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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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