It's not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book it's a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and understand the world around us, at a moment when that is desperately needed, The time is ripe for a big novel that tells us as much about trees as Moby Dick does about whales.The Overstory is that novel and it is very nearly a masterpiece.On almost every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine precision and vision., brilliant on the strange idea of 'plant personhood.' opening our eyes to the wondrous things just above our line of sight.

Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. Pages that take you into menaced remnants of primeval forest or contemplate singularly splendid or fascinating trees teem with knowledge and gleam with aesthetic appeal., The Overstory is a visionary, accessible legend for the planet that owns us, its exaltation and its peril, a remarkable achievement by a great writer., A deep meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated separation from nature., Remarkable.This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction., This book is beyond special.

The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference., Vast, magnificent, and disturbing.An array of human temperaments and predicaments as manifold as Charles Dickens' or Leo Tolstoy's.I have never read anything so pessimistic and yet so hopeful., An immense and intense homage to the arboreal world (its biological sophistication, its rich panoply of environmental benefits), the book is alive with riveting data, cogent reasoning and urgent argument.

The book is full of ideas-about trees, root systems, computer games, actuarial science, group psychology.

The overstory by richard powers