River of Love in an Age of Pollution

David Haberman has written a compelling, vividly heartbreaking and irrationally hopeful book. It is a book destined to be widely read and taught, as it promises to involve and inspire students of religion and ecology at all levels. It is a book that might even have a benign effect on the problematic world it seeks to describe. I am not saying this is a flawless work. I shall duly carp at some of its weaknesses, but I am more inclined to praise the singular virtues of River of Love in an Age of Pollution. Haberman writes clearly in a hybrid genre, which manages fluidly to integrate natural history with human and religious history; visions of divine realities with visions of material landscapes; authorial commentary with voices of pilgrims, priests, and activists. He also offers—not only in bits appropriately scattered throughout the text, but thankfully gathered as wholes in an invaluable appendix—some beautiful translations of devotional odes to the Yamuna, which wonderfully convey the theological poetics that lie at the heart of this book.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Literature · Natural (archaeology) · Poetics · Poetry · Praise · Social science · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · History · Philosophy · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology