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Dancing on the Stones : Selected Essays
John Nichols
Manufacturer: University of New Mexico Press
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Frank Waters Reader: Southwestern Life In Writing
ASIN: 0826321828 |
Amazon.com
John Nichols is well known, out in the larger world, as a novelist, the author of such books as The Sterile Cuckoo and The Milagro Beanfield War. In his longtime home of northern New Mexico, Nichols has earned a parallel reputation as a political and environmental activist, an advocate and protector of the Taos valley and the upper Rio Grande. Dancing on the Stones gathers hitherto uncollected essays and speeches that reflect both sides of his 40-year career. He remarks on the business of writing and moviemaking, on the pleasures of trout fishing and long-distance hiking, and especially on the necessity of finding a place to call home and defending it from harm. The essays range from mild provocation and even outrage (one bears the title "The Writer as Revolutionary") to whimsy, as when Nichols proclaims he was lured to the Southwest by clouds. One of the strongest pieces, "What Is a Naturalist, Anyway?" combines seriousness and humor to formulate a suitably broad answer: a naturalist, Nichols writes, "is a person whose curiosity is boundless ... who tries to delight in everything, is in love with the whole of life, and hopes to walk in harmony across this earth." Fans of Nichols's work and newcomers to it alike will find much of pleasure in this personal anthology. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
If you've read any of John Nichols's novels or books of nonfiction, you've met a lively, funny, and very impassioned man. This new collection of essays gives you the opportunity to know him even more intimately. Taoseño, fisherman, father, author, spokesman for all underdogs, Nichols has gathered writings that span more than thirty years and range from idyllic reflections on nature to unmerciful satires on impending Armageddon. We see the author as a young man on the trip to Central America that gave him a social conscience that wouldn't quit; as a hunter, hiker, and naturalist on rivers and in mountains increasingly threatened by development; and as a novelist watching in embarrassed disbelief as his book The Milagro Beanfield War is made into a movie that succeeds in spite of Hollywood's best efforts to garble the outcome. The vitality that made Nichols a standout prep-school mischief maker and college hockey player lends irresistible high spirits even to essays about departed friends and mortal illness--subjects that are treated with compassion, bawdy irreverence, thoughtful philosophizing, and the author's intense love of life.
Nichols can find a miraculous universe in a tiny stock pond, turn a rafting trip into a Keystone Kops misadventure, advocate revolution at a moment's notice, and laugh with beguiling aplomb at his own awkward pomposity. Almost everything this long-time New Mexican has to say is at once deadly serious and bright with untrammeled joy and curiosity.
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The World's Best Word Pilot.......2000-04-17
Mr. Nichols continues to amaze and delight his readers. As a novelist he lives in an invented world but as an essayast he takes his master's skill at prose and knifes into the butter of living in a world he finds all too real. "Dancing On The Stones" allows the reader to hop safely from the rocks of reality onto the reefs of fantsy. John's reality in Taos becomes the reader's virtual trip to his moral values. The trip is a maze of lofty thoughts bottomed by harsh facts and an unpleasant insistence on making one's living while living with what one makes. If more of us had John Nichols's insight into nature we'd see our world the way he sees his: life exists in spite of nature and life is as fragile as the clouds which enhance and hide it.
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Edited with an Introduction by Larzer Ziff.
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One of the great essayists -An American original and classic.......2005-11-09
Emerson is one of the greatest of essayists. His thoughts have a poetic power. But they are often complex and paradoxical and difficult to understand.
The title essay of this collection, 'Nature' is one of Emerson's most famous works. In it he in a sense talks about forgetting the fundamentalist reading of Scriptures and finding a true meeting with God through Nature.
For Emerson , Nature is the great harmonizer and harmony. He writes of our proper moral relation to it as a way of bringing the divinity into our lives.
Emerson makes an analogy between the moral and the spiritual which he claims we can only understand intellectually in proportion to our virtue or the goodness of our character.
In writing of Language and Nature he writes that true poetic speech has a command over, and can move and shape Nature.
Emerson is famous for his optimistic tone and message, but as Stephen Whicher long ago pointed out Emerson also has a darker side and knows the evils that can come in life.
Classic isn't a good enough description.......2003-08-05
This is a radiant essay on nature's greatness. It's beautifully written by Emerson. This book will stay with you even months after you've read it.
Book Description
The concept of systematicity is central to Immanuel Kant's conception of scientific knowledge and to his practical philosophy. But Kant also held that we must be able to unite the separate systems of nature and freedom into a single system: on the one hand, morality itself requires that we be able to see its commands and goals as realizable within nature, while on the other hand our experience of nature itself leads us to see it as a system with the goal of human moral development. The essays in this volume, including two published here for the first time, explore various aspects of Kant's conception of the system of nature, the system of freedom, and the system of nature and freedom. The essays in the first part explore the systematicity of concepts and laws as the ultimate goal of natural science, consider the implications of Kant's account of our experience of organisms for the goal of the unity of science, and examine Kant's attempts to prove that the existence of an ether is a necessary condition for a physical system of nature. The essays in the second part explore Kant's view that morality requires a systematic union of persons as ends in themselves and of the ends that persons set for themselves, and examine the system of duties and obligations necessary to realize such a systematic union of persons and their ends. These essays thus examine both the general foundations of Kant's moral philosophy and his final account of the duties of right or justice and of ethics or virtue in his late work, the Metaphysics of Morals. The essays in the third part examine Kant's attempt, in the last of his three great critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgment., to unify the systems of nature and freedom through a radical transformation of traditional teleology as a theory of the creation of organic nature into an account of our experience of organic nature and of nature as a whole.
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The Name and Nature of Poetry: and Other Selected Prose
A. E. Housman
Manufacturer: New Amsterdam Books
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The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman
ASIN: 0941533611 |
Book Description
Lovers of Housman's poetry have generally been aware, from the Introductory Lecture (1892) to The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933), that he was a master of English prose. For better or worse, these are the opening gun and the last post of modernism.
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THE REVIEWER TO END ALL REVIEWERS.......2004-11-20
Somewhere in London there is, I am told, a commemorative plaque to Housman denoting him 'poet and scholar'. The man would have been outraged - 'scholar and poet' if you please: he would have been content with 'professor of Latin' and no mention of his poetry at all. Obviously he is better known to a general posterity for 'A Shropshire Lad' than for his three great editions of Latin poets and the great mass of contributions that he made to the learned classical periodicals, or even for his comparatively well-known inaugural address when he was given his first chair at University College London. It is his poetry that sells him, and this book has accordingly taken for its title in this new edition the title of an address that he was persuaded to give in the field of literary criticism, which he protests himself (a bit too much) to be unfitted for.
I find his 'Name and Nature of Poetry' to be both insightful and brilliantly entertaining. Whatever you think about Housman's poetry, he was one of the finest and purest stylists in prose ever to have graced the English language. However you will not find much more here about poetry. There is a fragment of a talk he gave to a literary society in London University on Matthew Arnold, which is hilariously amusing; there is a letter to The Times offering a textual emendation to the commonly printed version of a poem by Keats; there is a review of a volume of the Cambridge History of English Literature; and that's it as far as poetry and literary criticism are concerned. There are some other items outside his normal area of operations, particularly an interesting historical review and some decidedly uninteresting bits of formal welcome he was asked to do for visits to Cambridge by the King. As for the rest, he sticks to his last.
Housman specified unequivocally in his will that his brother Lawrence Housman should act as his literary executor with strict instructions that any hitherto unpublished prose should be destroyed, although he might publish any further poetry that he came across. The fragment of the paper on Arnold is a clear breach of his wishes in this respect, but his second inaugural address, at Cambridge, escaped Mr Carter and has had to wait for a slightly later book before becoming another such breach. Housman's anxiety has a clear cause - anything in prose might be related to his true professional reputation as a scholar, and he would not risk compromising that. Poetry he was not worried about. What we have here, in a strictly scholarly vein, are lengthy sections from his famous prefaces to Manilius and Juvenal, sundry extracts from learned articles and reviews, his scarifying address The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism with its deliberate humiliation of the people he was addressing, and one review given in full. You do not need much Latin, indeed none, to get the full flavour and benefit of these pieces. Housman himself noted once that of the five volumes of his Manilius only the first had sold out because 'it found purchasers among the unlearned who had heard that it contained a scurrilous preface from which they hoped to extract a low enjoyment'. Carter's general purpose in this edition is to communicate the said low enjoyment, and he cuts out for the most part anything of too learned or too technical a nature. Housman was brilliantly witty, and a brilliant intellect. The exasperation that wrung some of the more wounding attacks out of him was the exasperation of a scholar who saw his trade being prostituted by duffers, idlers and phonies, but it amounts in my own opinion to a great deal more than the standard bitching that learned periodicals in any discipline tend to be full of. The study of Greek and Latin is a matter of making sense of things, and the greatest practitioners of textual criticism of Greek and Latin authors are colossal figures indeed. What Housman adds in particular is not just his unique power of expression, but a conceptual framework round the process, a veritable paradigm of how to think straight.
I certainly extract a low enjoyment out of the parts where I am intended to do just that. In terms of how to write my own language, and above all in terms of how to use my brains such as they are, I have extracted a lot more. In a highly specialised department, namely how to put together a review, I have an example second to none in the full-dress specimen contained in this book.
Book Description
"àa rich and fitting tribute." -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"With previously unpublished journal entries and letters, this volume captures the original mountain man's final trek." -OUTSIDE
"I am now writing up some notes, but when they will be ready for publication I do not know... It will be a long time before anything is arranged in book form." These words of John Muir, written in June 1912 to a friend, proved prophetic. The journals and notes to which the great naturalist and environmental figure was referring have languished, unpublished and virtually untouched, for nearly a century. Until now. Here edited and published for the first time, John Muir's travel journals from 1911-12, along with his associated correspondence, finally allow us to read in his own words the remarkable story of John Muir's last great journey.
Leaving from Brooklyn, New York, in August 1911, John Muir, at the age of seventy-three and traveling alone, embarked on an eight-month, 40,000-mile voyage to South America and Africa. The 1911-12 journals and correspondence reproduced in this volume allow us to travel with him up the great Amazon, into the jungles of southern Brazil, to snowline in the Andes, through southern and central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study. Although this epic journey has received almost no attention from the many commentators on Muir's work, Muir himself considered it among the most important of his life and the fulfillment of a decades-long dream.
John Muir's Last Journey provides a rare glimpse of a Muir whose interests as a naturalist, traveler, and conservationist extended well beyond the mountains of California. It also helps us to see John Muir as a different kind of hero, one whose endurance and intellectual curiosity carried him into far fields of adventure even as he aged, and as a private person and family man with genuine affections, ambitions, and fears, not just an iconic representative of American wilderness.
With an introduction that sets Muir's trip in the context of his life and work, along with chapter introductions and a wealth of explanatory notes, the book adds important dimensions to our appreciation of one of America's greatest environmentalists. John Muir's Last Journey will be must reading for students and scholars of environmental history, American literature, natural history, and related fields, as well as for naturalists and armchair travelers everywhere.
Customer Reviews:
Good.....but.......2006-11-03
Muir's journals were good but I didn't care for the introduction to the journals in each chapter by the author. The intro's went into way to much background detail. I would have been fine with less intro.
Book Description
A stunning celebration of forty "natural heritage" sites, combining brilliant color photography with the insights of two acclaimed naturalists.
Customer Reviews:
Amazing photograph.......2006-02-15
This is an outstanding book with spectacular photographs of 40 wilderness selected by UNESCO. Photographs of Animals and places is simply amazing and a great value for the price.
I specially liked the Kilimanjaro pictures. This book has also won a Sweden Panda award in 2001
Book Description
This book is like Stanley Crawford's floor. The floor began more than thirty years ago when Crawford moved his family to New Mexico after selling movie rights to his first novel. The history of their home-made house is written in the hand-plastered floor, patched and sealed over the years. At first a reminder of how little he and his wife knew about working with mud, the floor has become beautiful in the years since 1971. It embodies their lives, the ways things have changed and the ways things have stayed the same. “A mud floor is perfectly sustainable, being infinitely repairable and finally recyclable.”
“Reflections in Mud,” Crawford's essay about the floor, is one of the many pieces collected in this book about his life in northern New Mexico. The novelist who didn't know how to lay a mud floor is now a seasoned farmer, irrigator, and northern New Mexico villager, and the essays on these subjects that he has been writing since the 1980s continue the work he began in Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament as an articulator of values that are out of synch and out of scale with the suburban lives of most Americans in the twenty-first century. Whether he is writing about the river whose water irrigates his land, the plants and animals with which he lives, or the continuing struggle he and his neighbors must engage in if their small farms and farmers markets are to survive, Crawford's thoughtful, witty essays are the kinds of summing up that his fans have been cutting out of periodicals for years. Now that they are in book form we can all throw away the clippings, reread the essays, and give the book to friends who have yet to discover the pleasure of reading Stanley Crawford.
Crawford's thoughtful and witty essays explore his experiences as a farmer, activist, and observer in rural New Mexico. In his third nonfiction book he writes, among other topics, about the river which irrigates his land and the animals and plants which touch his life.
Customer Reviews:
Way better than "Mayordomo".......2007-01-12
Unlike Stanley Crawford's almost cripplingly boring book "Mayordomo," "The River in Winter" is a collection of essays, and is actually interesting to read.
I particularly like his essay on the Sandia Mountains village of San Antonio, the village's shotgun-wielding struggle to stop rampant development, and the village's acequia or irrigation ditch.
So did some UNM students several years ago, because they blatantly plagiarized several passages from that essay for a paper they published entitled "Agua, Tierra, y Vida."
Fans of New Mexico, small town life, and a simpler way of living will find a lot here to enjoy.
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Making the Environment Count: Selected Essays of Alan Randall (New Horizons in Environmental Economics)
Alan Randall
Manufacturer: Edward Elgar Publishing
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ASIN: 1840640863 |
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Making the Environment Count brings together, in one accessible volume, an outstanding selection of Alan Randall's essays published over the past 30 years. It explores ideas on making the environment count from a conceptual perspective and addresses a range of topics pertinent to the study of environmental economics including:
* the limits of markets in reflecting environmental quality, and the implications of this for policy and institutional design
* cost-benefit analysis, with emphasis on its welfare-theoretic foundations, and its ability to reflect the public's demand for environmental quality
* conservation, biodiversity and sustainability
* developments in methodology
* the ethical foundations of public policy
* conceptual foundations of empirical methods of valuing the environment
By improving access to Alan Randall's many important contributions, this volume makes a significant addition to the literature and will be welcomed by environmental economists.
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What Is God?: The Selected Essays of Richard R. Lacroix
Richard R. LA Croix , and
Richard R. Lacroix
Manufacturer: Prometheus Books
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ASIN: 0879757396 |
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Born of the Conquerors: Selected Essays by Judith Wright
Judith Wright
Manufacturer: Aboriginal Studies Pr
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ASIN: 0855752173 |
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