanity. Beautifully nuanced and written in masterful prose, this is a necessary read." — Alfredo Corchado, Dallas Morning News border correspondent, author ofMidnight in Mexico

"Everything that is absent in the current political crises of this nation is abundantly present in Philip Connors'A Song for the River: humility, quietude, forgiveness, and gratitude. His writing is pure, exact, compassionate, and often elegaic…I loved this book." — Benjamin Alire Sáenz, author of the PEN/Faulkner-winningEverything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

"Philip Connors redirects our attention from the trivial to the timeless: fire and water, ash and rock, death and rebirth. He shows us what we lose when we dam our rivers, and what we gain when we unleash our souls. He writes of nature as of a dear friend, and of his friends as though they were pieces of nature. This is the ethics—the ecological humanism—that we sorely, sorely need." — Chad Harbach, author of The Art of Fielding

"Once again, Philip Connors demonstrates why he's one of the most interesting writers in America. His prose—confessional, angry, wise, mesmerizing—has never been better. A Song for the River is about wildness within and without, and it's as bracing as an early-morning chill. I loved this book." — Tom Bissell, author of Apostle

"Philip Connors is the best sort of writer, one alert to the mysteries and attuned to absurdity. His concerns are elemental: fire, water, earth, and air. Add to that loss. Add to that love. And A Song for the River becomes a potent, moving tribute to wilderness, solitude, and some extraordinary people gone too soon. In the face of gaping pain, Connors, with courage and vulnerability, maintains a devotion to seeing what next season brings. In so doing, he shows us that our most scarred, charred places can be the source of the mightiest kind of beauty." — Nina MacLaughlin, author of Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter

"In the literary tradition of Gary Snyder and Edward Abbey, Philip Connors climbs down from his fire lookout to tell his story of love and loss along the sacred waters of the Gila River, the heart of the Gila Wilderness, a place of rock and ruins, juniper and pine. The book was a page-turner for me, lyrically paced and a real pleasure to read." — Doug Peacock, legendary naturalist, protector of wilderness and writer

Best Nonfiction Books of the Year, Publishers Weekly
Best Books for the Summer 2018, Publishers Weekly

Sigurd Nolson Nature Writing Award, Notable Book
Best Nonfiction of 2018, Amazon Book Review
Southwest Book Award, BRLA
Southwest Books of the Year, Pima County Public Library

Library Journal

★ 06/15/2018
As a fire lookout at New Mexico's Gila National Forest, Connors (Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout) spent summers working in the Gila River wilderness, getting to know the region and its inhabitants intimately. This moving memoir recounts a trio of tragic events that impacted him deeply at a time when he was recuperating from several significant life changes. The mountain he calls home burns, another lookout he has grown close to dies suddenly, and a plane containing a group of optimistic students and their teacher working to save the river crashes. In the style of Annie Dillard, Anne LaBastille, and Aldo Leopold, Connors interlaces all of these stories into a poignant plea for change—of our attitudes toward nature as well as to all forms of life. VERDICT Readers who enjoy personal narratives and nature writing will be drawn to this book, which is a nice companion to the author's earlier work, Fire Season.—Venessa Hughes, Buffalo, NY

OCTOBER 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Adam Verner seems miscast in his reading of essayist Philip Connors’s dark memoir. Part elegy, part lamentation, part catalogue of ailments, this audiobook seems less a song than a requiem. Verner’s reading style—airy and hopeful—is at odds with the seriousness of the content. Connors writes evocatively of his recently deceased friends, his lonely education as a forest fire lookout, and a tragic plane crash that killed students from the Aldo Leopold Charter School in Silver City, New Mexico. He also describes his personal trials: physical (his hip replacements and prostate disease) and emotional (his recent divorce) with restraint. He is a serious critic of the state of the republic and a champion of environmental issues, the Gila River especially. A different narrator was needed. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2018-06-18
A veteran fire lookout in the mountains of southern New Mexico ponders life and death in one of North America's oldest wilderness areas.In his first book, Fire Season (2011), Connors (All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found, 2015) focused on a year spent as a fire lookout for the Forest Service. Here, he's back in the Gila Wilderness area in his tiny yet beloved fire tower/office/living quarters where he had spent numerous summers gazing through binoculars, searching out and reporting smoke outbreaks. To kick off the adventure, the author took a raft trip down the Gila, a twisting, turning knot of river with likely the shortest rafting season of all of America's waterways. The occasion? To navigate the river perhaps one last time before the government launches a possible dam project currently being studied. Along the journey, we meet the ghosts of Connors' recently deceased friends—John, a fellow fire lookout, and Ella Jazz, a multitalented, brilliant high school student whose life was cut short while studying the ecological benefits of natural wildfires. A running controversy among scholars of forestry, the traditional logic was once to suppress wildfires, which was the purpose of having lookouts on the government payroll. Recently, however, the philosophy has been to allow wildfires to burn freely, providing a fresh environment for healthy new growth. Connors keeps both feet firmly planted in the nurture camp despite the fact that this new science, along with growing satellite technology, threatens the continuing existence of fire lookouts altogether. As the author recalls his friends and times they shared in the Gila, he reflects on spreading their ashes, drawing the parallel between a free-burning wildfire and the deaths of his friends, reconciling both with the idea that from death springs new life.A heartfelt, well-written volume of vignettes and reflections of a man who—much like his long lineage of fire lookout forebears—gladly chooses to escape civilization for the natural world.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169811292
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	08/28/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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