From the vantage point of her 70th year, this collection is a testament to a lifetime of doing just that.
A collection of essays that serve as a solid introduction to a writer blessed with an all-consuming consciousness steeped in both faith and science.
Over the span of a 40-year career, Dillard has written memoirs (An American Childhood, 1987, etc.) and novels (The Maytrees, 2007, etc.), but she is perhaps best known for her nonfiction narratives, which are personal and deeply aware. “It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open” she writes in an essay excerpted here from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner that made her a literary celebrity at the age of 29. “Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children. Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot?” Over the four decades since the publication of Pilgrim, the author’s vision has only sharpened. Seeing a trapped deer (“The Deer at Providencia”) raises the eternal question of suffering. In “The Weasel,” Dillard contrasts an encounter between a thinking animal and a reactive one. She’s at her best when seeing the world in a grain of sand, or billions of them; the essay “Sand” is also about prehistoric life and the Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who devoted his life to uncovering it. A similar juxtaposition of micro and macro is at work in “An Expedition to the Pole,” in which Dillard compares dual approaches to the infinite: Arctic exploration and Catholic Mass. The author gives insight into her own craft in her advice to younger writers: don’t bank your fire. “Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now,” she writes.
From the vantage point of her 70th year, this collection is a testament to a lifetime of doing just that.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-243297-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Aging parents and a troubled, ne'er-do-well brother draw Brox home to the family farm in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, where she confronts an age-old dilemma: the conflict between familial duty and the need to live one's own life. Farming in contemporary New England is primarily an act of faith, much like the insistence of Brox's 83-year-old father on planting orchard saplings he'll never see bear fruit. Shunted to the margins of society, hemmed in by second-growth forest and sprawling suburbia, the family farm is further hamstrung by Sam, the surly, undependable scion whose cocaine abuse and erratic behavior jeopardize the operation's future. Into this generational vacuum steps Brox. With a poet's facility with language and an essayist's talent for finding significance in the quotidian, she forges compelling narrative from the workaday: short passages, rarely longer than five or six paragraphs, read like self-contained prose poems and create a cyclical, almost timeless chronology (it's unclear if she spends one season or more on the farm). Her lithe, lyrical descriptions of the seasonal variation of land and work- -demanding and bone-tiring in summer; insular and quietly contemplative in winter—pay gratifying tribute to a vanishing way of life. Though she perceptively and eloquently observes the natural and the man-made worlds (``Pollen clots the hand-dug pone''), she avoids examining closely the conflicts that divide her family. The subtext of their strained dinner conversation is the suppressed anger of arguments carefully avoided but unresolved. It comes as no shock when Brox decides she's not her brother's keeper, that her life lies beyond the farm. This slim book's surprising strength accrues line by line in Brox's keen observation and spare, poetic prose.
Pub Date: June 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-6200-6
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
As befits the elusive nature of Canis lupus, more questions are raised than answered in this absorbing and thorough discussion of a much studied but poorly understood and unfairly maligned predator Steinhart, who has been a columnist for Audubon magazine, consults with North American wildlife biologists, park rangers, ranchers, trappers, hunters, and even private wolf owners, eliciting a multiplicity of responses to a wide range of issues. Does the wolf on its own lower the number of prey animals such as deer and caribou, or are climate and human hunting more important limiting factors? Do wolves pose a threat to domesticated livestock? Should the wolf be artificially reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and elsewhere? What are the genetic standards by which wolves should be judged for protection under the Endangered Species Act? In addition to presenting the proponents and the research behind these often heatedly debated issues, Steinhart unveils some of the observable facets of wolf life as well as speculating on wolf consciousness. Among the more fascinating topics are the reasons wolves howl; the requirements for attaining the rank of alpha male; the almost extrasensory perception exhibited by wolves in encounters with humans; and the evolution-based differences in intelligence and behavior between domesticated dogs and wolves. Steinhart is not sanguine about the future of the species. As wolf populations decline as a result of human habitation, ``the grave threat is that eventually there will be broad areas without wolves and the sharing of genes.'' The author thoughtfully adds appendices covering additional readings, places to see (or hear) wolves, and subspecies of the gray wolf. A well-balanced and highly informative report on the long and continuing scientific, economic, and politically charged debate.
Pub Date: May 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41881-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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