Rhythm of the Wild

Rhythm of the Heart is a compelling memoir about Kim Heacox’s 30+ year relationship with the most iconic landscape in Alaska, a sister book to his 2005 Lyons book The Only Kayak, a PEN USA Literary Award finalist now in its seventh printing. Woven throughout the personal narrative will be stories on the human and natural histories of the Denali National Park, garnished with a conservation polemic, much as Edward Abbey did with Desert Solitaire, and Rick Bass has done with any number of books (that continue to sell well). Heacox will write of Denali through an inspirational arc; to show how a place can touch a life, even save a life, quietly, profoundly, day after day, year after year, and how that saving multiplied by millions of lives over a century makes the world a better place. Heacox makes the argument, through his beautiful and impassioned prose, that we must save these places so they in turn will save us. Denali National Park is the most accessible subarctic sanctuary in the world, and has awakened millions of people to what’s authentic, priceless and true. Any serious student of spirituality and the American landscape must one day address his relationship with Alaska, and once in Alaska, he must confront Denali, the heart of the state, the state of the heart.