Flat Rock Journal is a kind of autobiography, and it is indeed about the author and his life-history, so those readers who want to learn about Ozark ecology will be frustrated or find the author egocentric. But "person in the woods" tales are not natural history, they are stories that begin from Thoreau's "Most people live lives of quiet desperation" and procede to show how the author escapes from this. The trees, birds and frogs -indeed the whole landscape of Flat Rock - is a kind of prop for this, however lovingly described. Carey is aware enough of this at his best, as in the chapter where he tries to get frogs to sing Handel. His life isn't meant as a model for everyone's, except insofar as he definitely escapes quiet desperation, and wants the rest of us to do so too.