This is a lyrical, wandering book that feels as much like poetry as prose. I read it with interest as a Minnesotan who has lived in many of the places mentioned in the book. It is beautifully written but not a book to be rushed through.

Ranae Lenor Hanson is a climate activist and a retired educator with forty five years of experience with various organisations in the field of ecological and racial justice. This is her debut illness memoir cum ecological writing which mediates on the intimate connections between human health and the health of the ecosystem as whole.

It begins with her childhood memories among the miners town of Minnesota where she starts to connect to nature along the streams and tributaries that connect the land. She talks about the potential impact of sulphide mining over the Minnesotan ecosystem. There are snippets of her religious upbringing and her family’s background. The turning point of her life comes when she was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes. The desperation of illness helps her to contemplate the surrounding natural word in distress and to reflect upon the ways to heal it through personal as well as global opportunities.

This book follows multiple arcs and it’s hard to follow a single line of thought. Most of the text the author quotes the stories of her students: about the onset of Somali crises through drought, efforts to save mangrove swamps in Saudi Arabia, of drought in Ethiopia etc. Even though the topics it raised are important and concerning, I couldn’t get along with the writing style. The writing is more like in the form of vignettes which don’t linger much in any topic discussed. I really liked the author’s attempt to inform about the day by day tribulations of a diabetic patient. There is certainly much more to it than I took from it. Read it and decide yourself.

* 𝙏𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙠𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙧, 𝙐𝙣𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙈𝙞𝙣𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙤𝙩𝙖 𝙋𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙉𝙚𝙩𝙂𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙮 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙢𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨 𝙚-𝘼𝙧𝙘 𝙞𝙣 𝙚𝙭𝙘𝙝𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙖𝙣 𝙝𝙤𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬.