Ill Nature

Joy Williams tells it how it is. If you really want to know what is going on in our environment read this book.

Williams is the greatest writer we have in America at this moment!

Death and suffering are a big part of writing. A big part. (To paraphrase and turn upon the gifted Joy Williams; see page 49.) And you can't waste satire or pure hardcore ridicule on targets unworthy of the name. You've got to go after the people who kill animals, and you can't spare anybody. Sure it's duck soup to take aim at the National Rifle Association and the few Big Game Machos left in the world. Duck soup. And the sickie scientists who lobotomize chimps and torture rabbits just to see how long they can take it, their white coats starched and pressed, their nimble fingers taking copious notes. These targets are too easy. In the final analysis you gotta get the burger eaters, every one of them, not just the Super-Sized that waddle into the Burger King or the suburban Mommas sneaking out of the Krispy Kreme, bags of donuts like warm puppies under both arms, mouths stuffed. No, you've got to get the photo safari people who kill merely with their privileged, ignorant, dilettante PRESENCE in jungleland, a lily-livered affront to nature, over-tipping the guides and spilling martinis and overexposed film onto the purity of the veldt.At any rate, this is the Joy Williams rant, and what I say is rant on, Voltaire!This collection of magazine essays begins with "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp" in which Williams goes after the wishy-washy, faux lovers of nature, addressing them (in effect) as hey "you" with the "Big Gulp cups." Next is a short-short about rhesus monkeys being raised for laboratory research on an island charmingly called "Key Lois" (Laboratory Observing Island Simians). Williams follows this with "Safariland" in which she makes fun of the photo safari experience, reducing it to a kind of Disneyland with mosquito netting.So far Joy Williams is just satirizing. Next comes a particularly brutal short-short on wildebeests, how they can't migrate to water during the dry season as they have for millions of years because there's a cattle fence that keeps them from the water they can smell. Williams is particularly vivid as she describes thousands of them up against the fence dying of thirst. But she's only warming up. In the next piece, "The Killing Game" and in a later piece, "The Animal People" we experience the full monty of Joy Williams unleashed. Now her writing becomes (as she describes it in the final essay entitled "Why I Write") "unelusive and strident and brashly one-sided." Her words are "meant to annoy and trouble and polarize, and they made readers...half nuts with rage and disdain." (pp. 209-210) I believe it. I too love the animals, but I'd bet protozoa to primates that she'd find my efforts sadly lacking and my attitude wimpishly laissez faire.I guess the best way to demonstrate the intent and style of this remarkable book is to just quote Joy Williams. Here's the opening lines of "The Case against Babies": BABIES, BABIES, BABIES. There's a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs o

Joy Williams takes a clear-eyed look at the greedy, short-sighted and uncompassionate ways of humans, particularly the gluttonous, over-consuming American horde, and what small-brained humanoids have done to the natural world and the creatures who share this water planet. The truth may set you free, but first it will make you miserable --- if your heart has not been sanitized, plasticized, and chemicalized into stuporous numbness. Williams outlines the enormity of the forces arrayed against those who would preserve some of this beleaguered planet for the plants and animals and natural lifeforms.With ironical humor, razor wit and passionate uncommon sense, Williams takes aim at industrial agriculture, federal Wildlife Services (which "manages" wildlife by killing it), fertility clinics which allows infertile women to birth litters of babies on this overtaxed planet, hunters and the whole panoply of unbridled growth-is-good ideologues.(Unbridled growth, Edward Abbey wrote, is the ideology of the cancer cell.)What gourmands call veal and seafood are, in reality, the corpses of slaughtered animals. Williams opens the blinders to reveal the reality behind the modern consumerist lifestyle and while it is not pretty, there is a dark and twisted humor to it.Williams puts her money where her mouth is. When she had to sell some land she owned in Florida, she insisted, over the bellowing of the realtors, on deed restrictions that would preserve the land's natural character. Eventually, a nature-loving buyer appeared. Good show. I have had similar thoughts about preserving the trees on my little land; thanks to this author for giving me hope that I can protect them. Keep writing, Joy Williams, words can make a difference.Buy this book, take it to heart, hear the clarion call, get sane, change your life!

I've been waiting for someone to speak my mind about the abuse of nature, the lip service of politicians regarding the environment, development run amok and other issues that seem beyond our control; Joy Williams does this with gusto, and one senses, a deeply passionate anger. "The Killing Game" especially runs true as I live in hunting country and hear the heart-sickening comments of hunters who can barely name a handful of the flora and fauna that surrounds them on their killing expeditions. "Wildebeest" is a poignant and sad tribute to that wonderful animal driven to survive and "The Case Against Babies" reminds us just out of control the human population is. You don't have to be a "liberal tree hugger" or nature mysticist to appreciate these essays: Ms. Williams speaks as a realist and she hits hard where it should hurt, which is to make us see our hypocritical ways. This is a fast-paced read and enjoyably sarcastic but beneath that lies a plea to speak out against man's selfish, selfish existence. She is also a fine writer. I will eagerly await her next book and hope more writers like her emerge into mainstream publishing.