"Sidelights"

Michael P. Branch is associate professor of literature and environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teaches courses in nature writing and American literature and helps direct the graduate program in literature and environment. The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley, which Branch edited with Daniel J. Philippon, is a collection of selections from four hundred years of writing on this region by explorers, travelers, journalists, poets, and residents. In the Quarterly Review of Biology, Gary Kroll wrote, "The saga of increasing settlement, agricultural innovation, and scientific investigation are here mingled with the German and Scotch-Irish settlers of the valley and punctuated by a bloody civil war." He explained that the book is "hardly a eulogy for a ruined landscape, we read here the work of nature writers coming to terms with the ebb and flow of modernity by drawing meaning from a region that by the twentieth century had become a hybrid of nature and culture. He concluded by calling The Height of Our Mountains "a valuable resource for anyone interested in the history of land and people--literary critics, scientists and naturalists, environmental historians, geographers, historians of science, and folklorists."

Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment includes twenty-one essays that...