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Overview"Small farms once occupied the heights that John Elder calls home, but now only a few cellar holes and tumbled stone walls remain among the dense stands of maple, beech, and hemlocks on these Vermont hills. Reading the Mountains of Homeis a journey into these verdant reaches where in the last century humans tried their hand and where bear and moose now find shelter. As John Elder is our guide, so Robert Frost is Elder's companion, his great poem ""Directive"" seeing us through a landscape in which nature and literature, loss and recovery, are inextricably joined. Over the course of a year, Elder takes us on his hikes through the forested uplands between South Mountain and North Mountain, reflecting on the forces of nature, from the descent of the glaciers to the rush of the New Haven River, that shaped a plateau for his village of Bristol; and on the human will that denuded and farmed and abandoned the mountains so many years ago. His forays wind through the flinty relics of nineteenth-century homesteads and Abenaki settlements, leading to meditations on both human failure and the possibility for deeper communion with the land and others. An exploration of the body and soul of a place, an interpretive map of its natural and literary life, Reading the Mountains of Home strikes a moving balance between the pressures of civilization and the attraction of wilderness. It is a beautiful work of nature writing in which human nature finds its place, where the reader is invited to follow the last line of Frost's ""Directive,"" to ""Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.""" Full Product DetailsAuthor: John C ElderPublisher: Harvard University Press Imprint: Harvard University Press Edition: New edition Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 21.00cm Weight: 0.313kg ISBN: 9780674748897ISBN 10: 0674748891 Pages: 272 Publication Date: 01 October 1999 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsDirective by Robert Frost Introduction South Mountain A Wilderness of Scars Hiking by Flashlight Bristol Cliffs The Plane on South Mountain Succession Someone's Road Home Interval In the Village North Mountain North Mountain Gyres The Ledges Coltsfoot, Mourning Cloak The Stolen Goblet A Confusion of Waters Notes Selected Readings Acknowledgments IndexReviews[This] is the most intelligent book about Vermont that I've read in several years. New Vermont books often fall into a very few predictable categories...John Elder's book, Reading the Mountains of Home, fits into none of those categories. It transcends them all, brilliantly, and emerges as that rare find: a new and fascinating look at this complex place we call home...A book of considerable subtlety and complexity that reads easily and spins a story as compelling as any good novel. But that's only one of [its] accomplishments. For what Elder has also done here, I believe, is the very important task of pointing a new, coherent direction for the national environmental movement, a movement now struggling with an outmoded script, and very much in need of revitalization...Perhaps the best description of Reading the Mountains of Home is to call it an exploration--a deep exploration of what a particular place can mean to a particular human being--and thereby to all of us. It's a book I hope every Vermonter will read. -- Tom Shayton Vermont Public Radio A slight memoir celebrating the natural wonders of the Vermont mountains. Elder (Following the Brush, 1993), a professor of English and environmental studies at Middlebury College, has clearly read the approved canon of nature literature, and much of this book reads like a heavily annotated syllabus. When he describes a place at first hand, he more often than not relates what another writer - especially Robert Frost, the dean of writers in those parts - has had to say about it, too. His glosses on those writers, Frost included, are seldom helpful ( In Frost's landscape, things are always changing, but the change is never random ); and his bookish leanings often obscure what is meant to be his subject, the hirsute landscapes (the metaphor derives from Dante) of northern New England, which, Elder points out, is far wilder today than it was a century and a half ago. Elder traces this renascent wildness to a combination of factors; whereas, he notes, Vermont was the fastest-growing American state up to the War of 1812, it fell victim to economic stagnation, farm failures, and industrial collapse, leaving it a hard-pressed and hard-bitten place - one that is now being yuppified, he writes, thanks to the telecommunications revolution, which turns quiet little worlds like this into targets for settlement, and for exploitation. Elder's immediate observations on both that land and its crusty Yankee occupants are often perceptive and well made. Would that his book had been given over to such direct reportage, and not to lit-crit and green pablum, such as Wilderness . . . offers a realm for human activity that does not seek to take possession and that leaves no traces; it provides a baseline for strenuous experience of our own creaturehood. Frost would have cringed. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationJohn Elder is Stewart Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and the author of Following the Brush: An American Encounter with Classical Japanese Culture and Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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