A well-written tale of life on Alaskan fishing boats in pre-pipeline days. In 1963 Durr was a professor of English literature at Syracuse University, respectable, tenured, and moderately well paid, with lots of time off, and considered a good teacher and scholar, liked by my students and colleagues. For all that, he was not content: he longed for adventure in some place far away, and that remote adventure meant Alaska, where he signed on for a tour of duty on a fishing trawler staffed by fellow Lower 48 refugees and local Native Americans. To get by, he learned, it would not be enough to work hard and entrust that time would acculturate him; Durr also had to learn how to shed his academic self and become as his rough-edged fellows, a process aided by his untoward talent for carousing. He also became a shipboard philosopher, explaining to his fellow crewmen that they were lucky to be out getting tossed around on the cold Arctic seas rather than locked in to some unpleasant desk job, even at a well-respected institution of higher learning. Durr saw his share of adventures and misadventures, and he writes with good humor of his own failures to fit in, as when he recounts a spell at the fishing nets fitted out in Eddie Bauer clothes that were far from the regulation heavy-gauge wet-weather gear, the latter devoid of buckles, straps, and buttons that could catch on a line and send their wearer deep into the drink. Durr’s crew, he writes, was far from the best bunch of workers, and they treated their health with studied disregard. Still, they taught him a thing or two about life. And while Durr’s memoir is generally lacking in surprises, it makes for a pleasant enough exercise in armchair travel.
Pub Date: June 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20529-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.
A book of trees–both real and imagined–that taps some very deep roots of the human psyche.
Here are a handful of arboreal specimens full of divine wonder and aesthetic pleasure, those for which we have special affinities and that resonate on the atavistic level. They speak of our species’ first homes, of life, of good and evil, of the oracular. Bulgatz (More Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 2000) paws around the earth from which these trees sprouted, discovering allegory, parable and metaphor in the process. He is a playful guide, sometimes speaking as a cherub, sometimes as a scholar discoursing on the cooperative relationship of the plant and animal kingdoms in the “Barnacle Goose Tree” and the “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.” He introduces readers to the farcical folk of Chelm, into whose hands one day came a miraculous box of oranges (“It was a gift, the paper enclosed said, sent from ‘Harry and David, Fruiterers of the World.’ ”), and to the blessed Shmoo Pear, a tree that adapted perfectly to the Atkins diet. But the laughs are spaced out amongst the author’s deeper exploration of our desire to anthropomorphize trees. Far from a pathetic fallacy, Bulgatz sees within these stories–Philemon and Baucis, the Tree of Liberty, Yggdrasil, the forest-intoxicated Celts, the age of the sacred grove–a profound exercise of the imagination.
A vessel as enchanting as the symbolic and shimmering freight it carries.Pub Date: June 23, 2005
ISBN: 1-4134-8422-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Tales from a high-plains pothole by Janovy (Vermilion Sea, 1991, etc.), a man much smitten with the sound of his brain ticking. Secreted in the Nebraskan countryside is Dunwoody Pond. Its weedy, teeming waters serve as a vibrant life-science laboratory, a primal stew he hopes will enter his students' souls as well as their collecting nets. His students are an estimable bunch: Tami and her damselfly parasites; Bill and his leeches; Rich and his black beetles; Skip and his gill tissue suckers. They all get deeply, sweetly immersed in their creatures. It's Janovy who's the problem. He wants to know what inspires these young naturalists, but he tells us more about himself than about his charges. In the process, Janovy scurries all over the place in a free association that he clearly finds charming; but it comes across as Brownian motion—which is to say, directionless and tedious. Too often he writes, ``And that is the main point of this story, even though we have taken a short diversion.'' He can be painfully smug (asking, for instance, why anyone would choose to be a physical therapist when one could be a parasitologist); he comes out with presumptuous statements that are utter rot (``Every dead soldier's mother is convinced that it is right for her to bear the death of her child in obeyance to a commander-in- chief''); and he strains analogies with the best of them. Enduring the chapter ``Conversations at the Rock'' is as pleasurable as being locked in a closet with a logorrheic methedrine freak. The one time Janovy cuts sharp is in his chapter on cliff swallows—gentle, humorous, insightful, and without a single mention of himself, even obliquely. As a place, Dunwoody Pond may have lit the passions of an undergraduate clutch; as a book, it is a pompous embarrassment of sputters and fizzles.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11456-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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