Book talkin'

Aron Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Atria Books, 2004) alternates a dramatic firsthand account of survival with the story of Ralston's previous mountaineering adventures (many of them solo), which show how he was predisposed to experience dire things.

As was widely covered by the mass media, Ralston amputated his own arm in the spring of 2003, then hiked and rappelled to where he was found by rescuers. For six days he'd been trapped in a remote Utah slot canyon, his wrist pinned to the canyon wall by a half-ton chockstone he'd inadvertently set into motion while climbing on it. (One has to wonder about someone who goes canyoneering with headphones on.) During this time, as Ralston writes, he didn't sleep, nor did he ultimately give up. He attempted to winch the rock using ropes and carabiners, tried to chip away the rock from his wrist. He thought long and hard about his life and its meaning, and he took video footage of of himself and his predicament, periodically adding updates on his deteriorating condition. (Toward the end he was hallucinating.)

After six long days and cold nights, severely dehydrated after having run out of water, reduced to sipping his own urine, having exhausted all other alternatives (and even hope itself), it finally occurred to Ralston that he could amputate his arm with knife blades and pliers, if he first broke his radius and ulna using the torque of his own body and trapped arm. And so he did, successfully.

The book is surprisingly well written. (Did Ralston dictate it? Was there an unseen hand ghost-writing?)

Cary J. Griffith's Lost in the Wild: Danger and Survival in the North Woods (Borealis Books, 2006) goes back and forth in telling two stories about getting lost, survival, and rescue. One is a suspenseful account about Jason Rasmussen's attempt to hike northern Minnesota's Pow Wow Trail alone in late October 2001. (Rasmussen lost his way, became disoriented, and eventually couldn't make his way back to his camp, thus beginning a week in which he survived by taking shelter in a rotting tree trunk and eating snow, eventually being found alive by tracking dogs.)

The other story is a relatively tame account about a 22-year-old Boy Scout leader, Dan Stephens, who got separated from his fellow canoe campers in Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park in August 1998 after he fell, hit his head on rocks, and was unconscious for a while. While this second story is complicated by the emotions and thoughts of Stephens' fellow campers, his survival was far less surprising. He was only missing for two days, was in no danger of freezing to death, and negotiated his way intelligently to a place where he encountered other canoe campers.

There's a fascination inherent in this genre, and Griffith writes clearly and effectively. From the start, though, I found the alternating chapters organization to be unwieldy, so I read the Rasmussen story first, skipping the Stephens chapters, and then went back and read the Stephens story all at once.

Dirk Jamison's Perishable: A Memoir (Chicago Review Press, 2006).

Picture this. It's your first day of school and Dad accompanies you, then lets you decide whether or not to attend, actually encourages you not to go, and says, "I want you kids to be free." So it was for Dirk Jamison, and it wasn't good. In this compelling autobiography Jamison describes dumpster diving with Dad and facing the freedom to decide whether or not to eat pickled eggs whose freshness date had lapsed. Jamsion also had the freedom to shoot dogs, sleep in a "gigantic plywood canoe," hang out with a Scoutmaster pederast, and cope unaided with a sadistic older sister. Like one of those survival after shipwreck stories, Perishable horrifies and makes one wonder how little Dirk survived and what damage may have been irrevocably done.

Where has Sparrow been all my life, this long lost kindred spirit? America: A Prophecy: The Sparrow Reader (Soft Skull Press, 2005), edited by Marcus Boon, offers a unique blend of dadaism, Taoism, and that certain je ne sais quoi. Thanks to Sparrow's writings appearing in Ascent magazine lately--including a "Zen recipe" that might have been dreamed up by John Cage--I've now devoured this book of proverbs ("Volcanoes are safe most days"), sky-watching journals, imaginary interviews, apparently real interviews (with Tiny Tim, for one), genre-defying humorous writings, and autobiographical musings.

I'm sure of almost none of these things, but am inclined to believe them: Sparrow's real name is Michael Gorelick; he lives in the Catskills hamlet of Phoenicia, New York, with a woman named Violet Snow; he's a longtime contributor to alternative press publications, ranging from esoteric little magazines and zines to The Sun and Whole Earth Review, as well as to the New York Times and the New Yorker; he ran for president in 1996; and he works as a substitute teacher. As evidence for some of these things, here's a record of his papers, circa 1970-2000, held by the Elmer Bobst Library.

In this compilation of writings first published in the likes of The Unbearables Assembling Magazine and LUNGFULL!, one can read Will Cuppy-esque descriptions of countries such as Iceland (where "the national bobcat, the White Penetrator, moves freely through city streets") and Poland ("Most of the world's straw originates in the Zcuk Valley"), essays about the joys of taking a bath ("bathifying") and reading old magazines, and imaginary autobiographical essays about purported sexual relations with a horse, an ant, and Cher. Sparrow also writes about how he got his name (and the significance of names in general), gives humorous and detailed account of working as a telephone solicitor, relates (through six months of journal entries) his encounters with cockroaches, ennumerates buildings he's "had sex in" in Manhattan, elucidates his political philosophy via anecdotes about freeing flies and reusing old envelopes, describes what it was like to meditate in public places in New York City, and reports on his presidential campaign.

"No one realizes that America's decline can be a boon," he writes. "A civilization's autumn can have the same virtues as retirement. It's time to relearn chess, to listen to Dixieland jazz. I'd be the perfect president of a declining America, as I've been in retirement since 1973, when I flunked out of Cornell. I fill each day with an array of personal whims. I stock the bird feeder, visit lobbies of famous hotels, read New Yorkers I find in the garbage, call my friend Sheila. I spend three dollars a day, and my life is plentiful. I can teach this to America."

One of my favorite pieces focuses on the fourteen cigarettes Sparrow has smoked over the past 34 years. "It has been 11 years since my last one," he writes. "Quietly I prepare for my next cigarette. I refuse to stop smoking."

Viva Sparrow!

Picture spiraling tree trunks, knotted and artfully interwoven branches, and growing chairs rooted to the ground. Imagine a room--or even an entire house made of living trees. Richard Reames' Arborsculpture: Solutions for a Small Planet(Arborsmith Studios, 2005) describes this unusual practice--crafting live sculptures by grafting and pruning trees--from its historical roots to its contemporary upsurge (spontaneously, it seems) here and there around the world.

Heavily illustrated with black-and-white photos and drawings, Reames' book looks at such related practices as pleaching ("the technique of weaving branches together into a flat plane... to create a sort of hedge on stilts"), bonsai, and espalier, an art form in which trees are trained to a flat plane and then shaped. (The latter practice reached its peak in mid-nineteenth-century France.) Reames profiles such progenitors as Axel Erlandson and his California-based Tree Circus, describes artists such as Joseph Beuys who have used living trees, and introduces the work of some contemporary arborsculptors today. Finally he gives tips on what he himself has learned about trees' properties and the practices of grafting, budding, framing, and otherwise shaping them. (Reames is also the author of the 1995 book How to Grow a Chair.)

Is the practice natural? Arguably so. Trees do grow together on their own sometimes, a process known as inosculation. What Reames and his kindred spirits in Thailand, Israel, Germany, and Japan share is the curiosity to take this process to a new level. In Reames' case, at least, this sense of wonder is paired with respect for trees as living beings. For him trees are teachers with crucial lessons for humanity.

Reames' self-published book conveys a sense of movement toward a fully coherent vision that for now is a little shady. Never mind its few typographical errors, though. Reames' skill is in manipulating trees.

Bill McKibben's Wandering Home (Crown, 2005) is a short book with a long subtitle: "A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks." Here McKibben describes a three-week backpack hike from his Vermont house "built a few years back, on land once owned by Robert Frost," to his house "smack dab in the center of New York's vast Adirondack wilderness."

While giving readers no justification for owning two houses, McKibben offers clear, engaging words that ought to inspire people to go for a long walk in the country, or at least wish they could do so, and to pay attention. Besides describing a beautiful landscape, McKibben writes about some good people who live in his region, and about good human works: Middlebury college students and their organic garden, a foundation devoted to protecting wilderness, a conservation officer devoted to destroying illicit hunting cabins. Perhaps the most hopeful image McKibben presents, though, is that of "cellar holes filling with birch trees," damp woods healing wounds made by humans.

Leslie Connor's Dead On Town Line (Crown, 2005) is a story in verse, told from the point of view of a teenage girl who has been murdered and who watches as people search for her body. I'd recommend it to reluctant readers-- since it is both superficially easy and compelling--and to writing teachers, among others. One can read it as poetry, narrative, or maybe something more. (It suggests possibilities.)

Was this written with young readers in mind? Is the book marketed to teens?

Anne LaBastille's Beyond Black Bear Lake (Norton, 1987) is a sequel of sorts to the author's Woodswoman (1976), a book about building a log cabin in the Adirondacks. In this newer book, LaBastille writes about conducting acid rain experiments after she senses a decrease in trout, osprey, kingfisher, otter, and bullfrog populations, and tells how people who read her first book tracked her down and intruded, prompting her to build a smaller and more remote cabin. Inspired by Henry David Thoreau, LaBastille calls her new cabin "Thoreau II." The structure was built using materials packed in via canoe and snowshoe, scaled down to 10' x 10' --smaller than Thoreau's cottage in Walden Woods (though with the addition of a sleeping loft)--in order to avoid the need for a special permit from the Adirondack Park Agency.

Chapter 14, "A Copycat Walden," describes the furnishings of Thoreau II and compares these in great detail to Thoreau's cabin furnishings. Photographs on facing pages 196 and 197 show a replica of Thoreau's cottage and LaBastille's cabin at Lilypad Lake, while pages 198 and 199 have lists of their respective expenses. (LaBastille's total, including a state tax and permits: $130.75.)

In a final chapter, LaBastille writes, "Building Thoreau II and living like Thoreau have given me the time, place, and serenity to search for answers to some philosophical questions." She notes the tension between solitude and professional demands, and notes the "slow corrosion of my roof, pollution of water, and insidious poisoning of trees, fish, frogs, and maybe me." "Recognizing this duality," she says, "I realize more strongly than ever that the only way to handle this ambivalence is to fight the dark side--whatever it is--with short, sharp, intelligent skirmishes. Then you can retreat, rest, and restore yourself in quiet, beautiful places. Then you can gain strength and inspiration for the next battle. Perhaps that's why Thoreau wrote: 'In Wildness is the preservation of the World.'"

While LaBastille is no Thoreau when it comes to prose, her heart is in the same place, it seems.

In An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland (Norton, 2003) Michael Dirda offers an autobiography of the author as young reader.

Washington Post Book World editor Dirda grew up in a somewhat troubled working class family in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1960s. At first this is a compelling and often funny story of an insecure, accordion-playing boy who'd read Candide, War and Peace, Walden, and Rousseau's Confessions, by age 16. This part of the book reveals not only personal bibliographic details but embarrassing accounts of young Dirda's dealings with girls and other non-bookish matters.

The details get skimpier, though, in the last one third of the book. Here adult Dirda seems a bit rushed and perfunctory in covering his scholastic success at Oberlin College and first travels abroad.

Was Dirda's childhood livelier than his young adult years? Perhaps so. Or maybe he chose to reveal less here about his more recent life.

I just read the short Judy Blume novel Forever (Bradbury Press, 1975), intended for teens, though the jacket says it's Blume's first novel "for adults." Blume said, I think, that she wrote it in response to a young person who asked her to write a book about young people who had sex and nothing bad happened.

Forever is told from the point of view of a girl who is turning 18, about her coming of age with her first serious sweetheart and their exploring sexuality together. Wearing a necklace engraved with their names and the word "Forever," she goes away to summer camp against her wishes, and--also without wanting it-- meets someone else for whom she has strong feelings.

"I wanted to tell him that I will never be sorry for loving him. That in a way I still do--that maybe I always will. I'll never regret one single thing we did together because what we had was very special. Maybe if [only...] it would have worked out differently..." Sheesh. I might have benefited from reading this about 22 years ago.

Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (Simon & Schuster, 1975) is the first of Therouxï's sardonic long-distance travel accounts. It describes a journey from London to India, through Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam (while the war was still going), Japan, and back west through Siberia so clearly that one can practically smell the trains on which Theroux ridesï--some of them squalid, slow, and fraught with danger, others opulent in a Victorian fashion, one an obvious holdover from pre-revolutionary Russia.

Theroux is perhaps at his best recounting conversations with locals and fellow travelers, here anti-British Indians whose sentences are full of Britishisms, Vietnamese officials talking up their country's charms, Japanese professors on the topic of Yukio Mishima and strip shows, and a Pushkin-reciting Russian railroad employee with whom Theroux gets drunk on Christmas Eve.

After four months of dubious food (turning the author into a vegetarian for a while) and cramped quarters, Theroux is ready for home, and suffers guilty dreams about his wife and children. "It was as if I had undergone some harrowing cure, sickening myself on my addiction in order to be free of it."

Addendum: "I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself,..." (Henry David Thoreau, from "Reading" in Walden).

Eric Pinder's North to Katahdin (Milkweed Editions, 2005) considers the culture of Appalachian Trail through hiking (introducing the concept of "trail magic"--food and beverage gifts left for trekkers), Baxter State Park in Maine, one of the most renowned visitors to the region--Henry David Thoreau, and the tensions inherent in setting aside wild places as parks which are then more heavily frequented by humans.

The book is pretty well written. I consumed it quickly-- which may mean I liked it, that I responded to it because it reminded me of a beautiful place I've been, or because it's not too deep. Maybe all three.

Pinder worked for seven years as a "weather watcher" (what a gig!) atop Mount Washington.

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, by Stanley Kunitz, with Genine Lentine (Norton, 2005).

These conversations with centenarian poet Stanley Kunitz about his twin passions--poetry and gardening--interwoven with twelve apt poems, offer the sort of wisdom that comes after one has lived fully for a long time, nearly died, and then recovered health to live again on borrowed time.

"One of the great delights of poetry is that when you're really functioning, you're tapping the unconscious in a way that is distinct from the ordinary, the customary, use of the mind in daily life. You're somehow cracking the shell separating you from the unconscious.

"There's no formula for accessing the unconscious. The more you enter into the unconscious life, the more you believe in its existence and know it walks with you, the more available it becomes and the doors open faster and longer. It learns you are a friendly host. It manifests itself instead of hiding from your tyrannical presence, intruding on your daily routines, accommodations, domestications.

"The unconscious is very much akin to what, in other frameworks, I call wilderness. And it's very much like the wilderness in that its beasts are not within our control. It resists the forms, the limits, the restraints, that civilization itself imposes. I've always felt, even as a child, that there was the decorum of social structure, the family structure, and so forth, and then there was the wild permissiveness of the inner life. I learned I could go anywhere in my inner life.

One function of dreams is to inform us that the boundaries of experience are infinitely open and that the limits we perceive in our daily life are in themselves an illusion, that actually to be alive is to occupy territories beyond those we recognize as our physical universe. Each person's dreaming is itself a universe."

From "Touch Me":

Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine,
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The long for the dance
stirs in the buried life.

Lately I've been enjoying--and feel inspired by--the trail journals of Dave Koskenmaki , husband of my friend Rosalie Maggio, who's hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada.

From his May 14 entry:

"We spent most of the day following Deep Creek until it finally emerged from the San Bernadino mountains, with an hour rest midday at Deep Creek hot springs. Unfortunately, this is Saturday and the hot springs had about two dozen locals cavorting in the springs and the adjacent deep pools of Deep Creek. I find that I'm not really interested in talking to anyone besides fellow hikers. Deep Creek hot springs has a reputation as a swimsuit optional swimming area so I decided to wear my glasses in order to enjoy the local scenery. Huh, some scenery--3 or 4 old fat guys--everyone else was wearing swimsuits. Then I decided to dive into a deep pool in the stream to cool off and forgot that I was wearing my glasses. They are now somewhere, 10 feet deep, on the muddy bottom. Fortunately I still have my prescription sunglasses.

After we left we passed two fat guys--obviously not PCT hikers--struggling up the trail to get back to their car, all out of breath and dripping with sweat. About a half-mile later two turkey vultures started circling over our heads. I told Wildcat that the vultures were circling over the wrong pair of guys."

Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich (Dalkey Archive Press).

Imagine a nightmare come to life, a world where cats and dogs are hunted and children with birth defects play "hospital" instead of "house." This haunting oral history about the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident bears witness to human nature, from negligence, denial, and fatalism to the ability to speak the unspeakable and survive all horrors. Its frank and brutal accounts spell out a cautionary message: "Humans, consider more carefully the generations to come."

Joseph Bruchac's At the End of Ridge Road (Milkweed Editions, 2005) is a new title in Milkweed's noteworthy "Credo" series of books by and about such naturalist authors as Gary Paul Nabhan, Pattiann Rogers, and Ann Zwinger. The heart of this volume consists of Bruchac's humble, straightforward autobiography: the formative books Bruchac read as a child that fostered his abiding interest in the natural world, the people who've mattered most to him (especially a grandfather whose gentle lessons took hold), and the places Bruchac has known, from the woods of his Abenaki ancestors to West Africa where he and his wife Carol worked in the late 60s.

In telling his own story, Bruchac calmly conveys a sense of sanity, engagement with the world on the earth's terms, and the interconnectedness of all things, rooted deeply and taking a long view.

"Keep your eyes and your heart open, and the way will find you," Bruchac writes. "My grandfather never said it to me in so many words, but the generosity of spirit he showed to others and the gentle but sure trust he kept in me gave me that teaching before I ever heard it spoken in our old language."

"One step in the right direction, if continued, leads away from the path of destruction."

The book also contains a 10-page bibliography listing works by the prolific Bruchac and a 33-page critical essay by Scott Slovic, wisely placed at the end.

The Nature Handbook: A Guide to Observing the Great Outdoors, by Ernest H. Williams (Oxford University Press, 2005), is a fascinating illustrated examination of phenology and such natural phenomena, patterns, and behavior as plant spirals, fairy rings, masting, bark beetle "galleries," nurse plants, thorns, heliotropism, albinism, galls, leaf mines, bioluminescence, animal coloration and mimicry, bird mobbing, butterfly "hilltopping" and "puddle clubs," skin shedding, "crooked wood" (krummholz), floral matting, and pink snow. Suitable for browsing, reference, or cover-to-cover reading.

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko & James Wright, edited and with an introduction by Anne Wright (Graywolf Press, 1986).

In August 1978, 50-year-old poet James Wright wrote a fan letter to Leslie Marmon Silko after reading the latter's book, Ceremony. Thus began a 19-month correspondence totalling less than 50 letters, between New Yorker Wright (sometimes traveling in Europe) and young Tucson-based Silko, terminated by Wright's death in March 1980, three months after he was diagnosed with cancer.

These letters are a case study in how correspondence can energize and inspire two people at once, can focus and clarify and encourage during cluttered times when such friendship is especially needed. In her letters Silko writes of a feisty rooster and tells stories from her Laguna Pueblo childhood, while Wright praises and asks for more. Clearly, love developed between the two, deep feelings of connection based in poetry and common understanding, in a way that arguably transcended some limitations, if not that of time itself. (In her last letter Silko wrote of her one visit with Wright, at a New York hospital the month before he died, saying that while sitting there with him she "could already feel that there is another present time where you and I have been together for a long, long time and here we continue together. In this place, in a sense, there has never been a time when you and I were not together.")

"When the Army Corps of Engineers flooded the sacred shrines and land near Cochiti Pueblo, many non-Indian (and Indians as well) said, 'Well, it is all ruined. Why do they (the Cochitis) even go near those places?' But here it seems the strong feelings, the love, the regard which the Cochiti people had for those places that were flooded, those feelings and the importance of those feelings, memories and beliefs are much more important than the physical locations. Which isn't to say that a great hurt and loss didn't occur when the shrines were flooded, but the idea or memory or feeling--whatever you want to call it--is more powerful and important than any damage or destruction humans may commit. It is the same with death. Death never ends feelings or relationships at Laguna. If a dear one passes on, the love continues and it continues in both directions--it is requited by the spirits of these dear ones who send blessings back to us, maybe with rain or maybe with the feeling of continuity and closeness as well as with past memories.... At Laguna, when someone dies, you don't 'get over it' by forgetting; you 'get over it' by remembering, and by remembering you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our lives and loved us, as we have loved them." --Leslie Marmon Silko, from a letter to James Wright dated Nov. 1, 1978

Silko again: "We are told that we should love only the good and the beautiful, and these are defined for us so narrowly."

Wright: "When you love a place, really and almost hopelessly love it, I think you love it even for its signs of disaster, just as you come to realize how you love the particular irregularities and even the scars on some person's face."

Boxing, shlepping and shelving books this month, not reading them. A new book I'd like to dip into is Jonathan Waterman's Where Mountains Are Nameless: Passion and Politics in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Including the Story of Olaus and Mardy Murie (W.W. Norton, 2005).

I've also been reading a poem or two each day from Noel Peattie's The Testimony of Doves (Regent Press, 2005).

I've not been reading. I've been weeding. My aspiration is chiefly to keep books that are essential and give away the rest. Want a one?

Joan Maloof's Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest (University of Georgia Press, 2005) describes forest ecology, often from the perspective of mast and fauna on the forest floor--weevils that inhabit acorns, snails that live in the rich debris below trees, and parasitic wasps that live on the leafminer that can only live on the American holly tree. Such attention to detail is rare.

Maloof notes, "Many people are sensitive to...invisible connections; and those who are most conscious of the living web suffer the most when it is bombed, paved, or otherwise disrupted. Biologists are often attracted to the study of living things because we feel these connections. Learning the details about the interactions of the myriad living things on the earth only deepens our concern for them."

Interpolating observations about beetle-transported pseudoscorpions with words by Rainer Rilke, Maloof herself writes on the line between science and poetry: "Whoever, finally, we will be, let us pray that it is worthy of being passed along."

The Lost Island: Alone Among the Fruitful and Multiplying, by Alfred van Cleef (Metropolitan Books, 2004). First published in Dutch in 1999, this book describes the author's three-month stay on remote Amsterdam Island in the South Indian Ocean, a tiny French outpost where small groups of men (never women) have researched weather, flora, and fauna--from microscopic rotifers to feral cattle--since 1949.

For Van Cleef, son of Jewish Holocaust survivors (and resident of Amsterdam, Holland), the voyage is an obsession that begins with eight years of persistent attempts to gain the required permission from a minor French official, a venture somehow connected to the author's failed relationships with women.

Of most interest perhaps are Van Cleef's descriptions of the island's transient but intimately connected community. "There were many facilities, but few personnel," he writes. The sole doctor was also veterinarian, dentist, garbage collector, dishwasher, psychologist, cleaner, and shopkeeper.

Amsterdam is remote. "The island didn't even have a boat of its own. "Where would you go?" the district chief said. "The nearest land is nearly two thousand miles away, over the roughest seas on earth."

Some readers will relate to Van Cleef's existential quest--to reach one place, one moment, somewhere wild, where everything is right and makes sense. The author writes of having reached a remote and rugged spot on the island from which he could see ocean all around, where he stood "face-to-face with infinity surrounding me. This was what I wanted: This was my life." Getting away from it all, Van Cleef no longer felt the loneliness he'd felt in his home city, "even though I was utterly alone on a corner of the most remote island on earth." On this extinct volcano, living in near squalor, coping with mud, rutting fur seals, and dubious food, "Here I felt fully connected to the life around me: rocks and wind, albatrosses and seals, biologists and meteorologists."

David Baronï's The Beast in the Garden (Norton, 2004) is a thoroughly researched, engaging account of human-cougar interaction, especially in and near Boulder, Colorado, where habituated cougars, increasingly unafraid of humans, graduated from snatching pet dogs and cats in the 1980s to preying on people, sometimes lethally. The book also effectively describes the political debate about wildlife management, from its philosophical premises to pragmatic practice (or inaction), in a human society where such debate is often polarized.

Having just come from a place where polar bears have come to view humans benignly, and where a polar bear attacked a human just three months ago, this book brought important issues into focus.

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, by Eric Brende (HarperCollins, 2004). In this somewhat superficial book in the "how-we-did-it" genre, author Eric Brende writes about how he and his partner set about minimizing their dependence on technology--living as part of a rural Amish-like community for a year and a half, divesting themselves of electrical appliances (and--eventually, for a time--an automobile), farming pumpkins and sorghum, and starting a family.

Henry David Thoreau cautioned a century and a half ago that technological development can enslave the creators. ("We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us," he writes in Walden.) Brende is aware of this propensity, and asserts, "Technology serves us, not we technology." The book grates at times with stretches of pretentious, bad writing, and what smells like a certain self-righteousness, but it also includes interesting accounts of mutual aid--mostly about being aided--in the community where Brende lived.

Rigorous readers are likely to ask questions that Brende never answers. Had he really proved his point after a year and a half, and so was it really an easy decision to leave when it became apparent that his partner was allergic to horses? Why is it that Brende's daughter knits and bakes cookies while his son works with him as a rickshaw driver? And what about his subsequent experience in an intentional community that failed, something Brende dismisses in one paragraph?

Having read this, what I'd really like is to get inside the heads and hearts of Amish women who have lived their whole lives simply--and not so simply at all.

I've just read the chapter titled "High Altitude" in Kenneth Kamlerï's Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance (St. Martin's, 2004). If you've been itching to climb higher mountains-- or want a reminder of the dangers of that activity--read this cautionary firsthand account. (This book isn't only about surviving, but also what happens physiologically when humans die under extreme conditions. Other chapters look at survival in the jungle, desert, underwater, outer space, and at sea.)

Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains (Random House, 2003) is a compelling profile of radical physician Paul Farmer who works directly with AIDS and tuberculosis patients in Haiti-- and also as an international advocate for patients' rights. (Farmer is the author of such books as The Uses of Haiti, Infections and Inequalities, and The Pathologies of Power, and co-founder of the nonprofit Partners in Health.)

Growing up in a large poor family in Florida, Farmer lived in a school bus, a homemade boat, and (for a while) a tent. After attending Duke University and spending some time in France, Farmer visited Haiti when he was 23 and saw firsthand the consequences of medical care inequality. Since then he has devoted his life, with almost fanatical energy, to clinical practice, organizing medical teams serving poor people in Haiti and elsewhere, and to writing and speaking on their behalf.

For me this book has spurred dialogue and action. It's funny, infuriating, provocative, and inspirational.

"When asked what he thought [of the deaths of a boy's family], Farmer adapted a mordant line from Graham Greene's The Comedians. 'Haiti,' he said. 'They died of Haiti.'"

"What we're trying to do," says Farmer, "is to make common cause with the losers.... We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it's not worth it. So you fight the long defeat." Some people wonder about the cost effectiveness of medical care. Others wonder whether palliative care even makes sense. Farmer believes, according to Kidder, "first, you perform what he calls 'the distal intervention' and cure.... Then you start changing the conditions that [caused the disease] in the first place."

The Library of Congress cataloger of this book assigned headings neither for AIDS nor Haiti.

May Sarton's The House by the Sea: A Journal (Norton, 1977) is a more prosaic and far less profound follow-up to her Journal of a Solitude. Its entries, written with the intent that theyï¿*d be published, began in November 1974, a year and a half after Sarton moved from smalltown New Hampshire to a house on the Maine coast, and continue through August 1976.

Above all Sarton loved flowers -- and gardening. By the time she was writing this book she had pretty much figured out how to people her solitude (though she was still angered by unannounced intrusions by strangers).

"Can a shepherd without sheep be called a shepherd?.... [M]y whole bent is toward not admitting the idea of an elite, of believing that to become more and more human (as I wish to do) means just the opposite, to admit all the ways in which one fails, to join with others in a great inivisible community of the nonleaders and the nonled, simply plain human beings in a universal struggle to survive with grace."

"Poetry is revolting unless it is good poetry."

John H. Timmerman's Jane Kenyon: A Literary Life (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002) is part biography of the poet, part book-by-book examination of Kenyon's poetic sensibility and craft. Well-written and for the most part deeply and broadly understanding, sounding no wrong notes, it's most likely to engage those who've read Kenyon's books and want a little more insight into "how?" and "why?"

Kenyon was a poet whose life and work in the 80s and 90s dealt with an ongoing balance between deep depression--and coping with sickness and death of people close to her-- and a relentless, courageous determination to ride those difficulties, and somehow transcend them, not losing sight of small beautiful moments, not hardening her heart.

Married to older poet Donald Hall who had been her teacher, Kenyon helped her husband through struggles with cancer, and then herself was afflicted with leukemia and died in 1995. (The last chapter of Timmerman's book looks at Hall's Without, a volume of poetry about Kenyon's illness, death, and Hall's subsequent grief.)

The book's epigraph quotes Kenyon:

"There are things in this life that we must endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I feel that there is a great goodness. Why, when there could have been nothing, is there something? This is a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, beauty?"

And later Kenyon is quoted again from her book A Hundred White Daffodils:

"The luckiest, sunniest life invariably includes tragedy, if I do not overstate these matters by calling them tragic. To lose your health, your strength, your ability to work, and to take pleasure in life--that is tragedy. It's no less tragic because it happens to everyone."

The answer for Kenyon to the question, "And what should one do about this?," was to apply herself to writing poetry that mattered.

I've been reading Thoreau's Familiar Letters and May Sarton's diary of her life in a house on the coast of Maine, and rereading, in chronological order, Noel Peattie's poetry collections, beginning with Western Skyline (Regent Press, 1995). From the latter:

        Snail Poem

        In the corner of the courtyard
        is a snail track.
        Here we're all busily trying to make our way in the world
        and here

        is a pathway of light.

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