Deft and evocative, making small adventures loom joyfully large.
A quest for the headwaters of a small stream in Maine becomes an obsession bound up in a celebration of life.
Writer and sometime novelist Roorbach (The Smallest Color, 2001) begins his narrative as a teacher at Ohio State who finds himself, along with his wife Juliet, longing to be at the summer home they are refurbishing near Farmington, Maine whenever their inconveniently separate careers keep them away from it. This is a dilemma; so is the fact that her biological clock is ticking, yet the professor (now Contemporary American Letters, Holy Cross) is fixed on the idea of finding the source of Temple stream, a nearby “pocket paradise [of] birdsong and beaver work.” But there are obstacles, like the moose-sized Earl Pomeroy, a lumbering (in all senses of the word) local who develops into Roorbach’s fated nemesis—and firewood supplier—beginning with his colorfully articulated theory that yuppie academics on research sabbaticals are somehow ripping off honest taxpayers. His initial confrontation with Pomeroy crystallizes the Down Maine antipathy that anyone from “away” will immediately recognize—a friend will later explain that even after 30 years’ residency, he and his wife are still regarded as “full-time summer people.” Sourcing Temple Stream goes on, however, summer and winter, the author dragging his canoe past beaver dams and paddling long-abandoned millponds, crossing the same ponds frozen on cross-country skis, consulting flawed antique maps, etc., until the objective is finally reached. In the meantime, a baby girl arrives and Earl Pomeroy gets ugly. Rich and colorful language flows, too, as Roorbach notes that the local Walmart has “metastasized” to a Superstore in only a few years, and at another point a cluster of teenage boys arrives on scene “looking like they’d just said yes to drugs.”
Deft and evocative, making small adventures loom joyfully large.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-33654-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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