I feel bad giving this a less-than-glowing review, but I may not have been the right reader for this book. There is a lot of very interesting detail about the world’s wetlands, past and present, but it did not come together in a way that captured my attention. I was expecting a more cohesive narrative about the wetlands and the climate crisis, but it was more of a series of thoughts. I think a different reader, one who has a stronger background and interest in ecology and natural science, might really enjoy it.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Great look at the importance of wetlands and the effects of climate change. I enjoyed this more than I expected and learned way more than I thought I would.

5★
“The old rhyme says it all:

The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.”

That's what humans have done as we have created settlements and begun using the land for our own needs with scant regard for how things are connected. Annie Proulx set out to write an essay or two, turning her love of nature and her concern for the disappearance of landscapes and species into a research project. That project grew into this detailed, fact-filled book that I will be thinking about for a long time.

Humans have been digging and drying peat and then burning it up for fuel or draining the areas for farmland and houses, or trying to plant directly into some slightly less wet wetland areas, and we have been doing it seemingly forever. We have disturbed and destroyed so much that we have changed whole ecosystems and weather patterns.

She speaks of her early interest, her mother’s passion for exploring the natural world, and recounts a childhood story where she followed her mother, as instructed, through a blueberry thicket to a swamp. Her mother stepped from tussock to tussock, but Annie was scared and saw mud stirred up in the water. She couldn’t bring herself to risk falling into that foreign territory, and burst out bawling, Her mother came and carried her out.

Then, they walked around the perimeter, where Annie was fascinated by all the new things she saw, some she remembers to this day. She was hooked.

“I came away from that wetland sharing my mother’s pleasure in it as a place of value but spent years learning that if your delight is in contemplating landscapes and wild places the sweetness will be laced with ever-sharpening pain.”

I’ve read numerous books which feature fens, bogs, and swamps (and marshlands and wetlands, and all the other names), but they are featured generally as dangerous areas to be avoided, which Proulx acknowledges.

“Suspense writers find bogs very useful. Bogs stir fear. They are powerfully different from every other landscape and when we first enter one we experience an inchoate feeling of standing in a weird transition zone that separates the living from the rotting. Black pools of still water in the undulating sphagnum moss can seem to be sinkholes into the underworld.”

She even refers to discussions about the various levels of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, quoting:

“And when that dismal stream had reached the foot
Of the malign and dusky precipice,
It spread into a marsh that men call Styx”.

She goes into a lot of detail, with examples around the world, of the various types of wetlands, but I’ll quote her simple definitions from the endnotes.

“Fen.
Peatland receiving [mostly ground] water rich in dissolved minerals; vegetation cover composed dominantly of graminoid species and brown mosses.

Bog. (Muskeg is the word used most in Alaska and Canada.)
Peatland receiving water exclusively from precipitation and not influenced by ground water; sphagnum-dominated vegetation.

Swamp.
Peatland dominated by trees, shrubs, and forbs; waters rich in dissolved minerals.
. . .
‘Mire’ is the umbrella word used in Europe for fens, bogs and swamps.”

In addition to the science, history, politics and increasing global environmental devastation, wait till you see her reports about Bog Bodies! People have been sinking bodies into these vast, dark, mysterious areas for centuries, thinking they are gone forever.

Wrong!

“… in fen bodies the soft tissues decompose but the skeleton persists. In bogs the soft tissues are preserved but sphagnan dissolves the bones. So most bog bodies become dark brown bags of skin after several thousand years.”

Get that? Several thousand years. The particular chemical composition of these wet areas affects different objects in different ways, but many are still completely identifiable thousands of years later.

“A two-thousand-year-old lump of ancient birch tar used as chewing gum with the imprint of a child’s teeth in it gave me a smart sting of immediacy. At the same time that I want to know, I shudder internally at my own shameless snoopery.”

These areas were used as graveyards (the boneyard), as places to execute criminals, and obviously as disposal sites by criminals.

There is a sizable section at the end with references, notes, and definitions for those who want to follow up. For me, I can’t get over how much the past is still with us, if we just know where to look.

I enjoy her personal encounters with nature.

“My best near-swamp experience came one summer when I lived in a remote and ramshackle house in Vermont with a beaver-populated swamp half a mile down in the bottom.
. . .
I had started reading Norman Maclean’s novella "A River Runs Through It" for the first time and once at the house decided to read to the end before I went inside. It was an utterly quiet windless golden day, the light softening to peach nectar as I read and ultimately reached the last sentence: “I am haunted by waters.” I closed the book and looked toward the swamp. Sitting on the stone wall fifteen feet away was a large bobcat who had been watching me read. When our eyes met the cat slipped into the tall grass like a ribbon of water and I watched the grass quiver as it headed down to the woods, to the stream, to the swamp.”

Borrowing from Maclean, her final sentence in this book is:

“In the end all humans will be ‘haunted by waters.’

Many of us are already.

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the review copy from which I’ve quoted, so quotes may have changed (but the message won’t, I’m sure.)

First things first: Those title words aren't synonyms, exactly, so much as a family tree of naturally occurring wet places on Earth.

<blockquote>fens, fed by rivers and streams, usually deep, peat-forming, and supporting reeds and marsh grass

bogs, shallower water fed by rainfall, peat-forming, and supporting sphagnum mosses


swamps, a peat-making, shallow wetland with trees and shrubs</blockquote>
This information is important to fully understanding the scale and cost of wetland losses we've inflicted on the planet. Author Proulx (whose use of "yclept" in this book I note here with a big smile, as it's a favorite underused word of mine) is an experienced campaigner when it comes to putting English through its paces to evoke a sense of place and a perception of mood:
<blockquote>The fen people of all periods knew the still water, infinite moods of cloud. They lived in reflections and moving reed shadows, poled through curtains of rain, gazed at the layered horizon, at curling waves that pummeled the land edge in storms.
–and–
It can take ten thousand years for a bog to convert to peat but in only a few weeks a human on a peat cutter machine can strip a large area down to the primordial gravel.</blockquote>
Nothing made by human minds is ever perfect. I'm glad the title gave Author Proulx, eighty-six at this writing, an opportunity to mourn publicly the fens of her Connecticut childhood. I was fascinated by the information about the vanished English fens. But the bogs came in for a cursory examination in comparison, seen mostly through the lens of bog bodies. I acknowledge the personal element of the fact that they're bodies probably gave more heft to the science of peat bogs that really needed to be presented. I found it a distraction, though, while others may think of it as an enhancement.

It is with the swamps and bayous of my erstwhile stomping grounds, Southern Texas and its adjacent lowlands, that the short shrift became apparent. Houston and its urban sprawl could, and should, form a book of damning indictments of greed and stupidity. New Orleans was, for reasons I simply can't understand, rescued as a human habitation after the death of the many bayous and wetlands south of it resulted in its near destruction...an expensive playground for rich people. Another book that should be written (again).

But take away from any read the best, accept that not all of it was made with your taste in mind, and Author Proulx's essential message shines a harsh lime-light onto the instrumentalist Judeo-Christian worldview that's landed us in this awful mess:
<blockquote>The attitude of looking at nature solely as something to be exploited—without cooperative thanks or appeasing sacrifices—is ingrained in western cultures.</blockquote>
Our addiction to Being Right, to understanding the uses but not the purposes of this, our one and only planet, is killing us. And the death sentence has fallen on our generation. Lucky, lucky us we have Author Proulx to bear witness: "The waters tremble at our chutzpah and it seems we will not change."

Fen, Bog & Swamp was very well researched and informative. As a kid, I always loved stories set in England or Scotland in the bogs so as an adult I really loved this book. It had me googling more information after reading the book, which is always a good sign with a non-fiction book. This was written so well and I learned A LOT. This is a book I will want to reread in the future!

This short book is more of a personal essay than a classic nonfiction, as Proulx weaves many threads into the main narrative - her childhood memories, literary digressions, descriptions of old discoveries and terrifying latest statistics. In the end, we get a moving tribute - or maybe an homage? - to the eponymous subject: fens, bogs, swamps, and other wetlands.

I think both fans of the writer’s style and those more interested in the subject itself will appreciate this slim volume.

Thanks to the publisher, Scribner, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

Well-researched and flawlessly prepared, FEN, BOG AND SWAMP is Annie Proulx’s essay: part personal memoir/ part historical document/ part science explanation about our changing planet. She adds another layer of explanation to our understanding of human influence on climate change. It’s never easy to read how far we’ve gone in the wrong direction. In this case, the centuries have piled up. The book is captivating and concise. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

It's obvious that an immense amount of research was done for this book. Some readers will really appreciate this complicated and thoughtful book full of facts. Being about the environment, this book is very timely and there's a lot of interesting information. For me, it's a bit too much information to fully absorb. It's well written but sometimes disorganized which makes it difficult to follow.

I commend the author for her dedication to the subject and I learned new things.

This book involved a lot of history and I just don’t think my brain was ready to absorb it. It’s disappointing because I’m very interested in this topic, however it felt unorganized. Or maybe my brain was too unorganized. Either way, this is dense for an author who isn’t a scientist. I still appreciate it and think many will enjoy and find value in it.

Annie Proulx’s book Fen, Bog and Swamp is a detailed look at wetlands around the world throughout history. The book provides a great background on the wetlands from the prehistoric animals who visited and lived in the wetlands through the distruction overtime of the wetlands and to the current preservations efforts. There is a focus on the ecological impacts that the wetlands previously and currently have and also on the potential impacts in the future.

Mostly this book was well focused but occasionally I struggled to keep up with jumps in material. For example, while the section on bog bodies, preserved corpses that were found buried in the bogs, was informative I struggled to find a reason why such a large portion of the chapter focused on this. Overall, this book was more detailed than what I needed to know but was worth the time to read it and learn more about these unique environments.

Prior to Fen, Bog, and Swamp, the only work of Annie Proulx that I had read was Brokeback Mountain. This is definitely a fitting entry into non-fiction for this author. Her other books are all set in wild natural areas and the descriptions that she gave of Wyoming in Brokeback Mountain were really beautiful, almost as beautiful as the love story itself.  The descriptions in Fen are almost as gorgeous.  Having gotten married in what my MIL referred to as a swamp (Waccamaw River), this book's cover and description spoke to me.  Recommended to lovers of the Earth and history.
It bothers me that the cover of my ARC has the Oxford comma but not the Goodreads cover or entry.  You will pry my Oxford comma from my cold, dead, and lifeless hands.

An incredible in-depth compilation addressing the earth's wetlands in relation to the climate crisis and the importance of awareness, preservation, and positive progress, Fen, Bog and Swamp is a must-read for a small audience.

I went into this expecting more of the Proulx from her fiction and got an immensely dense and textbook-like approach. While I recognize the liberties taken for novels cannot be replicated for nonfiction, this will remain in its current form, too jam-packed with information, however pertinent, to be accessible to those who truly need to be convinced.

However top-heavy this long-form essay is with the histories of, the scientists involved, the research done, and the results indicates, I cannot help but appreciate all, on top of that, Proulx manages to display right along with it. From a sentence referencing Norman Maclean's closing line from the title short story in A River Runs Through It and Other Stories ("I am haunted by waters."), to a mention of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, to Akira Kurosawa's film adaptation of Rashomon, Proulx brings in and ties together wide swaths of citations.

Her research, no matter what the COVID-19 pandemic hampered, is clearly thorough. And she cannot possibly be faulted here. The inclusion of the newly fascinating Doggerland seems to have held her attention a smidge too long, but she so obviously scoured all potentially relevant research that she regretted leaving anything out, lest she be unable to convince.

I wanted to love this book with a capital L but something was lacking, maybe organization. As a wetland biologist I can appreciate that Proulx threw herself into such a wonderful topic but the book came across as rather disjointed. One paragraph you are in one locale and somehow she connects it to another topic in the next paragraph and we lose the thread from the previous paragraph too quickly. I did learn a lot about wetlands that I'm not familiar with because I don't live near them and I think this is a great opening into wetlands for more literary minded folks used to Proulx's other works.

I was really looking forward to this book, both because I enjoy Proulx's writing and because I'm always seeking new topics in environmental writing. I liked the history of how the various wetlands have been changed, destroyed, restored or some combination. I thought the information about the Mesolithic people of Doggerland was interesting but veered a little too far from the main point, the climate crisis, as laid out in the subtitle. I didn't like the times that Proulx threw in archaic terminology for the fun of it. While reading The Shipping News, I happily looked up words I didn't know in my library's copy of the OED. However, this text was already dense with scientific terminology and genuinely useful archaic words for various topographical features of fens, bogs, and swamps. Throwing in "yclept," for example, was unnecessary and irritating. I would still recommend this book for the specificity of how the loss of wetlands has a huge impact on the climate changes we are seeing and how their destruction led to short-term wealth for a very few while benefiting the majority not all.

An eloquent look at wetlands. Fans of Gardeners World have listened to the great Monty Don go on about peat free compost - and Proulx explains the background to the UK ban on it. But this is about more than peat, it's also about bogs, wetlands, and more. Yes we've heard some of this before but she's presented the problem with gorgeous prose and thoughtful examination that is just scientific enough. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I likely would not have picked this up had it not been written by Proulx and I would have been lesser informed for it.

Fen, Bog and Swamp is nonfiction from Annie Proulx. She writes about the history of wetlands, their role in the world's ecology and the potential impact their destruction has on the planet and it's climate.
there are references to wetlands all over the globe and at many points in history. She explains the differences between swamps, fens, moors, bogs and marshes. Some of the stories of the Bog People were fascinating.
If you like a lot of detail in your nonfiction, this is the book for you.

When I think of peat, fen, and bog, the United Kingdom comes to mind. I was unaware that these ecosystems exist all over the world. Annie Proulx has written a comprehensive and detailed account of peat, swampland, bogs, fen, and all things like them. The book is very readable but also very niche-y.

One of Proulx's great strengths, besides her descriptive narrative, is to inject humans into the story. I especially enjoyed her sections on the Fenlanders, Doggerland, and Bog people, and how the continued use of these areas have damaged them and contributed to climate change.

This title is for readers who enjoy books that present a thorough and narrow look at a specific topic.

My thanks to NetGalley for a digital review copy of the book.

This is not normally my type of read but since I am a fan of the author I thought I would give it a try! I was so impressed by the amount of research that the author did and how much these wetlands contribute to the environment. We all hear about climate change but in the pages of this book, with her characteristically beautiful prose, you can truly feel and see the destruction we have caused and the long term affects it will have. Certainly a book I will be sharing with the science teachers to use in their classrooms.

Proulx makes a strong case in favor of three habitats that we seldom consider, and when we do, our thoughts incline toward the negative. We perceive these places as waste lands that would better serve us by being drained. They are often impenetrable and seem to impede human progress. Moreover, they can be forbidding because of their threatening flora and fauna, as well the ghosts that are buried or lost there.

This well researched book is filled with many fascinating scientific, geographic, sociological and historical facts that make for an enlightening reading experience. Despite this, Proulx’s narrative style has a decidedly stream-of consciousness feel to it. Unlike her superb fiction, firm connections between the book’s various topics decidedly are lacking.

Her central thesis is that these vast wetlands are incredibly important for the survival of the planet, and they are being destroyed at a frightening pace. Clearly, Proulx loves and appreciates all these low-lying and moist locales as they are. Despite some innovative restorative initiatives, we already may be beyond a tipping point to save these intriguing and vital habitats.

I was interested in this book because "The Shipping News" by Annie Proulx is one of my all-time favorite books; because I'm interested in nature writing; and because I try to keep up with books about climate change--in that order. Once I started reading it, however, it was soon clear that with "Fen, Bog and Swamp," Proulx is not overly concerned with beautiful storytelling or lyrical nature writing; this is primarily a climate change book, and one that pulls no punches in laying out its dire message. As such, it is certainly effective, but as a lay person in the field I was often out of my depth, and it did occasionally have that meandering and unfocused feel that often characterizes an essay that is expanded into a book. Definitely a worthwhile read, but also worth knowing what to expect going in.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.