Perfection of the Morning: A Woman's Awakening in Nature

Rating:
Summary: An Encounter With Nature and With Yourself
Review: Sharon Butala has written a deeply personal book with universal application. She tells of her journey from a fulfilling but hectic urban life to one of isolation and introspection. She joins her new husband on a cattle ranch in southwest Saskatchewan and leaves behind her university teaching, her graduate studies, her support network of feminist friends, and her teenaged son. In her long, lonely hours of interaction with "Nature," she encounters the mysteries and messages of the natural world and experiences the gradual healing of her own wounds. As I read Butala's book I found myself stopping to write about my own pains, my own healing, and my own mysterious encounters with Nature. It was a journey we took together, and I am stronger for the experience.

Rating:
Summary: An Encounter With Nature and With Yourself
Review: Sharon Butala has written a deeply personal book with universal application. She tells of her journey from a fulfilling but hectic urban life to one of isolation and introspection. She joins her new husband on a cattle ranch in southwest Saskatchewan and leaves behind her university teaching, her graduate studies, her support network of feminist friends, and her teenaged son. In her long, lonely hours of interaction with "Nature," she encounters the mysteries and messages of the natural world and experiences the gradual healing of her own wounds. As I read Butala's book I found myself stopping to write about my own pains, my own healing, and my own mysterious encounters with Nature. It was a journey we took together, and I am stronger for the experience.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: The author claims that having left behind her urban comforts to live in rural Saskatchewan eventually put her closely in touch with nature. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed with her version of 'in touch with nature'. I expected to read the words of someone who respects animals and wilderness. Instead I read about her views on mice as pests, how she and her husband made their living fattening cows before the slaughter, and her twisted comments about hunters having a greater capacity for pain and suffering than the animals they cruelly kill. Exploiting animals has clearly become an inherent part of her livelihood on the farm. She thinks nothing of attending rodeos where animals are wantonly abused, and she has no trouble inflicting pain on cows through branding without anesthetics. She describes environmentalists as mostly "urban" people who are only capable of fighting the corporate world and governments by attempting to put Nature in their own terms. (Huh?) She fails to realize that if us crazy "urban" environmentalist all moved out into the wilderness, there would be no wilderness left! (I for one am proud to live in the city, leaving wild areas free for the animals to roam.) The author also totally fails to acknowledge that an animal-based diet (which she and her husband directly rely on for their livelihood) is behind much of the mass-destruction of wilderness observed in the last century. I suppose I wouldn't have been so shocked reading this book had it not been advertised as "an apprenticeship in nature". I'd sooner see it called "a treatise in exploiting nature".