UConn Reads for 2024 launched with this year's selection, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Braiding Sweetgrass is a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, named a “Best Essay Collection of the Decade” by Literary Hub, and a Book Riot “Favorite Summer Read of 2020”
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
The eBook is currently available through UConn Library. Learn more including how to access to the book at https://uconnreads.uconn.edu/
If you are interested in participating in the campus-wide conversation, please contact the UConn Reads Committee.
For more information, contact: Jean Cardinale at jean.cardinale@uconn.edu