A hushed, meditative tribute to the nearly forgotten value of living off the land.
Novelist Kessler (Birds in Fall, 2006, etc.) chronicles the time he and his wife spent among dairy goats in rural Vermont.
Burned out from the daily grind of New York City, Kessler and his wife Dona purchased a 75-acre parcel of land to establish a working goat farm. The author details their foray into pastoral living with all the imagery and polished word choice one would expect from a practiced novelist. From the daily challenges and rewards of acquiring, shepherding, breeding and milking Nubian goats and birthing young kids, to their first experience with cheese-making, Kessler’s account serves as a user-friendly how-to manual on goat farming. The author also delves into the foundations and history of goat keeping, the predator/prey relationship (as he tracks the coyotes that are frequenting his barnyard) and man’s quest for a spiritual connection with other creatures and the land that sustains him. The book is more than just a story of escape from urban monotony; it’s also a detailed diary of the transformative effects of a new beginning. Because the entries don’t always cohere as a chronological narrative, the chapters are short, conclusions are somewhat choppy and the material, while interesting, is exceedingly quiet in tone. Nonetheless, Kessler pleasingly echoes the work of Annie Dillard and Georgeanne Brennan’s A Pig in Provence (2007).
A hushed, meditative tribute to the nearly forgotten value of living off the land.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6099-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
Disarming tales from a frontier doctor, an appealing old coot who actually considers himself a mere mortal. The year is 1949. Young Dr. Ron Losee has piled his wife and child into an army-surplus jeep and pointed it at Ennis, Mont., a wee burg hard by the foot of the Tobacco Root Range. What follows are the trials and tribulations of a GP forced to handle all manner of catastrophes, large and small, with a wing and a prayer and a sharp knife. Losee has a smart take on his profession: ``Doctoring should not be a business, and I think that the surgeon who operates needlessly, as it were, possesses the morality of a rapist.'' He charges each incident with enough drama to draw the reader in like blood to a cotton swab. Fractures are set; hot appendixes snipped; laryngectomies, stitchings, lancings, and bilateral castrations performed; an arm removed with a hacksaw. His theater of operations is an army cot illuminated by an old car headlight. His mistakes and failures are confessed and serve to humanize him; so do his wrenching losses, as when a child dies, and her father, dazed and confused, begs the nurse not to throw the body out with the trash. For a break, Losee shuttles off to Montreal to attend a residency in orthopedic surgery. He returns to Ennis, now with a hospital of its own, and starts to specialize in knee work, gaining a modest reputation in the process. Most of the stories hereafter revolve around lateral, medial, and cruxial ligaments, but the humor shines right through all the bloody tissue. Get this guy to a biochemist and have him cloned. As a memoirist, he's just fine; as a physician, we could use a few more thousand just like him. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1994
ISBN: 1-55821-323-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
This biography of a lesser Madame de SÇvignÇ proves Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses was not merely a fictional study of sexual politics but an accurate portrait of aristocratic behavior in 18th- century France. Marie de Vichy-Champrond was born to a noble French family in 1696. But despite her high birth and convent education, Madame du Deffand (her married name) was, by Parisian social standards, a fallen woman by the age of 32. A divorcÇe known for her affairs, including a short-lived dalliance with the regent, the Duke of Orleans, that secured her a lifetime annuity, she spent over a decade redeeming her position by serving in the court of the Duchess of Maine and as a lover to the esteemed Charles-Jean- Franáois HÇnault, president of the AcadÇmie franáaise. At 51, she established what was to become Paris's most important literary salon—frequented by Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire- -where aristocrats and intellectuals came to trade influence and knowledge. Her correspondences with those who most engaged her passions—the Duchess of Maine, HÇnault, d'Alembert, her niece Julie de Lespinasse, Voltaire, and Horace Walpole—reveal her days to have been consumed with high-stakes social conquests and betrayals. Card games and coquetry aside, as a high priestess of the art of conversation, she exercised important influence on intellectual affairs. AcadÇmie franáaise elections became arenas for women to one-up their social competition with the seats won by their pet philosophes. Craveri (French Literature/Univ. of Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy) fortifies every supposition, almost every page, with letters to, from, or about her subject. These letters, penned by masters like Walpole and Voltaire during the glory days of literary letter writing, not only substantiate Craveri's points but are minor literary works on their own. This impressive biography and history of French aristocratic intrigue rides more on the vitality of these quoted correspondences than on Craveri's solid, academic writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56792-001-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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