You can read the publisher’s description for the premise of this text. Yes, it is a survey, not without occasionally riotous humor, of the triumphs and sins of English-language literary stylists. But I found my response to its engagement with our environment indistinguishable from reading nonfiction about nature—I guess it could wobble there, if you are concerned about genre. I was transported back to the excitement of my early reading when as a boy I read indiscriminately and obsessively, contacting and absorbing not only worlds, but The World. Passages about uninhabited tropical islands thrilled me in pirate novels, and so too, once again with pure innocence, here. So maybe this is a boy’s book. It is certainly a very American one, no European would think of it: fantasies of unspoiled land…the climax, for me, happens in the passages about Prairie, rhapsodies that rise to the level of hymns. I highly recommend this book, not so much as a novel, but as its title proclaims, a Nature Book.