WITH EVERY GREAT BREATH New and Selected Essays, 1995-2023

Rick Bass delivers these essays--old and new--at a deliberate pace and a careful tempo. His voice sounds kindly and literary. Reared in Texas, he retains a slight twang and the long vowels of that region ("fi-er", "why l" and "e-quator"). That he is soulful, sincere, and aspirational matters more. A fiction writer and essayist, he is also an environmental activist, and a number of these texts center on the horrific aftermath--asbestosis and mesothelioma--of the mining that took place near his adopted home in the Yak Valley of Montana. His appreciation of friend and fellow environmentalist Barry Lopez, along with Ernest Hemingway and nature itself, plus his decimation of W.R. Grace, the mine owner at the heart of one the biggest lawsuits ever filed, makes this collection memorable. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2024]