In describing her salmon-fishing life along Alaska's Cook Inlet, fiction writer Lord (Survival, 1991) fashions a rich, personal cosmology in prose as fluid as her environment. Lord and her husband, Ken, spend their summers at fishcamp, netting salmon—kings, pinks, sockeye, silvers, chums—for market and for themselves, with the occasional fish head tossed to eagles. Cook Inlet is no longer a great place to fish, but then ``making a living is less important to us than living where we want to be.'' Lord aspires to an authentic integration of work and life, trying to gain a healthy and wise connection to the patch she chose back in 1978, and so she lives deliberately, attentively, and in the spirit of inquiry. And to her everlasting credit, she doesn't browbeat readers with her lifestyle, doesn't get righteous, but wears her experiences lightly and with telling effect. Her book is written in the descriptive mode, broadly curious: She tells of opening up the fishcamp in late spring and of settling into beach time (sacred as opposed to chronological); explains how the immediate landscape was shaped (glacial and tectonic and volcanic forces); ruminates on the art of net mending and the constant impact of solitude; offers a knowledgeable guide to area botany and insinuates the local fauna gracefully into the story—thrush and warbler, beaver and moose, and the colossal brown bear with whom she had a run-in (``It's not fear I taste in my mouth, but something icy and metallic, like the backside of a cold mirror''). Sprinkled throughout are stories from the native Athabascan people and from immigrants come to make a living in an unforgiving locale, tales full of ``drownings, other deaths, abrupt and defeated departures, disasters narrowly averted.'' Lord creates an elegant, evocative portrait of a hard, beautiful place.
Pub Date: May 10, 1997
ISBN: 1-55963-477-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Shearwater/Island Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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