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Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food
From the acclaimed author of Theft : “A lyrical exploration of the timeless themes of nature, mortality, love, and family” in the American West (Kristen Iverson, author of Full Body Burden ). “Radical, before it meant a person who advocates strong political reform, meant getting to the root of things, the origin. It comes from the Latin radix, radicis, meaning radish, a root vegetable.” ―BK Loren These meditative essays range in subject from a transcendental encounter with a pack of coyotes to the irony of a neighbor’s claim that nature “has gone out of vogue”; from a mother’s slow deterioration from Parkinson’s disease to the unexpected way the Loma Prieta earthquake eroded the author’s depression by offering her a sense of her small place in our wild and worthwhile world. Award-winning writer and naturalist BK Loren takes an empathetic and gentle approach to the intricacies of human relationships and the nature of consciousness. Fear of death and time, cooperation born of clashing viewpoints, the beauty of tradition even when it’s destructive, a love of language, a sense of loss amid the fast-paced materialistic world―through each of these subjects and more, Loren peels back the layers of her own life, revealing what it means to be a human being in these often inhumane times.
- GenresEssaysMemoirNonfiction
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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167 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
June 25, 2021
I bought this book by mistake, thinking that B. K. Loren was the author of an essay I have long admired (actually by Loren Eiseley). I don't regret it, even if I'm not sure the book is something I need to keep.
Animal, Mineral, Radical is an interesting collection of memoir-y essays, and Loren is a thoughtful and deliberate writer, whether she is writing about things I have yet to experience but am dreading (the aging of one's parents), or things that made a definite impression on both of us (the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), or things that I tend to have small but significant existential crises about (how did I, a smallish bipedal ape, end up living in concrete boxes and wearing clothes and looking at screened machines?). It helps that Loren and I have lived in roughly the same place among redwoods and driven the same windy highway over the Santa Cruz mountains. There's kinship in knowing and loving the same place, I think.
The writing is often lovely, if a bit fussier than I prefer.
3.5 stars - not quite enough resonance with me to earn a spot on my shelf, but worth the time and money spent upon it.
Animal, Mineral, Radical is an interesting collection of memoir-y essays, and Loren is a thoughtful and deliberate writer, whether she is writing about things I have yet to experience but am dreading (the aging of one's parents), or things that made a definite impression on both of us (the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), or things that I tend to have small but significant existential crises about (how did I, a smallish bipedal ape, end up living in concrete boxes and wearing clothes and looking at screened machines?). It helps that Loren and I have lived in roughly the same place among redwoods and driven the same windy highway over the Santa Cruz mountains. There's kinship in knowing and loving the same place, I think.
The writing is often lovely, if a bit fussier than I prefer.
Depression, the clinical kind, and its best buddy, insomnia, kept me company, and we went walking together, sometimes late at night, or early in the morning: any time, that is, when everyone else was sleeping. Sometimes when we walked, it snowed. It rarely snows in Albuquerque, but when it does, it comes in the night, when you can sip darkness from the sky like wine - a little celebration with confetti. At the first sign of morning, though, the snow sinks back into the earth, soaking the dry desert beneath the city.
3.5 stars - not quite enough resonance with me to earn a spot on my shelf, but worth the time and money spent upon it.
November 11, 2012
I was lucky enough to read this book way in advance of its publication date and it was like taking a clean cool shower on a very hot day. A meditation on how the way we treat the natural world and the way we treat language and the art we make with it are essentially all bound up together and to pretend they are not is going to get us in serious trouble. These essays are beautiful and heartfelt and deeply important to the world.
February 7, 2013
At times this book is a painting, at others a poem, or a song to life and all of it's wonderful variety. It is passion and it is pain because a good life necessarily has both--a yin/yang of mystery that is nevertheless familiar to us all. BK is boldly open and honest about things that have happened in her life, and how they help mold her into the person she is today, which is still a forever changing being. Her lyric voice, even when hard edged, is mesmerizing. I loved this book, and I will be its champion forever--it is definitely on my list of best books I've ever read.
January 27, 2013
Thanks to everyone who is reading or has read this book. I wrote every piece in Animal, Mineral, Radical out of sheer love for the topic. I've added an update to any chapter whose story continued after I quit writing; I forgot to mention, though, that I lived at the lighthouse station in "Margie's Discount" for a month. The Lighthouse keeper was convinced that my mother's ghost was staying there, so she gave me the digs while she was in Mexico. That's another essay--but knowing it may also add to your read of "Margie's Discount." Please feel free to drop me a line any time. I answer every email I receive (eventually). And thanks again for reading ANIMAL, MINERAL, RADICAL.
March 6, 2015
Animal, Mineral, Radical arrived on Sat. and I have been slowly savoring it.
We have movements in our world: Slow Food, Slow Money. Perhaps we need a movement called Slow Read? If one belongs to the Slow Read movement one would read slowly, carefully. We would chew each word deliberately and with care as though it is a precious gift - which indeed it is. We would allow these precious word gifts to digest thoroughly, to nourish us completely. Such are the words in Animal, Mineral, Radical. They are precious gifts to be savored, to be chewed slowly and deliberately. These are words to read slowly and to nourish completely.
Thank you to BK Loren, for writing and sharing these special words and for turning these special words into a very special book. I think I will now consider founding the Slow Read movement.
We have movements in our world: Slow Food, Slow Money. Perhaps we need a movement called Slow Read? If one belongs to the Slow Read movement one would read slowly, carefully. We would chew each word deliberately and with care as though it is a precious gift - which indeed it is. We would allow these precious word gifts to digest thoroughly, to nourish us completely. Such are the words in Animal, Mineral, Radical. They are precious gifts to be savored, to be chewed slowly and deliberately. These are words to read slowly and to nourish completely.
Thank you to BK Loren, for writing and sharing these special words and for turning these special words into a very special book. I think I will now consider founding the Slow Read movement.
October 23, 2019
This might be my new favorite book. I cannot do it any justice with my words, but I will say this: this book made me feel - more, perhaps, anything I have ever read before. It infuriated me. It overwhelmed me. If made me incredibly grateful to be alive, to be a reader, and to be fortunate enough to be reading these stunning essays. This collection is art in its highest form. Like all great art, it heightened my sense of connection to and awareness of life, the experience of living, and the plight and privilege of humanity. Breathtaking.
December 15, 2019
BK's essays are so succinct, sensitive and graceful. I've had the opportunity to take a class of hers, and you notice right away from the light that she radiates that she sees the world clearly. This is only confirmed in her writing.
September 24, 2013
Brilliant, funny, thoughtful, and gorgeously written. The most captivating book I've read this year.
July 15, 2016
An incredible set of essays that all reminded me of the import of our words, and the relationships we try to cultivate with those words. Wow.
September 1, 2016
The thirteen essays in this volume, of varying length and subject matter, exhibit deep honesty and vulnerability, sensitivity and seeking, wonder and wisdom. They are all very personal, and very often about loss: of innocence; of language due to aphasia; of her home in the Loma Prieta earthquake, though that loss showed her the way back to her own lost center; of her mother to Parkinson's disease, and of her brothers, though they not to death; and over and over, of essential wildness.
Throughout the writing is at turns straightforward and lyrical, closely descriptive and metaphorical—but never sentimental. Nor does Loren shy away from contradictions, in the world or within herself. As when she goes hunting with her beloved older brother:
"If you're not a hunter, what happened next may disturb you. It disturbs me. Because it was beautiful. I swear it felt for a moment like Roy and I had stepped into the crack between two worlds. For no apparent reason—no difference in sound or movement or mood—the deer stopped grazing. They became as still as Roy. Then there was the shot and the scattering of the deer that ran like seeds might blow across the land, and one doe fell to her knees. Then to her neck. Then to her side.
"The click of the gun cocking, the blast, the sound of the doe falling, and the crash of the rest of the herd taking off were all one sound. Time layered, no sequence.
"Then we snapped back to this world. It was no longer beautiful. I was watching a living being die. It was ugly, as death is always ugly. And it was mean, and it was hard, and it was bloody, and life wanted to hang on; it always does."
Loren is able to bridge the gap between our lived world and something larger, more encompassing. There is both yearning and appreciation, awe even. Her view is often philosophical. She concludes an essay called "The Evolution of Hunger," in which she describes the deaths of a homeless man and of her father, the vanishing of her younger brother, and the celebration of Thanksgiving, with this lovely paragraph (one that begins to explain the "food" of the book's subtitle):
"In the morning I wake to a world that pulses beauty in its sunrise veins, but whose little cells of people seem doomed to repeat rather than evolve. I am among them, the déjà vu of centuries, millennia, the wars of eons, of gods, of islands blasted to barrenness. But the sunrise is still saffron, melting above solid mountains, and the beauty drips from the sky onto the human mess of us all. And after centuries, millennia, eons of eating—of stuffing my privileged self to the gills that I no longer have—I wake hungry, achingly starved to become more human: the beautiful animal in the core of me craving the evolution of it all."
I marked many passages that I thought particularly lovely: lyrical, potent, keenly felt. This book is something of a prayer, by one who professes no religion but who knows what is sacred, who knows how to stop and listen for "the ragged beauty and reason of everyday life."
Throughout the writing is at turns straightforward and lyrical, closely descriptive and metaphorical—but never sentimental. Nor does Loren shy away from contradictions, in the world or within herself. As when she goes hunting with her beloved older brother:
"If you're not a hunter, what happened next may disturb you. It disturbs me. Because it was beautiful. I swear it felt for a moment like Roy and I had stepped into the crack between two worlds. For no apparent reason—no difference in sound or movement or mood—the deer stopped grazing. They became as still as Roy. Then there was the shot and the scattering of the deer that ran like seeds might blow across the land, and one doe fell to her knees. Then to her neck. Then to her side.
"The click of the gun cocking, the blast, the sound of the doe falling, and the crash of the rest of the herd taking off were all one sound. Time layered, no sequence.
"Then we snapped back to this world. It was no longer beautiful. I was watching a living being die. It was ugly, as death is always ugly. And it was mean, and it was hard, and it was bloody, and life wanted to hang on; it always does."
Loren is able to bridge the gap between our lived world and something larger, more encompassing. There is both yearning and appreciation, awe even. Her view is often philosophical. She concludes an essay called "The Evolution of Hunger," in which she describes the deaths of a homeless man and of her father, the vanishing of her younger brother, and the celebration of Thanksgiving, with this lovely paragraph (one that begins to explain the "food" of the book's subtitle):
"In the morning I wake to a world that pulses beauty in its sunrise veins, but whose little cells of people seem doomed to repeat rather than evolve. I am among them, the déjà vu of centuries, millennia, the wars of eons, of gods, of islands blasted to barrenness. But the sunrise is still saffron, melting above solid mountains, and the beauty drips from the sky onto the human mess of us all. And after centuries, millennia, eons of eating—of stuffing my privileged self to the gills that I no longer have—I wake hungry, achingly starved to become more human: the beautiful animal in the core of me craving the evolution of it all."
I marked many passages that I thought particularly lovely: lyrical, potent, keenly felt. This book is something of a prayer, by one who professes no religion but who knows what is sacred, who knows how to stop and listen for "the ragged beauty and reason of everyday life."
September 20, 2014
BK Loren puts together one beautiful sentence after another in these meditative essays on food, the environment, modern life, family, and friends. For me, she's at her best when she's talking about people--and more specifically, when she's talking about people who are unlike herself (her "redneck" and autistic brothers, the rag man, the friend whose father rapes her, etc). These people challenge her own vision of herself as unlike them and work towards finding the human connections that make possible and effective the kind of collective action she advocates in "Got Tape?"
In some ways, it's ironic that Loren begins this book with an introduction that worries about a trend towards blog-style writing (her fear that coalesces when she read a n+1 articles that argues "soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care"). As a reader of Victorian essays, I can't help but see how far we already are from the elevated rhetoric of one to two hundred years ago. By those standards, Loren might be judged as a representative of the kind of writing that she fears, yet the less mannered style requires as much effort and patience as its predecessor. These essays are neither pretentious or old-fashioned, and thank goodness for that. Loren takes the time and puts forth the enormous effort to write a quick-reading, engaging, and thought-provoking read.
In some ways, it's ironic that Loren begins this book with an introduction that worries about a trend towards blog-style writing (her fear that coalesces when she read a n+1 articles that argues "soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care"). As a reader of Victorian essays, I can't help but see how far we already are from the elevated rhetoric of one to two hundred years ago. By those standards, Loren might be judged as a representative of the kind of writing that she fears, yet the less mannered style requires as much effort and patience as its predecessor. These essays are neither pretentious or old-fashioned, and thank goodness for that. Loren takes the time and puts forth the enormous effort to write a quick-reading, engaging, and thought-provoking read.
April 5, 2015
In the first issue of Orion Magazine that I ever read was an essay by BK Loren called “Snapshots of My Redneck Brother.” It was a taut and compelling piece of writing, telling of the messy bonds between siblings and the ways we go about finding our place in the world. I knew then, in just a few evocative pages, that I’d found writer whose work resonated deeply with me. Now that essay finds a home in Animal, Mineral, Radical, a collection of rare honesty and illumination. Whether detailing a mountain lion seen crossing a tennis court in the evening flood of artificial light, the ghostly and memorable outline of coyotes by a river, or the consequences of the earthquake that flattens the author’s house, Loren explores the connections, correspondences, and contradictions between ourselves and the natural world in beautiful, transformative prose.
June 1, 2017
BK Loren has further perfected the art of essaying by her use of environment as the stream connecting one piece to the next. Each piece less a reflection on the physical environment portrayed, of course, but instead diving deep into the interpersonal relationships of her friends and family, or perhaps all family - as that seems to be Loren's preferred arrangement. None of this alone is groundbreaking to the form, but the execution is absolutely perfect. The balance of characters, viewpoints, and lack of judgement made every one of these essays a pleasure to read.
September 10, 2013
B.K. Loren is an extremely talented writer. She has an amazing way of describing place so that you see it, feel it, and smell it; place is truly a strong character in all her work. Her love of family, even in the context of complicated, layered relationships, comes through in an honest, gut-wrenching, yet totally unsappy (yes; I know that's not a word) way. After spending a week with B.K. the person and many pages with B.K. the writer, I plan to read every book she writes.
January 19, 2015
Splendid, candid, fierce, tender essays. Loren truly dares to wander and try, to let the materials come together as they need to and must. I was hooked with the first essay on coyotes. "Margie's Discount" makes me wish I wrote essays. What a tribute to her mother and to life itself.
This will be a favorite book for decades. I recommend it highly. Loren shares her fresh, grounded, hard-won, unique take on being human. Her views are not predigested but fresh as rainfall.
This will be a favorite book for decades. I recommend it highly. Loren shares her fresh, grounded, hard-won, unique take on being human. Her views are not predigested but fresh as rainfall.
March 20, 2013
Beautifully written, this is an eclectic collection of essays that touches on the health concerns of those who grew up in the path of the radiation from Rocky Flats; how we relate to family members; and our interactions with wilderness/wild animals. Absolutely lyrical.
November 11, 2014
This book is a stunning collection of essays on topics as varied as love, depression, mountain lions, vegetables, and family. Each is exquisitely rendered and yet raw at the same time. I look forward to reading more from BK Loren.
May 11, 2015
I've taken writing workshops from BK and particularly enjoyed this work of nonfiction and the range of topics-- it's her mind at work and reminds me of how I think too. She also has a novel, Theft, that is a good read in a totally different way.
October 13, 2016
It's incredibly difficult--and brave--for a writer to travel into the much traveled territory of "nature writing." BK Loren does. Magnificently. This slender collection of powerful essays deserves a much wider audience. Highly recommended.
June 27, 2017
An emotional collection of essays gorgeously written by a unique person able to share a passel of universal truths about family, illness and aging, war, Colorado, depression, elation, nature, oppression and friendship. And that is just what I got. I bought a copy for my mother. Need I say more?
August 18, 2013
A powerful and moving collection with echoes of Dillard and Terry Tempest Williams. I lived this book.
February 19, 2013
Loved reading a variety of essays by BK. Her way with words is like fine music, sometimes classical, sometimes folk, and sometimes rock and roll.
Wonderful. I am going to read each one again.
Wonderful. I am going to read each one again.
March 9, 2014
She is running the workshop in Taos.
I've so enjoyed meeting and working with BK. And her writing rocks :)
I've so enjoyed meeting and working with BK. And her writing rocks :)
September 23, 2013
Lovely book. In the spirit of Terry Tempest Williams, a creative non-fiction collection of essays. Tasty words, with meaning conveyed in a delicate, sensitive, artistic way.
November 30, 2015
The essays soar when Loren's attention to language guides the writing. A nice mis of subjects give a lens into her life.
January 8, 2020
I really enjoyed this read!
April 2, 2020
I was all-in on this book. Essays span a life's trajectory of peaks and nadirs. The reflections are beautiful, brainy, sad, full of heart, speculative, personal and relatable--especially if you allow yourself some transformation while reading.
I seldom take notes when reading but I stuck yellow sticky notes on pages of this book. 11 of them. Two marked paragraphs I noted simply "me."
Two "dreams."
One a song I'd like to listen to.
Two questions of mine: "Why couldn't they accept this? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. How would you encourage others?"
Several exclamation marks (mine).
Stars.
The last, "when animals go blind, it's all sleep" (that's me, not Loren, and I wish I could talk to her about it).
I seldom reread books--for the many I haven't read that I must read--but I will reread this one.
I seldom take notes when reading but I stuck yellow sticky notes on pages of this book. 11 of them. Two marked paragraphs I noted simply "me."
Two "dreams."
One a song I'd like to listen to.
Two questions of mine: "Why couldn't they accept this? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. How would you encourage others?"
Several exclamation marks (mine).
Stars.
The last, "when animals go blind, it's all sleep" (that's me, not Loren, and I wish I could talk to her about it).
I seldom reread books--for the many I haven't read that I must read--but I will reread this one.
Read
November 18, 2020Maybe not my cup of tea, but there was still some nice writing
March 29, 2025
I devoured this book and got to know a bit about my beloved writer teacher and friend
June 17, 2025
Some really thoughtful, beautiful essays in this collection. However, when the subtitle is “Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food, I expect more than 2 food essays.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews