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Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River

Amazon.com Price:  $20.34 (as of 16/04/2019 09:21 PST- Details)

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Description

People who flyfish know that a favorite river bend, a secluded spot in moving waters, can feel like home—a place you know intimately and intuitively. In prose that reads like the flowing current of a river, scholar and essayist George Handley blends nature writing, local history, theology, environmental history, and personal memoir in his new book Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River.

Handley’s meditations on the local Provo River watershed present the argument that a sense of place requires more than a strong sense of history and belonging, it requires awareness and commitment. Handley traces a history of settlement along the Provo that has profoundly transformed the landscape and yet neglected its Native American and environmental legacies. As a descendent of one of the vital first pioneers to irrigate the area, and as a witness to the loss of orchards, open space, and an eroded environmental ethic, Handley weaves his own personal and circle of relatives history into the landscape to argue for sustainable belonging. In avoiding the exclusionist and environmentally harmful attitudes that include the territorial claims to a native land, the flyfishing term, “home waters,” is offered as a substitute, one of those belonging that may be informed by deference to others, to the mysteries of deep time, and to a fragile dependence on water. Whilst it has infrequently been mistakenly assumed that the Mormon faith is inimical to good environmental stewardship, Handley explores the faith’s openness to science, its recognition of the holiness of the creation, and its call for an ethical engagement with nature. A metaphysical approach to the physical world is offered as an antidote to the suicidal impulses of modern society and our persistent ambivalence about the facts of our biology and earthly condition. Home Waters contributes a standpoint from within the Mormon religious experience to the tradition of such Western writers as Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams, Steven Trimble, and Amy Irvine.

Winner of the Mormon Letters Award for Memoir.


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