"A multifaceted exploration of one of the first great public works projects in America." - Kirkus Reviews
"A lovely history - with a profound twist. David Brown Morris makes an intriguing argument that climate change turns the notion of 'park' into a necessity." -Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization
"Ten Thousand Central Parks is a brilliant exploration of the cultural and environmental changes that have shaped our nations most celebrated urban park. Offering a fascinating combination of insightful perspectives from horticulture, landscape architecture, literature, and the visual arts, this exemplary work of environmental humanities scholarship demonstrates the power of looking closely at how we shape nature, and how nature in turn shapes us. A gifted storyteller whose thoughtful, curious, well-informed approach is matched by the precision and grace of his prose, David Morris has achieved a tour de force multidisciplinary appreciation of how a deep understanding of our local natural spaces can illuminate planetary concerns." - Michael P. Branch, author of Raising Wild and On the Trail of the Jackalope
"I am a strong admirer of David Morriss work, from the beginning on Pope, to his swerve into writings that are like no others, utterly his, original, beautifully written, and profound, narratively driven with moments of such fine attention that they become lyrical. I think his writing on Central Park is perhaps his best and most important book." - Peter Weltner, Professor Emeritus, San Francisco State, author of The Risk of His Music and Old Songs Replayed
"David Morris has written another vitally important book! Ten Thousand Central Parkslike his PEN award-winner The Culture of Pain - cuts to the heart of a dark, epoch-defining dilemma. The mind-numbing perils of climate change, understood against the Civil War origins of Central Park, yield a compelling parable of radical hope in this adventurous, boundary-crossing, innovative work." - Gerald L. Bruns, author of Heideggers Estrangements and Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature
"This book is not a conventional guide to Central Park's landscape features. It is something rarer and richer: a guide to the Park's deep meaning and potentially global significance. Weaving scrupulous historical research, biographical empathy, and autobiographical ardor, David Brown Morris creates a story as engaging as engaged. Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate-Change Parable is a beautifully compelling narrative that could not be more 'central' to our current environmental and ethical needs." -John Sitter, professor emeritus, University of Notre Dame and Emory University
"Ten Thousand Central Parks is many things: history, biography, meditation, social polemic, ecological prose poem, and documentary, delivered with a time-lapse precision that lives somewhere between cinema and lyrical verse. It is also Morriss most powerful case to date for the importance of a workable metaphor: the Park that is both the object and the ideological aspiration of this book. He documents his subject along two planes - as a geographical artifact, its 840 acres drained, leveled, planted, and developed across nearly two centuries through the painstaking efforts of a cast of magnetic characters; and as an idea, something to inhabit, think with, and multiply into every space where there is need for a patch of green and a project to galvanize behind. Central Parks is at once a Hail-Mary offering to environmentalists racing against the clock of climate change, and a much-needed argument for restoring imagination and art to the heart of American innovation and entrepreneurship." -Kiera Allison, Assistant Professor, University of Virginia
