Kathleen Dean Moore is a stunning new voice among the literary naturalists. Her writing, like that of Annie Dillard or Edward Hoagland, shows us a vast, complex, partly hidden and startling world that has always been right before our eyes. In these twenty elegant and provocative essays, she invites us to travel through the West with her, and often with her family, as she rafts down rapids, hikes through dunes, camps in the desert, and walks along riverbanks. All along the way, she shares her remarkable observations about the life - both human and otherwise - that is sustained by rivers. Moore ponders love, loss, motherhood, happiness, evolution, and country music with ease and acuity.Moore is a philosopher by training and a naturalist by sentiment. The way in which she sees the world and way in which she gracefully imparts how she sees it, is a mixture of both disciplines: part keen analysis, part sumptuous embrace, of all that she sees, hears, and feels in the moving water of rivers and of memory.The result is Riverwalking, a collection that is enlightening, moving, and brilliantly conceived.

(61/4 X 91/4, 180 pages).