Winston Ma, a Chinese American, has three daughters. To honor his own father, Winston plants a mulberry tree. When he takes his own life beneath the mulberry, his eldest daughter, Mimi, is left to divide the family heirlooms, which includes three jade rings and an ancient scroll. Douglas Pavlicek – an orphan who enlists in the Stanford prison experiment before joining the Air Force. He falls from his plane and is saved by a banyan tree. After being discharged, he wanders across America, realizing as he does so that deforestation is ruining the country. He signs up to plant seedlings, only learning after the planting of his fifty-thousandth seedling that this effort does nothing to help trees and only contributes to their destruction at the hands of logging companies. Richard Powers’ structural approach to The Overstory breaks with traditional plotting. The result is two books in one, each designed to appeal to a different type of reader. The flaw in this approach is that the book either reads like a literary triumph that starts slow then builds to something satiating, or it reads like a bait-and-switch with a breathtaking start followed by a wearisome and long-winded trek to the conclusion. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men … In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Olivia Vandergriff is a druggy college student who almost kills herself on a pot high then hears voices that turn her into an ecowarrior. By various ways and men, she ends up fighting the destruction of California’s redwoods. Eventually all the different characters and messy plotlines start getting tangled together. There​ is something exhilarating in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life Absorbing, thought-provoking and more than enough incentive to embrace your inner tree-hugger Culture Whisper I’m also familiar with the types of characters the author has selected, quirky, iconoclastic, talented (mostly) outsiders. Many began with an early interest in the natural world until adulthood caught up with them. The Overstory is] the best book I’ve read in ten years. It’s a remarkable piece of literature, and the moment it speaks to is climate change. So, for me, it’s a lodestone. It’s a mind-opening fiction, and it connects us all in a very positive way to the things that we have to do if we want to regain our planet. We’ve got lots and lots of trees where we live in Scotland. If I’m feeling unwell or unsettled in any way, I always go and sit with a tree or walk through the trees, and that’s incredibly healing and helpful Emma Thompson, New York Times A beautiful novel about humans reconnecting with nature in a fascinatingly, inventive world with colourful, rich characters, it will rekindle your love for nature Asian VoiceIf all of this sounds high concept, that’s because it is; but Powers is also skilled at capturing a character, a family, a culture with a few swift brushstrokes. Bio- and cultural diversity is part of his point. At the heart of the novel are two women, Patricia Westerford, a botanist who “discovers” that trees are communal, that they communicate with each other, an idea that costs her an academic job before the intellectual fashions change and it makes her famous. (For a real-life equivalent, see Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees.) Her work, on the wisdom and utility of trees, underpins much of the novel: A sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of the natural world. It tells the story of a world alongside ours that is vast, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive and almost invisible to us. A handful of disparate people learn how to see that world and are drawn into its unfolding catastrophe.” In his extraordinary 12th novel, Powers follows nine characters whose lives are bound up with the beauty, history, science, mythos and heedless destruction of trees … Passionately ecological in its themes, the novel doesn’t hammer at them. The green message becomes a natural element borne eloquently through the narrative. Mail on Sunday Neelay Mehta – the child of Indian immigrants, spends his life building computers and creating computer programs in northern California. Despite being paralyzed when he falls out of a tree as a child, he goes on to become a computer programming marvel, eventually creating a series of video games called Mastery, inspired by trees, deforestation, and colonization.

Moving through history and across landscapes, this tree-filled novel unfurls our potential to destroy or restore the natural world. The Diversity of Life, by Edward O. Wilson—masterful synthesis of biodiversity and species interdependency in ecosystems and scope of the current threat, with a focus on forests and junglesA wonderful tour of how human lives can intersect and become engaged with that of trees. The complex narrative of nine separate characters who grow alone, have different kind of formative influences from events involving trees, and then converge in mind or action by the middle of the book on the political fight in the 80s over the logging of the last old-growth forest plots in the Pacific Northwest. In the process we get to experience a satisfying interplay and integration between tree-hugger spirituality (or cult mentality from some perspectives) and the surprising discoveries about the ecology and botany of trees in recent decades. The overstory is the name given to the part of a forest that protrudes above the canopy. When you look at a rainforest, for example, what you see from above is the canopy with trees standing out above it. What you don’t see unless you get into the rainforest is the understory that sits below the canopy but above the ground, then the shrub layer below that and, finally, the forest floor. A story about trees, nature and people, and the complicated relationships that hold the world together. Layered and intricate, it’s a wonderful epic … It’s a beautiful, brilliant and involving book, with a vital message at its heart. Psychologies The second section brings many of the human cast together in 80s California, where they join campaigners attempting to protect some of the last remaining redwood trees - this is a mixture of fact and exaggeration - in general the tree science is fact, but the human activity is fictional or adapted. At the end of this section, the failure of these protests leads them to start an arson campaign, in which the charismatic Olivia "Maidenhair" (whose story is partly modelled on that of Julia Butterfly Hill) is accidentally killed.. For me this was the most powerful part of the book. Reefs blanch and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.

People underestimate coding. I knew what I was doing when I sent them Saint Alan. It's all part of My plan. To be honest, I wasn't sure when reading the book, if Mimi did sell the family heirloom. I think either way she decided, it would have been a correct decision. - BuffaloGirl What you need is a story. Of course, this is an in-joke, too, because The Overstory is full of all these things: drama, development, colliding hopes and fears, tangled plots and lots of characters.A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.” It is true that we all need to become better stewards of the environment, and this book gets points for its good intentions and cool factoids about our arboreal friends. But almost anyone who makes it through this book is probably already converted to the environmentalist cause (or at least whatever substrate involves believing "trees = good"), and I wager that anyone who wasn't will be turned off by how silly and mawkish this book is. Read Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate instead. Adam Appich – “an inquisitive boy who is fascinated with insects and later becomes interested in human psychology and how humans can only understand things that are put into narratives. His father planted a tree before the birth of Adam and each of his four siblings; as a child, Adam conflated the characteristics of each tree with his siblings.” It’s also a book about an assortment of characters, mostly pairs, and their interactions with, or passion for, trees and forests (and sometimes each other). Ray Brinkman – a conventional intellectual property lawyer and Dorothy's husband, who later in life, following a stroke, falls in love with nature.