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Maybe someday
31
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
46/100Critics
16/100Scholars
Author:
Lisa Wells
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
July 20, 2021
Poet and essayist Lisa Wells takes us on a pilgrimage to the margins of the environmental movement, examining the lives and work of trailblazers and outliers who are finding new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change.
What The Reviewers Say
... a thought-provoking and heady mix of memoir, journalism and philosophy.
Three-quarters of the way through her book, Wells gives up on her series of immersive jaunts with 'believers' and steps back to draw on the thoughts and writings of others. We miss the outrageous forays, the wrong turns and the tangled ways her rootlessness drives her. Somewhere she loses her thread and fails to fully break through. Her own 'promised land' is always elsewhere.
Wells shows us the faces of an evolving movement dedicated to saving the planet from the ravages of human exploitation. Their stories are often heart-wrenching, with personal tragedies fueling their desire to create environmental change.
Believers is digressive and its scope broad, the book’s many threads tied by Wells’ appraisal of environmental damage and repair. She’s largely successful in this intertwining, although some storylines are better executed than others. A chapter that fluctuates between a reconciliation ceremony in Taos, New Mexico, and a mental breakdown on a trip to Philadelphia feels off-kilter. (Sometimes, the language itself feels circular; while reading, I underlined a sentence that struck me. When the same sentence appeared 10 pages later, its repetition felt more accidental than intentional.) Still, Wells’ prose, rooted in her poetry, gives her a unique advantage when writing about living through this unstable moment in history.
