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ISBN 978-1-958263-07-5
Paperback B&W Interior
Retail $24
ISBN 978-1-958263-03-7
Paperback
over 60 color photographs
Retail $32
ISBN 978-1-958263-05-1
over 60 color photographs
Hardcover
Retail $48
Real history is both personal and political. Sometimes we narrate only the story of a marriage or a home, other times we describe a sustained campaign to preserve the natural world. Miraculously, Patricia Damery entwines both themes in her unblinking saga of the struggle over the fate of the Napa Valley, as well as the evolution of her marriage.
In this book, letters to the local paper jostle next to tales of birthing goats; face-offs with a corrupt Board of Supervisors share space with tender tracing of a devastating diagnosis.
The reader is treated to a front row view of the determination of some winegrowers to use water and land for profit, and an illuminating salute to those hardy souls who plant their feet in opposition.
The story does not end with the closing of the book.
—LAUREN COODLEY
author, Lost Napa Valley (Arcadia, 2021)
Napa is a special place, for its beauty, and for the care some of its residents take in protecting it even in these dire decades of climate chaos. That shines through in these pages.
—BILL McKIBBEN, author The End of Nature
This is so refreshingly far from the usual Napa Valley memoir as to constitute a new genre. Instead of self celebration so common, it’s at once a full autobiography, a paene to the natural world, and a vivid lesson in the challenges and rewards of working the land oneself.
In the course of unwrapping her personal history, the author lays out her considerable involvement in the efforts of environmentalists in Napa to slow down the ravages of development of the one of the most famous and threatened valleys on Earth.
—JAMES CONWAY
author of Napa at Last Light
An alchemical book, Fruits of Eden is the record of one soul's deepening and complexifying through the mystery of committed relationships—with a wonderful husband whose memory is slowly slipping away, with an eloquent and sagacious tree, with the imagist magic of dreams, and with the exhilarating but difficult practice of democracy itself.
And, underlying and sustaining all those ongoing relations, the book tracks the author's soulful metamorphosis through her full-bodied and fiercely committed relationship with a powerful piece of land, a worthy place on the breathing earth.
— DAVID ABRAM, author of Becoming Animal and The Spell of the Sensuous
In this riveting book, activism in the world and contemplation of the sacred and profane, with glimpses of wholeness and pain of fragmentation, go hand in hand. Fruits of Eden narrates the journey of a unique person in an absolutely singular place at a ripe time of Kairos that simultaneously becomes a microcosm of the whole world.
An extraordinary book by an extraordinary human being.
—TOM SINGER
Editor of Cultural Complexes and The Soul of America: Myth, Psyche, and Politics.
As a personal long-time friend to Patricia, I have always been amazed by her open heart, her open eyes, her intense willingness to put to word to what so many can barely conceptualize or articulate.
She gives wings to our wounded hearts and overwhelming feelings of helplessness in the face of the mass destruction of our Home planet.
Guiding us on a dream walk, Patricia inspires us towards collective action in accepting the sacred responsibility to reach to our highest collective potential as care givers of Mother Earth.
—CHARLIE TOLEDO
Executive Director, Suscol Intertribal Council
FRUITS OF EDEN has been greeted with critical acclaim: