Renny Russell News
Animist Press is proud to announce Rock Me on the Water was a finalist in the 
2008 Benjamin Franklin Award for the Nature and Environment category. The Benjamin Franklin Awards are sponsored PMA, the Independent Book Publishers Association, and celebrate excellence in editorial and design for titles published in 2007. Judges for the Benjamin Franklin Awards come from all areas of the industry: major newspaper and trade media reviewers, bookstore and library buyers and reviewers, non-competing publishers, artists and writers who serve the industry. One judge writes of Russell's book: "GREAT! This one stays on my permanent-forever bookshelf." From ForeWords founder and publisher Victoria Sutherland: "These carefully chosen titles affirm our notion that the best ideas in written form are coming from the independent press community, and that with some distinction will find a broader audience among the reading public."
Review from FOREWORD Oct 2007
"Renny Russell's Rock Me on the Water; A Life on the Loose is a product of self examination. The long coming follow-up to the Sierra Club's million-seller, On the Loose, documents a singular water-journey. In a hand-built wooden dory, Russell follows the Green River that took his brother Terry's life forty years before. "I was wrestling with having been at the oars when the stars fell from the sky." The narrative flows between present and past. The Streer Ridge Rapids disaster is central, but less mournful memories also feature. Over a hundred photographs plus watercolor illustrations enrich the already lyrically evocative text. The tight connection between inner struggle and nature's challenge suggests Peter Matthinessen's The Snow Leopard."
A Review from a reader at Amazon:
"The outer journey parallels the inner as soul is recovered by landscape. Beautiful photos and drawings. The personal becomes universal. No commercialism, nothing packaged or taken for granted. Eloquent writing; spare but descriptive. The reader sees what the author writes because the author is a visual artist as well as a seasoned river guide."
— Katy Perlman
Review by Joe Foster from the "Durango Telegraph" September 13 2007
I hesitate to write a review of a beautiful book while constantly referring to another, previous, beautiful book. In this specific case, though, there is a tragedy that hangs over both, tying them together through the decades that separate them. Suffice it to say, both works stand strongly on their own, but neither is even remotely complete without the other. Some back story is necessary for those of you who don’t know: back in the ’60s, two brothers, Terry and Renny Russell handed a manuscript of photographs, calligraphic poems, quotes and musings to David Brower of the Sierra Club. He was astounded and immediately wanted to publish it. To celebrate, or simply because they hadn’t been there before, the brothers took a trip down the Green River through Desolation and Grey canyons in an old army raft. The boat flipped, throwing both young men to the rapids. Terry, the older of the two, never made it to shore. Renny washed up on the beach and looked for his brother for days before climbing out of the canyon and walking 70 desolate and isolated miles to the nearest town for help. Terry’s body was found days later.
The book was On the Loose, a cult phenomenon that helped spawn a back-to-nature movement. As co-author of the Sierra Club’s most successful book, Renny says in Rock Me on the Water, “I’ve borne the challenge of celebrating it without (Terry) and defining myself beyond it … I sometimes feel myself trapped inside its pages.” Renny was forced to experience the success of the very thing that was most important to him and to his brother, and to watch it not only move people to experience an immersion in wilderness as demonstrated by On the Loose, but to witness the places they both loved become inundated by these same people they had inspired so much, effectively changing those places forever.