An enjoyable look at how outdoorsy vacations have changed, though the appeal isn’t too broad.
A chronicle of the fishing exploits of five generations of the Mumford family, who for the past 100 years have been enjoying regular trips to the fishing camps along Canada’s Miramichi River.
At the beginning of the 20th century, some well-heeled New Englanders began heading up to New Brunswick, Canada, to take part in the excellent salmon fishing along the Miramichi River. These “sports,” as the tourists were called by locals, hired their own guides, cooks and packhorses as they set out on their one- or two-week adventures into the wilderness. The journals and log entries from these expeditions inspired Mumford (Cloudy Night Books, 1979) to assemble the collection into a memoir. In 1916, the author’s father accompanied his own father to the Miramichi for the first time, and he began writing the journal entries that make up the first, most interesting, part of this book. These were the early, rustic years, during which guides could raise a makeshift shelter out of birch bark in time to protect their charges from an oncoming storm. Lunches were served by campfire along the shore, and the guides happily shared their life-in-the-wilderness techniques and local humor with the citified members of the Miramichi Fish and Game Club. (It doesn’t seem that the “sports” actually practiced any of these survival skills themselves.) Time marched on, and automobiles began to replace the trekking by foot, horseback and wagon. Lunches were served at the lodge in between morning and afternoon fishing forays, and the frequent comments in the club log, which make up the bulk of the latter portion of this book, focus on the number of salmon caught, the number of grilse (salmon that have returned to spawn after their first trip into the Atlantic) caught, the number of each that avoided the hook and a seemingly endless list of lures used. Information like this might only be relevant to fellow anglers already familiar with the terminology—e.g., a fishing experiment includes “a brown dry fly known as a Macintosh or Squirrel Tail.” Likewise, the extensive citing of names of fellow participants might only concern the men and women of the Miramichi Fish and Game Club.
An enjoyable look at how outdoorsy vacations have changed, though the appeal isn’t too broad.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4931-2021-5
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An enjoyable, eloquently told tale.
Sutherland’s (Windsong, 2008) contemporary novel takes readers to the small, fictional Australian town of Trundle, offering a peek at the lives of its residents over the course of a year.
Grown sisters Ronnie and Marie have returned to their family home in Trundle, each of them recovering from a personal heartbreak. They’re not sure what to make of their troublesome neighbors, the Lals, who have built a large, modern house next door. The sisters and the Lals are at the core of the story, but Sutherland expertly weaves the lives of various residents into a rich tapestry. Trundle possesses many elements found in any small town: mom-and-pop shops, a struggling economy and a colorful cast of characters. What sets it apart from other towns is a place called Pelican, a commune founded in the 1980s on the outskirts of town. Marie, a former resident who left Pelican under a cloud of disgrace, returns to find she is welcome in the community; burned out from work, Ronnie finds herself restored by her stay there. Meanwhile, the grieving Mr. Lal sees Pelican as the perfect spot to build his own version of the Taj Mahal in tribute to his deceased wife, and his son, Vijay, struggles to find himself and the meaning of life. The story shifts perspective, often jumping among the central protagonists and various Trundle figures, giving readers an intimate view of the town. But well-defined, realistically drawn characters enable readers to easily follow these shifts in perspective. In spite of occasional scandals and disturbing events, Sutherland’s novel is, at heart, a quiet story of ordinary people dealing with everyday problems. Her graceful descriptions—“Through the open window flowed a deep and restful stillness punctuated by the chime of birds and the tolling of frogs”—bring to life both the landscape and the people who inhabit it.
An enjoyable, eloquently told tale.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1426904394
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Provides the type of engrossing hodgepodge of memoir, philosophy, literary theory and metaphysics growing more...
What if reams of our conventional knowledge are just flat-out wrong—what if, for instance, the division between “perceiver” and “perceived” is erroneous?
Peace theorizes about the nature of human existence and how we interact with our environment. Offering argument as well as description, Peace posits that the prevailing mode of seeing the self as “separate” from what it seen, as well as from others, is unproductive and wrongheaded. Touching on his work with the disabled, he recounts his own life experience, mixing personal anecdotes with excerpts from the writings of American poets Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, as well as the British poets T. S. Eliot and John Keats. The poets serve as de facto guides through this book, as Peace looks to them to provide examples of the kind of consciousness he means to exalt: one where a sense of the self as an entity divorced from the rest of reality is overcome. The effects of this practice, Peace states, will benefit not just humankind, but the entire earth. His scope ranges from the perspective of the individual to the universe itself. At points, his reasoning becomes lost in insufficiently defined terminology or in the abstract nature of its own ideas. Sometimes, it’s unclear whose ideas are whose: “Without consciousness, there is no ‘time’ ” is essentially a paraphrase of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Likewise, Peace’s discussions of perception in relation to the self might have benefited from an examination of the philosophical literature around that topic. There are platitudes, but there are also real insights, as well as a tone that indicates a passionate but tempered candidness. Though the collection as a whole seems elliptical, and at times repetitive, it’s by and large an intelligent project that aims to explore its subject matter outside of the confines of genre boundaries. It is at once an original statement and a bibliography of sources for further reading. Peace’s treatise, with its aggressive tone and pace, will not be for everyone. But this may be a strength, not a limitation.
Provides the type of engrossing hodgepodge of memoir, philosophy, literary theory and metaphysics growing more endangered—and perhaps more valuable—in book culture every day.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 391
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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