Whispers and Shadows

Combining his signature lively storytelling and careful observations of nature, Apps draws on a lifetime of experiences, from his earliest years growing up on a farm to his ventures as gardener, tree farmer, and steward of wetlands, prairies, and wildlife. He also takes inspiration from the writings of Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau, Sigurd Olson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, Richard Louv, and Rachel Carson. With these eloquent essays, Jerry Apps reminds us to slow down, turn off technology, and allow our senses to reconnect us to the natural world. For it is there, he writes, that “I am able to return to a feeling I had when I was a child, a feeling of having room to stretch my arms without interfering with another person, a feeling of being a small part of something much larger than I was, and I marvel at the idea.”

“[Jerry Apps’s] lively storytelling, anchored by exquisite attention to detail, profound discovery and an obvious passion for his subject, make this a pleasure to read—even if your idea of convening with nature is mowing the lawn once a week.”

—Michael Popke, Isthmus Magazine

“[Jerry Apps’s] memoirs are what for me rise to, if not greatness, then at least exceptional goodness, putting Apps in the company of our region’s finest nature writers: Sigurd Olson, August Derleth, Ben Logan, John Hildebrand, and, dare I say, Aldo Leopold. . . . These essays . . . radiate simplicity, one of the most complicated things for a writer to do. You can pretty much open the book at random and read something beautiful. . . . Apps is what his father taught him to be: a thorough and thoughtful observer of the natural world. He describes not just Wisconsin . . . but other favorite haunts, including the Boundary Waters and Yukon Island in Alaska. He describes the wildflowers he loves, the animals he watches, the nature writers who inspire him, the family excursions he cherishes. He makes the natural world palpable, as when he tells of how ‘dew hung heavy on the grass, the little beads of moisture reflecting the first rays of the sun as it climbed above the eastern horizon,’ or his evocation of wood smoke as ‘a primitive smell rich with history and memory.’”

—Bill Lueders, Wisconsin State Journal