paper 1-57131-232-3 Kittredge (Who Owns the West?, 1995, etc.) explores what makes his pen flow in this third contribution to Milkweed’s Credo series. In picking up the series theme—how the dance of the human community with the natural world has influenced writers—Kittredge details the ways his essays, memoirs, and meditations on the American West have been shaped by his youth in Oregon’s Warner Valley, where strawberries ripened in the dark peat soil of his family’s ranch, meadows sported wild hay, and lilacs bloomed under a sky racing with clouds. For Kittredge, the valley was sanctuary, paradise, an embrace of place he still yearns for: “To be welcome in the world as I think I was when I was a child. . . . I wanted the world to be that good. Still do.” Kittredge ruined his land as a young farmer—turned his soil saline from over-irrigation, poisoned it with pesticides, eradicated the coyotes and badgers in even nastier ways—but stopped upon realizing he was killing one of the “small settlements, many rough-edged and isolated, held together by hard-handed self-respect, and not much money.” Both his life and writing came to reflect his sense that “exploration and rethinking were the point of things.” And this is clear from his books, which, while whiskery and often sentimental, are earnest, attentive, and ruminative. For Kittredge, our stories—from cultural hallmarks to everyday utterances—bespeak our system of values, and our conduct toward the land is the measure of our decency: “We all know a lot of stories and we’re in trouble when we don’t know which one is ours. Or when the one we inhabit doesn’t work anymore.” Kittredge’s hope is to add his voice to a coherent myth our society can inhabit. His writings embody his sincerity.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57131-231-5
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
