Whatever the subject, his literary mission remains constant: to wrestle onto the page “a multitude of facts whose significance is neither stable nor self-evident”—what writer Guy Davenport has called “doubtful certainties.” The goal is not so much to plumb rock-bottom truths as to shine light into murky crevices. . . . The evocative title . . . “The Inner Coast,” refers most directly to the shores of the Great Lakes, where land and water meet in the middle of the country. But it also reflects something of the nature of Mr. Hohn’s writing, the fertile ground on which his outward explorations meet up with his natural tendency toward intellectual reflection and interiority—his own inner coast. . . . These boundaries—between meaning and sentiment, memory and nostalgia—are among the coastlines Mr. Hohn explores in this polished, limpid collection.

—Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal

“A collection of perceptive essays…[Hohn] has a charming attraction to quixotic characters.”
—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle

“[The essays] are connected by Hohn’s passion, his intelligence and the evocative style of his prose…Fascinating.”
—Keith Taylor, Michigan Quarterly Review

Tender and poetic, and a genuine feat of empathy. With his close sense of connection to nature and knack for quietly moving prose, Hohn reveals himself to be a valuable new name in narrative nonfiction.

—Publishers Weekly

A Virgil in strange and unwonted places, Hohn now emerges as not only trustworthy, but also just the sort of person you’d want spinning a yarn over a fire in some backwoods fishing camp, and likable, indeed, especially in his larger-hearted moments, as when he writes, in a subsequent essay, “All human lives are poignant when seen intimately but from a distance. This may help explain the widespread belief, contradicted by so much evidence, in a loving God.” It’s a generous sentence worthy of Henry David Thoreau or Marilynne Robinson. . . . Deftly weaving literature, science, journalism, philosophy, the history of out-the-way locales, arcane skills like canoe building, and no small number of family secrets, Donovan Hohn offers with The Inner Coast a humane view of a world that, as Ernest Hemingway said, is a fine place worth fighting for.

—The Los Angeles Review of Books

“His mastery of his subjects is evident, but it is the joy he exhibits when taking readers along on his discoveries of connections of ever-increasing complexity between literature, science, history, and geography that makes these pages sing. Comparisons to a host of talented essayists are obvious (Didion, Dillard, for sure), but perhaps none is more apt than John McPhee. Hohn has McPhee’s thrilling intelligence and single-minded devotion to finding deep truths in overlooked subjects; he has crafted a title to treasure.”

—Booklist, starred review

“Donovan Hohn has a genius for noticing the previously unnoticed and for writing about our environments with careful precision and a patient observer’s love of detail. He is a kind of contemporary archeologist, writing about what surrounds us, and he does so with uncommon grace and quiet eloquence. This is a wonderful book.”

—Charles Baxter

“One of our very best contemporary essayists."

—Rivka Galchen, author of Little Labors

“Donovan Hohn has a diviner’s capacity to tap into the source and flow of a story, whether the ‘story’ is narrative or argumentative. His attention to the appearance of things—the false, the true—tunes the reader’s alert-addled brain to the meaningful, and the terrible. As the Earth begins to resist us, to remind us that how we’re living will be our undoing, Hohn’s work is that sad, happy thing, glinting in the sand: evidence of what a human mind could do, and what a human heart could yield.”

—Wyatt Mason

“I’ve seldom encountered a writer with a better understanding of both the literary and journalistic ways and means of telling a true story. Donovan Hohn thinks clearly; he writes with eloquence and force.”

—Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Lapham’s Quarterly

“Donovan Hohn’s prose is as immaculate and quotable as that of any writer of his generation. And while you always sense his outrage about ecological calamity, and never doubt his moral engagement, his advocacy never feels hectoring. There is no writer living or dead I would rather read on the topic of environmentalism than Donovan Hohn.”

—Tom Bissell, author of Magic Hours

“Hohn moves easily between the micro and the macro, weaving personal histories into science and industry as he roams... [He] seems to have it all: deep intelligence, a strikingly original voice, humility and a hunger to suss out everything a yellow duck may literally or metaphorically touch. ” 

—Elizabeth Royte, The New York Times Book Review

“Some years ago a cargo container of rubber bath toys fell overboard and dispersed its contents far and wide, and something about this book is as turbulent and as abundant as that incident, as though a whole cargo container of exquisite sentences were washing up in the reader's mind, a whole Pacific current of engaging ideas and encounters was sweeping that reader away.”

—Rebecca Solnit 

“Like the novel from which it has borrowed at least a portion of its title, Moby-Duck is a far-ranging, delightfully narrated masterwork of adventure, science, exploration, and much more. Imagine a real-life Ishmael in the 21st century on a quest to discover how a container full of little rubber duckies washed up on the wave-battered shores of Alaska, and you have the wacky and wonderful premise of this wacky and wonderful page-turner of a book.” 

—Nathaniel Philbrick