Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #550993 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 218 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Incarcerated naturalist Lamberton's strange and compelling debut examines the flora, fauna and microecology of an Arizona prison while describing the author's life before and during his sentence. Lamberton is a former biology teacher who has now spent over a decade behind bars for his relationship with a teenage student. After his conviction, he became a prolific nature writer, publishing largely in literary magazines. (A year free on appeal saw him become a nonfiction editor of the Sonora Review.) Lamberton's measured and exemplary prose follows the interactions among the prisoners, their built environment and the birds and plants they encounter there, tracing connections disturbing and consoling, ecological and metaphorical. Africanized killer bees arrive and depart, as does a terroristic guard; brittlebrush and goldpoppy's tough seeds (adapted to Arizona droughts) imply Lamberton's own need for endurance. The overcrowded facility's on-site disposal of toilet water ironically "turned this bleak place into a wildlife island, a rest stop and refuge for wings and beaks and talons." A few chapters near the end of the book put the desert biology on hold for straightforward accounts of Lamberton's recent travails. Usually, though, the book's two genresAfirst-person prison journal and third-person nature-descriptionAcomplement each other. (Lamberton is especially good on insects, on ground-level flora and on the sometimes brutal criminal justice bureaucracy.) Arizona poet and essayist Richard Shelton (Going Back to Bisbee) offers a warm, persuasive introduction. Lamberton suggests that "I learn more by walking across this same plot of ground again and again than if I had the whole world to explore": his deeply moved readers are likely to believe him.(Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Short, unbuffed essays that shuttle restlessly between natural history and prison life, and the unexpected moments of interpenetration, from inmate Lamberton. A few years back, Lamberton made a real bad move. Married and with three children, a respected high school science teacher, he ran off with a 14-year-old student. It was love, he says, consensual if stupid beyond utterance. He got 12 years in jail. There he has toiled imaginatively to avoid death by boredom (and by fist and boot, as sex offenders get little respect in-house or out): he has turned to the natural world, and writing, to escape into his head. ``My wilderness is a prison,'' he acknowledges, but one that experiences the seasons, the weather, and, though not teemingly, plant and animal life. It is not solace that Lamberton seekshe is ready to suffer for his crime and the pain it has causedbut a chance to keep his brain and soul from atrophying, and to chew on small ironies: As a harvester ant scuttles across the prison yard, he realizes that ``in subterranean (at least partially) masonry cells, a single-sexed, non-reproducing horde of workers . . . unwillingly serve a colony much like his own. These are are quick essays, for the encounters are perforce brief and circumscribed: on the seasonal migration of birds through the yard, where they would overnight in the few spare trees that existed before prison officials cut down as being too civilized for inmates; on a tarantula hawk shadowing its prey; or on the spider itself, its fangs piercing the armor of a beetle ``with a primeval sound, a sound out of the Devonian.'' The writing is stony and unmediated with humor, though warmed by Lambertons remorse, and cautionary; unless youve been there, you can't begin to imagine how bad prison life is, even in medium security. ``I'd rather watch bugs,'' says Lamberton of all prison amusements, for the moths and bees and jimsonweed are his communicants, if not his salvation. (50 line drawings) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Booklist (starred review), November 15, 1999
"...this astonishing testament to the coexistence of beauty and brutality illuminates the presence of grace in tragedy.

Customer Reviews

Writing as a Way of Surviving
Buddhists say that wisdom, at least a form of it, comes to those who gain access to a plane of imagining beyond hope and hopelessness. To be able to see clearly, witness openly and without prejudice, is to enter this imagining. To be able to see for seeing's sake.

"Wilderness and Razor Wire" is an opus and an opera of seeing. Written during the author's twelve years of incaceration in the Arizona State Prison, the essays in this book focus the eye and the ear, sense of scent and touch, on the fragile bits of wildness which entered prison cell and corridor, walkway and window. The heat of the desert, the gaze of the owl, the aroma of spring's bounty of flowers in a barren place, inside a landscape seen as barren, but isn't, are beautiful, and defiant. This is a book to read when contemplating, to borrow from Bill McKibben, The End of Nature. The only end of nature, the book implies, is when we stop looking for and imagining it.
This is a triumphant book.

True then... True now...
Ken Lamberton, also referred to Mr. Lamberton to many thirty-somethings in Arizona, was caught for doing something many other instructors have done before and will do again. In this book, Lamberton teaches us lessons of nature, and yet also seems to share important lessons of life. This is the way he was in the classroom and he still has that gift today. This book is perhaps more meaningful to those of us who actually sat under him as students and still respect him in adulthood. Reading this book brought back many memories of basic science lessons where Mr. Lamberton actually took us out of the classroom and into real nature. He has us imagine and look at nature in a different way - a more appreciative way. There were tests for us back then, but none like the test his family went through - and survived.

The cost of altruism
Lamberton's book, a literary work indeed! I am fishing for a word to describe it and the emotion it conveyed to me, but I cannot find a good word. It is a book filled with beauty and brokenness, arrogance and repentance, reel love and real love. It really is a story of the human condition, trying to walk a ridge line and not falling into the abyss. Some of us fall into the abyss due to our own stupidity and get caught up in all kinds of trouble for violating some cultural rules scripted as law. (Had Ken been in Kenya among the Luo people, the age of 14 is just right for marrying and he could have had as many wives as he could afford.) Others fall into the abyss due to illness which can be equally devastating. Still others would rather take their life on the ridge line before falling.

When someone takes a serous fall and survives it may take years for them to recover and all too often those who witness the fall are not there at the time of recovery. Karen, Ken's wife, was always there. An impressive part of this book is the story of a remarkable wife with her three children, committed to an intellegent man. She believed her love would return and again light up her life!