Recommendation: “The Overstory”

By Greta Micheals
Originally published in the May 2020 issue of the 1666 Coffman Newsletter

In The Overstory, his 2019 Pulitzer Prize novel, author Richard Powers focuses on trees. He gives the reader scientific and  historic information about trees in a narrative that is both complex and challenging. Part of the complexity lies in the structure of the novel. The long first section, entitled “Roots,” introduces the nine characters whose actions intertwine in succeeding chapters, named “Trunk,” “Crown,” and “Seeds.” Initially, the characters’ efforts to preserve trees and the natural 

environment are nonviolent; then frustration leads to violent eco-terrorism. This saga was inspired by the Redwood Summer of 1990, an effort to halt logging of California's giant sequoias.

The book contains an encyclopedic amount of scientific information about trees that makes them more visible to the reader. We learn that trees are alive and interconnected, and that we humans and trees share about a quarter of our genes. New insights into forestry are articulated by the character Patricia Westerford, a scientist who is at first ridiculed and later lauded for her work.

While the book is a challenging read, the real challenge in the message: that we humans have been using the earth as ours to exploit and plunder. We must stop. 

Richard Powers has written twelve previous books on scientific subjects and has worked as a computer field and as a professor of creative writing at Stanford. ​