The Inland Island: A Year in Nature

By Josephine Winslow Johnson

Book Overview

"A beautiful book...about nature the way Walden was a book about nature. It should be read by everyone who still retains the capacity to feel anything" (The New York Times).

Stunningly written and fiercely observed, a new edition of a classic work of nature writing about a year on an Ohio farm, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Josephine Johnson.

Originally published in 1969, The Inland Island is Josephine W. Johnson's startling and brilliant chronicle of nature and the seasons at her rambling thirty-seven-acre farm in Ohio, which she and her husband reverted to wilderness with the help of a state forester. Over the course of twelve months, she observes the changing landscape with a naturalist's precision and a poet's evocative language. Readers will marvel at the way she brings to life flashes of beauty, the inexorable cycle of growth and decay, and the creatures who live alongside her, great and small.

A forerunner of iconic American women nature writers and a champion of civil rights who marched in Washington against the Vietnam war, Johnson intersperses these "delicate marvels" (The New York Times) with profound reflections about racial inequality, urbanization, social justice, and environmental destruction that speak powerfully to our time.

Ready to be rediscovered by a new generation, The Inland Island is a vital and relevant meditation on nature and time, capturing the wonder, beauty, hope--and flaws--of our turbulent world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1982177497
• ISBN13: 9781982177492
• Release Date: July 2022
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Nature writing at its most thought-provoking best

This is my all-time favorite book. If you like "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek," be sure to read "Inland Island" by Josephine Johnson. She has the same unromanticized view of nature's uncompromising rule (whatever survives, works), and she has the mind of an agnostic poet expressed in prose. Example: I think it is disgusting to praise God for making us acknowledge His presence by a poke in our eyeballs with His sharp stick.And: All day, a rain of life and death goes on. A catbird crashed against the pane and fell gasping. Then it gathered itself in a narrow canoe shape and lay there patiently waiting to recover or die. Awareness is a name of agony. I wish there was something to pray to for its life. But one must not get excited. One must not grieve. Nature, Mom, all-powerful, monstrous and monolithic Mother sits and chooses.The whole book is wonderful! I wish I could read it again for the first time just for the pleasure of its discovery.