Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
We have sold nearly 700 copies of the paperback edition of Braiding Sweetgrass in the store, so it's obvious that our customers know and cherish this book. (It may be the most gifted book purchased here.) But it seems worth reiterating Robin Wall Kimmerer's central message: that our relationship with the natural world is reciprocal, and that until we begin to live with that knowledge, we will continue to stumble along, creating chaos and destruction.
I don't know why it took me so long to read this beautiful book (a longtime Point Reyes Books bestseller), but I'm so grateful that I finally did. Braiding Sweetgrass is a revelation, a sermon, a love poem, a scientific text, a memoir, and an instructional manual for how to live on earth. We're lucky to have it. — From Molly's favorites
Description
A New York Times bestseller
A Washington Post bestseller
A Los Angeles Times bestseller
Named a "Best Essay Collection of the Decade" by Literary Hub
A Book Riot "Favorite Summer Read of 2020"
A Food Tank Fall 2020 Reading Recommendation
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on "a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise" (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices. In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
About the Author
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling collection of essays Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants as well as Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Kimmerer is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Syracuse, New York, where she is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment.
