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HAUNTED BY WATERS

Name: HAUNTED BY WATERS
Author: Mark Browning
ISBN: 0-8214-1218-3

FLY FISHING IN NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE

by Mark Browning ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1998

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paper 0-8214-1219-1 Fishing, particularly fly fishing, writes Browning, “seems to hold a disproportionate place” in North American letters In this thoughtful, penetrating, but dissertation-like look at the literature of fly-fishing, the author notes that fishermen who write can be likened to our ancient ancestors, “who blazoned portrayals of the hunt on the walls of . . . caves.” Browning asserts that “the distinctiveness” of American fishing writing flows from the Transcendentalists, in particular from a few paragraphs by Thoreau in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers wherein he views an old man fishing from a riverbank as performing “a sort of solemn sacrament.” Thoreau and others established another early hallmark of American fishing writing, he suggests, by wistfully writing of a Golden Age in America “to be preferred over the present age of industry.” But it is in scrutinizing Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his story “Big Two-Hearted River” that Browning finds the most profound portrayals of fishing as an “activity where life and death meet and stare at each other.” Unfortunately, this is also where the author’s dissertation style is most in evidence as he overreaches to investigate the “story’s doubleness,” as suggested by its title. Interspersed with these scholarly chapters are —interludes— about Browning’s own fishing experiences.

Pub Date: April 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-8214-1218-3

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Ohio Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.

Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955

ISBN: 0670717797

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MADELINE'S SEASONS
developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

- BOOK REVIEW
LOVE FROM MADELINE
by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno

- BOOK REVIEW
LA BONNE TABLE
by Ludwig Bemelmans

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IN MY PLACE

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992

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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)