World Within a World

In this book naturalist Paul Gruchow meditates on twelve sites among the many acquired over the past 25 years by the Minnesota Department of Natural resources "to provide sanctuary for rare plant and animal communities--in some cases the last representatives of their kind in Minnesota": the Prairie Coteau near Pipestone and the 3.6-billion-year-old rock near Granite Falls in southwestern Minnesota; Townshend Woods, Mound Prairie, and Kellogg-Weaver River Valley in southeastern Minnesota; Felton Prairie in the northwest; and Rush Lake Island, Ripley Esker, Black Lake Bog, Lost Lake Peatland, and Lutsen Woods in the forested northeastern part of the state. The essays are brief, perhaps 2,000 words, often accompanied by useful one-page field notes (Richel Burkey-Harris) and forty illustrative four-color photos from the Minnesota DNR magazine MINNESOTA CONSERVATION VOLUNTEER, where the essays first appeared. The book is a reduced coffee table size, short-side bound, printed on heavy coated stock, attractively designed (except for the irritatingly brittle semi-transparent dust jacket).(...)Gruchow has a prairie eye even when he's off of the prairie, and he focuses not just on sites, but on component parts of sites (in this respect his prose is much richer than the book's photographs) (...)In WORLDS WITHIN A WORLD, Gruchow's words have the upper hand: elegant, sometimes literary (Jim Wright's poem on a blue heron is quoted), always vivid and precise. This book won the 2000 Minnesota Book Award in the category of Nature and Minnesota, and the award was well deserved.