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A Story of Hope, Science, and Self-Discovery in America's Imperiled Forests
by Marguerite Holloway
An empowering journey into the overstory with the arborists and forest experts safeguarding our iconic trees.
Journalist Marguerite Holloway arrives at the Women's Tree Climbing Workshop as a climbing novice, but with a passion for trees and a deep concern about their future. Run by twin sister tree doctors Bear LeVangie and Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll, the workshop helps people―from everyday tree lovers to women arborists working in a largely male industry―develop impressive technical skills and ascend into the canopy. As Holloway tackles unfamiliar equipment and dizzying heights, she learns about the science of trees and tells the stories of charismatic species, including hemlock, aspen, Atlantic white cedar, oak, and beech. She spotlights experts who are chronicling the great dying that is underway in forests around the world as trees face simultaneous and accelerating threats from drought, heat, floods, disease, and other disruptions.
As she climbs, Holloway also comes to understand the profound significance of trees in her relationship with her late mother and brother. The book's rousing final chapter offers something new: a grander environmental and arboreal optimism, in which the story of trees and their resilience meshes with that of people working to steward the forests of the future, and of community found among fellow tree climbers. A lyrical work of memoir and reportage, Take to the Trees sounds the alarm about rapid arboreal decline while also offering hope about how we might care for our forests and ourselves.
"A hopeful yet cautionary commentary about the power and fragility of trees." ―Kirkus Reviews
"The most affecting passages discuss how climbing trees changed Holloway, as when she notes that she conquered her fear of heights by learning to trust herself and, "like using the lanyard to overcome an obstacle, finding ways of becoming unstuck." Nature lovers will dig this." ―Publishers Weekly
"Like the trees that it centers, this wonder of a book soars, oxygenates, roots, connects, and awes. It's a paean to all things arboreal, a memoir about loss and community, and a call to engage in acts of caretaking for our trees and for each other. To do any one of these things well would have made for a good book; to do them all beautifully is a true gift." ―Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of I Contain Multitudes and Immense Worlds
"Take to the Trees invites us to contemplate pushing past our own limits up into the treetops, as well as respecting the guidance of trees. I learned much from this wise book, and can only hope that many readers follow this writer up into the highest branches, to gain an understanding of where we are planted on this earth. Holloway's insights are urgent and necessary." ―Sarah Ruhl, MacArthur fellow, playwright, and author of Smile
This information about Take to the Trees was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marguerite Holloway is is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and has written for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications. She is the author of The Measure of Manhattan, and she lives in New York.
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