Paradise Blues: Travels Through American Environmental History

Paradise Blues is an unconventional history of the United States of America that follows and renders visible the country's paths of nature, history, and civilization. Christof Mauch is a leading German historian who has spent many years in the US and attempts to grasp the diversity of American culture and the transformation of its environments. He seeks the familiar in unfamiliar places and the curious in places that seem common and well-known, bringing to light the tension and ambivalence in most Americans' attitudes towards their often-perilous environment. One of Mauch's dominant themes is that the grand hopes and bitter disappointments of the American paradise are not equally distributed, and environmental injustice toward Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized people is a recurring and haunting motif. This is a book of melancholia and hope, exposing the beauty, imperilment, and wreckage of the American environment and demonstrating that stories reveal the infinite discoveries to be made in humans' relationship to nature.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 300 pages
Publication date: 05 January 2024
Publisher: White Horse Press

Paradise Blues is an unconventional history of the United States of America, an unusual travel guide that follows and renders visible the country's paths of nature, history, and civilization. Christof Mauch is a leading German historian who has spent many years in the US. Here he attempts, from a European perspective, to grasp the diversity of American culture and the transformation of its environments, combining travel reporting with nature writing, personal observation, and philosophical reflection. Mauch seeks the familiar in unfamiliar places and the curious in places that seem common and well-known. His wanderings in space and time, his serendipitous and planned encounters with places and people, bring to light the tension and ambivalence in most Americans' attitudes towards their often-perilous environment, the intertwining throughout history of valuation, conservation, and destruction. Interactions between human beings and the environment have settled like sediment down the centuries and may be read in the present - in the form of landscapes and collective memory, in bodies of water and the earth's strata, tree rings, and human cells.

One of Mauch's dominant themes is that the grand hopes and bitter disappointments of the American paradise are not equally distributed - the blues is the voice of the dispossessed and disadvantaged; and here environmental injustice toward Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized people is a recurring and haunting motif. This is a book of melancholia and hope - Mauch exposes the beauty, the imperilment, at times the wreckage, of the American environment. And he shows us that, more powerfully than abstract ideas, governmental edicts, or technological forces, stories reveal the infinite discoveries to be made about the natural world.

Paradise Blues is a remarkable work that offers a fresh and insightful perspective on the United States of America. Through his travels and observations, Mauch challenges us to think critically about our relationship with the natural world and the impact of human activities on it. He encourages us to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the environment while also recognizing the challenges and injustices that exist. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, culture, and the environment, and it will inspire and challenge readers for years to come.

Weight: 418g
Dimension: 151 x 230 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781912186785