Reviews and Comments

I like Nick Offerman. He's thoughtful, funny, self-deprecating, and has some perspectives on our relationship with the world around us that are worth listening to. Consequently, I want to like Offerman's book, but I can only like it halfway, because only half the book is really about those things. The rest is basically a travel blog about a couple trips he took with his friends or his wife. It helps that his friends (writer George Saunders and rock musician/Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy) and his wife (actor Megan Mullally) are very interesting people, but at the end of the day, those sections of the book are probably more interesting to Offerman and people who know him than they are the average reader. I thought the sections on Offerman's visits to a sheep-ranching family in the North of England had a lot more to say, both about our relationship to the land and the effort it takes to maintain that in the modern world.

Early on in the book, Offerman teases the name of Aldo Leopold, by way of a conversation he had with celebrated author Wendell Berry, and Offerman eventually gets around to describing Leopold's role in the American conservation movement (somewhat at odds with more celebrated characters like John Muir) and some lessons we can learn from Leopold's experience and way of thinking. The travelog tales do sometimes contribute to those perspectives, but the book is strongest when it avoids specific politics (it was very clearly written during COVID-19 lockdowns and many of the references already feel dated) and Offerman allows himself to explain his view of our place in the world.

Although the author, NPR reporter Sarah McCammon, recounts some of her own evangelical upbringing, this book mercifically avoids being just a memoir. It also avoids a large degree of bitterness, and in surveying and examining the white Americans who have left evangelical churches, the consistent theme seems to be a longing to belong and connect with family and traditions that have no room for them. I was struck by how separated many evangelical kids were growing up, in alternative schools, alternave sports leagues, bible colleges, etc. I was also struck by how the embattled mindset of many evangelical leaders contrasted with the height of their influence in power through the Republican Party, and impropbably, their embrace of Donald Trump. It's a good book, a thoughtful book, and it doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but it definitely cast more light on a big chunk of America whose motivations and contradictions often seem hard to understand.

I have read and enjoyed Beaton's other work, including Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside Pops, both of which are whimsical and impish re-imagining of historical figures and events that I found both irreverent and delightful.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, is something different entirely, an autobiographical telling of Beaton's time working for oil companies in Northern Alberta, and there is very little whimsy here. Graduating from college and having to pay a significant student loan, and facing a lack of jobs in her home province of Nova Scotia, Beaton takes a job in the oil sands, where pay is good, even if the work and conditions are rough. It's a bargain she reconsiders multiple times, particularly as she lives with daily sexual harassment or worse, the isolation of the camps, the physical toll and safety hazards of the work, and homesickness. She depicts her fellow workers in a candid and human way, as pawns of the system too, even when many of them treat her harshly or cruelly. And while I wouldn't call it a comedy, there is humor mixed in with the grind. The book felt honest and important, probably the most important book I've read this year so far.