“Ambivalent Characters The Golden Spruce is about a lot of things--but they all take place against the back-drop of the logging industry. As the author interviews those who have made their living supporting the world's lifestyle enabled by wood-based products, his interviewees keep coming back to a single point: looking back on their logging careers in SE Alaska and NW Canada, they aren't sure if logging these forests has been "worth it."Maybe this element is always present in the books we find "good" or "interesting"--something that characters (or even ourselves) are locked into, they/we know that it's a violation somehow, yet are coming up quickly to the consequences. As readers, we take something from their experiences. What are other books have you found that do this for the reader where charcters' ambivalence teach us something, give us conviction, steel an opinion, essentially tell us about ourselves?”
