Hunting for Hope: A Father's Journeys, By Scott Russell Sanders. Boston: Beacon P, 1999. 200 pp. Cloth $23.00. Paper $14.00.

Scott Russell Sanders is more than a "nature writer"; he is a storyteller who tells finely crafted and mindful essays which engage questions of social values. The narrative he tells is of personal relationships as he struggles to win for his grown children a reason for hope and a faith in the future. Hunting for Hope begins with a hiking and rafting trip to Colorado with his teenage son, Jesse, when the son turns on the father and attacks him for his lack of faith: "You make me feel the planet's dying and people are to blame and nothing can be done about it," Jesse tells his dad. "I have to believe there's a way we can get out of this mess. Otherwise what's the point? Why study, why work--why do anything if it's all going to hell?" (9).

The rest of the book is a progression of essays written to calm this cry from his son, and for his older daughter Eva, who is embracing marriage. To help him explore this struggle of values, he interweaves a series of chapters on "Mountain Music" which continue the opening story of the father and son's trip into the wild. Meditating on "sources of hope" in his journal, Sanders lists not only "Wildness," as we would expect from the "nature writer," but also body bright (a call for cleansing the doors of perception), family, fidelity, skill, simplicity, beauty, and the way of things (God). These become the chapters of this finely structured book, and the tokens for his "medicine bundle." Sanders packs these essays with details of the earth, community, and place, and of epiphanies drawn from the muddle of ordinary life.

Some readers may find the essays lacking in humor. After all, what better antidote to despair than laughter? But Sanders has his own brand of humor--and humility--but not the absurdity or smug irony that is often so close to hopelessness. There is a moral earnestness here reminiscent of Wendell Berry, but there is also Sanders’s own distinct voice, concerned and loving, almost like what that "nature writer" Henry David Thoreau would be if he had kids. Carry this book in your own medicine pouch for healing.