USC Belser Book Discussion Nov 2024: "The Overstory" by Richard Powers

Welcome all nature lovers to the Belser Arboretum Book Club! Please join us, and share this announcement with your fellow readers.

Meet Sunday, November 24, 2024, at 3 p.m. in the Arboretum's Outdoor Classroom.

PLEASE REGISTER in case we must change venue due to weather.

Discussion with arboretum staff.

The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

“Monumental… The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.… A gigantic fable of genuine truths.” ― Barbara Kingsolver, The New York Times Book Review

“This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed.” —Bill McKibben“

The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable achievement by a great writer.” —Thomas McGuane

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The Bloomwood gate opens at 2:30, so please enjoy a walk before we begin.

We'll have snacks and beverages, and you're welcome to bring your own.

Note that trails are natural and hilly, and restrooms are not available.

Please leave pets at home.

Host or Publisher W. Gordon Belser Arboretum