Review by New York Times Review
In the essays collected here, Hoagland, a writer of fiction and nonfiction born in 1932, describes growing up in Connecticut and the "concentrated happiness of listening by a lake to the lap and hiss of rustling water" ; working for the Ringling Brothers circus in the 1950s; writing "local appreciations of nature" for the Times editorial page in the 1970s; and aging, which, he explains, is "not a serene occupation." Like most of us, he thinks about sex a lot and comes back to the subject frequently. His passages about wildlife are evocative; a toad has an "ethereal, extended trill" that "seems like spring's angelic epitome - whereupon the male may clasp the female for many hours." When it comes to humans, the sex is less memorable, at least where it concerns the women he loved. Those relationships were complex, and "the sex in the package cannot be extricated from the stymieing cowardice or passivity, the misperceptions that dUuted our passion." That does not sound hot. Later, things get worse. At 70, he observes how "some men keep an eye peeled for a final chance to implant themselves clear to the last," adding, "I seem to be among them." He relates how he once picked up a hitchhiker who was fleeing an abusive husband, and how he drove her for a stretch on a Vermont highway. During the ride, he noticed the woman's vulnerability - her face was "pale," though he didn't "detect any bruises" - and then he became aroused. While these essays are full of elegiac writing, the sex stuff (where people are involved) is a disaster.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Naturalist and essayist extraordinaire Hoagland does write about sex and death, as the title to his new, reverberating autobiographical collection promises. But nature is his overarching, enrapturing, and heartbreaking focus. In his foreword, Howard Frank Mosher dubs Hoagland our last great Transcendentalist, a designation earned in the first of 13 vigorous and bracing essays as Hoagland portrays himself as a book-loving, solitude-thriving, avidly attentive boy with a stutter who finds bliss and enlightenment in the woods just beyond his Connecticut home. Not only do the specificity of Hoagland's memories and the rapture of his descriptions attest to the transforming powers of nature, this evocation of a lush, lost world also reveals how drastically life has changed during Hoagland's seven decades on earth. Self-described rhapsodist Hoagland mourns the decimation of ecosystems, calling out the names of fallen species as casualties in our wars against the splendid diversity of nature. He also recounts with flinty humor and candor his adventures with the circus, his travels in Africa and India, his love life, and the struggles and revelations of age. An astute social critic, Hoagland sharply contrasts the pallid cyberrealm with life's glorious hurly-burly. Fueled by zest, zeal, mischief, awe, and compassion, master writer Hoagland is exacting, gritty, and exalting.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Naturalist, novelist, and prolific essayist, Hoagland (Cat Man) describes his love affair with nature, given a fresh twist by his conviction that "human nature is interstitial with nature, and not to be shunned by a naturalist." Thus he describes his travels to Uganda, China, India; summers while young working with the circus or when older sitting in the senior center, all in the same keen, graphic detail with which he observes cedar waxwings passing a wild cherry tree. Hoag-land's range is capacious-political dissent, Tibetan barley, his stutter, overpopulation, his wives, his pique at becoming "a dirty old man" exciting his intellect and eliciting frank, deeply felt confessions. While rarely aphoristic or witty, Hoagland's prose sings. Extensive in range, intensive in passion, the direction of these 13 essays is inexorably toward the River Styx of the title-lament and a perverse satisfaction. In a world where "fish become a factory for omega oil. Fowl for ¿buffalo wings,'Å" only "death will save me from witnessing the drowned polar bears, smashed elephant herds, wilting frog populations, squashed primate refuges." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From the acclaimed essayist, novelist and travel writer, more deeply profound essays on the conditions of the natural world.In this outstanding collection, 78-year-old Hoagland (Early in the Season, 2008, etc.) culls 13 years of magazine writing, published in stalwarts like Harper's and Outside, for a result that, again, will draw comparisons to Thoreau. Another great naturalist, John Muir, once wrote, "I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." There might not be a more apropos line to describe this book, which not only finds Hoagland reminiscing on his many widespread adventures exploring the globe in years past, but also on the connectedness between the destruction of the planet, his mortality and aging, failed love relationships and his impassioned, sometimes polemical but always articulate, brilliant thoughts on humans' abdication of responsibility to protect nature. Citing an unwavering allegiance to what's alive, Hoagland believes that "heaven is here and the only heaven we have." The author is less concerned with his own demise than with the larger unraveling of the world, and these glimmering essays avoid nostalgia or self-pity by focusing on his various entanglements, with past lovers and wives, Tibetan yak herders, a Ugandan family and the circus aerialists with whom he worked 60 years ago. Hoagland possesses the rare quality of being both thirsty to absorb knowledge and experiences and also, organically, to want to pass along what he's discovered. It's a wonder, too, that these writings, never pedagogical, allow for the world he's witnessed to stand as the star of the show.Eloquent musings from a master.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
