A small-town Oregonian glorifies rural life, hisses at higher education, and ponders his existence as writer and community activist in this collection of platitude-laden essays. Heilman, a National Public Radio commentator, is best when describing various low-paying, back-breaking forestry jobs and the conflicts between environmentalists and supporters of the timber industry. He rightly condemns extremists in both camps. His depiction of an economically depressed community is well balanced and sensitive, and he draws an interesting correlation between the decay of small-town community spirit and the demise of amateur baseball. Elsewhere, unfortunately, Heilman chooses to play anti- intellectual in celebration of the bucolic: ``My background has given me an understandable, perhaps unavoidable, belief that blue- collar workers are generally better people than white-collar workers and professionals.'' And in discussing college-educated bosses he writes, ``I found them to be oddly incompetent and overly self-conscious.'' His working-class-hero soliloquies are punctuated by frequent and banal musings on writing and boastful episodes in which he reveals that his SAT scores ranked in the top percentile, that he alone could find a rapport with a young retarded boy at a Head Start class, that he can dive from 40 feet, and that in issues of human understanding in general, his vision is far less clouded than that of a sociologist friend of his. Possessing an incurable fondness for metaphor and an irritating habit of personifying animalsgeese, buzzards, salmon, and squirrelswhenever they wander into his intellectual purview, Heilman affixes a maudlin poetry to all aspects of the natural world, refusing to rescue his book from his own egotistical clutches. Ultimately, Heilman's gushy, epiphanic observations of life from the backcountry effectively smother any early traces of cogency in this literary morass.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1995
ISBN: 1-57061-037-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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