This was my car book. What’s a car book, you might ask? It’s (unsurprisingly) the book you keep in your car to read excerpts from while waiting for family members to run errands. Need to go to Walmart? No problem—I’ve got my car book.

The Long-Shadowed Forest transported me from the consumerville to the forests of Northern Minnesota where Helen and Adrian Hoover lived, observing in minute detail the natural world around them. This volume surveys everything from the weather to the trees, and mammals to birds. She even devotes a chapter to “Insects and Other Small Land Things.” The natural world comes alive in Hoover’s prose, especially since I’ve had the privilege of paddling the waters on the Northern side of that Minnesota border.

If you love the natural world and need a book to save you from the business of wherever your car takes you, Hoover’s words are the solution.

Let us look to the earth, to its wealth and beauty, and be proud that we are a part of it. Let us respect it, and time and space, the forces of creation and life itself. As we hold the future in our hands, let us not destroy it. (258)

Amen.

Hoover, Helen. The Long-Shadowed Forest. 1963. U of Minnesota P, 1998.