“This writer is a seeker and seer among those who work the land within the cycles of time. He knows how to listen and not simply catalog nature, both human and wild, but create a tapestry of embodied stories born out of the intimate wisdom of sweat and hunger and an earthly intelligence. At a time when we wonder where hope resides, this is a book of faith in the natural histories of community, broken and sustained. Not only does the language honor the encountered beauties along the way, it explores a complexity of ideas that reminds us we are not strangers in the world if we remain open to awe and respectful of the tenacious spirit required to live in place. The Small Heart of Things is a book of patience.”—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Finding Beauty in a Broken World
“‘To be at home in the world is to let ourselves be drawn into its embrace,’ writes Julian Hoffman in this sparkling, humane collection of essays. Something similar can be said about reading his exquisite book—we’re drawn into the warmth and intimacy of his meditations. Part travel writing, part environmental witness, part celebration of the human spirit in the more-than-human world, this book guides us to a distant landscape of borders visible and invisible and of enriching change. Throughout, Hoffman is a superb tour guide: observant, knowledgeable, and deftly surprising in the connections he makes among the myriad small things he enables us to see.”—Elizabeth Dodd, author of Horizon’s Lens
"A sharply observed . . . collection of essays on the interrelationships of man and nature, of soul and place . . . A deeply felt book that will lead readers to other books that inspired it."—Kirkus Reviews
"Julian Hoffman's vast knowledge of the natural world is surpassed only by his deep compassion for all beings—human and otherwise—who inhabit this planet we all share. The Small Heart of Things is a big-hearted book written in prose as clear and strong as the stunningly beautiful Greek landscape it describes."—BK Loren, author of Theft
"The best essays in The Small Heart of Things examine intricate problems of place and legacy. . . . What makes Hoffman’s plea for a deeper engagement with the natural world so arresting is that this engagement doesn’t come at the expense of a relationship with the often-messy political and social environments of a place, but rather strengthens it. Hoffman’s tranquility is not a passive retreat from our tumultuously loud, permanently distracted era; his project is to exert a compassionate mindfulness in the face of apathy—apathy toward the environment, or toward overlooked or forgotten populations." —Caitlin Keefe Moran, Iowa Review
"In writing this remarkable work of environmental and natural-history literature, Hoffman resided in the Prespa Lakes Transboundary Park shared by Greece, Albania, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. These seventeen short essays capture an intensely focused, curious, tireless, supremely gifted writer as he acquaints himself with himself and one of the world's most unique places." —Matt Sutherland, ForeWord Reviews
"The message of finding wonder in our surroundings, as familiar as it may seem, is fresh here. The prose soothes. The pages absorb you. Hoffman’s world is endlessly instructive and inclusive. It’s our world, too, if we wish to see it that way. An environment on its own is uninflected, but it becomes a home when we attach experience to it. Any place—and every place—can be a home. The Small Heart of Things is a celebration of spaces and the hidden, miraculous lives within them, but it’s a quiet celebration, the pause after you open a gift, truly surprised, and inhabit a speechless moment." —Scott Onak, The Rumpus
“As I read the book, which I have done slowly, saving a chapter a day as a meditative treat, I find myself drawn out of indifference. The doors of my perception are opened wider. . . .Each handcrafted story shows us how the doors of our perception are opened, if, like the author, we pay loving attention to the places around us. Our universal human capacity for attention, when finely honed, as in this wordsmith’s collection, enables us to see the beauty in the ordinary as in the marvellous.” —Shaun Lambert, The Baptist Times
2013-09-01
A sharply observed, occasionally overwritten collection of essays on the interrelationships of man and nature, of soul and place. Born in Britain and raised in Canada, Hoffman now lives in and often writes of the Balkans, near the Prespa Lakes, a region of natural splendor and deep political divisions. He and his partner "were led to this Greek village by a book. Having read a glowing review of it in a bird-watching magazine, we bought the book on the off chance that we might someday visit the region it described. But it took only a single evening of leafing through its pages, reading passages aloud, and looking at photographs to reach a decision of far greater import…it captivated us from the start." An impetuous romantic, the author also came to love that particular place, and here, he shares that love, as well as his love of books about places, for he seems to connect with nature from a particularly literary perspective. He writes of "the resonance of place," "the environmental vicissitudes of place," and the feeling that "there are no clean, easy lines that connect ourselves to a place, as if we were joining up a question with its answer in a beginner's language book." More compelling than such grand pronouncements and conceptual conceits are the specifics of experience and detail, the wonder Hoffman finds in this seemingly insignificant woods, in the cry of this bird or the stateliness of that tree, and the exhilaration he feels as he experiences life as part of the natural world: "The places where I can look up or out, either at the vast ceiling of cloud and sky, or the disappearing horizon, and feel more or less the same thing: the inconsequential scale of our lives. Paradoxically, it is in those places that I feel most alive, experiencing a wild and shuddering depth to existence." A deeply felt book that will lead readers to other books that inspired it.
