and flowers. In Montana, my home
ground, for instance, it’s western meadowlark and Indian paintbrush, which he
says is “a flower I have loved since childhood.” Our travelers also enjoy the generosity of Cli=’s tolerant and usefully rich,
happily gay and well-adjusted movie-business son. Clearly, this is not a story
focused on plausibility or plot or social
theories. It’s about our yearnings to be at
least commonly cherished.
The English Major isn’t one of Harrison’s
major e=orts but it does reintroduce us to
his enthusiasm for common-sense pleasures like fine food and wines and bird
watching and flowers and the consoling
psychic usefulness of devotion and ecstatic
physical lovemaking. It’s about curiosity,
getting out and around, sizing up the
world as it is.
While the story is told by a male who
indeed appreciates the physical glories of
females, Harrison has never been accused
of sexism so far as I know, because sexism
isn’t what he’s up to. The English Major
spins a forgiving dream about the most
vital and creative connections and impulses built into our species. It gave me
solace to find them so kindly celebrated.
— William Kittredge
The Entire Earth
and Sky
Views on Antarctica
by leslie carol roberts
University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
$24.95, 322 pages.
“I THINK OF ANTARCTICA every day,”
writes Leslie Carol Roberts. Anyone who
has been to this fantastic, far-o=
continent knows exactly what she means—
Antarctica is like a dream, a lost lover,
“our imagined territory.” Roberts is, she
freely admits, a “polar junkie,” drawn
physically and emotionally to Antarctica
and also drawn intellectually to the question of how the continent takes shape in
the cultural imagination.
Roberts’s love a=air with Antarctica
begins in 1987 when, as a newspaper
reporter, she joins the environmental
group Greenpeace for a trip to the Great
White South. As the crew loads the ship
in New Zealand, she slips o= to visit the
Lyttelton Historical Society Museum, an
old-fashioned, quirky archive of all
things Antarctic, overseen by the eminent Antarctic historian, archivist, and
gentleman Baden Norris. A friendship is
born, which Roberts rekindles fifteen
years later when she returns to write her
book. The charming, understated Norris
and his museum work become the perhaps unintended heart of this narrative
of how history gets made through the
collection and display of artifacts that tell
particular stories.
The complex dynamics of
life on the landscape of
central Idaho’s Sawtooth
Valley are the subject of
Laura McPhee’s new book,
River of No Return (Yale
University Press, 2008).
Presented in a large,
picture-book format, the
project explores the classic, often-photographed
subject of the American
West in unexpected ways,
mixing its beautiful landscapes with moving social
documentary and exposé
of the environmental
threats and tragedies.
