"Quiet Desperation, Savage Delight weaves together memoir, natural history, travelogue, and literary homage to reveal a mind fully awake to our dire situation, yet able to relish birds and books, family and friends, and the living Earth."
--SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS, author of The Way of ImaginationWhen the pandemic struck, nature writer David Gessner turned to Henry David Thoreau, the original social distancer, for lessons on how to live. Those lessons--of learning our own backyard, re-wilding, loving nature, self-reliance, and civil disobedience--hold a secret that could help save us as we face the greater crisis of climate. DAVID GESSNER is the author of Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt's American Wilderness and the New York Times-bestselling All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and founder and editor-in-chief of Ecotone, Gessner lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife, the novelist Nina de Gramont, and their daughter, Hadley.