now is rapturous. And we only have to step out our front door to find it. In her memoir I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here On Earth novelist and nature writer Brenda Peterson explores the paradox of a family both deeply in love with nature and deeply committed to the belief that the true salvation will only come with the earthOs destruction. The lone liberal in a family of conservative Southern Baptists, Peterson writes lyrically about her early childhood in a Forest Service station--and in a world where God and Satan, and the impending Rapture are as real as the forests she loves. She traces her path away from her conservative Southern Baptist childhood, through the Civil Rights era, protests at Berkeley, a fledging career at The New Yorker, another career farming in Colorado, and then yet a third career as a nature writer in Seattle. Peterson's account of a transformative period in American history is fascinating. Equally fascinating is the more intimate journey she and her family take in finding paths through the deep religious and political schisms that divide them. The climax of the book comes in an epiphany--that fundamentalists and environmentalists butt heads not because they are so very different, but because they are flip sides of the same coin. She continues: "This list was so disturbing to me that I immediately put it in the back of my notebook, feeling disloyal to all my own environmental causes. Yet I could not help but