“Thank you for your wonderfully engaging keynote. It was just what we hoped it would be — and I’ve already heard from a few [attendees] that it’s given them some new ways to think about their own work.” —Erika Bsumek, UT Austin after a talk titled “The Reindeer at the end of the World”
“Thank you so much for your talk — your work is inspiring, and truly galvanizing!” — Robert Suits, Chicago
“Your talk was mesmerizing. And now that I have started to read your book I’ve decided that you are a poet – who chooses to disguise herself with prose.” — Kali Lightfoot, after a talk on Floating Coast at the Boston Book Festival
“Such a great talk—your explanation of “colonization starts where energy is most concentrated and follows that gradient” is imprinted on my cerebral cortex. Thanks for putting words to that and explaining it so concisely and clearly. And it was a huge crowd for JH Bird and Nature Club! Your talk was much appreciated.” — Ben Williamson, from the Jackson Hole Bird and Nature Club
“Bathsheba is a brilliant writer and presenter, and garnered rave reviews when she taught a 49 Writers class.” —Jeremy Pataky
“It would have been so cool to hear her talk more! I think that my biggest takeaways are that this is really energizing work that I hope more people can do because…we can’t exist in a way we can’t imagine.” — Chloé-Rose Colombero, undergrad attendee at a Harvard talk
“Floating Coast is an extraordinary piece of history writing, seamlessly weaving together disparate elements. It is astonishingly rich in ethnographic detail, ecological precision, economic circumstance and historical texture. Most illuminating and original is Demuth’s focus on the circulation of matter—in flesh, on hoof, inside fur and hide, and in buried minerals.” — Sverker Sörlin — Nature
“This book has unsettled me like no other I’ve recently read…[Floating Coast] is brilliant.” — Lucy Kogler – Literary Hub
“A brilliant hybrid…Often reminiscent to me of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams in its combination of rigorous research, intense looking and listening, and its clear ethical vision.” — Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
“Floating Coast is a historian’s Moby Dick, a great white whale of a book that spans centuries and links landscapes, living beings, and the flux of time, into a marvelously readable narrative.” — Amitav Ghosh, author of The Great Derangement
“A poetic meditation on the devastations of modernity in the sea, on terra firma, and, eventually, belowground. Whale hunters and reindeer herders, greedy capitalists and utopian planners, hopeful prospectors and raw-material-hungry government bureaucrats appear on the stage in this analytically powerful book, a monument to a people and their land just as much as an allegory of the world we have created.” — Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History
“Brilliant, compelling, and beautifully executed…Bathsheba Demuth writes with the poetry and wisdom of the land and the sea, drawing the human-wrought past of a faraway place close to the lives and future of us all.” — Jack E. Davis, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
“Bathsheba Demuth’s history flows as richly and fluidly as Arctic waters. As she tracks the dynamics of the modernist ecological makeover of the Bering Strait, Demuth is inventing a new form of historical narrative.”
— Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival
“In a time when human desire bends so very much of what it encounters to its own image, Bathsheba Demuth’s debut encourages us to think about the very physical limits of such a proposition. Easily one of the most innovative and poetic natural histories I have read in years.” — Elizabeth Rush, author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
“With her pleasing prose, relentless research, and profound sense of place, Bathsheba Demuth does elegant justice to the social and environmental revolutions that define the modern history of Beringia, and to the stories of indigenous communities and diverse newcomers, of gold rush and gulag, of whales and caribou.” — John McNeill, author of Something New Under the Sun
“A cautionary, instructive tale highly recommended for readers with an interest in environmental conservation.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“A superb book, essential reading for students of the once-and-future Arctic.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
