While book shopping on Martha's Vineyard for his 2011 summer vacation, President Obama's family was spotted buying a copy of My Green Manifesto, an expansion of this piece by author David Gessner to book length. The Obama purchase was reported by the Boston Globe, which recommended the book in a column.
BIO:
David Gessner is the author of eight books, including Sick of Nature, The Prophet of Dry Hill, and Return of the Osprey, which was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year and the Book-of-the-Month club as one of its top books of the year. The Globe called it a "classic of American Nature Writing." In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize; in 2007 he won the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay; and in 2008 his essay, "The Dreamer Does Not exist," was chosen for The Best American Nonrequired Reading. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals including The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, and Orion. He has taught environmental writing at Harvard, and is currently an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he founded the national literary journal, Ecotone.
This summer he has two books coming out: My Green Manifesto in July and The Tarball Chronicles in September, both from Milkweed. Together they both describe and embody a new way of writing about nature and place, full of humor and strangeness, stripped of the old pastoral cliches, and focused on a more "limited" nature, the only nature left to most of us. This nature may involve kayaking up to have dinner and drinks at the Irish Ale House in Boston or may involve watching birds near Haliburton Road in southern Lousiana during the height of the BP oil spill. But while the nature may be less pure, it is still full of wildness and joy.
http://www.davidgessner.com/
