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The Inner Coast Lib/E: Essays
Prize-winning essays on our changing place in the natural world by the best-selling author of Moby-Duck.
Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects ten of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, which feature his physical, historical, and emotional journeys through the American landscape.
By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, the lost art of ice canoeing, and Americans’ complicated love/hate relationship with Thoreau. The Inner Coast marks the return of one of our finest young writers.
Since the publication of Moby-Duck a decade ago, Hohn has been widely hailed for his prize-winning essays on the borderlands between the natural and the human. The Inner Coast collects ten of his best, many of them originally published in such magazines as the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, which feature his physical, historical, and emotional journeys through the American landscape.
By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, the lost art of ice canoeing, and Americans’ complicated love/hate relationship with Thoreau. The Inner Coast marks the return of one of our finest young writers.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
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First published June 2, 2020
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About the author
Donovan Hohn
2 books65 followersDonovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2010 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. Moby-Duck, his first book, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism and runner-up for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn is now a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he has begun work on a second book.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 21, 2023
Thoughtful collection of essays, many previously published in literary journals, Harper's, and in The New York Times Book Review and Magazine. The title geographically links the book to the Great Lakes region of North America, and several essays delve into the history, culture, and current events of this region.
One of my favorite pieces, "The Romance of Rust" follows collectors of pre-industrial and primitive tools. It's a great dive into early North American material culture and archaeology, and a unique character study of these collectors. Philosophy interwoven with ingenuity... it's a great essay.
"...maybe handiness does matter. Once upon a time, we referred to all forms of manufacturing (a Latinate word for "making by hand") as "the arts", and all artists, manual as well as fine - masons, blacksmiths, and mechanics, as well as sculptors, musicians, and poets - could find meaning in their work." (pg 30)
Recommended for those who have enjoyed Barry Lopez, Roland Barthes, and Terry Tempest Williams.
4.25/5*
One of my favorite pieces, "The Romance of Rust" follows collectors of pre-industrial and primitive tools. It's a great dive into early North American material culture and archaeology, and a unique character study of these collectors. Philosophy interwoven with ingenuity... it's a great essay.
"...maybe handiness does matter. Once upon a time, we referred to all forms of manufacturing (a Latinate word for "making by hand") as "the arts", and all artists, manual as well as fine - masons, blacksmiths, and mechanics, as well as sculptors, musicians, and poets - could find meaning in their work." (pg 30)
Recommended for those who have enjoyed Barry Lopez, Roland Barthes, and Terry Tempest Williams.
4.25/5*
December 29, 2023
Here's a book that I hope is able to rise out of the darkness that is the pandemic. It is definitely worth getting to your bookshop (even if it can only be on-line) and snagging a copy. I reviewed it for Michigan Quarterly Review:
In 2012, Donovan Hohn published Moby-Duck and gave his book a marvelous 18th century subtitle: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. Hohn’s big first book is bound together by the narrative of these rubber duckies dropped from a freighter when a shipping container went overboard in a storm. The bathtub toys were set free on the waves of the North Pacific to begin their wandering all across the world. That event becomes the line from which Hohn can hang several threads. He writes about the people who hunt beaches for detritus. He goes to Chinese factories where plastic toys are created for the American market. He writes about the scientists who study oceans and their currents. He sails the northern ocean to get a personal feel for the movement of ocean currents. All of these chapters—Hohn calls them “chases”—could have been separate inquiries, but those rubber duckies bind them all together as one effort in one book.
This new book, The Inner Coast, has a different, simpler subtitle: Essays. That seems to imply that this book has a much looser structure, might be a collection of occasional essays brought together because it was time for Donovan Hohn to have another book. But that impression would be so incomplete as to be entirely wrong. First there is Hohn’s insistence in that subtitle: these are “essays” in Montaigne’s first meaning of the word – “efforts,” “attempts at understanding,” and not examples of the more fashionable label, “creative non-fictions,” although several of these essays use the authority of the first person in much the same way as that newer discipline does. But it becomes very clear as the reader processes through the collection, that those attempts are connected by Hohn’s passion, his intelligence and the evocative style of his prose.
Hohn worked for many years as an editor at GQ and then at Harpers. He knows how to structure the well-researched essay and to combine facts with observation. The longest essay here is partly a history of the odd pastime of collecting antique tools, as well as a moving narration about one of Hohn’s relatives. Along the way, it says very interesting things about the Midwest, the region Hohn has decided to make his own after formative years on the outer coasts, those that might be a bit better known than the “inner coast” of the Great Lakes.
Hohn has fascinating essays on racing canoes over ice on the St. Lawrence River, on the mammoths that are dug out of thawing permafrost and Midwestern cornfields, on Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards—the man most responsible for providing the science that defined what is now known as “the Flint water crisis”— and even a moving essay on Hohn’s own childhood in San Francisco. Near the end there is an essay, or rather four essays collected under one title, “Four Lights.” These are short biographical and critical studies of four writers who have been important influences to Hohn and on his own writing. He names novelists Evan S. Connell and Marilyn Robinson, as well as a young journalist of his own generation, Matthew Power, who died long before his time researching a story in Egypt. He concludes with a brilliant essay on Thoreau, where he takes on the easy criticisms of Thoreau that have become unthinking intellectual tics in some, primarily academic, circles—“He always went in to town to see his friends;” “His mom did his laundry everyday;” “He started a forest fire on a camping trip;” “He was a privileged misanthrope;” etc. Hohn makes a convincing argument that Thoreau directly engaged the “genuinely difficult moral questions.” Just in case we’ve forgotten, he explains that Thoreau made exact observations of the natural world, observations that people are using now as early baselines for ecological surveys in New England. Hohn even convinces us on the more difficult point that Thoreau is sometimes an intentionally funny writer.
By the end of The Inner Coast, it is clear that Donovan Hohn is not only attempting to understand the inner coast of America, that porous liquid border of the Great Lakes, the one some Michigan writers have called “the third coast.” Hohn’s careful explorations of the subjects presented to him by his new place also become markers along his own process of the intellectual and personal discovery of his psychological inner coast. It is there, in that landscape, where this book finds its thematic and its spiritual unity.
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2020/...
In 2012, Donovan Hohn published Moby-Duck and gave his book a marvelous 18th century subtitle: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. Hohn’s big first book is bound together by the narrative of these rubber duckies dropped from a freighter when a shipping container went overboard in a storm. The bathtub toys were set free on the waves of the North Pacific to begin their wandering all across the world. That event becomes the line from which Hohn can hang several threads. He writes about the people who hunt beaches for detritus. He goes to Chinese factories where plastic toys are created for the American market. He writes about the scientists who study oceans and their currents. He sails the northern ocean to get a personal feel for the movement of ocean currents. All of these chapters—Hohn calls them “chases”—could have been separate inquiries, but those rubber duckies bind them all together as one effort in one book.
This new book, The Inner Coast, has a different, simpler subtitle: Essays. That seems to imply that this book has a much looser structure, might be a collection of occasional essays brought together because it was time for Donovan Hohn to have another book. But that impression would be so incomplete as to be entirely wrong. First there is Hohn’s insistence in that subtitle: these are “essays” in Montaigne’s first meaning of the word – “efforts,” “attempts at understanding,” and not examples of the more fashionable label, “creative non-fictions,” although several of these essays use the authority of the first person in much the same way as that newer discipline does. But it becomes very clear as the reader processes through the collection, that those attempts are connected by Hohn’s passion, his intelligence and the evocative style of his prose.
Hohn worked for many years as an editor at GQ and then at Harpers. He knows how to structure the well-researched essay and to combine facts with observation. The longest essay here is partly a history of the odd pastime of collecting antique tools, as well as a moving narration about one of Hohn’s relatives. Along the way, it says very interesting things about the Midwest, the region Hohn has decided to make his own after formative years on the outer coasts, those that might be a bit better known than the “inner coast” of the Great Lakes.
Hohn has fascinating essays on racing canoes over ice on the St. Lawrence River, on the mammoths that are dug out of thawing permafrost and Midwestern cornfields, on Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards—the man most responsible for providing the science that defined what is now known as “the Flint water crisis”— and even a moving essay on Hohn’s own childhood in San Francisco. Near the end there is an essay, or rather four essays collected under one title, “Four Lights.” These are short biographical and critical studies of four writers who have been important influences to Hohn and on his own writing. He names novelists Evan S. Connell and Marilyn Robinson, as well as a young journalist of his own generation, Matthew Power, who died long before his time researching a story in Egypt. He concludes with a brilliant essay on Thoreau, where he takes on the easy criticisms of Thoreau that have become unthinking intellectual tics in some, primarily academic, circles—“He always went in to town to see his friends;” “His mom did his laundry everyday;” “He started a forest fire on a camping trip;” “He was a privileged misanthrope;” etc. Hohn makes a convincing argument that Thoreau directly engaged the “genuinely difficult moral questions.” Just in case we’ve forgotten, he explains that Thoreau made exact observations of the natural world, observations that people are using now as early baselines for ecological surveys in New England. Hohn even convinces us on the more difficult point that Thoreau is sometimes an intentionally funny writer.
By the end of The Inner Coast, it is clear that Donovan Hohn is not only attempting to understand the inner coast of America, that porous liquid border of the Great Lakes, the one some Michigan writers have called “the third coast.” Hohn’s careful explorations of the subjects presented to him by his new place also become markers along his own process of the intellectual and personal discovery of his psychological inner coast. It is there, in that landscape, where this book finds its thematic and its spiritual unity.
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2020/...
October 25, 2020
loved this
September 14, 2022
This was genre-defining: essays that are memoirs, literary criticisms, investigations, excavations, and eulogies. And yet... it was one story. An understanding (and almost a yearning?) for the author's view of the world.
September 14, 2020
Some essays were okay, some were great, a few not my cup of tea. I enjoy books like this because of the variety. Just because you don't enjoy one part doesn't mean the next one won't Wow you.
February 18, 2021
Thoughtful and masterful writing. Hohn's engaging storytelling melds reason, care, and detail into lucid prose. The book is a collection of previously published essays. A moving and delightful read. Here are a few quotes.
Donovan Hohn wrote:
"We are born into stories already in progress - those our families tell or avoid telling; those recorded in history books and newspapers, or left out of them; those encrypted by biomes and geographies, even in our bodies."
"Whether spectators or competitors, what else do we seek from sport, other than to slow time down and give it more discernible shape that is marked, say, by a starting line or a finish line, divided into laps, reducing history to moments because moments are easier to understand and abide?"
"Clean water this coming century, creditable oracles predict, will become more valuable than oil, an accelerant to conflagration as well as conflagration's antidote."
"All human lives of poignant when seen intimately but from a distance. This may help explain the widespread belief, contradicted by so much evidence, in a loving God."
Donovan Hohn wrote:
"We are born into stories already in progress - those our families tell or avoid telling; those recorded in history books and newspapers, or left out of them; those encrypted by biomes and geographies, even in our bodies."
"Whether spectators or competitors, what else do we seek from sport, other than to slow time down and give it more discernible shape that is marked, say, by a starting line or a finish line, divided into laps, reducing history to moments because moments are easier to understand and abide?"
"Clean water this coming century, creditable oracles predict, will become more valuable than oil, an accelerant to conflagration as well as conflagration's antidote."
"All human lives of poignant when seen intimately but from a distance. This may help explain the widespread belief, contradicted by so much evidence, in a loving God."
March 1, 2023
Brilliant but slow-going is how I would classify this book. As he did in his previous book, Moby-Duck, he takes obscure subjects and follows them deep and wide, as in “A Romance of Rust,” where he digs into the art of collecting old farm implements, attending auctions, visiting museums, and meeting guys who geek out on rusty wrenches and tractors. Other essays look at the myth of the mammoth, the struggle for clean water in Flint, Michigan, and the madness of ice canoeing. In “Falling,” he takes a more personal turn, sharing stories from his dysfunctional childhood. It’s all fascinating, masterfully researched and beautifully written, but perhaps best read one essay at a time, coming up for air in-between.
August 29, 2020
Donovan Hohn can write interestingly about anything, if these essays are any indication. I would never have thought I'd be gripped by an essay about antique wrenches, but I was. Looking forward now to picking up Moby-Duck and looking forward to whatever he writes next.
September 5, 2020
I enjoyed these essays on the author’s experiences in the American Midwest and growing up in California. Living in the midwest most of my life helped make these essays come to life. I was especially moved by his essays in his early childhood and his relationship with his mother.
May 31, 2020
This author can talk about the most mundane of topics and you just can’t put the book down.
October 15, 2020
Beautifully written essays, many about water.
March 27, 2021
Competent, readable, but in the end forgettable. Read about 1/3 of the book, won't finish.
December 30, 2020
Interesting for sure. I love the cover design.
February 15, 2025
The Inner Coast is a beautifully written collection of essays. Even those topics I found less engaging at first read continue to intrigue.
The title is clever, in light of the organization of topics. The inner coast initially suggests geography but encompasses individual quests and vulnerability as shaped by time. And all this heralded by a quote from the recently named 2020 Nobel Literature honoree at the start of this adventure.
As in his earlier book Moby-Duck, Hohn proves captivating narrator, a dogged researcher, and willingly shares his wonder, joy, pain, and hope.
I look forward to his book- or essays.
The title is clever, in light of the organization of topics. The inner coast initially suggests geography but encompasses individual quests and vulnerability as shaped by time. And all this heralded by a quote from the recently named 2020 Nobel Literature honoree at the start of this adventure.
As in his earlier book Moby-Duck, Hohn proves captivating narrator, a dogged researcher, and willingly shares his wonder, joy, pain, and hope.
I look forward to his book- or essays.
April 8, 2023
A gem of a book. Donovan writes on a diverse range of topics touching aspects of his personal story and upbringing. The essays are each independently brilliant and come together to create a profound tapestry of life in America. As an east-coaster I learned a lot about the culture and history of the great lakes region (aka The Inner Coast) and feel richer for it. Highly recommended!
August 9, 2021
I lost interest after a few essays.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews