Items related to Indian Summer: Musings on the Gift of Life (Volume...
Returning to Nova Scotia every summer contributes to the illusion of smooth continuance, each summer not the first thread in a new fabric but another button on a cardigan, perhaps looser than buttons below but still familiar and comfortable. Every summer the songs of white-throated sparrows bounce from scrub like novelty tunes from the fifties. Early in the morning ravens grind woodenly. . . . No matter how slowly I jog, on the headland butterflies spring from my feet in clumps, first azures and orange crescents, then wood nymphs, and finally over the lowlands near the Beaver River outlet cabbage whites spiraling, dizzy with mating.
Indian Summer is the newest collection of personal essays by Sam Pickering. In typical Pickering fashion, he seeks to capture the gift of living. He brings to the page again his family, students, and a wealth of country characters who live in places that exist only in his imagination and who wander through the stories he tells.
He describes how his life has been altered by his children leaving home for college, and he ponders the changes aging brings and the things that never change. The consummate teacher, he celebrates academic life and the pleasures of the classroom. Readers will roam familiar ground with Pickering as he explores the fields and small hills of eastern Connecticut and the bogs and woods on his farm in Nova Scotia. Indian Summer celebrates hearing and seeing. Butterflies tumble across the pages, flowers bloom and wilt, and dragonflies glitter like stained glass in the sunlight. Pickering teaches us to value our words and to laugh at the world around us. His musings mirror his desire for his readers to appreciate life a little more after exploring this book."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
From Booklist:
Samuel F. Pickering is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut. His unconventional teaching style was one of the inspirations for the character of Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society. Academically, Pickering specializes in the familiar essay, children's literature, nature writers, and 18th– and 19th–century English literature. He has published many collections of nonfiction personal essays as well as over 200 articles. Pickering and his wife, Vicki, live in a small house in Connecticut with three little rescue dogs and two imaginary grandchildren. “Well-behaved children,” he writes, “mannered and old-fashioned, kids whogenuflect to their elders and use bad language only at the dinner table at home.”
An inveterate observer of nature, both Mother and human, Pickering continues to cast his wickedly acerbic yet reassuringly reasonable gaze on items both momentous and trivial in a collection that, as its title suggests, ponders the effects of aging on both author and his chosen subjects. From the infirmity of the family pet to the frailty of its owner, Pickering more often than not imbues each entry with an anticipatory nostalgia for the way things, and he, used to be. "If one reads quickly and doesn't pause to analyze brushstrokes," he cautions, "a book of essays may convey the richness of life." One of the wisest writers out there, Pickering always does just that, his piquant reflections on the vagaries of his fellow humans sitting in tantalizing contrast to the poignant regard in which he holds the natural world. More curmudgeonly than he has been in the past, Pickering still writes with wit and clarity of the individual traits that confirm and inform universal truths. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherUniversity of Missouri
- Publication date2005
- ISBN 10 0826215963
- ISBN 13 9780826215963
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages232
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Indian Summer: Musings on the Gift of Life
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University of Missouri Press
(2005)
ISBN 10: 0826215963
ISBN 13: 9780826215963
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Paperback
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less 0.76. Seller Inventory # G0826215963I4N00
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