Into the Remainder Bins
15th June 2015
Kathy Shaidle jerks back the curtain.
That Watt-Cloutier was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore isn’t something I’d personally brag about, but it gets us to the message of her book, which is basically “global warming is melting stuff up here and wrecking our way of life.” Said way of life in Nunavut amounting to paying ten times the price for groceries flown up from the part of the country where we actually grow and make stuff, then sitting in the dark half the year getting drunk.
Carrie Saxifrage, who wrote the second book in question — The Big Swim: Coming Ashore in a World Adrift — also changed her name in adulthood, but for pretentious, First World white lady reasons:
She and her husband named themselves after a white flower that grows on mountaintops, and, as she recounts, “Our families didn’t know what to make of our earnest explanations of how we were claiming relationship to those pure, high places[.]”
I pray that being “high” had something to do with this couple’s rejected-Portlandia-script name-change. The notion of anyone undertaking such an endeavor stone cold sober chills the blood.
…
The very notion of “climate change memoirs” provides minutes of fun. One eagerly awaits the release of Confessions of a (Locally Sourced, Organic) Opium Eater and Go Ask Alice (About Bee Colony Collapse.)