Book Review: Refuge

Title: Refuge

Author: Terry Tempest Williams

Date: 1991

Publisher: Vintage

ISBN: 0-679-74024-4

Length: 304 pages, including a bird checklist

Quote: “The understanding that I could die on the salt flats is no great epiphany. I could die anywhere.”

When does a young, healthy, happily married birdwatcher look at a favorite bird refuge and think about her own death? When family members, old and young, are dying. Terry Tempest Williams wrote, “I have known five of my great-grandparents intimately,” before years when one funeral followed another and “At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family.” The good news is that Refuge is not exclusively about mortality. It’s also about birds, and natural events that threatened the bird refuge, and a mother in her early fifties who doesn’t expect to have grandchildren but, if she does have them, wants them told that she is “the bird’s nest beyond the waterfall.”

Mrs. Tempest, the author’s mother, was one of a lucky few. After a diagnosis of breast cancer, she lived more than ten years before cancer appeared in a different part of the body. Observing the impact her cancer had on the rest of the family, Mrs. Williams thought that individuals don’t get cancer; families do. This observation moved past its intended meaning and became literally true as other relatives developed cancer.

The slow, painful death scene in Refuge is not allowed time to dominate the reader’s memory. The book moves us on. Bereaved people normally go through a stage of wanting to blame someone for the loss; Mrs. Williams found that blame for her extended family’s years of funerals could be assigned reasonably.

A popular protest song refers to “gentle, angry people...singing, fighting for our lives.” Terry Tempest Williams was such a person; Refuge is a gentle, angry, True Green book. It’s recommended to all who appreciate good nonfiction writing; and to all who care about the environment; and to all who think that environmentalism may be turning into a religious cult; and to all who have living parents, and need to be reminded to enjoy them while they can. 

Book Review: Crabs

Book Review: Crabs

Author: Herbert S. Zim

Date: 1974

Publisher: William Morrow & Company

ISBN: 0-688-30114-2

Length: 64 pages including index

Illustrations: drawings by René Martin

 

Quote: “Crabs show another interesting kind of growth that is called regeneration.”

This is an informative little picture book, meant to be a challenging read in grades three and four, informative enough to interest adults.

Reviewing Crabs, about which there’s little for an amateur to say, provides me with as good an opportunity as any to share what I know about books for children and the notion of “reading levels.”

I learned to read before my fourth birthday. Being a child prodigy was good for lots of adult attention and resulting envy and hostility from other children. People handed me all sorts of grown-up things to read; I remember entertaining our pediatrician by reading aloud from his medical journals. Like most children who figure out phonics and seem to be “reading” material beyond their age level, I didn’t understand or remember most of the grown-up stuff I “read”. I remember keeping myself awake, reading the medical journal, by imagining “Hemoglobin” as a little cartoon goblin; I remember that even Charlotte’s Web was far enough over my head, at four, that I rediscovered it as a completely new book at eight.

In most ways my brother was more precocious than I was. Let’s just say that while I was being the child prodigy and waiting for kids my age to catch up with me, my brother, three years younger, was never far behind me in anything. So naturally people expected him to start reading at three, after playing with alphabet blocks and magnets, as I had. But he didn’t. He could spell out short messages (“I LOVE YOU MOM”) with magnetic letters, and he liked to have grown-up books read to him, but he didn’t seem to read even picture books by himself until age six. As a result, in primary school his I.Q. was drastically underestimated. At home, while he was in grades one through three, he’d find me reading something age-appropriate like Tom Sawyer or Heidi and want to read it too. He’d read a few pages and then bring the book back to me: “Would you read the rest of it? I’m tired.”

Toward the end of grade three he spent a rainy morning curled up with one of those Zane Grey books I scorned, and then my brother became a reader. He liked all stories with dogs and horses in them, but his preference was for grown-up nonfiction; there was no in-between stage. He’d liked to have history, biography, and simple science read aloud even at six. We had to imagine that my brother had had the mental ability to read even at three, but had had to wait for his eyes to mature before he could enjoy reading ordinary-size print.

Later we learned that this is quite a common way children, especially boys, learn to read. They may be intelligent enough to learn the letters before age six, but they are slightly farsighted up to six, eight, even ten, and won’t start reading ordinary books for pleasure until their eyes are ready for that job. If they are not given an emotional complex about it, or forced to wear glasses that may interfere with the development of normal vision, they usually outgrow this farsightedness in time to catch up with their age group at school--or pass it. (How computers affect the development of children’s eyes remains to be learned.) That’s why books that work for most primary school students will have large clear print.

Crabs has large clear print, and although my brother was not particularly interested in crabs, this is the kind of book that primary school students like him need. A slow-reading first-grader who lived near the beach and was interested in crabs might enjoy reading this book, a page or two at a time, as his eyes would allow, in time to relieve the anxiety of adults who underestimate his intelligence because he’s not reading novels. 

Book Review: Have You Heard the Cricket Song

Title: Have You Heard the Cricket Song

Author: Winston O. Abbott

Date: 1971

Publisher; Inspiration House

ISBN: 0-918114-02-0

Length: pages aren't numbered, but it's a thin book; fewer than 100 pages

Illustrations: line drawings by Bette Eaton Bowen

Quote: "I have seen ten thousand / migrant wings against the sky-- / but-- / yet to see one brush against / another as they fly--"

"This is not a book for everyone," the publisher warns on the jacket flap, but the publisher reprinted it every year; my 1980 copy is the "Ninth Printing.,"

I suspect that Bette Eaton Bowen's line drawings, which aren't far below field-guide quality, were more of a selling point than Winston O. Abbott's verse, but both appeal to True Greens. This team had collaborated on five previous short books of verse and pictures, all invoking the love of Nature. They were gifts for people who already had the complete works of Thoreau. If you like thinking about green space in the Northeastern States, you might want to collect the whole series.

 

Book Review: Hill Country Harvest

Reclaimed from Blogjob...

Title: Hill Country Harvest

Author:  Hal Borland

Date: 1967

Publisher: J.B. Lippincott

ISBN: none, but click here to see it on Amazon

Length: 377 pages

Quote: “An editor…forty miles or so up the Housatonic valley from where I live, asked me to write a weekly column for his daily newspaper. ‘What about?’ I asked. ‘Nature,’ he said, ‘the outdoors, life in general.’”

Ten years later, Borland and his book publisher looked back over his columns and decided, “We’ve got a book.” This is the book.

Borland’s home was farther west, but he had married a native of New England, and this book is about New England. It’s about the Appalachian foothills rather than the Atlantic seacoast, which may explain why the book was read and enjoyed here, too. The similarities and differences between our hill countries are interesting.

New Englanders are hereby invited to keep up the consideration of a question Borland raised after reading an old book about New England : “It is observed by the Indians that every tenth year there is little nor no winter.” Borland had not observed this, but if any readers in New England observe it I hope they’ll keep the rest of us posted. Of course, the old book was written “about 330 years” before some point between 1956 and 1967, when Borland was writing about it. Between 1625 and 1640 the English in America were still stumbling around in confusion. They were aiming for Virginia when they struck Massachusetts and it’s possible that Borland’s misinformant, one William Wood, thought he was in Massachusetts when he was actually in Virginia .

That was the topic of one column. There are dozens. There are columns about the behavior of Borland’s squirrels (he was able to attract red squirrels and gray squirrels to the same feeder), about the origins of Groundhog Day, about why the grass greens and the flowers bloom earlier above the septic tank. There’s an explanation of why Weather Service reports started including “wind-chill factors” and why the thermometer on your porch is likely to run a few degrees colder than the one at the local weather station. There are observations of towhees and ground-ivy and lilacs and country people who whistle in public. There are complaints about rhubarb and salsify…people who dutifully ate those two New England classics never complained about zucchini. And so on.

If Borland had meticulously noted the date of each of his observations of nature and listed them in chronological order, his book might have seemed bloggier and less like a novel than it does, but he would also have been practicing “phenology,” the scientific observation of shifts in natural cycles from year to year. Bloggers who keep methodical phenological records are helping professional ecologists with tasks like proving or disproving theories such as global warming. Borland was not a really meticulous phenologist, but he came close enough to give Hill Country Harvest some real scientific and historical value.

In short, Hill Country Harvest is a fun read, often comic, never very sad, often informative…warmly recommended.

Posted on September 8, 2015 Categories Book, Green Tags Appalachian Mountains, nature notes

 

Book Review: My Side of the Mountain

(I have copies of this book in English and in Spanish I wrote reviews of each edition on a different day; therefore they're different reviews. This is what came to mind after my last rereading of My Side of the Mountain in English.)

Title: My Side of the Mountain

Author: Jean Craighead George

Date: 1959

Publisher: Dutton / Penguin / Puffin

ISBN: 0-14-034810-7

Length: 177 pages

Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: "I am on my mountain in a tree home that people have passed without ever knowing that I am here. The house is a hemlock tree six feet in diameter."

When naturalist and novelist Jean George was a little girl, she said, she told her mother she was going to live alone in the woods. Her parents had taught her to find food in the woods, so her mother advised her to take a toothbrush and a postcard. George was home in less than an hour. She tells us her parents had had the urge to live alone in the woods, too, and so had her daughter: "I checked her backpack for her toothbrush and...blew her a kiss...Presently, she was back."

But, for those who want to read about a child who actually lives alone for months, here's the fictional account of Sam Gribley, a child who has absorbed the same survival information George's family passed down, but who is improbably immune to the urge to be home in time for dinner, finish reading that book, be tucked in at night by Mom, and hang out with friends the next day. Sam is obviously not a normal child; George spends some time assuring us that he's not even conspicuously "Aspy," just  a stubborn teenager, determined to prove that he can do what he does. Living in a big city with too many siblings, he's heard of an old abandoned farm to which he's the heir, on which he'd have the right to live. So he saves his money and one day he goes out to live there, all alone.

Like most introverts Sam does enjoy human company. The biggest threat to his life as a hermit is that he enjoys company and makes friends easily. Even the medieval monastic hermits, who took vows not to live with other people on a regular basis, were known for their hospitality; after a few weeks of solitude Sam is happy to let a visitor have his bed, and sleep on the ground. For most of us, the trouble with Sam's lifestyle would not be that Sam's survival skills are too hard for the average twelve-year-old to practice (they're not) but that most young people wouldn't want or need that much solitude. 

(Does it matter that Sam is a boy and that Jean Renvoize's less successful Wild Thing, Morag, is a girl? I think not. I don't think it matters that Sam is obviously a bright student and Morag is described as a problem student, either; Morag has her fair share of survival intelligence. I think the difference is that Sam is determined to live entirely on his own for a few months; he can go back to town and school when he chooses, and he does. He's a temporary hermit. Morag plans to be a permanent outlaw, which is less sustainable.)

It should perhaps be noted that although my brother was more drawn to the practical details of survival in My Side of the Mountain and I was more drawn to the human relationships in Where the Lilies Bloom, the book my brother always talked of wanting to write, himself (as distinct from wanting me to write), was about the practical details of how a family of orphans survived without adult help for a good long time. Sam is one lucky little survivalist in this novel. We knew firsthand, from having seen our big strong father slip on loose gravel and break an ankle, that no matter how strong or tough you are, you want to have more than a tame hawk and a friendly raccoon living near you in the woods.

That said...kids can learn from Sam: It can take a looonnng time to start a campfire with flint and steel--don't bet your life on being able to do it even if you have flint, steel, and dry tinder. You can eat cattails, walnuts, violets, dandelions, spring beauties. You can do a lot of things with acorns if you take the time to leach out the tannin, which Sam doesn't mention doing. You can kill and eat many kinds of wild animals without metal traps or guns, although probably not as easily as Sam does, and although most of them aren't exactly a treat; for living on the land, it's a huge advantage to be a part-time vegan. (In summer, many wild animals carry nasty diseases.) Campfires are much, much less dangerous in the East (and in winter) than in the West (or even in late summer), but always present some hazards, one of the less obvious of which is that they can consume the oxygen in a snug shelter. Your body can adjust to lower temperatures and feel reasonably comfortable until temperatures drop to within a few degrees of the freezing point of water; below that point you must have some shelter, warm clothes and boots, and some source of heat beyond your body or even a friend's body. A bird, if you happen to be able to bond with one, is a reliable warning of poor air quality. And you don't need walls and a door to have a home, but you do need a family...especially parents, if living.

I'd like to add this comment for young readers. There will be plenty of time to live without your parents at the other end of your life. A few people have parents who are truly bad human beings and should be abandoned as early as possible, by any and every means necessary. Normal parents are loved and will be missed. One should never lose any opportunity to enjoy the company of one's parents.

One should, of course, encourage one's parents to appreciate wilderness living. Sam does, and as a reward his story gets the happiest of all possible endings.

My brother and I, along with our parents, did most of the things Sam does in this story--the ones that work in the Virginia mountains. (Sam lives in New York State, with colder winters and other slight environmental differences. In our part of the world, hollowing a tree for shelter would be wasteful and stupid even if one found a tree big enough. We have caves.) They're fun. Young readers don't have to give up being tucked in by Mom at night and playing on the school sports team to share many of the pleasures of Sam's fictional life, on weekends.

Some of Sam's pleasures are now recognized as unwise. Sam kills deer when he needs meat and leather. In real life you wouldn't be able to do that twice in a season, and it would be foolish if you were. Sam catches a young hawk (a very dangerous idea) and rears it as his main companion (not a very sanitary idea) and expects it to be able to supply his protein needs within his territory (a silly idea for serious carnivores who want meat twice a day). Sam doesn't mention how he disposes of bodywastes but does mention bathing in a mountain spring, which used to be the primary way polio virus spread.

But you can still eat the native plants Sam eats, cooking them Sam's way if you want to, if they grow near you. You can still make the camp conveniences he makes. Sam's leather clothes would not be much fun to wear in real life; even hemp and flax (linen) clothes last so long because they stay stiff, heavy, and uncomfortable for the first several months, but you can try making your own clothes from cotton or the inner coat of any animal that sheds its coat in spring. You can try making flutes or whistles, too. You can even try bonding with a wild animal, as Sam does--not trying to cuddle it (most adult animals don't cuddle) but hanging out with it, observing its behavior.  

Book Review: Uncommon Wealth

(Reclaimed from Blogjob. Long-tailed tags: eagle sanctuary, nature notes, nature preserve,Virginia Nature Conservancy, Virginia tourism, Virginia wildlife,whitewater rafting in Virginia.)

A Fair Trade Book

Book Review: Uncommon Wealth

Editor: Robert M. Riordan

Date: 1999

Publisher: Falcon

ISBN: 1-56044-915-2

Length: 216 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Megan Grey Rollins

Quote: “Now it is the wild places that stand as outposts, pockets in a matrix of human habitation.”

Virginia’s Nature Conservancy sponsored Uncommon Wealth, an anthology of twenty writers’ descriptions of their favorite landscapes, most of which are of course “protected by” the Nature Conservancy.

Virginia’s three-cornered shape suggests that the essays might have been arranged in some sort of geographical progression. In what may have been a deliberate attempt to break up sectional preconceptions, the essays are instead arranged by historical perspective, classified as “New Ground,” “Old Ground,” or “Roots.” If you read them in order, you’ll be hopping around the state, going straight from the Great Dismal Swamp to the Clinch River, from the Blackwater River to the town called Blackwater.

All three corners of the state are reasonably well represented by writers who live near the places they describe...which, of course, means that there’s more about the northern corner than about the other two. Three writers describe places along the Clinch River, and four describe the southeastern corner of Virginia. One finds an eagle refuge twenty miles from the Capitol; one finds whitewater rafting in Richmond. Scott County, where I live, is represented in this book by Richard Cartwright Austin. (I had a water-damaged copy that was autographed by him.) Rural northern Virginia (along the West Virginia border) is of course represented by both Janet Lembke and Katie Letcher Lyle. Some of the other writers have published nature guides or articles in Audubon and similar magazines; some have written books on non-ecological topics, and some write for local newspapers.

Self-congratulation, a subtle form of boasting, has been part of Virginia’s stereotype for a long time. (“Never ask people where they’re from. If they’re from Virginia they’ll tell you which town; if they’re not, why embarrass them?”) Uncommon Wealth could be considered one big display of self-congratulation...but these places are, in real life, much more interesting than writers could make them. This book really is a celebration of uncommon wealth.

This is why folks in Scott County have mixed feelings about tourism as an economic venture. I think it’s fair to say that we like visitors. We like to hear about the places where they’ve been. But we don’t particularly want to be paved over with amusement parks and outlet stores, like Pigeon Forge. We want a slow, steady trickle of visitors who appreciate what we have that other places don’t have. We have three places that offer lodging to visitors (cheap motel, pricey bed & breakfast, and rustic cabins) and an assortment of places where visitors can eat, but some of us prefer the kind and number of visitors who plan to stay with people they actually know. Not, you know, crowds of tourists. Not bus loads. Our uncommon wealth is “wild.”

So are most of the places discussed in Uncommon Wealth. They’re not private homes and farms, but neither are they widely advertised or commercialized. Not everyone who lives in the nearest town or county will necessarily even know where the nature preserve, park, or refuge is. You can visit these places yourself, and it won’t cost a great deal of money to get in once you’re in the area...but you will need to know, or get to know, somebody who trusts you to take only pictures and leave only footprints. The Nature Conservancy is, of course, the place to begin making the connections you’ll need: https://www.nature.org/about-us/index.htm?intc=nature.tnav.about .

Uncommon Wealth is recommended to anyone who enjoys being outdoors and is planning to spend some leisure time in Virginia.

 It's hard to credit an anthology like this book to an author, but in this case, since each of the writers donated his or her essay to a charity, I'll stretch a point. If you send $5 per copy + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to either of the addresses at the very bottom of the screen, I'll send $1 to the Nature Conservancy. You can include as many books as will fit into one package for the same $5 shipping fee, so please feel free to check out other books discussed here.

Book Review: Wheatfields and Vineyards

Book Review: Wheatfields and Vineyards

       
Author:  Ralph W. Seager

       
Date: 1975

       
Publisher: Christian Herald

       
ISBN: 0-915684-00-4

       
Length: 94 pages

       
Illustrations: drawings by the author

Quote: “The winds of March wind up the willow trees / All through the day, until their springs are tight.”

       
Professor Seager wrote from the Appalachian foothills of New York state. The phenomenon whereby circular storm winds moving out from the Midwest usually break up, as they approach the mountains, into a mild wind that shifts from one direction to the other after a few hours, is common throughout the mountain region.

       
I am, like C.S. Lewis, so coarse the things some poets see are obstinately invisible to me; I can’t see why Seager chose to write “The high hawk hangs on the thread of hunger” rather than “The hawk hangs high...” To my mind, these mostly rhyming poems are flawed, but still enjoyable. They paint pictures of animals, places, and people. If you’re attracted to the idea of painting pictures with words, you’ll like Wheatfields and Vineyards.

       
Although they were published by Christian Herald Press, most of the poems aren’t religious. “Protect Me Not” is more cute than evangelical:

                  “My policy states that I am covered

                From loss by various acts of God...

                still we cannot compensate,

                to wit, the following risks to you:

                The act of arson in the fall

                when ivy sets fire to your wall—

                nor shady deals and other gyps

                when the sun goes in eclipse—

                ...I waive all claims against such fraud;

                Protect me not from these acts of God.”

       
Then there’s an epitaph that borders on being cute, although it doesn’t offend me:

                  “His life was uphill like his haying,

                With hardship and ill fortune preying

                Parasitic on their host,

                He never had much chance to coast...

                God leaned down to fourscore seven,

                And gave a hand-up into heaven.”

       
There are, however, a half-dozen religious poems, not precisely orthodox: “Although your patience with me must be tried, / I come to you as Self—not Self denied,” Seager tells “the Lord.” 

       
All of these poems express love—of place, of nature, of traditions, and of course of people. Perhaps the love lyrics addressed to people are the weakest. A list of those of Seager’s favorite things that have names beginning with C, which starts with a rhyme scheme it can’t sustain, calls to mind the kindergarten-level “Sound Box” books by Jane Belk Moncure (the poem is, of course, leading up to a woman’s name). On the other hand, the image of

                  “A weed of a woman in white and blue...

                A wispy, dusty white she was—

                Blue hat—and a cane of hickory;

                I see her every time I see

                Queen Anne’s lace and chicory”

is as lively and lovely a portrait of an old lady as I’ve seen in any book.

If you like the lines quoted here, Wheatfields and Vineyards is for you. Online, it will cost $5 + $5 shipping, which is the best I can do on any online book, and since Ralph Seager no longer needs the dollar our pricing allows on Fair Trade Books, I won't be offended if you find a better deal at another online bookstore.