The Hopes of Snakes and Other Tales from the Urban Landscape Book

The ideas behind these are more interesting than their execution.

Couturier wants to make the case that urban areas are natural, too--though not necessarily wild--which is a perspective with which I am in agreement. I really wanted her to develop her argument. Unfortunately, she sometimes gets bogged down in the conventions of narrative essays--"I went here, with this person, s/he looked like this and the environment looked like that"--and also because they too often took turns toward the personal, less about nature and more about her life. There's nothing wrong with such essays--nature has long been used as a mirror for personal struggles--but it's just not what I was after, nor did it seem to serve her thesis.