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The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston | 
 enlarge | Author: John Hanson Mitchell
Publisher: Beacon Press
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $7.50
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 47599
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 080707148X
Dewey Decimal Number: 508.74461
EAN: 9780807071489
ASIN: 080707148X
Publication Date: August 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In 1614, explorer John Smith sailed into what was to become Boston Harbor and referred to the wild lands and waters around him as "the Paradise of all these parts." Within fifteen years, the Puritans were developing the tadpole-shaped Shawmut Peninsula, as members of the Massachusett tribe fled. Now, nearly four hundred years later, one must wonder what remains of John Smith's "Paradise."
Equipped with wit, intellect, and an innate curiosity about people and places, John Hanson Mitchell strolls through Boston's streets, chronicling the nonhuman inhabitants and surprisingly diverse plant life, as well as the eccentric characters he meets at various turns. Using his modern observations as a starting point, he tells the fascinating stories of the tribal leaders, naturalists, community activists, and organizations who worked to preserve nature in the city over generations, from the Victory Gardens of the Fenway to the expansive woods of Franklin Park.
But much of the history is in the land itself. As he battles traffic on notorious Route 128, Mitchell considers the ancient origins of the rocks that line the highway and those that form the city's foundation. A walk across Boston Common calls to mind the Tremount Hills, flattened by seventeenth-century newcomers; only Beacon Hill remains. A stroll through the Back Bay allows Mitchell to imagine the Charles River, so polluted by sewage that it became a public nuisance and was partially covered over with a massive nineteenth-century landfill. With this natural history in mind, Mitchell explores both ancient and new green space from Chelsea to South Boston, including the greenway formed by the Big Dig.
Endlessly readable and full of personality, The Paradise of All These Parts offers Boston visitors and residents alike a whole new perspective on one of America's oldest cities.
"Hands-on and eloquent – a lover's rhapsody."
?Edward Hoagland
"A wonderful, surprising, and gracefully written exploration of Boston's true nature. If you love this city, you will love this book."
?Eric Jay Dolin, author of LEVIATHAN: The History of Whaling in America
"A wonderful piece of work: lively, thought-provoking and totally absorbing. The city of Boston has been chopped to pieces, riddled with tunnels, and surrounded by fill, but as Mitchell reveals in The Paradise of All These Parts, it is still a place of wonder."
?Nathaniel Philbrick, author of MAYFLOWER: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
"Like Vladimir Nabokov, John Hanson Mitchell is a writer with an eye for nature's curious details, rather than a naturalist who practices writing. His new natural history of Boston is actually more a history of naturalists, explorers, conservationists and others at play on nature's grand stage with lots of juicy subplots and a large cast of engaging eccentrics. Irresistible."
?Christopher W. Leahy, Gerard A. Bertrand Chair of Natural History and Field Ornithology, Massachusetts Audubon Society, and author of The Birdwatcher's Companion to North American Birdlife, Peterson First Guide to Insects of North America, and more
"The history of urban areas is often framed as the march of human mastery: culture replacing nature tree by tree. John Hanson Mitchell tells the story of how geology, nature, Natives and new arrivals have continually made and remade the place we call Boston. His amiable tale rambles easily from rocks to rivers to red light districts, interweaving natural and human history in a way that's quietly but deeply meaningful."
?Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies
"There is plenty of history, natural and otherwise, in The Paradise of All These Parts, but there is also wit, narrative, and vision. Like Thoreau, Mitchell has a genius for sauntering, and I can't imagine a better rambling companion. As we stroll through Boston with him, he points out the place's deep history, its returning wildness, its migrating birds and flowering plants, and of course, since this is Mitchell, its quirky characters. The journey is a grand success, and John Hanson Mitchell proves once again that he is one of our very finest writers about place."
?David Gessner, author of Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond
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A casual & painless approach to learning environmental history September 14, 2008
As the title suggests, Mitchell's book traces the natural history of the Shawmut Peninsula, better known today as downtown Boston and hardly recognizable as such a distinctive landform. In his singular "walkabout" style, Mitchell walks and drives around the metropolis, leading us through its geologic origins and survival of the ice ages to the eventual arrival of various animal species. Anyone who looks at Boston today will be amused at comparing the contemporary scene to its volcanic beginnings or as a playground for roaming woolly mammoths. (Whether or not the place was wilder back then, than it is today, is a matter of opinion.)
Among the new residents was the "bipedal primate" who had made its way across the North American continent from its ur-home in Siberia. Of course, that animal's presence gradually altered much about the land, even as the creature itself changed in appearance and nationality. The familiar story proceeds from those natives to British colonists and a wide assortment of immigrants. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought new ideas and requirements to Boston residents; and the city became a home for both land preservationists/reformers and city planners/developers. Thus began a push-me-pull-you relationship of tearing down, building up, and saving green. That trend continues today.
Mitchell is an expert at reading clues in the landscape and interpreting the printed histories. He also shows no fear by daring to chat with the locals he meets along his semi-circular journey. He puts so much of himself into the writing that each chapter is a subtle memoir as well. The bottom line is that some form of Nature continues on the landscape, no matter how much concrete is poured and no matter how many highways and high-rises are added. "Nature is life," reads the inscription Mitchell finds on a granite boulder in a park in East Boston. Indeed, it is so.
Readers who enjoy John Hanson Mitchell's books and this kind of scrutiny of an urban setting may also appreciate John Tallmadge's "The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City" and Marie Winn's "Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama in Central Park." A longer geologic road trip can be taken with John McPhee in "In Suspect Terrain."
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