What We Hold In Our Hands: a Slow Road Reader ranges widely across the realm of relationships-with family, community, and the global order of nature-both as blessings and as obligations we hold in our hands. Like his first book, this one is, in part, a memoir of place, a "personal ecology" with more about his Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains environment and the non-human neighbors the author lives with. First also brings the reader to more perplexing issues: how much (clothes, technology and stuff) is enough? How ought we to live so that our children's children can live within their means and within the planet's capacities to rebound? With good humor and an easy style, the author elevates the simple, ordinary, and local in a way that will bring a smile, a raised eyebrow, or nod of affirmation.