book review of greenwood

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Redwoods … ‘They’ve been fighting a war for sunlight and sustenance since before we existed.’

Greenwood by Michael Christie review – an arresting eco-parable

T he Canadian writer Michael Christie is a former professional skateboarder whose debut novel, If I Fall, If I Die , was a semi-autobiographical story of an 11-year-old boy caring for a severely agoraphobic mother. Christie’s off-kilter style presented a peculiarly Canadian perspective on the vast, empty landscape: “My mother claimed that because nature was always trying to kill Canadians it made them different from other people.”

The follow-up, Greenwood , is a dense yet exhilarating eco-parable that spans a period from the great depression to a bleak prediction of the very near future. But at its heart lies that same Canadian paranoia about the natural world. Harris Greenwood is a lumberman raised during the leanest years of the 1930s, who has made a healthy fortune hacking down swaths of British Columbian forest. His rationale is that even the mighty sequoia are merely “weeds on poles”; and that clearing them is a necessary, pre-emptive form of self-defence. “You think trees are sacred, that they love you. That they grow for your enjoyment. But those who really know trees know they’re also ruthless. They’ve been fighting a war for sunlight and sustenance since before we existed.”

Over the generations the Greenwood lumber empire has diminished as catastrophically as the forests it plundered. The decline begins with Harris’s ill-advised deal to supply railway sleepers to Japan shortly before the outbreak of the second world war. Later his estranged adopted daughter Willow gains posthumous revenge by handing her entire inheritance to a chaotic hippie collective in the 70s. Her son Liam is left to scrape a living as an artisan carpenter, crafting increasingly scarce reclaimed wood into boardroom tables. But the opening chapters of the novel are set in 2038, and feature Liam’s daughter Jacinda Greenwood (known as Jake); a graduate dendrologist with a mountain of student debt living in a world almost entirely devoid of trees.

Christie posits a world attempting to recover from an ecological catastrophe known as the Great Withering, during which rising temperatures unleashed a virulent new strain of fungus that destroys trees. The lack of a forest canopy causes soils to dry up, creating “killer dust clouds as fine as all-purpose flour”. The world is left swarming with desperate climate refugees, many suffering from “rib-retch”; a lethal, hacking cough that “snaps ribs like kindling”.

In the new world order, the Canadian prime minster emerges as the most powerful woman on earth, with the vast and, in places, still-green country functioning as “a global panic room for the world’s elite”. Jake finds herself working as a vastly over-qualified tour guide at a Pacific island re-branded as the “Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral”: an exclusive resort where the super-rich take therapeutic breaks in one of the world’s last surviving old-growth forests. “They come to be reminded that the earth’s once-thundering green heart has not flatlined, that it isn’t too late and all is not lost. They come here to the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral to ingest this outrageous lie, and it’s Jake Greenwood’s job as Forest Guide to spoon-feed it to them.”

The speculative episodes contain the most arresting and bleakly realised passages of the book, but they form merely the outer perimeter of a layered narrative constructed like the growth rings of a giant redwood. The scale of Christie’s ambition becomes apparent when the novel goes head-to-head with the greatest dust-bowl narrative ever told. The allusions to The Grapes of Wrath are far from hidden – Liam Greenwood observes the hipster clientele of a Brooklyn cafe “in their old-time canvas aprons, linen work shirts and perfectly distressed boots like they’ve stepped out of the pages of a Steinbeck novel”. But the sections set in the 30s resound with authentically Steinbeckian cadences, albeit slightly modified in vocabulary: “Smothering dusters scoured the lead paint from the barn and house, leaving great swaths of pinewood as white as a farmer’s bared ass.”

Every generation produces prophets convinced that the age we are living in will be the last. Yet who in the present climate can confidently dismiss as fiction Christie’s depiction of “the quaint period before the Withering when people still believed that well-intended, measured engagement could avert catastrophe”? Perhaps the most prescient sections of the book are those that depict the dawn of climate activism in the 70s. Jake’s feckless grandmother Willow is among the original tribe of earth-warriors; yet saving trees is to her as much a self-conscious pose as cultivating underarm hair and a lentil diet. “Why is it, she wonders casually, that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and to rescue the planet tomorrow when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today?”

Christie’s book predicts a horribly plausible ecological Armageddon; and though it may not be the first to suggest that the opportunity to avert catastrophe has already passed, its great summation could well be the old Chinese proverb that Willow is fond of quoting: “The best time to plant a tree is always 20 years ago. And the second-best time is always now.”

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‘Greenwood’ is an absorbing saga of families and trees — and how they survive

Literary fiction has its ebbing and flowing trends like anything else: Sprawling family sagas give way to tart short-story collections, magic-inflected tales cede the room to sober autofiction. The abundance of options is stoked by algorithms that assume if you like this, you’ll enjoy a similar that. Michael Christie’s second novel, “ Greenwood ,” makes it clear that we really want 500-page novels about trees.

“Greenwood” has plenty of competition in this particular subgenre of ecofiction. Richard Powers’s tree-centric, Pulitzer-winning “ The Overstory ” has spent months perched near or at the top of bestseller lists. Annie Proulx’s hefty 2016 novel about deforestation, “ Barkskins ,” earned similar acclaim. Karl Marlantes’s 2019 novel, “ Deep River ,” braided a century’s worth of family drama and political turmoil around Oregon’s logging industry. If you know any of those books, the broad strokes of “Greenwood” will sound like more of the same: paeans to the beauty of trees, the tragedy of their destruction and the complex relationship between human greed and nature’s defiance.

Annie Proulx’s long-awaited, spectacular new novel ‘Barkskins’

But even if you’re suffering from what you might call Literary Tree Fatigue, Christie’s novel is worth reading, in part because it’s a clever mash-up of genres that distinguishes itself from its literary cousins and earns its bulk.

It opens as a dystopian novel: It’s 2038, and climate change is decimating humanity in earnest. The “Great Withering,” a massive tree die-off, has turned much of the planet into a dust bowl, and one of the few refuges left is the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, an island near Vancouver that’s retained its lush stands of Douglas firs. As the fancy name suggests, only the wealthy can afford to visit (“Water- and tree-rich Canada has become the global elite’s panic room,” Christie writes). Jake Greenwood, a.k.a. Jacinda, is lucky to avoid the devastation but is paid a pittance to serve as a tour guide on the island, making it impossible to climb out of her student debt.

Jake’s ex arrives at the island with a preposterous suggestion: There’s evidence that she’s a descendant of Harris Greenwood, the timber baron who purchased and preserved the island, and she may be due rightful ownership of it. Jake scoffs. Her shared last name is just a coincidence; her father was a struggling carpenter before he died, and her grandmother was an activist who detested the lumber business. So, cue a historical novel: Christie tunnels backward to 2008, 1974, 1934 and 1908, all signature years in the history of the island and its inhabitants. They are also, pointedly, years of depressions and recessions. “You picked a dying world to show up into,” says Everett Greenwood, Harris’s brother, in 1934, worn down by the Great Depression. Christie means to spotlight the despair that’s marked every crisis moment, with a hopeful hint that we might yet endure the next withering. (Like the rest of those Literary Tree novels, Christie’s seems an uncanny metaphor for our current moment.)

But broad messages aside, the heart of the novel is a winning and energetic chase story. Everett discovers an infant abandoned in the Newfoundland woods. The baby is apparently the daughter of R.J. Holt, an industrialist, and Euphemia, an employee he had an affair with. Euphemia was supposed to give up the baby for adoption but got second thoughts and absconded, dying in the woods. Euphemia kept a journal, and when Everett skips town with it and the child, Holt sends a search party to recover both and silence the potential scandal.

Review: ‘The Overstory,’ by Richard Powers

As Holt’s man Friday attempts to hunt down Everett from the East, his estranged brother Harris is trying to survive in the West, amorally: He cuts deals with the Japanese government, a sworn enemy, and torches half the island’s trees to rout a handful of poachers. The collision course between the two brothers is a matter of economics, but it also involves dueling philosophies about nature. Everett is sensitive to the environment’s fragility: “The tree decides whether it’s worth the effort of going on living or not, and there’s no way you can convince it otherwise. They’re finicky things.” Harris is more cynical: “Those who really know trees know they’re also ruthless. They’ve been fighting a war for sunlight and sustenance since before we existed. And they’d gladly crush or poison every single one of us if it gave them any advantage.”

Family trees, Christie suggests, are just as knotty and complicated as real ones, and he’s expertly studded the novel with revelations about Greenwood family history. So Jake, when we return to her in the closing passages, has at once a rock-solid case for inheritance and shaky ground to stand on. The moral choice she faces is the same one everyone in the narrative does: When do we choose self-preservation, and when do we choose survival in a broader sense? The question has never gone away, but “Greenwood” closes with the message that it’s increasingly urgent. “Why is it that people are engineered to live just enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes but not long enough to fix them?” he writes. “If only we were like trees. . . . If only we had centuries.”

Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

By Michael Christie

Hogarth. 480 pp. $28

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Greenwood : Book summary and reviews of Greenwood by Michael Christie

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by Michael Christie

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Published Feb 2020 528 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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Book summary.

A magnificent generational saga that charts a family's rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, and the conflicted relationship with the source of its fortune - trees - from one of Canada's most acclaimed novelists.

It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father's once vast and violent timber empire. It's 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple-syrup camp squat, when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie's effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.

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Reader reviews.

"[R]iveting...This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers's The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "[A] page-turner of a saga that complements sylvan books such as Sometimes a Great Notion and The Overstory ...Beguilingly structured, elegantly written: ecoapocalyptic but with hope that somehow we'll make it." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Ingeniously structured and with prose as smooth as beech bark, Michael Christie's Greenwood is as compulsive as it is profound. A sweeping intergenerational saga that explores trees and their roots—from the precious evergreens that become commodities in the entertainment business of the future to the intricately tangled trees of family—all of it is dazzlingly delivered in a framework inspired by the actual growth rings of a tree. Every one of Greenwood's characters burrowed their way into my heart. Beguilingly brilliant, timely, and utterly engrossing, Greenwood is one of my favorite reads in recent memory." - Kira Jane Buxton

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Author Information

Michael christie.

Michael Christie is the author of the novel If I Fall, If I Die , which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Kirkus Prize, and selected as a New York Times Editors' Choice Pick. His linked collection of stories, The Beggar's Garden , was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and won the City of Vancouver Book Award. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times , the Washington Post , and the Globe and Mail . A former carpenter and homeless-shelter worker, Christie divides his time between Victoria, British Columbia, and Galiano Island, where he lives with his wife and two sons in a timber-frame house that he built himself.

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by Michael Christie ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2020

Beguilingly structured, elegantly written: eco-apocalyptic but with hope that somehow we’ll make it.

Canadian novelist Christie ( If I Fall, If I Die , 2015, etc.) takes us to the end of the world and shows how we got there.

“No one knows better than a dendrologist that it’s the forests that matter.” It’s 2038, and Jacinda “Jake” Greenwood is a guide in one of the last stands of old-growth forest in the world, a place to which wealthy eco-tourists, fleeing the dust storms and intense heat wrought by “the Great Withering” elsewhere, come to spend a few days in a tiny patch of green. One visitor, a former fiance named Silas, informs Jake, long an orphan, that she’s more than just an employee: The whole shebang belongs to her, and not just because she bears the same name as the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral to which those well-heeled pilgrims flock. No, it’s because she descends not from the Greenwoods but from a founder of the all-encompassing Holtcorp, owner of Greenwood and much else, by way of her grandmother Willow. (Note all the woody names.) Therein hangs a tale that Christie staircases his narrative down to reach, generation by generation, one in which Jake's antecedents love and admire the forests in which they dwell but still set into motion the machines that will one day ruin the Earth. Willow is a free-spirited hippie whom we meet in the early 1970s, newly indignant to discover that the man she supposes is her father has derived his considerable fortune from having felled more old-growth forest than “wind, woodpeckers, and God—put together.” But Willow—well, suffice it to say that the matter of her paternity isn’t at all clear-cut even if the forests her progenitors control have been. Christie skillfully teases out the details in a page-turner of a saga that complements sylvan books such as Sometimes a Great Notion and The Overstory , one that closes with Jake’s realization that, tangled lineage and all, a family is less a tree than “a collection of individuals pooling their resources through intertwined roots.”

Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-984822-00-0

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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Michael Christie: Writing Eco-fiction with Hope

PERSPECTIVES

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

LITERARY FICTION

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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Book Review: Greenwood by Michael Christie

Feb 7, 2023 | Book Reviews , historical fiction , Literary Fiction | 5 comments

picture of Greenwood by Michael Christie book, next to a small plastic tree with flames on it

It’s that time of year again: Canada Reads is getting Canadian booklovers all jazzed up about one of the most popular readers’ choice competitions in the country, and it’s the perfect opportunity to get to those backlist books that may have fallen off your radar. Greenwood by Michael Christie is one of five books competing this year, which is a choice I was delighted by, as I’ve had this book hanging around for over four years now, and I finally had a reason to dig it out and complete it. I was shocked at how much I loved it, despite it being just shy of 500 pages. I can excuse longer page counts when the author holds my interest, and this novel most certainly does.

Plot Summary

It’s 2038, and Jacinda Greenwood is living and working on an exclusive island off the coast of British Columbia, acting as a tour guide within one of the last old-growth forests remaining on earth. Then we move back in time to 2008 where we meet Jacinda’s father Liam, a recovering addict and carpenter who builds with wood he admires, creating gorgeous counters, floors, ceiling beams and furniture for the rich. Then we move back to 1974 where we meet Liam as a little boy, and his mother Willow, a woman hell-bent on stopping de-forestation. Driving around in her Westfalia van with Liam tumbling around in the back, she pours bags of sugar in the gas tanks of construction vehicles at night, gleefully halting their progress one site at a time. We learn that Willow has given away a massive fortune, inherited from her father Harris Greenwood, who built up an incredibly successful timber empire, cutting trees down all across Canada. The majority of the book takes place in 1934 and 1908 where we meet Harris and his brother Everett, growing up together on a patch of forest in Eastern Canada, torn apart by WWI and the blindness that afflicts Harris as he grows into adulthood. Everett struggles after his return from combat, tramping across the country in search of respite, but instead finding an adventure he never dreamed possible.

My Thoughts

Better described as a literary depiction of a family tree, the first page of this novel features a cross-section of a tree with certain rings marked as years, highlighting the pivotal time periods for the Greenwood family. Through this framing technique, Christie introduces us to a family and their shared love of trees, all bound up in a plot-driven novel that bounces in-between time periods, but remains easy-to-follow despite the unique time structure. The exact years and the order in which we travel to them are secondary to the characters and their personal journeys. Some we hear from for only a page or two, while others make up the majority of dialogue and thought, yet each plays a pivotal role in the Greenwood life span.

Everything in this book revolves around trees; its plot and structure, its characters, even its metaphors. The trees withstand all the turmoil surrounding them, and when they live through droughts, floods, storms, the torment these natural disasters inflict are visible in their tree rings only after they are cut down. The characters’ lives are full of suffering, each struggling with challenges that reflect the time period they sit within; the depression, the dust storms, climate change, the opioid epidemic. At one point, a character even dies against a tree, clinging to it as the life bleeds out of her. This book is rife with symbolism, and although some readers may roll their eyes at it, I loved it! The natural world will always be a classroom, and the trees in this story are continually teaching those around them.

To top off an already engaging plot with colorful characters is a style of writing that doesn’t distract, but enhance the bones of a successful story. This doesn’t have spoilers in it, so I’ll leave you with a quote from the very end of the book:

“As soon as I’m ready, we’re going to leave this place. Together. If they attempt to stop us, we will flee into the forest. It will be a long walk from here into town. But I am strong & you give me courage & a forest has always been the best place for a person to escape into.” -p. 490 of ARC of Greenwood by Michael Christie

Spread the Word!

That last reminds me of what happened after my aunt divorced her second husband. The dude moved into a tree and bathed in a river.

Anyway, I’m with you. Books that focus on trees without being a straight-up science text are some of my favorites. I have a collection of essays/fiction that take real events about trees and fictionalize them a bit, along with some stories from the author’s life. It’s really elegant.

Jeez that must have been one big tree. Was it a tree house he moved into, or like, the hollowed out trunk? LOL

Since it was in Michigan, I have to imagine the dude built a tree house. This was back in the late 80’s or early 90’s.

I loved this too, and was so happy to have finally read it. I also loved all the symbolism and wondered if I was the only one. Ha! I felt so sorry for poor H.

I know, I know me too. Yes symbolism abound! We will see how it does in the competition…

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Greenwood by Michael Christie

A multigenerational family story about our relationship with nature and each other, social sharing.

A book cover featuring a green filtered photo of a lush forest.

They come for the trees. It is 2038. As the rest of humanity struggles through the environmental collapse known as the Great Withering, scientist Jake Greenwood is working as an overqualified tour guide on Greenwood Island, a remote oasis of thousand-year-old trees. Jake had thought the island's connection to her family name just a coincidence, until someone from her past reappears with a book that might give her the family history she's long craved.

From here, we gradually move backwards in time to the years before the First World War, encountering along the way the men and women who came before Jake: an injured carpenter facing the possibility of his own death, an eco-warrior trying to atone for the sins of her father's rapacious timber empire, a blind tycoon with a secret he will pay a terrible price to protect and a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant from certain death, only to find himself the subject of a country-wide manhunt. At the very centre of the book is a tragedy that will bind the fates of two boys together, setting in motion events whose reverberations we see unfold over generations, as the novel moves forward into the future once more.

A magnificent novel of inheritance, sacrifice, nature and love that takes its structure from the nested growth rings of a tree, Greenwood spans generations to tell the story of a family living and dying in the shadows cast by its own secrets. With this breathtaking feat of storytelling, Michael Christie masterfully reveals the tangled knot of lies, omissions and half-truths that exists at the root of every family's origin story. ( From McClelland & Stewart )

Greenwood will be championed by actor and filmmaker Keegan Connor Tracy on Canada Reads 2023.

The Canada Reads debates will take place on March 27-30. This year, we are looking for one book to shift your perspective.

Meet the Canada Reads 2023 contenders

They will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One , CBC TV , CBC Gem and on CBC Books .

LISTEN | Michael Christie reacts to making the Canada Reads longlist:

Greenwood was on the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist and won the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award (now the Canadian Crime Writing Awards) for best novel . CBC Books named Greenwood one of the best works of Canadian fiction in 2019 .

The best Canadian fiction of 2019
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CBC Books fall reading list: 30 books to read now
How environmental destruction and family trees inspired Michael Christie's new novel Greenwood

Michael Christie is a novelist currently living in Victoria. His 2011 short story collection The Beggar's Garden won the Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His 2015 novel If I Fall, If I Die won the Northern Lit Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize .

Why Michael Christie wrote Greenwood

"I was thinking of the idea of a bloodline and wanted to complicate the idea of a family tree. The whole book is an extended metaphor of a family tree.

"Genealogy isn't a simple story. In my own personal life and experience, families are built much more than they are born. Looking back into your ancestors, all those people have a name and story of their own. There are so many stories to be told in family history. So the narrative in the book is structured in that way.

Genealogy isn't a simple story. In my own personal life and experience, families are built much more than they are born. - Michael Christie

"I did a lot of reading about the Great Depression in Canada and the Canadian timber and farming industries. I also looked at the early days of the environmental conservation movement, particularly in British Columbia. I looked at a wide array of books to build this big world.

"I was thinking more cinematically than ever before in writing this book. I didn't write it as a screenplay but I was certainly aware of moving the story in a cinematic way."

Read more in his interview with CBC Books.

More i nterviews with Michael Christie

Other books by michael christie.

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Theresa Smith Writes

Delighting in all things bookish, book review: greenwood by michael christie, greenwood…, about the book:.

2038. On a remote island off the Pacific coast of British Columbia stands the Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, one of the world’s last forests. Wealthy tourists flock from all corners of the dust-choked globe to see the spectacle and remember what once was. But even as they breathe in the fresh air and pose for photographs amidst the greenery, guide Jake knows that the forest is dying, though her bosses won’t admit it.

1908. Two passenger locomotives meet head-on. The only survivors are two young boys, who take refuge in a trapper’s cabin in a forest on the edge of town. In twenty-six years, one of them, now a recluse, will find an abandoned baby — another child of Greenwood — setting off a series of events that will change the course of his life, and the lives of those around him.

Structured like the rings of a tree, this remarkable novel moves from the future to the present to the past, and back again, to tell the story of one family and their enduring connection to the place that brought them together.

My Thoughts:

‘…green things are all that keeps the land and sky from trading places.’

I don’t read anywhere near the amount of eco-literature that I’d like, but I’ve made a personal commitment to myself to read more, not just new releases, but to also pull off the eco titles from my #tbr that have been there patiently waiting for their turn for far too long. Greenwood is a new release, and one that I was eager to read from the moment I heard of it. And wow, it did not disappoint, not even a little bit. Greenwood is a brilliant novel that demonstrates the ghastly effects of treating the environment as a commodity. This really is a novel for our times.

‘One is subject to much talk nowadays concerning family trees and roots and bloodlines and such, as if a family were an eternal fact, a continuous branching upwards through time immemorial. But the truth is that all family lines, from the highest to the lowest, originate somewhere, on some particular day. Even the grandest trees must’ve once been seeds spun helpless on the wind, and then just meet saplings nosing up from the soil.’

We begin in the year 2038, a mere 18 years into the future and the world is choked with dust, climate change having affected the balance of ecosystems to the dire point where the world’s forests have died off, with only a few small pristine pockets left, one of which is on Greenwood Island. We meet Jake, a botanist working as a forest guide, and she notices whilst on a tour that one of the oldest trees in the forest, well over a thousand years old, has begun to show signs of disease, the ‘Withering’ that caused the present day environmental catastrophe. I admire how the author explained the Withering and the way in which climate change can affect the balance of an ecosystem, in a manner like dominoes tipping over; this knocks into this, changing this, which in effect changes this and then this happens. When you present issues comprehensively, they instantly gain more plausibility, something I think is of great importance in this era, particularly with the loud and persistent voices of climate change deniers bleating in the background. To my mind, this is the time where well written and well researched fiction can be at its most powerful, and eco-literature has a real chance at raising awareness and affecting change at a grassroots level.

‘It’s a crime to burden the young with the sorrows of the old.’

From the future we move back into the past, inching back gradually through the generations, learning more and more about Jake’s family history – far more in fact, than even she knows. This is where the true brilliance of this novel evolves, as it morphs into a blend of eco-literature, historical fiction, and family saga. It’s a big book, but it holds its own right the way through, never stalling, always illuminating. Structurally, I loved it, the way it moved backwards to the beginning, only to then move forwards to the ending. Trees are vitally important within this story and within this family. The manner in which the author linked the two was spellbinding.

‘Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors. And since the journal came to her, Jake has gained a new awareness of how her own life is being held up by unseen layers, girded by lives that came before her own. And by a series of crimes and miracles, accidents and choices, sacrifices and mistakes, all of which have landed her in this particular body and delivered her to this day.’

This novel illuminated me, broke me in parts, and gave me hope in others. It truly is a brilliant read and one that I’ll be recommending for years to come. It is, that which is most rare, a flawless novel.

Thanks is extended to Scribe for providing me with a copy of Greenwood for review.

About the Author:

Michael Christie is the author of the novel If I Fall, If I Die, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Kirkus Prize, was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was on numerous best of 2015 lists. His linked collection of stories, The Beggar’s Garden, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and won the Vancouver Book Award. His essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail. A former carpenter and homeless shelter worker, he divides his time between Victoria, British Columbia, and Galiano Island, where he lives with his wife and two sons in a timber-frame house that he built himself.

Greenwood Published by Scribe Released 4th February 2020

By Michael Christie

By michael christie read by kimberly farr, category: literary fiction | historical fiction, category: literary fiction | historical fiction | audiobooks.

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About Greenwood

A magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, from one of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize • “A rugged, riveting novel . . . This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory .”— Publishers Weekly (starred review) “There are plenty of visionary moments laced into [Christie’s] shape-shifting narrative. . . . Greenwood penetrates to the core of things.”— The New York Times Book Review It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and violent timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple-syrup camp squat, when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.

Listen to a sample from Greenwood

Also by michael christie.

About Michael Christie

MICHAEL CHRISTIE is the author of three books, most recently the novel Greenwood, which was an international bestseller, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Arthur Ellis Award, and has been translated into 10 languages. If I Fall,… More about Michael Christie

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“Ingeniously structured and with prose as smooth as beech bark, Michael Christie’s Greenwood is as compulsive as it is profound. A sweeping intergenerational saga that explores trees and their roots—from the precious evergreens that become commodities in the entertainment business of the future to the intricately tangled trees of family—all of it is dazzlingly delivered in a framework inspired by the actual growth rings of a tree. Every one of Greenwood ’s characters burrowed their way into my heart. Beguilingly brilliant, timely, and utterly engrossing, Greenwood is one of my favorite reads in recent memory.” —Kira Jane Buxton “Christie skillfully teases out the details in a page-turner of a saga that complements sylvan books such as Sometimes a Great Notion and The Overstory , one that closes with Jake’s realization that, tangled lineage and all, a family is less a tree than ‘a collection of individuals pooling their resources through intertwined roots.’ Beguilingly structured, elegantly written: ecoapocalyptic but with hope that somehow we’ll make it.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A rugged, riveting novel . . . This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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‘Greenwood’: an interview with author Michael Christie and a review of his new novel

September 27, 2019

Trees… if you love adventure and the outdoors, they are all around you, all the time. They form the backbone of the wild places we recreate in—and yet we often take them for granted. We walk, ride, ski and run past them. Yet, whether we realize it or not, we feel better when we’re around them. They calm us, they provide us with oxygen, they shade and shelter us. Trees are a very real and integral part of human and planetary survival, happiness and connection. (The Japanese practice of Forest Bathing is trending for a reason.)

In his latest novel Greenwood , Canadian author Michael Christie puts trees at the centre of his multi-generational tale of the Greenwood family. It begins in a dystopian near-future, where a climate change calamity known as the ‘Great Withering’ has wiped most of the trees from the planet. One of the few places with intact, mature old growth trees is a private island hidden among the Gulf Islands on the BC Coast. Like the ‘Tree Museum’ that Joni Mitchell sings about in her song “Big Yellow Taxi,” wealthy people glued to their smart phones pay big bucks to spend time on this island, away from the dust storms and blistering sun that ravages most of the planet. One of the tour guides there is Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood, a tree biologist plodding her way through tree tours in order to stay on the island and away from the calamity on the rest of the planet.

From here, Christie takes us on a brilliantly-crafted tale of the family, starting in 1908 with Jake’s great grandfather and great granduncle—one an eventual timber baron, the other a drifting hobo. Then onwards through the other key years of 1934, 1974 and 2008—where the Greenwood tale slowly unravels. Intertwined in the family tale is an inextricable relationship each has with trees—be it her great grandfather Harris Greenwood who destroys them for profit, or her grandmother Willow Greenwood who dedicates her life to protect them.

Christie probes the essence of trees and the intrinsic and practical value they hold for each of his characters, and in essence for each of us. On one level, Greenwood is a gripping yarn that follows the dramatic and tragic tale of a family trying to navigate the dark secrets of their past, while on the other it’s a tale of trees—and what we’ll face if we don’t care for them like we do our own children. It’s a brilliant, essential work that utters a subtle yet urgent warning about the future of our planet.

Frank: What inspired you to write a family saga centered around trees?

Christie : I’ve always admired novels that traverse generations and that portray great societal transformations, and I suppose I (quite naively it turned out) wanted to take a crack at one for myself.

Initially, I had some notes for characters involved with climate destruction, and environmentalism, carpentry and the timber industry, but the idea to lay the sections of Greenwood out like the concentric growth rings of a tree was what really kicked the project off. My wife and I own some property on Galiano Island, and we were in the process of clearing the land of some of its red cedars and Douglas firs so that we could build a little cabin, and after I cut down a fairly small tree I looked down at the stump and had a kind of revelation. It looked like a book: the yearly growth rings like pages, each building outward from the tree’s narrative beginning. And so I got the idea of giving my book this structure, one that mimicked a cross-sectioned tree, and the writing really flowed from there.

Aside from its structure and its historical sweep, the desire to write Greenwood also stemmed from the fact that in the last ten years I have witnessed my two children enter this world and have also witnessed both my parents leave it. And so I suppose I’ve been thinking a great deal about death and birth and this chain of being that we’re all a part of, and I wanted to write something that spoke to this.

I really related to the character of Everett Greenwood, the tree-tapping drifter and brother of timber baron Harris Greenwood. Is there a character in the novel that you relate to most? Are there bits of you in all the characters?

Everett Greenwood is one of those characters who felt like an undeserved gift when I first encountered him in my early drafts. He embodies so many traits that I admire: a kind of stoic resourcefulness, a sense of selflessness and resiliency. But he also harbours his share of damage, which is something I can also identify with, I suppose. So yes, I identify with Everett as well. But there are bits of me in all my characters. In Lomax, the drug-addicted family man who is pursuing Everett; in Liam Feeney, Harris Greenwood’s straight-talking assistant with an explosive secret; in Willow Greenwood, the tireless environmentalist who’d rather spend her life in a Westfalia rather than in the clutches of a soulless career; and in Jake Greenwood, an overqualified tour guide for the wealthy trying to hold on to the last scraps of hope and humanity in the face of ecological collapse. They’re all me. And my hope is that readers will see parts of themselves in these characters as well.

A good chunk of the novel takes place in depression-era Canada, stricken by poverty and drought. The writing is incredibly evocative, transporting the reader to that time. How did you research this section?

Firstly, I did a ton of reading. This included novels, memoirs and historical accounts of that time, with a particular focus on the Canadian experience of the Great Depression. I also watched some great films like Days of Heaven, There Will Be Blood and The Dust Bowl , the PBS documentary by Ken Burns that communicates powerfully (and terrifyingly) the sheer magnitude of human desperation at that time. It’s so easy to remember the Dust Bowl only as an economic disaster rather than as also an environmental one. But it was the first time North America lost control of things like soil erosion and proper farming practices, with disastrous results. Judging by our current woefully insufficient preparations for the much more massive climate threats that we’re facing now, I doubt we learned our lesson.

But beyond the reading and research, the depression-era has always been a period that has fascinated me. I grew up near the railway tracks in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and there was always this sense that we weren’t that far away from the hardships of the Great Depression. I even rode a freight train to Winnipeg once in my youth, which was thrilling, and fairly scary, especially because you’re afraid of getting caught and you never sure if you’re on the right train. So that was the end of my hoboing career. But it was an amazing experience. You see a part of the landscape you’d never see from the road.

There are a couple of lines about children imparting meaning to life that really stood out for me. Everett says of Pod, the child he ’s caring for, “I never had a knack for living before she came to me. It was more like I was killing time before I was gone, ” and, “A person never knows they’re starved for something until they get a taste for it.” Is this how you felt before you had y our own kids? Do you think these are universal truths?

I’m always careful when discussing the transformational nature of parenthood, because I have many friends who have quite understandably chosen not to have kids (often for environmental reasons) and also other friends who are unable to conceive for whatever reason, and I wouldn’t suggest for a minute that they lack the opportunity to connect with a deeper meaning in their lives. But with that said, and speaking only for myself, having my two sons has been the most amazing, positive and steadying experience of my life. I have a pet theory that if you only live for yourself, only ever guarding your own safety and satisfaction and development and enjoyment, then you will never truly experience what it means to be human.

You give very detailed accounts of the effect of opium on the character Lomax as he uses it to deal with physical and mental pain. How did you research opium and its effects? To me, his character represents a growing (and relatable) segment of present day society and the opioid crisis. Was this intentional?

In my younger years, drugs (at least the drugs that were available at the time) were fairly interesting to me. It was a misplaced sense of curiosity I suppose, but it also stemmed from what I have only identified in retrospect as a kind of emptiness that I was harbouring since I was young. I do quite a bit of cross-border travel, so I’m not going to get into the specifics of my research on opium. But I will say that I took a surf trip to Indonesia in the late nineties, and that experience benefitted me greatly while writing the character of Lomax.

Beyond that, I’ve been involved with addiction professionally in my life as well. In the 2000s, I worked for many years in a homeless shelter on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, housing and assisting people who were struggling with a complex array of issues, which usually included drug use and some kind of mental illness. So I’m very familiar with, and very sympathetic to, people who use drugs for whatever reason, and the current opioid crisis just breaks my heart. Those drug company executives who pushed Oxycontin into impoverished and hurting communities are some of the lowest, most despicable people on Earth, in my opinion.

The novel starts and finishes in a dystopian future where most of the world ’s trees have been wiped out by a climate change catastrophe. Is your novel a warning of such and event, or are you hopeful for a better outcome?

The warnings are already constant and convincing, for those who are heeding them, at least, so I don’t really see it as my job to provide more. Close to my home, the western red cedars of Galiano Island are all browning and withering as I write this, because a series of successive dry seasons has stressed them to the point of total collapse. These are trees that have grown here for centuries that are now simply giving up. And I can tell you: it’s completely gutting to watch. So the Great Withering that I’ve written about in my book didn’t even require much imagination at all, it pains me to say.

But I do have some hope, founded mostly upon the incredible resourcefulness and resilience of average human beings when an undeniable crisis is at hand. Look at WWII or our response to the Great Depression for inspiring examples of this resilience. Because if the oceans continue to acidify, and global temperatures continue to rise, and the aquifers dry up and large swaths of arable land turn to desert, then many, many human beings are going to die. All we can do now is try to minimize that number. But if we’re going to turn this ship around we’ll need to surrender our addiction to absurd levels of consumption and our extreme selfishness and our belief that something other than ourselves will come and save us. Will we do it? I’m not sure. But I’m ready to get to work.

Greenwood is published by McClelland and Stewart and was released on September 24th, 2019.

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Review: ‘Greenwood’ by Michael Christie

The rise and fall of forests and trees.

Feb. 4, 2022 5:05 a.m.

When the publishing industry speaks of “genre” it is usually for the ease of classification of any given book, about where to put in on a bookstore’s shelf and where a reader might go looking for the kind of book they particularly enjoy. And that’s fine, for the kind of book that lends itself to such classification.

Those books are not necessarily simple, but they are clearly classifiable (by content, by subject matter — you can also use keywords, and the story will find the correct level to belong to).

And then there’s something like Canadian author Michael Christie’s “Greenwood” — this year’s Whatcom READS pick. It isn’t so easily classifiable. The dates it uses to bracket its storyline range from the turn of the (last) century to 2038, and the aftermath of a science fictional “Great Blight” which has resulted in a wholesale extinction of trees (except in protected pockets) and a resurgence of Dust Bowl conditions which are rather more widespread than the iconic American Midwest original from the early 20th century years.

So — technically — it’s science fiction. But it’s also a sprawling family saga, of an extraordinary family and some extraordinary characters. And it’s also written in such a way and in such language that it earns the label of being highly literary. So it’s a “literary science-fiction family saga.” This may confuse or annoy those readers with no patience for such treasures; for others, it’s going to be the kind of book you read the first few pages of, and know that you now need to get comfortable and simply settle in for the rest of the ride.

The rise and fall of forests and trees is both a backdrop and an echo of what is happening to the human cast of characters. In a passage where somebody says something about just “wanting a normal life,” one of the book’s protagonists replies, “There aren’t any normal lives. That’s the lie that hurts us most.”

And that is where this novel absolutely shines — showing the extraordinary inside any life, showing how lives are lived from the inside, using the metaphor of wood and trees to showcase the human condition, both the glory and the rot of it. It tells the truth about there not being any “normal” lives because all lives are, as and of themselves. Sometimes difficult. Sometimes borderline impossible, whether or not that is self-inflicted. Often unexpectedly luminous, filled with moments of grace that come unlooked for.

“Greenwood” is one of the best examples of the old saying that fiction is simply a silver tissue of lies designed to tell an ultimate truth.

An elegy for forests, an empathetic exploration of several generations of a family deeply connected to trees, “Greenwood” is a novel that amply repays a reader’s time, and interest. It isn’t an easy book, it is not pure entertainment, it isn’t something you can just toss aside when you’re done because you’ll be thinking about it well after you’ve read its last line. This one will linger. If you like a book with heart, this one is highly recommended.

As part of Whatcom READS, borrow “Greenwood” as a book, eBook or audiobook from your local library, or purchase it from Village Books, which donates 10% of each sale to Whatcom READS. Author Michael Christie will visit Whatcom County March 3–5 to discuss the book and his creative process. Sign up for upcoming events related to the book at www.whatcomreads.org/events .

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Greenwood: A Novel Kindle Edition

Print length 480 pages
Language English
Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
Publisher Hogarth
Publication date February 25, 2020
File size 2844 KB
Page Flip Enabled
Word Wise Enabled
Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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From the Publisher

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07M75QB4X
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hogarth (February 25, 2020)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 25, 2020
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2844 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1984822004
#341 in Literary Sagas
#1,804 in Historical Literary Fiction
#2,572 in Saga Fiction

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Michael christie.

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Greenwood (Christie)

Greenwood Michael Christie, 2020 Random House 528 pp. ISBN-13: 9781984822000 Summary A magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, from one of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists . It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and violent timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple-syrup camp squat, when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio • Birth—ca. 1976 • Where—Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada • Education—Simon Fraser University • Awards— • Currently—lives in Victoria and on Galiano Island, British Columbia Michael Christie is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. He was born and raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, later moving to San Francisco and traveling the world as a professional skateboarder. Eventually, Christie landed in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he studied psychology at Simon Fraser University. After earning his degree, he spent several years working in social services. In 2008 Christie enrolled in the University of British Columbia's creative writing program. Less than years later, in early 2011, Christie published his first story collection, The Beggar's Garden , which was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize. Christie's first novel, If I Fall, If I Die , came out 2015, and Greenwood , his second, came out in 2019 it. Both novels received nominations for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Today, Christie divides his time between Victoria, BC's capital, located on Vancouver Island, and Galiano Island, some two hours north, where he lives with his wife and two sons in a timber-frame house he built himself. ( Adapted from Wikipedia and the publisher. Retrieved 3/1/2020 .) Read a more indepth (and much more interesting!) bio in the Quill & Quire .

Book Reviews ( Starred review ) A rugged, riveting novel.… This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction. Publishers Weekly ( Starred review ) Celebrated Canadian author Christie dazzles with this richly woven historical tracking five generations of the "trouble-plagued" Greenwood clan and the environmental devastation wrought by its lucrative timber empire. — Annalisa Pesek Library Journal ( Starred review ) Christie takes us to the end of the world and shows how we got there. … [The author] skillfully teases out the details in a page-turner…. Beguilingly structured, elegantly written: eco-apocalyptic but with hope that somehow we’ll make it. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 1. Greenwood is part of a new genre of novels known as CliFi (climate fiction). What makes it fall under that category? Do any of the novel’s environmental themes resonate with you? 2. At its heart, Greenwood is a family saga. How did the boyhoods of brothers Everett and Harris make them into the men they became? How do you think Willow’s nomadic life affected her son Liam? How did Jake’s orphaning influence the person she became? 3. The Great Withering began with the trees—“the wave of fungal blights and insect infestations, to which old growth was particularly defenseless.” What environmental stresses do you see in your life today? How do you personally address these issues? 4. “The best sacrifices, Willow knows, are always made in solitude, with not a camera in sight.” Characters make many sacrifices in Greenwood—Everett for his brother during the war, Temple for the downtrodden, Feeney out of love for his principles. What other sacrifices did you notice in the novel? Which character’s sacrifice moved you most and why? 5. How did you feel about Meena’s reaction to Liam’s painstakingly created gift, a homemade viola that replicated the Stradivarius Meena so loved? Were her actions necessary? Cruel? What did her reaction say about their relationship? 6. The word “roots” has many meanings in Greenwood —a tree’s stability, a family’s ancestry, a person’s connection to place. Which meaning resonated most with you and why? 7. “Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow.” Greenwood travels back and forth through time—deepening characters and their backstories, connecting characters in unforeseen ways, twisting the plot like roots. In fact, the book’s timeline, starting and ending with the most recent years, and with the earliest events tucked into the middle, is structured like the rings of a tree. How did this structure affect your reading experience? How would the reading experience have changed if the story was told linearly? 8. Why do you think author Michael Christie chose to write the center section—1908—in the voice of a Greek chorus of townspeople? How does this perspective enhance our understanding of the Greenwood boys’ upbringing? 9. Christie writes that nature has taught Temple “things she’d never speak in polite conversation. Like the fact that Mother Nature’s true aim is to convert us people back into the dust we came from, just as quick as possible.” Like Temple, people tend to view Mother Nature as either the great destroyer (earthquakes, floods, the Dust Bowl), or the great nurturer (providing food, shelter, oxygen, and more). Which view did each character take? Which do you lean toward? Do you think both can be true? Why or why not? 10. What do you think of Jake’s final actions at the end of the book? Did she make the right decisions? How would you have handled the revelations? ( Questions issued by the publisher .)

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Greenwood: A Novel Hardcover – Sept. 24 2019

Print length 512 pages
Language English
Publisher McClelland & Stewart
Publication date Sept. 24 2019
Dimensions 16.23 x 3.68 x 23.55 cm
ISBN-10 0771024452
ISBN-13 978-0771024450
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart (Sept. 24 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 512 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771024452
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771024450
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 907 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.23 x 3.68 x 23.55 cm
#2,278 in Family Saga
#3,043 in Family Life
#10,531 in Historical Fiction (Books)

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What to Know About Donald Trump’s New $60 Bible

“all americans need a bible in their home, and i have many. it’s my favorite book.”.

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One month after releasing a line of gilded high-tops for $399, Donald Trump revealed on Tuesday a new item: the Bible. “All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many,” the former president explained in a video promoting the country singer Lee Greenwood’s version of a King James translation, the “God Bless the USA Bible.”

“It’s my favorite book,” Trump added.

Throughout the rest of the clip, as if daring us into a collective disgust, Trump swerved through random opportunities to rail against bureaucrats and a country under threat—all while hawking a holy text.

But his latest sales pitch also prompted some legitimate questions. Such as: What the hell is going on? And: Excuse me? Here, we try to answer some of the queries.

So, that first question—what the hell—but more formally: What exactly is Trump promoting and how much will it cost me to shell out for this?

Trump is encouraging his supporters to buy a Bible endorsed by himself and Lee Greenwood. It costs $59.99, without taxes or shipping included. That seems to sit on the more expensive end of Bibles on sale at Barnes & Noble . But those books presumably don’t include copies of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the handwritten lyrics to the chorus of Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

The “God Bless the USA Bible” does include these items .

Trump is in a serious cash crunch . So is he going to make money with this Bible?

According to the book’s official site , the God Bless the USA Bible has nothing to do with Trump’s campaign. It is “not owned, managed, or controlled by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, CIC Ventures LLC, or any of their respective principals or affiliates.” Instead, Trump’s “name, likeness, and image” are being used “under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC.”

Wait, what is CIC Ventures LLC, though?

Okay, so CIC Ventures LLC is, according to the Washington Post , basically a pipeline to Trump:

In [Trump’s] financial disclosure released last year, he’s identified as the [CIC Ventures LLC’s] “manager, president, secretary and treasurer” and the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust is identified as a 100 percent owner of the business. The same entity also receives royalties from his book “A MAGA Journey” and speaking engagements.

In case it’s not already obvious: if you look at the company’s documents, you’ll find the principal address for CIC Ventures LLC is 3505 Summit Boulevard, West Palm Beach, Florida. That is a Trump golf course . Moreover, in a 2022 disclosure, Nick Luna is listed as a manager. Luna was Trump’s personal assistant and body man.

So, I’m sorry, but let me ask again: Is Trump making money off this?

The New York Times reports that “according to a person familiar” (classic) Trump will receive royalties from sales.

You could have just said that.

I wanted to tell you about the other stuff I found. Any other questions?

Yes. Who is Lee Greenwood?

The country singer who wrote “God Bless the USA.” Greenwood is a fierce MAGA guy who otherwise made news after pulling out of an NRA concert in response to the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting.

Does Greenwood have a Christmas album with an oddly sexual cover?

Yes. Look at this .

Perfect sweater. Anyway, I feel like I’m experiencing deja vu. Hasn’t Trump made headlines before with a Bible?

You’re probably recalling that despicable photo-op when Trump held up a Bible in front of St. John’s Church, which had been a location of racial justice protests in the days prior. There was a complicated saga, afterward, about whether or not Trump deployed the police to clear protesters to get to the church. An Inspector General’s report ultimately concluded that he did not.

Man, it’s pretty rough remembering all the awful shit we went through with him as president.

Yep. If you ever want to wallow in political depression, check out this quick compilation .

But wait. Wasn’t there another time Trump and the Bible made waves for something far more stupid?

Christian nationalists adore Trump, so there have probably been many times that Trump has referenced the Bible. But you might also be thinking of this incredible clip of Trump attempting to name his favorite verse .

Has a presidential candidate ever partnered on a holy text sale with a country musician?

Not to my knowledge. But this is from a dude who just last week seemed to compare his current legal jeopardy with the persecution of Jesus Christ. Happy Easter!

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Cash-strapped Trump is now selling $60 Bibles, U.S. Constitution included

Rachel Treisman

Then-President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., during a controversial 2020 photo-op. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Then-President Donald Trump holds up a Bible outside St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., during a controversial 2020 photo-op.

Former President Donald Trump is bringing together church and state in a gilded package for his latest venture, a $60 "God Bless The USA" Bible complete with copies of the nation's founding documents.

Trump announced the launch of the leather-bound, large-print, King James Bible in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday — a day after the social media company surged in its trading debut and two days after a New York appeals court extended his bond deadline to comply with a ruling in a civil fraud case and slashed the bond amount by 61%.

"Happy Holy Week! Let's Make America Pray Again," Trump wrote. "As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible."

Consider This from NPR

Why trump's persecution narrative resonates with christian supporters.

The Bible is inspired by "God Bless the USA," the patriotic Lee Greenwood anthem that has been a fixture at many a Trump rally (and has a long political history dating back to Ronald Reagan). It is the only Bible endorsed by Trump as well as Greenwood, according to its promotional website .

The Bible is only available online and sells for $59.99 (considerably more expensive than the traditional Bibles sold at major retailers, or those available for free at many churches and hotels). It includes Greenwood's handwritten chorus of its titular song as well as copies of historical documents including the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Pledge of Allegiance.

"Many of you have never read them and don't know the liberties and rights you have as Americans, and how you are being threatened to lose those rights," Trump said in a three-minute video advertisement.

"Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe that we need to bring them back and we have to bring them back fast."

'You gotta be tough': White evangelicals remain enthusiastic about Donald Trump

Trump critics on both sides of the aisle quickly criticized the product, characterizing it as self-serving and hypocritical.

Conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes slammed him for "commodifying the Bible during Holy Week," while Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota critiqued him for "literally taking a holy book and selling it, and putting it out there in order to make money for his campaign."

Trump says the money isn't going to his campaign, but more on that below.

Klobuchar added that Trump's public attacks on others are "not consistent with the teachings of the Bible," calling this "one more moment of hypocrisy." Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser for anti-Trump Republican PAC the Lincoln Project, called it "blasphemous ."

And former Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, trolled Trump with a social media post alluding to his alleged extramarital affairs.

"Happy Holy Week, Donald," she wrote. "Instead of selling Bibles, you should probably buy one. And read it, including Exodus 20:14 ."

Christianity is an increasingly prominent part of his campaign

Trump has made a point of cultivating Christian supporters since his 2016 presidential campaign and remains popular with white evangelicals despite his multiple divorces, insults toward marginalized groups and allegations of extramarital affairs and sexual assault.

And his narrative of being persecuted — including in the courts — appears to resonate with his many Christian supporters.

Trump has increasingly embraced Christian nationalist ideas in public. He promised a convention of religious broadcasters last month that he would use a second term to defend Christian values from the "radical left," swearing that "no one will be touching the cross of Christ under the Trump administration."

He made similar comments in the Bible promotional video, in which he warned that "Christians are under siege" and the country is "going haywire" because it lost religion.

What to know about the debut of Trump's $399 golden, high-top sneakers

"We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor or discriminate against us," he said. "We have to bring Christianity back into our lives and back into what will be again a great nation."

Trump himself is not known to be particularly religious or a regular churchgoer. He long identified as Presbyterian but announced in 2020 that he identified as nondenominational .

A Pew Research Center survey released earlier this month found that most people with positive views of Trump don't see him as especially religious, but think he stands up for people with religious beliefs like their own.

Trump said in the promotional video that he has many Bibles at home.

"It's my favorite book," he said, echoing a comment he's made in previous years. "It's a lot of people's favorite book."

The Impact Of Christian Nationalism On American Democracy

Trump's relationship to the Bible has been a point of discussion and sometimes controversy over the years.

In 2020, amid protests over George Floyd's murder, he posed with a Bible outside a Washington, D.C., church, for which he was widely criticized. U.S. Park Police and National Guard troops had tear-gassed peaceful protesters in the area beforehand, seemingly to make way for the photo-op, though a watchdog report the following year determined otherwise .

That same year, a clip of a 2015 Bloomberg interview, in which Trump declines to name his favorite — or any — Bible verse resurfaced on social media and went viral.

Bible sales are unlikely to solve Trump's financial problems

An FAQ section on the Bible website says no profits will go to Trump's reelection campaign.

"GodBlessTheUSABible.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign," it says.

However, the site adds that it uses Trump's name, likeness and image "under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC."

Trump is listed as the manager, president, secretary and treasurer of CIC Ventures LLC in a financial disclosure from last year.

Here's what happens if Trump can't pay his $454 million bond

Trump's sales pitch focuses on bringing religion back to America.

"I want to have a lot of people have it," he said at one point in the video. "You have to have it for your heart and for your soul."

But many are wondering whether Trump has something else to gain from Bible sales while facing under mounting financial pressure.

There's his presidential reelection campaign, which has raised only about half of what Biden's has so far this cycle. Trump acknowledged Monday that he "might" spend his own money on his campaign, something he hasn't done since 2016.

There's also his mounting legal expenses, as he faces four criminal indictments and numerous civil cases. Trump posted bond to support a $83.3 million jury award granted to writer E. Jean Carroll in a defamation case earlier this month, and was due to put up another $454 million in a civil fraud case this past Monday.

Trump is on the verge of a windfall of billions of dollars. Here are 3 things to know

His lawyers had said last week that they had approached 30 companies for help making bond, but doing so was a "practical impossibility" — prompting New York's attorney general to confirm that if Trump did not pay, she would move to seize his assets . On Monday, the appeals court reduced the bond amount to $175 million and gave Trump another 10 days to post it.

Trump has evidently been trying to raise money in other ways.

The day after the civil fraud judgment was announced, he debuted a line of $399 golden, high-top sneakers , which sold out in hours . The company behind his social media app, Truth Social, started trading on the Nasdaq exchange on Tuesday, which could deliver him a windfall of more than $3 billion — though he can't sell his shares for another six months.

Donald J. Trump
sales pitch
Christianity

Trump’s Newest Venture? A $60 Bible.

His Bible sales pitch comes as he appears to be confronting a significant financial squeeze, with his legal fees growing while he fights a number of criminal cases and lawsuits.

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Former President Donald J. Trump holding a Bible in his right hand. A sign for St. John’s Church is behind him.

By Michael Gold and Maggie Haberman

March 26, 2024

Before he turned to politics, former President Donald J. Trump lent his star power and celebrity endorsement to a slew of consumer products — steaks, vodka and even for-profit education, to name just a few.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, added a new item to the list: a $60 Bible.

Days before Easter, Mr. Trump posted a video on his social media platform in which he encouraged his supporters to buy the “God Bless the USA Bible,” named after the ballad by the country singer Lee Greenwood, which Mr. Trump plays as he takes the stage at his rallies.

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” said Mr. Trump, who before entering politics was not overtly religious and who notably stumbled while referencing a book of the Bible during his 2016 campaign. “It’s a lot of people’s favorite book.”

Though Mr. Trump is not selling the Bible, he is getting royalties from purchases, according to a person familiar with the details of the business arrangement.

Priced at $59.99, plus shipping and tax, the “God Bless the USA Bible” includes a King James Bible and a handwritten version of the chorus of Mr. Greenwood’s song, and copies of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance.

In his video, Mr. Trump expressed his approval of the book’s blend of theology with foundational American political documents, framing that mix as central to the political call that has been his longtime campaign slogan, Make America Great Again.

“Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country,” Mr. Trump said. Later, he added, “We must make America pray again.”

As he runs for president this year, Mr. Trump has framed his campaign as a crusade to defend Christian values from the left. He often makes false or misleading claims that Democrats are persecuting Christians. Last month, he told a religious media convention that Democrats wanted to “tear down crosses.”

His Bible sales pitch comes as he appears to be confronting a significant financial squeeze. With his legal fees growing while he fights four criminal cases and a number of civil lawsuits, Mr. Trump is also being required to post a $175 million bond while he appeals his New York civil fraud case — a hefty amount, though one that is significantly smaller than the $454 million penalty imposed in the case.

According to the Bible’s website, Mr. Trump’s “name, likeness and image” are being used “under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC.”

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions about the business arrangement. But CIC Ventures is also connected to another product Mr. Trump has hawked while campaigning: $399 “Never Surrender” sneakers that he announced at a sneaker convention in Philadelphia last month.

Michael Gold is a political correspondent for The Times covering the campaigns of Donald J. Trump and other candidates in the 2024 presidential elections. More about Michael Gold

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

Our Coverage of the 2024 Elections

Presidential Race

President Biden raised $25 million campaigning alongside Barack Obama and Bill Clinton at a Radio City Music Hall event , adding to his huge cash edge, after Donald Trump pushed his law-and-order message at a wake for a police officer killed on duty.

Trump Media, now publicly traded, could present new conflicts of interest in a second Trump term.

Donald Trump cast Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a liberal democrat in disguise while also seeming to back the independent presidential candidate as a spoiler for the Biden campaign.

Other Key Races

Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady, abruptly ended her bid for U.S. Senate, a campaign flop that reflected intense national frustration with politics as usual .

Kari Lake, a Trump acolyte running for Senate in Arizona, is struggling to walk away from the controversial positions that have turned off independents and alienated establishment Republicans.

Ohio will almost certainly go for Trump this November. Senator Sherrod Brown, the last Democrat holding statewide office, will need to defy the gravity of the presidential contest to win a fourth term.

Trump promotes Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless The USA Bible': What to know about the book and its long journey

Former president Donald Trump encourages supporters to buy Lee Greenwood's "God Bless The USA Bible," a project inspired by Nashville country musician's hit song.
Resurgent version of Greenwood's Bible project a modified version from original concept, a change that likely followed 2021 shake-up in publishers.

After years with few updates about Lee Greenwood’s controversial Bible, the project is again resurgent with a recent promotion by former President Donald Trump.

“All Americans need to have a Bible in their home and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in a video posted to social media Tuesday, encouraging supporters to purchase the “God Bless The USA Bible.” “Religion is so important and so missing, but it’s going to come back.”

Greenwood — the Nashville area country musician whose hit song “God Bless the USA” inspired the Bible with a similar namesake — has long been allies with Trump and other prominent Republicans, many of whom are featured in promotional material for the “God Bless The USA Bible.” But that reputational clout in conservative circles hasn’t necessarily translated to business success in the past, largely due to a major change in the book’s publishing plan.

Here's what to know about the Bible project’s journey so far and why it’s significant it’s back in the conservative limelight.

An unordinary Bible, a fiery debate

The “God Bless The USA Bible” received heightened attention since the outset due to its overt political features.

The text includes the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, and the lyrics to the chorus to Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA.” Critics saw it as a symbol of Christian nationalism, a right-wing movement that believes the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.

A petition emerged in 2021 calling Greenwood’s Bible “a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism.” From there, a broader conversation ensued about the standards by which publishers print Bibles.

Gatekeeping in Bible publishing

Greenwood’s early business partner on the project, a Hermitage-based marketing firm called Elite Source Pro, initially reached a manufacturing agreement with the Nashville-based HarperCollins Christian Publishing to print the “God Bless The USA Bible.”

As part of that agreement, HarperCollins would publish the book but not sell or endorse it. But then HarperCollins reversed course , a major setback for Greenwood’s Bible.

The reversal by HarperCollins followed a decision by Zondervan — a publishing group under HarperCollins Christian Publishing and an official North American licensor for Bibles printed in the New International Version translation — to pass on the project. HarperCollins said the decision was unrelated to the petition or other public denunciations against Greenwood’s Bible.

The full backstory: Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible' finds new printer after HarperCollins Christian passes

A new translation and mystery publisher

The resurgent “God Bless The USA Bible” featured in Trump’s recent ad is an altered version of the original concept, a modification that likely followed the publishing shake-up.

Greenwood’s Bible is now printed in the King James Version, a different translation from the original pitch to HarperCollins.

Perhaps the biggest mystery is the new publisher. That manufacturer is producing a limited quantity of copies, leading to a delayed four-to-six weeks for a copy to ship.

It’s also unclear which business partners are still involved in the project. Hugh Kirkman, who led Elite Service Pro, the firm that originally partnered with Greenwood for the project, responded to a request for comment by referring media inquiries to Greenwood’s publicist.

The publicist said Elite Source Pro is not a partner on the project and the Bible has always been printed in the King James Version.

"Several years ago, the Bible was going to be printed with the NIV translation, but something happened with the then licensor and the then potential publisher. As a result, this God Bless The USA Bible has always been printed with the King James Version translation," publicist Jeremy Westby said in a statement.

Westby did not have the name of the new licensee who is manufacturing the Bible.

Trump’s plug for the “God Bless The USA Bible” recycled language the former president is using to appeal to a conservative Christian base.

“Our founding fathers did a tremendous thing when they built America on Judeo-Christian values,” Trump said in his video on social media. “Now that foundation is under attack perhaps as never before.”

'Bring back our religion’: Trump vows to support Christians during Nashville speech

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at [email protected] or on social media @liamsadams.

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Good Friday

Trump is selling ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles for $59.99 as he faces mounting legal bills

Former President Donald Trump, now the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, released a video on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday urging supporters to buy the “God Bless the USA Bible,” inspired by country singer Lee Greenwood’s patriotic ballad.

FILE - President Donald Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John’s Church across Lafayette Park from the White House, June 1, 2020, in Washington. Trump is now selling Bibles as he runs to return to the White House. The presumptive Republican nominee released a video on his Truth Social platform Tuesday urging his supporters to purchase the “God Bless The USA Bible.” (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump is now selling Bibles as he runs to return to the White House.

Trump, who became the presumptive Republican nominee earlier this month, released a video on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday urging his supporters to buy the “God Bless the USA Bible,” which is inspired by country singer Lee Greenwood’s patriotic ballad. Trump takes the stage to the song at each of his rallies and has appeared with Greenwood at events.

“Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible,” Trump wrote, directing his supporters to a website selling the book for $59.99.

The effort comes as Trump has faced a serious money crunch amid mounting legal bills while he fights four criminal indictments along with a series of civil charges. Trump was given a reprieve Monday when a New York appeals court agreed to hold off on collecting the more than $454 million he owes following a civil fraud judgment if he puts up $175 million within 10 days. Trump has already posted a $92 million bond in connection with defamation cases brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll , who accused Trump of sexual assault.

Former President Donald Trump awaits the start of a pre-trial hearing with his defense team at Manhattan criminal, Monday, March 25, 2024, in New York. A judge will weigh on Monday when the former president will go on trial. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, Pool)

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video posted on Truth Social. “I’m proud to endorse and encourage you to get this Bible. We must make America pray again.”

Billing itself as “the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” the new venture’s website calls it “Easy-to-read” with “large print” and a “slim design” that “invites you to explore God’s Word anywhere, any time.”

Besides a King James Version translation, it includes copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Greenwood song.

The Bible is just the latest commercial venture that Trump has pursued while campaigning.

Last month, he debuted a new line of Trump-branded sneakers , including $399 gold “Never Surrender High-Tops,” at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia. The venture behind the shoes, 45Footwear, also sells other Trump-branded footwear, cologne and perfume.

Trump has also dabbled in NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, and last year reported earning between $100,000 and $1 million from a series of digital trading cards that portrayed him in cartoon-like images, including as an astronaut, a cowboy and a superhero.

Donald Trump is facing four criminal indictments, and a civil lawsuit. You can track all of the cases here .

He has also released books featuring photos of his time in office and letters written to him through the years.

The Bible’s website states the product “is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign.”

“GodBlessTheUSABible.com is not owned, managed or controlled by Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, CIC Ventures LLC or any of their respective principals or affiliates,” it says.

Instead, it says, “GodBlessTheUSABible.com uses Donald J. Trump’s name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.”

CIC Ventures LLC, a company that Trump reported owning in his 2023 financial disclosure, has a similar arrangement with 45Footwear, which also says it uses Trump’s “name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.”

A Trump spokesperson and God Bless the USA Bible did not immediately respond to questions about how much Trump was paid for the licensing deal or stands to make from each book sale.

Trump remains deeply popular with white evangelical Christians , who are among his most ardent supporters, even though the thrice-married former reality TV star has a long history of behavior that often seemed at odds with teachings espoused by Christ in the Gospels.

When he was running in 2016, Trump raised eyebrows when he cited “Two Corinthians” at Liberty University, instead of the standard “Second Corinthians.”

When asked to share his favorite Bible verse in an interview with Bloomberg Politics in 2015, he demurred.

“I wouldn’t want to get into it. Because to me, that’s very personal,” he said. “The Bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.”

When he was president, law enforcement officers aggressively removed racial justice protesters from a park near the White House, allowing Trump to walk to nearby St. John’s Church, where he stood alone and raised a Bible. The scene was condemned at the time by the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Before he ran for office, Trump famously hawked everything from frozen steaks to vodka to a venture named Trump University, which was later sued for fraud .

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Review: 'Greenwood' by Michael Christie
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COMMENTS

Greenwood by Michael Christie review
Harris Greenwood is a lumberman raised during the leanest years of the 1930s, who has made a healthy fortune hacking down swaths of British Columbian forest. His rationale is that even the mighty ...
Greenwood by Michael Christie
His linked collection of stories, The Beggar's Garden, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction, and won the Vancouver Book Award. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Globe & Mail. Greenwood, his most was released in September 2019.
Greenwood by Michael Christie book review
Books Book Reviews Fiction Nonfiction March books 50 notable fiction books 'Greenwood' is an absorbing saga of families and trees — and how they survive. Review by Mark Athitakis.
It's 2038. The World Is Dust and Forests Are Scarce
The year is 2038, and Greenwood Arboreal Cathedral, as it's called, is home to "one of the last remaining old-growth forests on Earth.". Most of the world has succumbed to dust storms and ...
Summary and reviews of Greenwood by Michael Christie
A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
GREENWOOD
Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry influencers in the know since 1933. ... It's 2038, and Jacinda "Jake" Greenwood is a guide in one of the last stands of old-growth forest in the world, a place to which wealthy eco-tourists, fleeing the dust storms and intense heat wrought by "the Great Withering ...
Book Review: Greenwood by Michael Christie
My Thoughts. Better described as a literary depiction of a family tree, the first page of this novel features a cross-section of a tree with certain rings marked as years, highlighting the pivotal time periods for the Greenwood family. Through this framing technique, Christie introduces us to a family and their shared love of trees, all bound ...
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Greenwood was on the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist and won the 2020 Arthur Ellis Award (now the Canadian Crime Writing Awards) for best novel. CBC Books named Greenwood one of the best ...
Book Review: Greenwood by Michael Christie
Greenwood is a brilliant novel that demonstrates the ghastly effects of treating the environment as a commodity. This really is a novel for our times. 'One is subject to much talk nowadays concerning family trees and roots and bloodlines and such, as if a family were an eternal fact, a continuous branching upwards through time immemorial.
Greenwood (Christie)
Greenwood. Michael Christie, 2020. Random House. 528 pp. ISBN-13: 9781984822000. Summary. A magnificent generational saga that charts a family's rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, from one of Canada's most acclaimed novelists. It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide ...
Greenwood by Michael Christie: 9781984822017
The New York Times Book Review It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. ... MICHAEL CHRISTIE is the author of three books, most recently the novel Greenwood, which was an international bestseller, was ...
'Greenwood': an interview with author Michael Christie and a review of
Frank Wolf shares his book review of Greenwood and conversation with author Michael Christie. Trees… if you love adventure and the outdoors, they are all around you, all the time. They form the backbone of the wild places we recreate in—and yet we often take them for granted. We walk, ride, ski and run past them.
Book Review: Greenwood by Michael Christie
Book Review: Greenwood by Michael Christie. Jodene Wylie. January 25, 2021. Reviews. by Dahl Botterill. Two things lie at the heart of Michael Christie's Greenwood: trees, and family. Jake Greenwood is a tremendously overqualified Forest Guide on Greenwood Island (no relation), one of the last bastions of truly ancient trees to survive a ...
Book Marks reviews of Greenwood by Michael Christie
The New York Times Book Review. The author broaches every kind of human valor, villainy and vulnerability: drug addiction, forbidden desires and laudable do-gooding, among others. He commands attention not through conservationist pieties but with the way his forest-killers and tree-loving zealots are equally off-kilter and contradiction-filled ...
Greenwood
In Greenwood, his thought-provoking second novel, B.C. writer Michael Christie uses the ringed cross-section of a tree as an organizing principle and structure. As Christie writes, "Wood is time captured. A map. A cellular memory. A record." And, in some cases, a handy metaphor for a family tree. The book begins in 2038, in the
Review: 'Greenwood' by Michael Christie
As part of Whatcom READS, borrow "Greenwood" as a book, eBook or audiobook from your local library, or purchase it from Village Books, which donates 10% of each sale to Whatcom READS. Author Michael Christie will visit Whatcom County March 3-5 to discuss the book and his creative process.
Greenwood: A Novel: Christie, Michael: 9781984822000: Amazon.com: Books
Greenwood penetrates to the core of things."— The New York Times Book Review It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a ...
Greenwood: A Novel Kindle Edition
Greenwood penetrates to the core of things."— The New York Times Book Review It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a ...
Greenwood (Christie)
Book Reviews (Starred review) A rugged, riveting novel.…This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers's The Overstory while offering a convincing vision of potential ecological destruction. Publishers Weekly (Starred review) Celebrated Canadian author Christie dazzles with this richly woven historical tracking five generations of the "trouble-plagued" Greenwood clan and the ...
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Greenwood penetrates to the core of things."—The New York Times Book Review It's 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace ...
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Greenwood penetrates to the core of things.' - Michael Upchurch, The New York Times Book Review 'This book is why we read books. Why we need books. Wildly inventive, structurally elegant, deeply felt, and so very wise. Greenwood is Michael Christie's best work ever, and that's saying something.' - Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting
Greenwood: A Novel : Christie, Michael: Amazon.ca: Books
Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel Shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize Shortlisted for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize "Superb. . . . There are plenty of visionary moments laced into his shape-shifting narrative. . . . Greenwood penetrates to the core of things." — New York Times Book Review "A deeply compelling ...
All Book Marks reviews for Greenwood by Michael Christie
Positive Michael Upchurch, The New York Times Book Review. The author broaches every kind of human valor, villainy and vulnerability: drug addiction, forbidden desires and laudable do-gooding, among others. He commands attention not through conservationist pieties but with the way his forest-killers and tree-loving zealots are equally off ...
What to Know About Donald Trump's New $60 Bible
Trump is encouraging his supporters to buy a Bible endorsed by himself and Lee Greenwood. It costs $59.99, without taxes or shipping included. That seems to sit on the more expensive end of Bibles ...
Donald Trump is selling a 'God Bless the USA' Bible for $60 : NPR
The "God Bless The USA" Bible is inspired by the Lee Greenwood anthem and includes copies of the nation's founding documents. Trump launched it ahead of Easter as his financial woes mount.
Trump's Newest Venture? A $60 Bible.
Priced at $59.99, plus shipping and tax, the "God Bless the USA Bible" includes a King James Bible and a handwritten version of the chorus of Mr. Greenwood's song, and copies of the ...
Why some Christians are angry about Trump's 'God Bless the USA' Bible
Former President Donald Trump is officially selling a patriotic copy of the Christian Bible themed to Lee Greenwood's famous song, "God Bless the USA." "Happy Holy Week!" Trump announced ...
Trump Bible: Journey behind Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible'
The full backstory:Lee Greenwood's 'God Bless the USA Bible' finds new printer after HarperCollins Christian passes A new translation and mystery publisher. The resurgent "God Bless The USA ...
Donald Trump is selling Bibles for $59.99 as he faces mounting legal
Trump takes the stage to the song at each of his rallies and has appeared with Greenwood at events. "Happy Holy Week! Let's Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible," Trump wrote, directing his supporters to a website selling the book for $59.99.

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