The Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons from a Life in Nature Hardback - 2005

This book is an enormous gift, an act of preservation as important as any chunk of land purchased by The Nature Conservancy. John Hay's stature cannot be overestimated, and David Gessner has done him great justice.--Bill McKibben, author of Wandering Home

"The Prophet of Dry Hill is a surprising book in many ways, tender, elegant, intelligent, always frank and sometimes very funny. This is a work of generous love, the story of a prickly friendship, but also and preeminently a short and fiery course on how to live in an increasingly crowded and confusing world."--Bill Roorbach, author of Temple Stream

"Reading The Prophet of Dry Hill is like taking a long, soul-satisfying walk with two remarkable naturalists, John Hay and David Gessner. Through Hay's wise words and Gessner's keen observations, we witness a gentle unfolding of a friendship seeded in a shared passion for the natural world and nurtured in the unpredictability of human connectedness." --Kate Whouley, author of Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved

"If Thoreau had wanted a disciple, he couldn't have had a better one than David Gessner. Following the great nature writer John Hay around his Cape Cod haunts, witnessing Hay's increasing dismay at the development crushing his beloved Cape, Gessner has made Hay's cri de coeur his own. This beautiful book should inspire the reader to 'get down in nature, down in the water and the dirt,' as Hay urges. I am sending my copy of this book to the wildlife-destroyer in the White House."-- Alice Furlaud, NPR reporter

David Gessner is the author of several books, including most recently Sick of Nature. His Return of the Osprey was chosen by the Boston Globe as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year. Gessner is currently the editor of Ecotone, a literary journal, and teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He lives in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, with his wife and daughter.