Forest & Desert Ecology, Plants - Trees, Natural History - United States
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Overview
Since Edmund Schulman discovered in 1958 that individual bristlecones live nearly 5,000 years, the trees have been investigated primarily for the elaborate record their rings contain. The trees have been "read" closely, with major consequences for natural and human history. Historians have read local and global environmental change. Archaeologists have rewritten the history of civilization. Writers have transformed them into figures pertinent to the human dilemmas of time and eternity. A Garden of Bristlecones investigates professional and popular conceptions as a set of narratives drawn from the outside and from the inside of the trees. It reveals the premises of the investigators, the nature of their inquiry, and the extent of their knowledge, while also revealing the Great Basin bristlecone itself.Editorials
Library Journal
Cohen, who teaches language and literature at Southern Utah University, also writes about environmental issues (e.g., The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness, 1984). His latest book focuses on a species of tree, the bristlecone pine, that is thought to be this planet's oldest living thing; these trees may live for up to 5000 years. But this is also a story of the relationship between humans and bristlecones, from their discovery well over a century ago to the tree-ring and radiocarbon dating studies done by individual scientists in recent times. Cohen, who focuses on the trees of the Great Basin in the American West, an area he knows well, is especially concerned with how the bristlecone is perceived in our modern culture. Recommended primarily for academic libraries but fascinating reading for anyone interested in the nature-people relationship.William H. Wiese, Iowa State Univ. Lib., AmesBook Details
Published
May 31, 1998
Publisher
Reno : University of Nevada Press, c1997.
Pages
344
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780874172966