Articles
A Place on Water
Essays by Robert Kimber, Wesley McNair and Bill Roorbach Tilbury House 2004 All you need is right here around you What a small gem of a book A Place on Water is. Nature literature lovers will savor it, not wanting it to end. Well, in a sense, it doesn’t–an “idyll,” as author Kimber titles his
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
By Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver HarperCollins 2007 Growing, Cooking and Eating as a Family Project In a possible case of preaching to the choir, Barbara Kingsolver’s book on her family’s experience of eating food from their own garden and immediate area for a year may happily push some over the
Slip Knot
Hyperion, June 2007 Quirky Characters, Deftly Handled Could this murder mystery novel by fishing boat captain Linda Greenlaw be any more contemporary? Set in a small coastal Maine town against a backdrop of commercial fishing boats, cod stern trawlers to be exact, gambling debts and an offshore windfarm project, Greenlaw crafts her first novel with
Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound
Public Affairs/Perseus Books May 2007 Not In My Backyard! It’s a surprise when a book on environmental politics reads like a good whodunit or an exposé. Cape Wind, the first offshore wind farm proposed in the U.S., is the “big idea” of alternative energy developer Jim Gordon, who wants to place 130 wind turbines in
Underwater to Get Out of the Rain: A Love Affair with the Sea
De Capo Press, 2006 Hardcover, 400 pages, $25.00 Diving for Inspiration What would draw a reader to this memoir by British marine biologist Trevor Norton? One of the back cover blurbs states: “The marine biologist known as Bill Bryson Underwater.” Lured by the prospect of humor in the outdoors, in this case at the sea’s
Lines on the Water
Goose River Press, 2006 A Lively Test Drive and Other Tales There’s a lot to love about this book by occasional lobsterman, car mechanic, computer analyst, islander Harold van Doren. No average teller of tales, he grabs our attention from the start with his dry humor and love of all the characters he’s encountered on
Small Misty Mountain
Pushcart Press, 2006 Hardcover, 280 pages, $22.00 Vulnerable to the Holy Sacred places are not always human-made (such as a cathedral, for instance)–they are “often at the meeting of land and sky,” writes author Rob McCall, and visited for renewal and inspiration. A passionate nature observer of his own locale, McCall affirms that Blue Hill’s
Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn
Bloomsbury 2005 Worlds Within Worlds Anyone who reads this book can’t look at their backyard the same ever again. Crows take on a new meaning, squirrels gain respect, earthworms (a European immigrant) fascinate, and slugs, well, they remain slugs. There are worlds within worlds around the tomato plants, the bird feeder and the lawn. In
The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold
Vintage Books, 2005 On a Crash Course with Creation When Gretel Ehrlich’s publisher asked her to write about climate change and the effects if we become “deseasoned,” she was living for six months on a Wyoming glacial moraine — snow pressing in on her tent. Ehrlich’s reflective journey in The Future of Ice encompasses Tierra
Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey
Words Like the Rings of a Tree Mix together a bit of Annie Dillard, Thoreau and Mark Twain and you might get a concoction like Bill Roorbach’s writing in Temple Stream. In addition to being a rich narrative of a stream running through the Farmington and Temple, Maine, it’s also about the characters that wander