Sharman Apt RussellCritiques

Very informative. Exceeded my expectations.
Very good.

This could be considered a book about pantheism, as it is labelled. And in a way, it is. She writes of different forms of pantheism throughout history with what appears to be considerable familiarity. Not being an expert on the subject myself, I can't fairly judge.

But for me, it read more as a memoir than a description.

(Aside: I'm not sure how other reviewers were so confused by this fact. The subtitle says "My Life as a Pantheist." If you didn't know going in that it was going to be mostly about her, maybe check your reading comprehension skills, because you were warned.)

Sharman starts off with a basic problem that is probably very common, though not much discussed:

She wants to have a faith. She wants to belong to a religion. She feels that she would be a better, happier, more connected person, and kinder to others, if she did.

But she can't bring herself to believe in gods. Not truly. The concept doesn't make sense to her.

Where she finds meaning in her life is as a naturalist and environmentalist, and so this is where she locates her spiritual meaning as well. Hiking, bird banding, gardening, trying to save the river.

And so what follows is a few hundred pages of (to my mind) well written prose describing this. What is scientific pantheism? Does it really make sense? Does she really believe it? What does that even mean? If she doesn't--or at least, not always--believe, what then? Does it matter? How to find community? How to deal with evil and ugliness and pain?

What I loved about it was that she proposes no answers, not for others and not even for herself. It's a long series of questions, partial answers that change over time, making do, and finding a way of being in the world that gives her life greater meaning and satisfaction despite all of the doubts, unanswered questions and imperfections.

I loved it. Enough to be sad that I have to give it back to the library. Her honesty, self-reflection and searching were all grand.

Standing in the Light by Sharman Apt Russell is a true blend of the writer’s experiences of nature and spiritual growth. Russell described her life as being a Pantheist, a word coined by John Toland in the 1700s. In beautiful prose she captured the joys of nature especially with bird watching and banding. In the text the writer reviewed the tenets of Eastern religions that she learned from books, companions, and during her travels as a younger woman in Asian countries.
Interestingly she put into context the lives and experiences of Pantheists like Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, Henry David Thoreau, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, and founder of the World Pantheist Movement Paul Harrison. Russell explained while being a Pantheist how she continued an on-and-off basis to have ties with Quakers. She wrote glowingly about her husband’s and family’s love for nature, work as a creative writing professor at two universities, philosophy, religious life, living in Silver City, and her friends that were involved in conservation efforts in New Mexico.

This was a fun read. Right off the bat it was interesting to learn about string theory and the idea that there are ten dimensions, butterflies being one of them. But, Russell goes on from there. Recounting mythologies, symbolisms, scientific studies, pop cultures, history, evolution, obsessions, butterflies play an enormous role in our lives, sometimes in the center of it, sometimes on the periphery. Russell has a way with words that is pure magic.
And. And! And, who doesn't love an author who can compare the antics of caterpillars to Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, with the line, "This is a sprint, the ultimate chase scene" (p 25). There is such a witty humor to Russell's writing.

A wonderful book, part religious and philosophical history, part biography, part natural history, part spiritual exploration, all woven together in a brilliant tapestry.

Post-apocalypse fiction, but way way out there.

Science fiction novel about humans living a paleolithic existence (with laptops, of course) in a bleak futuristic society in which humans and animals not only coexist for the first time in millions of years, but can also read each other's minds.

A little out there for me.

I received a copy of this book as party of a Goodreads giveaway. Many thanks to the author for allowing me to read her work.

This book was very much unlike books that I typically read. Having said that, I enjoyed this very much. The writing was beautifully, descriptive and expressive. The story started a bit slow for my tastes, but yet was filled with many interesting elements. I was particularly enabled by the supernatural aspects of the main character's life. I loved how she was able to talk to the earth. My only hope was that this would have been a larger part of the story. The only criticism I have is that I really didn't feel as if I knew the characters very well. Despite that, I recommend this book.

In my opinion this was a very boring and would be a difficult book to read for students. This book described the life and achievements of Frederick Douglass. This book was written in a way that would not be very engaging to students. The author included chapter titles and then a lot of information for each chapter. This book was also not written in a way that would be engaging to students. The illustrations in this book are drawn and black and white and are not very appealing to look at. This would not be a good book for students to read if they had trouble paying attention to text. The main idea or message of this book was to explain to readers about all of the achievements that Frederick Douglass completed throughout his lifetime. I believe the author could have written in a more appealing and engaging way for readers. This biography would not be very appropriate to the targeted audience because they would find this boring and uninteresting.

Sharman Apt Russell challenges my abstract and lazy pantheism, as I had hoped, with this hard to categorize book. Reading it, I quickly realized how truly ignorant I am about the environment, how much I take for granted. I enjoy my creature comforts too much, am too distracted to ever comprehend Nature the way she does. She can identify the assorted flora and fauna of her native New Mexico with ease and knows rancher neighbors who can quote Cervantes. Contrariwise, I understand that I need to aerate and fertilize my ostentatious lawn on occasion and am lucky if I even know one of my neighbors (although, owing to the housing bust, the distance between occupied homes in my community does give it a very ranch-like feel at times).

Against the backdrop of her amateur ornithology, Russell traces pantheism’s thread through early Greek thought, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Tibetan Buddhism, Quakerism, Whitman, Hinduism, Taoism and Gaia Theory. She paints in broad strokes when discussing them, so there are gaps. But the gaps aren’t so large that I much cared, instead appreciating her fluid prose and learned insights. My only criticism is that she sometimes clicks off the common names of wildlife with the strained enthusiasm of reciting a liturgy. To me, it’s like reading a phone book. I guess I'm more generalist in my orientation – which is what I’d suspected all along, anyway. I propose the comfort of sharing in a community of believers is more comforting than the belief itself.

This book is tough for me to review.

On the one hand, it was a revelation, an epiphany, a waking to the fact that godless people have labels we can hang upon the numinous. It gave me impetus to pick up the new Gregory Hays translation of Marcus Aurelius. In Russell's book I found several soft hollow shocks of recognition and affirmation. And yet, the writing was choppy. The use of 'principle' for 'principal' more than once was grating. The strings of sentence fragments. Annoying in the extreme. The way Russell wove the memoir part of the book with the research and exposition of pantheism's history was, to my eye, awkward.

Three stars tempered with ambivalence. I could have gone as high as four for content and as low as two for style.

I wasn't sure I was going to like this book when I first brought it home from the library. But, as I began to read it, I found it very engaging. Russell, has done quite a bit of research, and takes the broad sweep of hunger and interrelated topiscs, such as famine, fasting, weight loss, even getting into the religious aspects of this topic.

A few weeks ago, I overheard an eight-year-old girl say to an adult in all seriousness, “I’m so hungry, I’m going to die!”

I couldn’t help thinking to myself that she had no idea what true hunger was; nor do I. In Hunger: An Unnatural History, Sharman Apt Russell details what it means, physiologically, to be hungry. Then she goes beyond the science of hunger and into the social aspects by reviewing the history of how we learned to help starving people recover and the various current worldwide issues surrounding hunger, from Anorexia Nervosa to refugees. It is an intriguing look into a social problem that everyone experiences, even to a small extent, every day.

I found Hunger to be a fascinating introduction to the subject. Russell’s book is best described, I believe, as an overview, neither focusing heavily on science nor on social issues. It’s very accessible and a quick read. I highly recommend it if such an overview is what you’re looking for.

More detailed review on my blog

Aptly mingles the history of pantheism with her own search for religious meaning and a year of her life in the Gila River Valley of New Mexico. Only the history has a linear trajectory; the rest circles around her family and friends, her experiences with the amazing natural history of the Gila River, and her association with the local Quaker Meeting. Infused with a quiet beauty, its pleasures are in the images and feelings of a thoughtful woman. HGW

Tells the life story of the man born in slavery who later became famous for his accomplishments as an orator and writer.

Science and psychology -- effects and our response to flowers, why? Illustrations - drawings.

Somehow, somewhere America's version of giving thanks became stuffing ourselves with food and then collapsing into an easy chair to watch football. Sharman Apt Russell's Hunger: An Unnatural History provides an excellent counterpoint to that mindset. Before you start backing away, this isn't book about famine in the third world (although that is unquestionably part of it). Instead, Hunger is a broad and wide-ranging exploration of and exposition on the subject, one that will make you think of hunger in ways you never have before.

Russell's unique approach begins at the outset. She starts from a simple proposition: "Hunger is a country we enter every day, like a commuter across a friendly border." She's right. Every day virtually every person, regardless of wealth, residence or social class, will feel their body tell them that it's hungry, that it needs fuel. Hunger is not limited to those who truly are starving.

Russell gradually expands her exploration by going through the various stages of hunger, whether it's a body that's gone a few hours or a day without food to those who are starving to death. Among other things, she examines the connection between hunger, albeit self-imposed via fasting, and religion. She basically broadens the common concept of hunger as simply a life-crushing experience and brings it into terms of everyday life and things everyone can understand.

Russell moves from the micro of the impact on the individual to the global, examining large scale famine and starvation and how they can be addressed. She looks at the personal, briefly recounting her experience with a fast she terminated after four days. She even looks at the obscene, or more accurately, how obscene events such as forced starvation imposed by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto led the Jewish doctors there to gain scientific knowledge that remains valuable today.

Balance of review at http://prairieprogressive.com/2005/11/22/book-review-hunger-an-unnatural-history...

Who knew a walk through the garden could bring an embarassed flush to one's face? Russell's intruiging work brings botany to non-science types (like English majors) and makes the world of flowers accessible. But her wonderful style and keen observation make it worth reading. Humans have known what some flowers can resemble since well before Georgia O'Keefe came along, but I had no idea there was truly so much lust in the garden. Shocking!