The Inner Coast

Starred review from May 15, 2020
Hohn switches gears from Moby-Duck (2011) to deliver an essay collection rooted in his clear love for coastal regions and, especially, his home state of Michigan. Several of the essays, some of which were previously published, dwell on watery subjects, notably Revival of the Ice Canoe, which provides an inside look at the odd wholesomeness of ice racing in Quebec, and The Zealot, a profile of environmental engineer Marc Edwards that takes readers deeply into the Flint, Michigan, crisis. As a group, Hohn's essays are engaging, thoughtful, and marked by his sparkling wit and boundless curiosity. His nimble technique takes him from name checks of Jesmyn Ward and Joseph Brodsky, the Bible and the Qur'an, DaVinci and Thoreau in a heady few paragraphs. His mastery of his subjects is evident, but it is the joy he exhibits when taking readers along on his discoveries of connections of ever-increasing complexity between literature, science, history, and geography that makes these pages sing. Comparisons to a host of talented essayists are obvious (Didion, Dillard, for sure), but perhaps none is more apt than John McPhee. Hohn has McPhee's thrilling intelligence and single-minded dedication to finding deep truths in overlooked subjects; he has crafted a title to treasure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

March 9, 2020
In this penetrating collection, Hohn (Moby-Duck), a former editor at GQ and Harper’s, offers keen insight on subjects ranging from ice canoeing in Quebec City to the Flint, Mich., water crisis. Taking a New Journalism approach, Hohn’s essays fuse the personal, historical, and cultural. In “A Romance of Rust,” he accompanies his tool-collecting uncle to a series of auctions across Michigan, while ruminating on the evolution of tools and their symbolic association with manliness. In “Watermarks,” Hohn considers writings about water, including both Genesis and Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” and incorporates snapshots from his own life—droughts during his 1970s California childhood, a more recent scuba diving expedition in Lake Michigan. The strongest piece is “Falling,” about his mother, who suffered periods of mental instability during his youth. His memories of her vary wildly—at one point she’s rising early to organize a complicated scavenger hunt for his birthday party, at another abandoning her husband and young children to live in a hotel for nine months. This essay is tender and poetic, and a genuine feat of empathy. With his close sense of connection to nature and knack for quietly moving prose, Hohn reveals himself to be a valuable new name in narrative nonfiction.

Starred review from March 15, 2020
A professor of English and former magazine editor lends literary stature to science writing and the exploration of interior landscapes, including his own. Collected here are 10 of Hohn's distinctive essays, many originally appearing in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, and other publications. Throughout, the author weaves dissections of environmental issues through meditations on culture and family. Other essays--e.g., "A Romance of Dust," featuring unlikely but fascinating observations on antique tool collecting--are elegies for (and critiques of) a misremembered past. While providing antidotes to romanticism and nostalgia-- "Memory, after all, is a kind of dream"--he unfailingly finds the magical or mysterious where it does exist. Some essays are set in the American Midwest (the "Inner Coast" of the title), others in New York, Quebec, California, or Thoreau's Walden (with a riposte to the poet's critics). A few have the flavor of expansive book reviews. There are echoes of Barry Lopez here, but Hohn's voice--reflective, trenchant, often eloquent--seems all his own. He has an almost unerring ability to choose just the right word or phrase to enrich a line of thought. His descriptive passages, whether amusing, pithy, or lyrical, will capture readers' imaginations. He is a poet of the prosaic, as on the subject of water, reminding us that the Great Lakes are actually a river. He also possesses an admirable way of presenting ecological or cultural problems without lecturing. He evaluates and argues, sometimes strenuously, but seldom judges. Hohn suggests his mindset from the start: "We are surrounded by a multitude of facts whose significance is neither stable nor self-evident." The world can be an amorphous place, and clarity elusive, but there are havens of the rational if we wish to inhabit them. Hohn finds some of those havens in the work of Thoreau, Evan S. Connell, Marilynne Robinson, and Matthew Power. Settle in and savor a keen mind with a laudable moral compass.

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