Elegant essays that seek to understand rather than define our relationships with nature and the places we call home, by an award- winning poet and director of the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. In 12 essays that are set in four ``loved places''—Grand Manan, a remote Canadian island; the woods of her Connecticut childhood; southern Alaska; and the Arizona desert—Deming explores ``the quality of reflection that these places seem to induce.'' And as she evokes these disparate locales, she skillfully includes vivid descriptions of local flora and fauna, autobiographical details, observations on humans' relationship with nature, as well as meditations on life, death, and the writing of poems. Each place has been a way station in her life, most notably Grand Manan, which she first visited as a child when her frugal Yankee father, concluding that Nantucket was becoming too expensive, found in this remote island, reachable only by a decrepit sling-and-winch ferry, the happy mix of beauty, relaxation, and cheapness he sought. Deming, who has returned there every subsequent summer, observes that ``it takes years to properly visit [a] place...to know where the wild blueberries ripen earliest...to notice a silly gull.'' As she describes the woods of her childhood, she recalls the conflicting reactions of her Puritan ancestors (she is a descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne's) to the wilderness that surrounded them, her father's painful last illness, and her experiences as a single mother homesteading in rural Vermont. The essays set in Arizona and Alaska are more conventional accounts of, respectively, lingering traces of early Native Americans like the Ansazi and an Alaskan program that rehabilitates injured bald eagles. But even these more familiar topics are infused with Deming's sagacious insights. Nature writing that refreshingly manages to educate, entertain, and move without once resorting to the bully pulpit.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1994
ISBN: 1-56279-062-5
Page Count: 214
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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