The New Jersey Meadowlands consist of thirty-odd square miles of swamp and muck situated just a couple of miles from Manhattan. For centuries, men have tried to build, farm, pave, and otherwise develop the Meadowlands, but everything simply sank into the swamp. Eventually, they wised up and just began dumping things there. By the 1980s, the stretch of land from Secaucus to Newark seemed like the place where the mothership crashed, but it also has open water and plants and animals and birds, so in 1992, Robert Sullivan began using it as a way to escape his life in Manhattan and find something resembling local nature. He found it; the swamp is actually a fairly important wilderness area, home to muskrats, wild grasses, and lots of beautiful migratory waterfowl. He also saw lots of weird man-made things floating, rotting, rusting, sinking, and exploding in the muck, all of which Sullivan turns into good reading. One find, for example, is the remains of the lovely, old, Gothic-style Penn Station, demolished in the '50s and disposed of by the Hackensack River. While slogging around, Sullivan developed relationships with others obsessed with the land and what should be done with it; in the end, the story of the Meadowlands is the way some of the world's most potentially valuable real estate nobly resists humans' attempts to alter, develop, and even restore it. The Meadowlands is funny, surprising, and actually quite inspiring; anyone frustrated by man's voracious appetite for developing natural spaces needs to read this book.