Eating Dirt

It's usually the case in books that the story takes place when people are not working: that's when life, apparently, begins. Gill's memoir flips that on its head: there is almost nothing in the book outside the work she did, along with troops of others, for almost twenty years: planting trees to replace logged clearcuts on Vancouver Island and elsewhere. The work is hard and repetitive, and she's not sure whether it's even doing the world any good. Why does she return every spring? Tree planting, she says—and she makes you believe it—"has a way of filling a life up with verbs."