Dean Kuipers
The Deer Camp: A Memoir of a Father, a Family, and the Land that Healed Them
(Bloomsbury, May 2019)
Amazon ‘Best Book of May’ pick
An Amazon “Best Book of 2019 so far” pick
For readers of The Stranger in the Woods and H Is for Hawk, a beautifully written and emotionally rewarding memoir about a father, his three sons, and a scrappy 100-acre piece of land in rural Michigan.
Bruce Kuipers was good at hunting and fishing, but not at anything else that makes a real father or husband. Distant, angry, and a serial cheater, he destroyed his relationship with his wife, Nancy, and alienated his three sons – journalist Dean, woodsman Brett, and troubled yet brilliant fisherman Joe. He distrusted people and clung to rural America as a place to hide.
So when Bruce purchased a 100-acre hunting property as a way to reconnect with his sons, they resisted. The land was the perfect bait, but the moment the sons arrived, none of them knew how to be together as a family. Conflicts arose over whether the land-an old farm that had been degraded and reduced to a few stands of pine and blowing sand-should be left alone or be actively restored. After a decade-long impasse, Bruce acquiesced, and his sons proceeded with their restoration plan. What happened next was a miracle of nature.
Dean Kuipers weaves a beautiful and surprising story about the restorative power of land and of his own family, which so desperately needed healing. Heartwarming and profound, The Deer Camp is the perfect story of fathers, sons, and the beauty and magic of the natural world.
Advance Praise for The Deer Camp
“Kuipers alludes often to other writers and thinkers—from ecological scientists and eco-humanists to poets W.S. Merwin and Wendell Berry… Lushly detailed and full of eco-devotion, this candid narrative has much to say about human beings bearing burdens, coping, and aiding one another.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“Kuipers’s gratifying narrative endearingly explores father-son relationships as well as the transformational power of nature.”
–Publishers Weekly
“Kuipers has an extraordinary ear. With great acuity and insight he hears and interprets the voices of human family and ecological community. The forest and its people come alive in his words. In beautiful prose, he uncovers and honors both the brokenness and the joy of our relationships with each other and the land.”
–David George Haskell, author of Burroughs Medalist The Songs of Trees and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Forest Unseen
“In this poignant, honest memoir, Dean Kuipers guides readers through forests that feel both familiar and wild, in search of a family and a father he’d never known. The Deer Camp deftly navigates the deep and often complicated relationships between who we are and the places we love.”
–Caroline Van Hemert, author of The Sun is a Compass
“This is a resplendent celebration of childhood, an elegy for broken fathers, and a communion with immensities. Kuipers maps how a shattered family can wade into wilderness and be bound back together by water and sky. Reading this is like hearing animal songs at night. You can feel the pines in these pages, and know that a tree is growing where this book once stood.”
–Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust
“A unique and engaging memoir that beautifully weaves candid, intimate personal narrative with deep, intelligent reflections on nature and humans.”
–Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Defending Beef
“Wise, beautiful, honest writing about a landscape I love.”
–Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
“The Deer Camp is an astonishing, impossible-to-put-down memoir that engages our largest conflicts –generational, psychological, global – with a rarified combination of rigor, grace, and levity. ‘The big problems can be solved only by small solutions,’ a friend tells author Dean Kuipers, and Kuipers’ radical, small solutions are sentences-one brutally true sentence after the next-that together accrue the breathing power of a wild landscape capable of reconciling, as only the land can, an estranged father and his sons. Luminous, vital, at times even hilarious, The Deer Camp is one of the most necessary books I’ve read in years.”
–Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water
Read Kirkus Reviews‘s review of THE DEER CAMP
Read Publishers Weekly‘s review of THE DEER CAMP
Publishers Marketplace shares THE DEER CAMP has been picked as an Amazon Best Book of the Month for May
Business Insider features THE DEER CAMP as part of Amazon’s Best Books of the Month for May
Read an excerpt of THE DEER CAMP on Outside Magazine
Paul Semel interviews Dean Kuipers
Read Detroit News‘s feature on THE DEER CAMP
Michigan Radio NPR reviews THE DEER CAMP
Dean Kuipers has studied and written about the field of environmental politics and the human-nature relationship for decades. He is the author of Burning Rainbow Farm and Operation Bite Back. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Outside, The Atlantic, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. He lives in Los Angeles.