“Against the Grain” Book Launch
Two-thousand-year-old redwoods once cloaked the northern California coast like bear fur. As wide as a road and as tall as ten houses stacked on top of each other, they cast a spell on anyone willing to listen. As a boy, Logan Blackburn spent many nights on a platform two hundred feet off the ground in his favorite giant, Uuma, lulled to sleep by her strange murmuring and thrumming. Now only three percent of these ancient beings remain. Logan, now a young man, joins his father and other activists to stop logging companies from finishing them off. The fight gets violent, and when Logan’s father dies in the attempt, the spell is broken. Logan can no longer hear the trees.
To make matters worse, billionaire Atlas Jamison, who staged a hostile takeover of Pacific Lumber, is tripling the tree-felling rate. The largest and most ancient ones are being reduced to lawn furniture with heart-stopping speed.
Activists resort to ever more desperate measures to save both trees and planet, but Jamison seems unstoppable until his daughter Diana shows up, wanting to protect him from what she thinks is an unfair smear campaign.
Can Logan overcome his grief and rage to show this privileged and savvy woman how to hear the voices of the trees—and stop her father’s destruction? Is there more to Atlas Jamison than meets the eye?
Based on the true story of violent clashes in Northern California between corporate raiders, loggers, and activists during Redwood Summer 1990, Against the Grain is action-packed, transcendent, and timely. It asks, what it will take to wake humans up? Violence, love, or loss?
