Forests

There's some staggering and beautiful detail hidden in the undergrowth of this book, particularly in the earlier parts, and many new previously unknown texts it revealed, but a couple of things throw it off. Keeping in mind it's written in the early 90s, and that its stated mission is the place of forests in “western” thought, I can almost forgive its overwhelming whiteness and eurocentricity, thought it is a missed opportunity – I wanted to read the version of this book that really wrestled with, or at least nodded to, how humanity as a whole considered the forest as shadow space. Even when it arrives in the Americas at the end, really there's only Thoreau and Frank Lloyd Wright. Secondly, was there not a single damn woman over all these millennia surveyed that had a thought worth noting about forests? Not a one? I can't forgive that for its time of writing. It also degenerates into its second half to a succession of middling lit crit essays about things (poems, paintings, buildings) with trees in them, which is not really what the promising core thesis was about. Alas.