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1948226464
| 9781948226462
| 1948226464
| 3.51
| 4,314
| Mar 03, 2020
| Mar 03, 2020
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liked it
| I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain lik I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence on myself and my body, submerging myself in pain like I did when I was working in the warehouse alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people.Noé Alvarez was at the beginning of his adult life, but he had seen a few things. Growing up near Yakima, WA, at 17, he took a job in a fruit packaging plant where his mother had worked for decades, in order to bring a bit more income into the household. Even though he had worked in the fields and done other physical labor as a kid, it gave him a lot more appreciation for how hard her life had been for all those years and gave him also a feeling of pride in doing his job well. The area promotes itself as The Palm Springs of Washington. Uh, no. It is, however, the area from where Raymond Carver hails, and Carver has provided a less than Palm-Springs-like look at it in his fiction. Hard-scrabble would be a better description. The train tracks that demarcate the town into East and West are no longer representative of the division between poor and rich neighborhoods—only poor and slightly less poor…We still seem trapped in the cycles of Carver’s narratives, as if his words condemned us to a world of loneliness, tarnished relationships, and violence. Seen differently, his words urge youth like us to rewrite ourselves out of these sinkholes. To sprint out of them.His parents had urged him to get out, and it looks like he will. Alvarez is accepted to Whitman College, with a generous aid package. The Hispanic Academic Achievers Program helps out more, so he winds up with a free ride. Off to Walla Walla in 2002. [image] Alvarez running in the event – image from WBUR.ORG In April 2004, two years into his college experience, he hears a speaker on Peace and Dignity Journeys (PDJ), a North American run through indigenous communities, from Alaska to Panama, held every four years. Alvarez had done some running, but was hardly a seasoned long-distance runner. Struggling with the demands of college, and buying in to a negative stereotype of himself and Hispanics generally, he decides this is for him, even asking Whitman for some money to get him started on it. They fork some over, which seems pretty sweet of them. Gotta say, that if it had been my kid dropping out of a free-ride college deal after two years, I would have been less than excited. Why not wait until you get your degree and catch this train the next time through? Sounds like Noé’s parents felt similarly. The man giving the presentation, Pacquiao, warned him of the hardships, but presented it as an event that promoted unity among indigenous peoples. But ok, college was not going all that well for him, so maybe a break was called for. Like, every step of the way, college was a very difficult thing for me. And it happened to coincide then when I was 19 years old with the Peace and Dignity Journeys, a six-month-long run that's organized every four years. And so it kind of saved me. It came - it coincided perfectly. I said, I needed to get out. I couldn't face my family. This is an opportunity for me to kind of hit the restart button and go and figure myself out. - from the NPR interviewThis is how Noé Alvarez found his way to the PDJ, but it is not how the book opens. There are many people who participate in this megamarathon. In the opening, we get a peek at each of the main ones before the event, strobe-light flashes of where they were just before deciding to join, maybe what prompted them. We get a where-are-they-now at the end of the book, a nice book-end. There is also a discontinuity between the event and Alvarez writing about it. I definitely wasn't ready to tell a story at 19. It's a lifelong process to make meaning out of it. I talked to some of the runners and I checked in with them too. I said, "Look, this is what I remember about you, this time. Do you remember that?" They shared information with me that I had blocked out. Then I just got to writing them. I took it scene by scene, just getting it down and figuring it out later, not thinking about the bigger picture because there were so many components to it. Runner's story, my story, dad's story, mom's story. It's a day by day thing. That's how the run was. - from the Salon interviewAlvarez reports on his experiences on this massive run, how he personally endures (or not) the physical demands, his attempts to extract meaning and connection from the PDJ, and his struggle to forge a clearer sense of his identity. In the run, he is only nineteen years old, so there is plenty of identity left to construct. He also fills us in on the uplifting welcomes given the runners in some communities and the occasional hostility of others sharing the road, including being hit by rocks courtesy of passing motorists, and concerns like encountering a mountain lion while running solo in a remote location, or waking up with a back full of blisters, courtesy of some crickets, getting lost in Los Angeles or seeing his knees swell to the size of melons. Though the run was physically taxing on the body, Álvarez joked, “running is the easy part.” Getting along with flawed people with broken histories could be challenging under the best of circumstances. - from the WBUR interviewWe meet, again, the runners whom he joins on the torturous trek from Alaska to Panama. Not all will last for the entirety. One of the strong points of the book is the stories he hears while hanging around the equivalent of a campfire after each day of extreme running. This was a highlight. Interesting, but not so compelling was the dysfunction within the group. The people on the run did not exactly seem like the most welcoming sorts. It certainly works as a descriptive, but does not exactly make us feel all that supportive for many of the runners and managers in this enterprise. People are people, whatever their origin, so this is not a huge shock, but I guess I was hoping that among a group of people who were engaged in a six-month test of their endurance and commitment, it might have been a bit less like middle school with more booze, sex, and snottiness. On the other hand, I have been around positively-minded political people at various stages in my life, and while most are pretty nice, there always seem to be some who are just awful. So, probably, bad on me for having unreasonable expectations. [image] Alvarez today - image from NBC News There is a duality here. Alvarez wants to support and identify with his working-class family, while wanting to feel a connection to a wider world, maybe a chance to fulfill his parents’ wish for him to have a better life than they had had. I know, why can’t one manage both? But it seems that the author, now in his thirties, has made some sort of a divide between the two. I seek elsewhere the spiritual and philosophical truths that running provided me. But within myself I believe that these truths can be achieved without a college education. The world tells me that achievement has to look one way, but I struggle with that.I take serious issue here, as the author appears to be conflating university education with a search for philosophical truths. Sure, it serves that purpose for many people. But it is a meaningful tool that allows one, or at least helps one, to make a decent enough living in the real world that one can afford to continue such truth-seeking without having to scrounge for cash. And Alvarez had some post-college work that was doing some real social good. In a description of his more contemporary life, he is working at lower end jobs than he really needs to. One was as an overnight guard at a museum. Here I contend not only with the mental fatigue of museum silence, but the nervous reality that has haunted and pestered me all my life: that I will always be working class.No shite, Sherlock. Been there, done that. I have my own guard uniform tucked away as well, but unlike Noé, I never really doubted my class status, despite college and graduate school. Sure, some can get out, but for the vast majority, while we may swap collar colors, our relationship to real power remains where it began. And it is likely to remain that way for our children as well. It is called a class-based society, whether the slots we are born into are Indian castes, or striations in the increasingly ill-named American middle class. The clacking dress shoes over marble floors remind me that I am surrounded by people who know where they’re going in life. In these small spaces, even in the most trivial conversations, I pretend that I matter, that people value my insight into random matters of life, literature, and local events.I would not project any sort of peace or direction onto anyone based on the sounds their shoes make on a marble floor. I have worked with many such people, as has Alvarez, and they are as likely to be as unhappy, or as undirected, as anyone walking on softer rubber soles. And if that is not persuasive, a quick look at any decent newspaper coverage of things political or economic should disabuse one of such notions. And maybe some people do value what you have to say. You can be working class and still have something to contribute that is of value, beyond physical labor, if sweat-based work is not sufficient to offer the feelz you need. That this book exists is absolute proof of that. Speaking of which, some of Alvarez’s writing can be beautifully descriptive, while lyrically evocative. It is an ink wash of a world here in rainy Chiapas where we traverse steep highlands with heavy feet, mobbing about the clouds as if in some dream world that smells of firewood. Roads coil around remote Mayan villages that appear and disappear in the fog like ghost towns. The silhouettes of women hunching over the land can be seen in the clouds, working the land, and carrying bundles of firewood on their backs.And then it can sometimes be clunky, for which I blame editors more than Alvarez, unless, of course, things of this sort were raised and changes were overruled by the author. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion… Not likely. Maybe your eyes sink, or it feels like they are sinking, within the sockets, but I expect the sockets stayed exactly where they were. Another. When the rhythms of working-class life cut inside me like broken beer glass, I run. Maybe broken beer bottle glass? What is, actually, broken beer? This sort of thing should result in DMV-like points on one’s poetic license. One further concern. Much is made of the importance of this run to healing. It was never clear enough to me how exactly that worked. Maybe I was missing something. Always a possibility. But repeating what sounded to me like a mantra about how this was about healing and that was about healing without really explaining how, made me feel in need of some healing of my own. There are plenty of wrongs that have been foisted on indigenous people. How does this run help heal those lesions? It sounded to me like a line of political truism taken in, and repeated, by a new, young (19) adherent, who was fully on board, but who did not yet have a deep grasp of the content under the slogan. I am not saying there was not healing of some sort going on, just that it could have used a bit more explication. I did like, in Alvarez’s introductory remarks on the NCRL site, (linked in EXTRA STUFF), his piece about running as a form of connection and prayer. The road is a classic image of the journey of self-discovery. We expect our narrator to begin in one place, both physically and emotionally or psychologically, and end his road trip someplace else, both internally and externally. I am struck ultimately by how little this run actually seemed to impact the author’s life. There is an immediate result, though. He does return to school, completing his expected education and much more, doing work that is of obvious value in the world. Yet finds insufficient psychic reward in that. Surprisingly, he seems no closer to finding what he was looking for years after the event than he was before he joined. While Alvarez may have picked up a nice trove of tales to tell, it was not at all clear that there was enough growth here to write about, given where he is when he writes the story. Does Alvarez feel more connected to his indigenous brothers and sisters, the indigenous communities through which the run passed? Sure. But what does one do with that? Is this a purely personal effort? Does it lead him to look for ways to help support Native American communities, or groups, after the race was over? If so, it was not obvious. He seems shifted more to a generic desire to help poor people. It seemed a very personal journey, despite the initial rationale, and his initial enthusiasm for being included. Which leads one to consider whether this was the intent. He even admits it was a need for a personal restart that was a great motivator. Maybe not all journeys really take you somewhere. Intended or not, that was where this one dropped me off. But the run certainly helped Alvarez embrace who he was at one level, furthering his sense of connection with his family. ==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 24, 2020
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Jun 03, 2020
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May 24, 2020
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Hardcover
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0345816773
| 9780345816771
| 0345816773
| 3.88
| 5,625
| Jan 30, 2018
| Jan 30, 2018
|
it was amazing
| The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed The end of the road was always just out of sight. Cracked asphalt deepened into night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by the blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If you ever reach the end, I remember thinking, I’ll fly off the rim of the world. I pedaled harder.Some lights shine brighter. The sky is full of stars, all with their distinct glow, color, and twinkle. But there can be no denying that, as breathtaking as are all the lights we can see after sunset, some call your attention at least a bit more. There are some on which you fixate. Kate Harris is one of those. She burns radiantly with obvious intellectual brilliance, which combines with a broad knowledge of science and humanities, glows with an impressive poetic gift for descriptive language, and is possessed of an incredible store of determination. [image] Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris’s telling of a bike trip she took with her from-pre-teen-years bff Melissa Yule. Nothing much, really, just a leisurely jaunt across the Silk Road. Be home in time for dinner, dear. Ten months and ten thousand biking kilometers later, they were. Actually, the journey was broken up into two trips, (so, back in time for lunch?) and took over a year in total. This book focuses on the longer chunk of their ride. I wanted to bike the Silk Road as an extension of my thesis at Oxford: to study how borders make and break what is wild in the world, from mountain ranges to people’s minds, and how science, or more specifically wilderness conservation, might bridge those divides.There is drive and then there is DRIVE!!! Most of us have it in modest quantities, sometimes in spikes, sometimes it barely registers. Mine has been of the spike sort. Finding, on occasion, a target, something that fills or I thought would fill a need, I found the wherewithal to make it happen. One, when I was still a teen, was tracking down a young lass I had seen at a frat party. Another was finding a study abroad program when I was tending to a broken heart, and was looking to heal somewhere far away, a third was plotting a cross country trip in an old Postal truck with a small group of peers. Not exactly riding the Silk Road, but maybe a small taste of the joys to be had when what has been dreamt of crosses the border into reality. Of course, once across that frontier, the new land in which one finds oneself may or may not be what one had imagined. But getting from here to there, setting and accomplishing a goal is a glorious experience. One that I expect all of us have had, to one degree or another. And hopefully one that we all nurture and renew at least somewhat through the course of our lives. There are some people, however, who set their sights slightly higher, sometimes beyond the bell curve, outside the box, off the beaten path. [image] Happiness is a red Hilleberg tent pitched among snowy mountains - Image from Harris’s FB pix The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I’d ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up towards the surface of something, a threshold or a change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.Harris writes of her early upbringing, hanging with her brothers, moving several times, particularly enjoying remote places. It did not take long for her to set her sights beyond the horizon, well, beyond the planet, actually. She had decided as a teen that she wanted to go to Mars, under the impression that all of her home planet had already been pretty much explored. She gained some notice from the Mars Society after she sent a letter to dozens of world leaders urging them to support a manned (womaned?) mission to the Red Planet. She went on a few Outward Bound adventures, and translated her particular gift for grant writing into third-party funding for projects of various sorts across the world. Toss in an early passion for biology as well. [image] Melissa Yule and Kate Harris - image from Explore-mag.com Harris and Yule had been teaming up for sundry adventures since they were classmates as pre-teens. Science fair projects eventually gave way to other pursuits. They ran in the NYC marathon, on a whim, according to their bios in CyclingSilk.com. Who does that? These two, apparently. They also biked across the USA in 2005 and rode bikes across Tibet and Xinjiang in 2006. (the earlier piece of the Silk Road trip.) I guess they were just getting warmed up. In 2011, three Masters degrees between them later, Harris’s from Oxford and MIT, they combined their endurance-athlete inclinations, a permanent desire for adventure, and an interest in protecting imperiled landscapes and ways of life to try to ride the entire Silk Road, or at least as much as was possible, beyond what they had already ridden. Some borders are real, though, defended by people with guns, and require one to set off in an unplanned direction. So, there were interludes that had them on trucks, buses, trains, and planes. Longing on a large scale,” says novelist Don DeLillo, “is what makes history.” And longing on a smaller scale is what sends explorers into the unknown, where the first thing they do, typically, is draw a map.There are passages throughout the book on nature conservation, and the irrelevance of political borders to biological realities, but I got the feeling that this was far secondary to the ecstasy of adventuring. It seemed to me that Kate’s prodigious talent at writing grant applications, and no doubt Mel’s as well, had secured necessary funding (a $10K grant, plus considerable other support) for their odyssey, but reporting on conservation along the ride, while constituting the labor required to justify the grant, was something less than a passion. ( I was smitten with wildness, and only incidentally with science.) Of course, it could be that Harris and Yule’s reports back to their sponsors on the more scientific details of the pair’s extended field trip was the channel for most of that material. This book focuses on the adventure of exploration and, remaining true to the title, a consideration of borders, literal and figurative. [image] From Harris’s Facebook pages The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves, the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag turned vicious, all in the dubious name of nationalism. And yet political fortunes, while sometimes solid as brick, are finally only as strong as shared belief.Harris provides spot-by-spot descriptions of the places through which they travel. She notes the sorts of things you would expect, the landscape, the architecture, the weather, the physical conditions of the area, the traffic, the colors and textures, the friendliness (or not) of the locals and the pair’s interactions with them. The history of the places they traverse comes in for a bit of a look. The origins of the word “Tibet,” for example, a consideration of whether Marco Polo actually traveled as far as he claimed, and disappointment that his motivation was solely mercantile and not exploratory. One source of inspiration was an intrepid female explorer from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Fanny Bullock Workman, a mountaineer and explorer also fond of the bicycle. this particular stretch of salt and wind, nearly uninhabited and widely dismissed as a wasteland, is one of the most contested territories in Asia. Tibetan by cultural heritage, Indian by treaty claim, and Chinese by possession, the Aksai Chin is caught in this territorial tug-of-war owing to its strategic location between nations. It all began when China furtively build a road across it in 1957, the very dirt track we were on, roping like a slow-burning fuse for more than 1,600 kilometres over the emptiness of the plateau. India only clued in to Highway 219’s existence half a decade later, and their discovery detonated a war over the borderland.[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org She fills us in on some of the logistical challenges involved, the hurdles to be jumped in getting the correct papers to cross from here to there, the difficulty of communicating when there is no common language, the struggle to find food, water and shelter, replacements for lost or broken pieces of this or that. One surprise was the absence of any reports of serious sexual predation, although she does report on the need to move quickly at times to evade potential unpleasantness. There are several reports of wonderful, warm experiences, as locals take the pair under their wings for a meal and a warm place to sleep. They are even joined for a time by a stray dog, and are swarmed by a herd of Tibetan antelope. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.Harris’s telling is not just the travelogue of seeing this, then that, but includes ongoing philosophical meanderings, about her own experiences and the wider human variety, about not only the political borders with which people must contend, but personal edges, where they begin and end, or don’t. Her intellectual explorations are bolstered by a rich trove of quotes from literary classics, both prose and poetry, and from some of the authors you would expect, like Thoreau and Muir, Wallace, Darwin, and Carl Sagan. But finally, it is Harris’s gift for language that elevates this book to Himalayan heights. Combining intellectual heft with an inquiring mind is amazing enough, but to be able to communicate both the inner and outer journeys with such sensitivity and beauty is a rare accomplishment indeed. After being on an achievement bender most of my life, the prospect of withdrawal, of doing anything without external approval, or better yet acclamation, kept me obediently between the lines I couldn’t even recognize as lines. Isn’t that the final, most forceful triumph of borders? They make us accept as real and substantial what we can’t actually see?[image] image from NatureNeedsHalf.org I would not want you get through this review without at least a few roadblocks. I really wanted for each chapter to include a map of the travels contained therein. There is a map provide at the beginning, but chapter-by-chapter additions would have been most welcome. I would have liked a bit more science in the book, even if it added a fair number of pages to the total. A quibble. I wonder, though, if Harris was aware of the issues faced by Fanny Bullock Workman, who also wrote of her travels, having greater popular success with work that focused more on the travel than the scientific findings. Whether buttressed with dirt roads or red tape, barbed wire or bribes, the various walls of the world have one aspect in common: they all posture as righteous and necessary parts of the landscape.This is not your summer trip to Europe. You will not be familiar with most of the places these two riders visit. The larger entities, sure, country names, some mountain ranges, but most of the local place names will be unfamiliar. Part of the fun of reading this book is that it sends you off on a journey of discovery of your own, looking up this town, that river, or an unheard-of plain or valley. In this, the book very much succeeds in sparking a bit of the exploratory impulse in most readers. You may or may not want to schedule a trip to many of the places she notes, but you will definitely want to learn more about them. The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t. Then there’s the fear, particularly acute on roads in India, that you won’t make it home at all.[image] image from Explore Magazine – shot by Kate Harris It may be grueling, surprising, filled with up and downs, demoralizing, exhilarating, exciting, stunningly beautiful, and rich with landscape, exterior and interior. Lands of Lost Borders may not wear out your arms or legs, your back, or any other muscle group, (ok, maybe the muscles that control your eyes) but it will stimulate your mind, lift up your spirit, and stimulate your need to pedal through darkness into knowing. Lands of Lost Borders is a stunning literary memoir you will not soon forget. Exploration, more than anything, is like falling in love: the experience feels singular, unprecedented, and revolutionary, despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the Silk Road or walk on the moon for you. The most powerful experiences aren’t amenable to maps. Review posted – April 6, 2018 Publication date – August 21, 2018 =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages Melissa Yule’s Twitter page. Yule holds a Master’s degree in International Development from the University of Guelph. Her interests include community development and environmental science. Here is her profile on the CyclingSilk.com site. There is a lot of information available at Cycling Silk. I strongly advise you to check out the site. A brief (11:43) video of their trip In case you missed the link in the body of the review, it is worth checking out Fanny Bullock Workman, one of Harris’s heroes. The Golden Record – it was sent on the Voyager mission to let far-away civilizations know we are here. Harris talks about it a fair bit at one point in the book [image] What’s on it - image from Wiki The Harper Book Queen included a bit on this book in her TBR Tuesdays FB live broadcast from 8/21/18 - at 11:47 Interviews -----The Globe and Mail - In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road - by Marsha Lederman - 2/15/18 -----Explore Magazine - The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris What was the hardest part of the journey?[image] The Harris Mansion - image from the Globe and Mail article 400 sq ft of paradise in Atlin, B.C. suits the author just fine. Not surprising that she is comfy in what most of us might consider roughing-it quarters. She is a descendant of William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. Sorry, I could not help it. There were just so many quotes from the book that I wanted to use. But it was not possible to fit them all in. So off we go to EXTRA EXTRA STUFF right below here in Comment #1 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 19, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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Mar 29, 2018
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Hardcover
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0804139024
| 9780804139021
| 0804139024
| 4.42
| 1,156,205
| Sep 27, 2011
| Feb 11, 2014
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it was amazing
| I’m pretty much fucked.Ok, show of hands. How many of you have uttered these exact words? (or words to that effect). Not everyone? I see we have s I’m pretty much fucked.Ok, show of hands. How many of you have uttered these exact words? (or words to that effect). Not everyone? I see we have some liars out there. How many have said them at least twice? Three times? Four? Those with hands still up, you probably need to make some adjustments to your approach, find a safer line of work, hobbies that do not entail long drops, stop trying the weekly specials at McBlowfish, or seek out people to date who are into less extreme…um…sports. These are the opening words of The Martian. Astronaut Mark Watney is definitely more screwed than most of us have ever been. Dude missed his ride and there will not be another along for, oh, four years. Supplies on hand were only meant to cover a few weeks, maybe months. And that Martian atmosphere is definitely no fun, lacking stuff like, oh, breathable air, and a reasonable range of temperature. It does, offer, however, extremely harsh (good for scouring that burned on gunk from sauce pans) and long-lasting (as in months) dust storms. And if that was not enough he faces an array of other challenges. [image][image] unfriendly locals No, Kibby (the 12-year-old kibitzer who infects my brain), no Mars Attacks brain beasts, or that other guy, even though I know he is your favorite. Real challenges. For example, the music he has for his stay consists of disco. The viewing options include 70s TV. Most of us might give serious consideration to minimizing the guaranteed pain, frustration, starvation and inevitable death by, maybe, taking a short hustle outside sans that special suit. It would be a very, very short last dance. Watney is either a cock-eyed optimist or an idiot. I'm going with the former, as he is indeed made of the right stuff. He is armored and well supplied with the sort of can-do designer genes that might make the rest of us feel like the can’t-do sorts we are. He is the poster boy for positive attitude. It does not hurt that he is way smart, with expertise in a wide-enough range of things scientific to matter. It does not hurt that he is an engineer who gets off on taking apart, putting back-together, figuring out, thinking through, testing, trying, and pushing envelopes. But his crew is headed home, and what hope is there, really? [image][image] The Martian tells of Watney’s attempt to survive in a literally alien environment, using only the tools on hand and his wits. It is a gripping story with one of the most adorable heroes you are likely to encounter, on this planet or any other. (No, Kibby, not a kitten) How could you not root for a guy who scrapes through Thanksgiving dinner for potato parts to plant for food? Of course, one might think “been there, done that,” particularly as 1964’s Robin Crusoe on Mars offered a retelling of Daniel Defoe’s classic tale in a more contemporary notion of a remote locale. A 1905 novel used a different classic traveler in the same sort of format. [image] Of course those tellings had a lot more in common with the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs as seen by Frank Frazetta than they do with the vision we have of the Red Planet today, or, say, reality. Reality [image] Or is it? [image] One of these was a shot of you know where. The other was taken at Death Valley, which was used, BTW, in the filming of Robinson Crusoe on Mars Most of the tale is spent on Watney’s very compelling attempt to survive, going through all the challenges he faces trying to make air, preserve and maybe generate water, make his food last, get some sort of communication set up, deal with things like exploding air-locks, biblical level dust-storms, toppling ground-transport vehicles, you know, stuff, most of it life-threatening. The other end of things is how the folks on the ground deal with this GInornous OOPS. There are technical elements, of course but more interesting, for me, were the political considerations. To tell the crew or not? Imagine how bummed out, embarrassed, and guilty you might be on that ship (the Hermes) returning home, knowing you had left one behind. Might it affect your ability to take care of necessary business for the next bunch of months? Another question is whether to tell the public, and if so, when. How about getting help from other space-capable nations? Are any international dealings simple? There is also some in-house (NASA) staff maneuvering that is wonderful to see. [image] Andy Weir In her fabulous book on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes Having a likeable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud…Probably the greatest strength of The Martian is the narration of Mark Watney. He is engaging and funny, optimistic and capable. I suppose there are some who might find him lacking in sharp edges, but I thought he worked great. [image] Matt Damon as Mark Watney, enjoying the view – from the film. The new earth-based shooting location was Wadi Rum, Jordan. I am sure they did plenty of color adjustments in post, but boy-o-boy does this place look like an alien landscape. Gripes Yes, really, there is too much scientific detail. It is not that it is beyond the comprehension of a lot of readers (although it will skip by a fair number) it is the share of time, the number of pages, the sheer volume of obstacles to be overcome, and the very detailed explanation of so many of them that tilts the book a bit too much towards the MacGyver demo. Weir writes very well about the other elements of the story. Repetition of DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, with the subsequent amazingly clever repair du jour, does get a bit old after a while. I had to fight an urge to scan at times. But that is really it. Otherwise, The Martian is an absolute delight to read. Watney is lovable as well as capable, and makes excellent use of his sense of humor to look on the bright side of life, in a very dark circumstance. Whether he makes it out on time or not (not gonna spoil that one) you will cheer him on, hope for the best, and fly past those pages with considerable, if maybe not interplanetary, speed. Is there life on Mars? There will be while you read this book. Review posted – 1/16/15 Updated and trotted out there again on release of the film - 10/2/15 This review has been cross-posted on my site, Cootsreviews.com Publication date – self-pub in 2011 – Bought, edited and published by Crown 10/28/2014 PS - Saw the film on 10/9/15 and it kicks ass! Go see it if you haven't already. It is very true to the book, with the improvement of not getting bogged down in details, has a great cast, looks amazing and does a fantastic job of promoting science. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to the author’s personal and FB pages. 5/24/16 - Weir wrote a short story prequel to The Martian, called Diary of an AssCan. I posted a review this week. It includes a link to the story, so you can read it for yourself. Andy Weir’s second novel, Artemis, while, IMHO, not quite up to this one, is also pretty darned good. August, 2016 - At the Hugo awards Weir wins the John W, Campbell award for best new writer, and the screenplay for the film wins for Best Dramatic Presentation, long form The Martian Chronicles on Gutenberg Gullivar of Mars by Edwin Lester Linden Arnold on Gutenberg For a real Martian experience check out NASA’s Mars page For a realer Martian experience, and ideal for those trying to keep one step ahead of creditors and/or the law, you might want to consider applying to be on a Mars mission, no joke. There is more on this project below but the above link is for the selection process, just in case you don’t mind a strictly one-way journey. A nifty article from the NY Times (10/5/15) about the woman at NASA responsible for seeing to it that we do not bring Earth germs you-know-where - Mars Is Pretty Clean. Her Job at NASA Is to Keep It That Way. - by Kenneth Chang I bet you thought I’d forgotten these guys. No chance! I just ran out of time to figure out how to stuff them into the review. So, sorry, I am stuffing them here. That sounds so wrong. If you want to experience Mars while still on earth, it is indeed possible [image][image] A general National Geo article on Mars Planetary.Org has an excellent list of all Mars missions to date, and some that are in process When you are checking your ancestry some of that unusual DNA might come from a place, far, far away. Two scientists look at the unfortunately named notion of Panspermia, (view spoiler)[(the natural result of guys watching really good porn? A bad review of ineffectual seed? An unspeakable fried dish?) (hide spoiler)] which addresses the possibility that the genesis of life on Earth had its opening act elsewhere. If you want to know Who goes to Mars for the waters, the answer is yes And speaking of Eau d'Ares, a nifty article on the presence of H2OMG you know where, in the 9/28/15 article in the NY Times - by Kenneth Chang. Thanks to my pal, Henry B, for this refreshing item. 8/31/16 - Another recommendation from the intrepid Henry B. Planning any long trips, HB? - How to Win Friends and Influence People (on Fake Mars) by Katie Rogers - New York Times [image] Downhill streaks indicate water has flowed - image from NY Times who got it from NASA who got it from JPL Here is a nifty article from The New Yorker, on work being done to cope with inter-planetary cabin fever. Moving to Mars: Preparing for the longest, loneliest voyage ever by Tom Kizzia - from the April 20, 2015 issue 9/12/16 - If, like Quint, you think we're gonna need a bigger boat, to get to Mars that is, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin company may have just the thing - Meet New Glenn, the Blue Origin Rocket That May Someday Take You to Space - By Daniel Victor for the New York Times 9/27/16 - New York Times - Elon Musk’s Plan: Get Humans to Mars, and Beyond - by Kenneth Chang 10/25/16 -National Geographic is producing a documentary series about our favorite red-tinted neighbor (no, not the lady across the way who got too much sun. Put those binoculars away NOW). Coverage in the latest issue includes a whole passel of things Martian. Enjoy. - Mars: Inside the High-Risk, High-Stakes Race to the Red Planet From the August 2017 National Geographic - This Is What a Martian Looks Like—According to Carl Sagan - By Natasha Daly [image] Painting by Douglas Chaffe - from the above NatGeo article 9/17/17 - Washington Post re-printing an AP story - Mars Research Crew Emerges After 8 Months of Isolation - Caleb Jones 12/16/17 - NY Times Sunday Review - Tim Kreider offers his take on why we should go Red - Earthlings, Unite: Let’s Go to Mars 5/4/18 - NatGeo - Interesting piece on the latest Martian explorer, Insight - Are Marsquakes Anything Like Earthquakes? NASA Is About to Find Out - by Nadia Drake [image] Illustration of Insight deployed - Photo by Lockheed Martin, NASA, JPL-Caltech All right. We’re all done now. You’d better get going or Marvin will lose his cool [image] Oh, sorry Marvin, just one more thing, lists. FILMS Abbott and Costello go to Mars The Angry Red Planet Bad Girls From Mars The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars Capricorn One Devil Girl From Mars Doom Empire of Danger Escape From Mars Flight to Mars Ghosts of Mars Invaders from Mars The Last days on Mars Lost on Mars Mars Needs Moms Mars Needs Women Mission to Mars Race to Mars Red Planet Red Planet Mars Robinson Crusoe on Mars Rocket Man Roving Mars Santa Claus Conquers the Martians Stranded The Terror from Beyond Space Total Recall TV Programs Is There Life on Mars – PBS My Favorite Martian Life On Mars – British Life on Mars – American Mars One – Proposed - (check this one out) Race to Mars Novels 2312 – Kim Stanley Robinson The Barsoom Series by Edgar Rice Burroughs ----- A Princess of Mars on Gutenberg - and my review -----The Gods of Mars -----The Warlord of Mars -----Thuvia, Maid of Mars -----The Chessmen of Mars -----The Master Mind of Mars -----A Fighting Man of Mars -----Swords of Mars ----- Synthetic Men of Mars -----Llana of Gathol -----John Carter of Mars Blades of Mars – Edward P. Bradbury C.O.D Mars – E.C. Tubb The Caves of Mars – Emil Petaja Children of Mars – Paul G Day City of the Beast – Michael Moorcock The Daughter of Mars – Thomas Keneally The Empress of Mars – Kage Baker First on Mars – Rex Gordon Icehenge – Kim Stanley Robinson Life on Mars – Jennifer Brown Life on Mars (a different one) – Jonathan Strahan The Long Mars – Terry Pratchett Mars – Ben Bova Mars is my Destination – Frank Belknap Long Mars Plus – Frederick Pohl The Mars Trilogy – Kim Stanley Robinson -----Blue Mars -----Green Mars -----Red Mars Marsquakes – Kevin F. Owens The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury Masters of the Pit – Michael Moorcock Moving Mars – Greg Bear No Man Friday – Rex Gordon Old Mars – George R.R. Martin Packing for Mars – Mary Roach – ok, not a novel Podkayne of Mars - Robert Heinlein Prelude to Mars – Arthur C. Clarke Priests of Mars – Graham McNeill The Road to Mars – Eric Idle The Sands of Mars – Arthur C. Clarke Sebastian Of Mars – Al Sarrantino Shadow Over Mars – Leigh Brackett Sin in Space – Cyrill Judd (Cyril M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril) Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein Urania – Camille Flammarion White Mars – Brian Aldiss ...more |
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Jan 2015
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Jan 08, 2015
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Jan 01, 2015
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Hardcover
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0061986461
| 9780061986468
| 0061986461
| 3.48
| 3,439
| 2012
| Feb 16, 2012
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liked it
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Most flight attendants are not exactly high fliers. The pay is far from lofty, they are faced with work restrictions and requirements that only a unio
Most flight attendants are not exactly high fliers. The pay is far from lofty, they are faced with work restrictions and requirements that only a union-buster could love, and then they have to put up with the likes of you, me and much worse in the course of a normal day. Heather Poole walked the mean aisles of our (mostly) national airways for fifteen years and has some tales to tell. She writes in a breezy, easy-to-read style, and does try to keep it light. But there is enough material in the unpleasantness these men and women have to cope with that she offers an eye-opening view into what it means to actually be a flight attendant. It begins with a seven-week Barbie Boot Camp that reminded me a bit of Cool Hand Luke. No box involved, but many, many ways to be invited to take a seat outside the facility. Fall asleep in class, you’re out. Late for class, you’re out. Look out an exit the wrong way during a drill, and buh-bye, and so on. She also offers slight views on her co-workers, ranging from disappointment to admiration. Poole is far too perky to really dish dirt and fess to despising anyone. If you are looking for juice on famous passengers, you might have to change seats to row Z, the one in the hangar behind the plane, ‘cuz that sort of thing just won’t fly here. She does offer a few instances of no-names-please oddities among the well-known set, and does have some kind things to say about a few celebrities. No name phobia there. She was particularly taken with how kind Mark Cuban was on her two shifts working his private jet, and gushes about the excellent manners of the members of his basketball team who were on one of those flights. [image] HeatherPoole - image from Medium.com There are some amusing tales of how the ladies cope with living on fruit-picker wages, while having to find housing in not-so-fruit-picker rental markets like NYC. You will learn a lot about the actual work involved in tending to passengers on a flight, about the hierarchy within the profession, and some surprising details about flying. Hint: ask for your own can when getting diet coke. For some reason it holds its fizziness long enough to take forever for your attendant to pour. There are dating tales here, but nothing actually steamy. And some passing refs to some unnamed mile-high-club members. You will pick up some terminology that may or may not come in handy. My favorite was the term "air mattress," which refers to "Cockpit Connies" who have been issuing an excessive number of boarding passes. And if you have it in mind that many flight attendants get into the profession in order to elevate their marriage prospects, you get a free upgrade. But others are there for the travel benefits primarily. And when your attendant is boasting about her grandchildren I doubt she is hitting on you. In short, this is an informative, fun, enjoyable book. It will make you appreciate more what the attendants on your next flight have to put up with. Be nice to them. So put your book into an upright position, turn on your reading light and enjoy your flight. =============================EXTRA STUFF Links to Poole's personal, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages You should know that her FB page was last updated in 2015 Items of Interest -----Quartz - February 27, 2020 - “A lot of us are suffering”: The dark side of the flight attendant lifestyle - By Natasha Frost - The skies are remain so friendly. Life's a bitch and then you fly. -----Buzzfeed - June 28, 2021 - Flight Attendants Told Us The Wildest Things They’ve Had To Deal With by David Mack ...more |
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Jul 04, 2012
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Jul 10, 2012
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Paperback
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B0045U9WJ6
| 3.62
| 2,314
| 2011
| unknown
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really liked it
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To a Mountain in Tibet tells two stories. One is the great travel writer’s observations along his trek to a significant physical and religious site. T
To a Mountain in Tibet tells two stories. One is the great travel writer’s observations along his trek to a significant physical and religious site. The other is his inner journey of coming to terms with the death of his mother, whose passing prompted this adventure. The sights, smells and sounds of this arduous walk into a remote, mountainous retreat capture his senses. But it is the local culture and sundry religious views of death that capture his imagination as he treks to the holiest mountain in the world. Four great Indian rivers—the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Brahmaputra—Have their sources on or near the mountain Kailas. To a fifth of the world’s population, this peak is the center of everything, to Buddhists and Hindus, and to believers of other religions before those. In Chinese-controlled Tibet, the mountain has never been scaled, but pilgrims walk around it as an act of devotion, and to seek favor from their gods. To the pious, the mountain radiates gold or refracts like crystal. It is the source of the universe, created from cosmic waters and the mind of Brahma…The sun and the planets orbit it. The Pole Star hangs immutable above. The continents of the world radiate from its centre like lotus petals on a precious sea (Humans occupy the southern petal) and its slopes are heady with the gardens of paradise.He catalogs a series of religious beliefs as he encounters monasteries destroyed by the Chinese, and remnant shrines and relics, noting the historic interactions of ancient religions, merging, absorbing each other. It would be a good idea to keep a dictionary handy as there are sundry new words to learn. And while it is not necessary to be familiar with eastern religions, it wouldn’t hurt, as Thubron tosses around quite a few names that are unfamiliar to those of us largely innocent of those belief systems. [image] Colin Thubron - image from Wanderlust Magazine When he writes about the death of his mother, it is not so much about her physical passing, but how her death affected him. Thubron is trying to cope with her death, and as we learn late in the book, the death at a young age of his sister. But he tells us almost nothing of his relationship with either person. It is their passing that is significant here. With the death of a last parent, material things—old correspondence, a dilapidated house, a pair of slippers—emerge like orphans to enshrine the dead. My mother threw away nothing. Her drawers spilt out letters, diaries, documents, photos, fifty, seventy, eighty years old, with the stacked correspondence of my father, my dead sister, my nurse, even my nurse’s mother. For months the papers lie piled, waiting. They grow huge with delayed sadness. How to decide what is to survive, what is to perish? The value of things no longer belongs to cost or beauty, but only to memory. The chipped and faded teacup is more precious than the silver tray that nobody used. And the letters bring confusion. Sometimes what was written for a day echoes in your head as if forever. Every one discarded sounds a tiny knell of loss. The past drops away into the waste-paper basket and oblivion, and in this monstrous disburdening, grief returns you to a kind of childish dependence. You sift and preserve (for whom?) and cling to trivia. You have become the guardian of their past, even its recreator. The themes of connectedness to both the sacred and the real permeate his musings. As they [a group of passing monks] walk on, I wonder at them, their lightness, their lack of need. They have already passed through a painless, premature death. They have shed what others shed in dying. They will leave nothing material behind them to be divided, claimed or loved. Their dispossession strikes me at once as freedom, and a poignant depletion. Their buoyant laughter follows me up the valley, but I do not quite envy them. I only wonder with a muffled pang what it would be in the West to step outside the chain of bequeathal and inheritance, as they do, until human artifacts mean nothing at all. It is a relatively short book, but it is not a fast read. This is a book you will want to read at the speed of speech. I found myself frequently re-reading passages, paragraphs, pages, only in part to assure that I had gotten what had just crossed my eyes. Mostly it was to savor the writing, the feeling, chewing a morsel very slowly in order to extract all possible deliciousness. Thubron has a great talent for describing not just what he sees, but the impact of what he sees. His dual career as a travel writer par excellence and a novelist has left us with incomparable writing. In fact the Times of London publishes a list of the greatest British writers of the post war era, and Thubron continues to be included. It is no shock that he is considered one of the best travel writers ever. Perhaps with ancestors like Dryden and Samuel Morse he has a natural gift for words. Whether for the information imparted here about a very remote place and people or for the more spiritual contemplation of permanence To a Mountain in Tibet is a trek worth taking. [image] [image] [image] [image] PS - about a week after posting this review, I came across the following on PBS. If you want to see the mountain for yourself, it figures prominently in this edition of Myths and Heroes ...more |
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Jan 09, 2011
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Jan 11, 2011
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Jan 09, 2011
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Kindle Edition
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0307279464
| 9780307279460
| 0307279464
| 4.06
| 416,719
| May 05, 1998
| Dec 26, 2006
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really liked it
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None
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Dec 25, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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140004622X
| 9781400046225
| 140004622X
| 3.54
| 1,150
| Jan 01, 2004
| Jun 08, 2004
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really liked it
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Crown journeys is a series of fourteen books that match well known writers with places they know a little something about. The authors have to do thei
Crown journeys is a series of fourteen books that match well known writers with places they know a little something about. The authors have to do their sightseeing on foot, but I presume they can do their writing any way they please. Cahill is a successful travel writer who lives in a small town just north of Yellowstone National Park. [image] Not Snow The personal appeal here was that I had just returned from a first visit to Yellowstone and was eager to compare notes. It is always fun to see in print references to locations you know, whether they are familiar sights or streets in places one has lived or places one might have visited. (Even more so for sights on film, but for GR we stick with books). Did the author see what we saw, feel what we felt, spot something we missed? I expect this is a manifestation of some underlying communal need to compare notes on common experiences. Oh, you saw such and such? Me too! The more common use for such a book is as a resource for people planning a visit. Around 3 million people a year visit the park and most would benefit from a quick tour through Cahill’s book. [image] Steamy Cahill divides the book into three parts. First, he focuses on day hikes. He makes liberal use of road pull-outs. We are not talking survivalist back-country trekking here, but the sort of short hikes even a motionally challenged sort like me can manage. He looks at some of the commonly viewed destinations, such as the Norris Basin, Old Faithful, Artist Paint Pots, the Monument Geyser Basin, and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, among others, offering a sometimes scatological appreciation for places that demand that sort of perspective, and an appreciation for the more sublime natural wonders. [image] The Savage Beauty of Yellowstone He offers some history. It is true that initial descriptions of the place were met with skepticism. Yeah, sure, thousands of geysers. I believe that. Having taken some photos in the park of formations that look more like Star Trek sets than Terran locations, I can understand how disbelief might have seemed a reasonable reaction. And Cahill provides information that was news to me. I did not know that Yellowstone has the largest petrified forest in the world [image] Part two tells of some well-led back-country hikes. There was very intriguing material in here. I was most taken with tales of seeing a moonbow, that is, a rainbow seen at night with moonlight instead of sunlight, causing a remarkable arch. Also, he communicates well what it might be like to see places that remain largely unseen by people, in areas where one can get a visceral sense of what the place must have been like before the current stampede of humanity (there were Native Americans who lived in what is now the park, before they were driven out) . He makes frequent note of the presence of bears, grizzlies in particular, and reminds his readers that Yellowstone is still a very wild place, where unpleasant things can happen to the careless. He offers some history and the usual Darwin Award tales and cautions about ways not to deal with the local megafauna. [image] The Buffalo Hunters - Yellowstone - 2010 - what shooting bison looks like today - the group scattered rather quickly once that bad boy clambered into the parking lot Part three is Cahill’s list of recommended readings for anyone planning a visit. I almost wish I had not already been, so I could head out to my local bookstore and add to the family Yellowstone collection. [image] Tim Cahill - image from Mother Jones I have only small gripes with this small book. Specifying when he was in each of the areas he visited would have helped. An exception, in talking about the Lamar Valley, Cahill specifies that winter is the time to see it. (I had just seen it in late summer/early autumn and his description made me envious). But the book needed some more specificity on when he was where. [image] Hello, Gawjus This short book is purely a supplemental item. Get some real guides if you are planning a visit. But Lost in My Own Backyard will prove a useful addition to your planning materials. It does not hurt that Cahill will make you laugh out loud on occasion or that he has captured some essence of the Yellowstone experience. PS - You can click on the above images to see them a bit larger. =============================EXTRA STUFF National Geographic is doing a long-term series, The Power of Parks. on National Parks domestic and international. This includes major coverage of Yellowstone. The following piece was part of the May 2016 National Geographic magazine - All three parts are by David Quammen - Learning to Let the Wild Be Wild in Yellowstone. The following images and descriptive text are from the individual article parts. [image] The colors of Grand Prismatic Spring come from thermophiles: microbes that thrive in scalding water. The green is chlorophyll they use to absorb sunlight. - Photo by Michael Nichols Here is part 2 of the National Geographic series on Yellowstone - The Yellowstone We Don't See: A Struggle of Life and Death. [image] Notoriously elusive, cougars vary their range in response to their prey, mostly elk and deer. In winter they favor the shallow snow in the northern reaches of Yellowstone. This cougar was caught on the prowl by a camera trap set behind an elk rack on a cliff. - Photograph by Drew Rush with the NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Here is part 3 of the National Geographic series on Yellowstone - Yellowstone's Future Hangs on a Question: Who Owns the West?. [image] Bison and elk share winter ranges in Greater Yellowstone—these are in the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyoming. Both can carry brucellosis, a threat to cattle. But elk are prized as game, whereas thousands of Yellowstone bison have been slaughtered in Montana because some consider them a menace. - Photograph by Charlie Hamilton James Also from the same issue, Booming Tourism Becomes a Stress Test for Yellowstone By Todd Wilkinson [image] Wildlife sightings often stop traffic at Yellowstone National Park. - photograph by Michael Nichols If you did not catch the link in the body of the review, Smithsonian Magazine's January/February 2021 issue has an outstanding article on who lived in Yellowstone before it was a National Park - The Lost History of Yellowstone - by Richard Grant ...more |
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Oct 28, 2010
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Oct 29, 2010
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Oct 28, 2010
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Hardcover
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0762736445
| 9780762736447
| 0762736445
| 3.00
| 3
| Mar 01, 2007
| Mar 01, 2007
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it was ok
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When I used to take my now nearly-adult spawn to the supermarket I would find surprising items in the cart at the checkout counter. Did I really take
When I used to take my now nearly-adult spawn to the supermarket I would find surprising items in the cart at the checkout counter. Did I really take those packs of gum? Hey, wait, I don’t chew gum. Perhaps the magic shopping fairy of a bygone time had come out of retirement for a reunion tour. That is the only way I can explain how this book came to be in my stack. The title does not give it away. “Explore! Glacier National Park and Montana’s Flathead Valley” was a wonderfully specific title for the trip the wife and I planned for 2010. The first part of that adventure included Glacier National Park. A drive through the Flathead Valley area to Missoula was step two. But the large quote on the back should have sent up a flare: “Falcon Guides point the compass to the best spots to play, climb, hike, fish, and be.” The “be” part I have down. I have been for a long time and expect to continue be-ing for a while yet. I have even been known to play, but playing is usually limited to Sudoku, crosswords, spider and mind games. Climbing consists mostly of climbing out of bed .Walking is what I have to do to get from here to there. Struggling is what I do after a few minutes of walking. I would love to hike and have done some in an earlier life, but my bones are at least ten years older than the rest of me and the rest of me is no kid. So for me, a travel book that focuses on hiking is as useful as a color wheel at The Lighthouse. If you are an outdoorsy type, this guide may be a useful resource for you. If you love to hike, ski, mountain-bike, camp out, or engage in publicly acceptable activities that burn measurable numbers of calories, this book is meant for you. As for me, alas. For when 6 or 8 mile hikes are termed “easy” because, I guess, they do not involve rappelling, the book has fallen into hands well outside its intended demographic. On the upside, that makes it a fast read when one can skip entire chapters. I suspect that even for its target audience this small volume might be a bit thin. An appendix lists photo-ops of such a general nature as to be worthless. For instance, we are advised to stop at the pull-outs on the Going to the Sun Road, possibly the most beautiful stretch of road in the country. Well, gee, do ya think? Specifying locations worth a look is useful when information is added, such as time of year, time of day, where to situate oneself to gain the best or an unusual view. That is not offered here. Overall, this is a look at the region, not a where-to-stay, where-to-eat directory with commentary, which is fine. For you outdoors types the insight offered on hiking, rafting, mountain biking, mountain climbing, et al, by such seasoned park veterans could be very useful. There is also a very informative section on the National Bison Range. It is not a bad book. It was just a bad call by a shopping fairy who should probably return to a well-deserved retirement. ...more |
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Aug 2010
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Aug 07, 2010
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Paperback
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1598800140
| 9781598800142
| 1598800140
| 4.11
| 19
| Sep 1994
| Feb 10, 2009
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liked it
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This is not a bad look over the entire state. The photos are black and white, which does not add much. The maps are ok. It divides its material by geo
This is not a bad look over the entire state. The photos are black and white, which does not add much. The maps are ok. It divides its material by geographic area, which was helpful as I was planning to visit only parts of this fourth largest state in the union. There is a good section at the back that covers many subjects in overview. I particularly enjoyed pieces on local apparel and mores and the propensity of the state to harbor extremists. It is tough to come up with a perfect combination of features in a travel book that does not weigh fifteen pounds and comes in at less than a thousand pages and a few hundred dollars. The Moon Montana Handbook does a good job in its 473 pps.
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Jul 20, 2010
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Aug 2010
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Jul 20, 2010
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Paperback
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1843537729
| 9781843537724
| 1843537729
| 3.92
| 13
| May 03, 2001
| Jun 04, 2007
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really liked it
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I read this in 2010 in anticipation of a 2011 trip north. As is the norm for my wife and me, we like to read through several books on our target desti
I read this in 2010 in anticipation of a 2011 trip north. As is the norm for my wife and me, we like to read through several books on our target destinations as we attempt to put together an itinerary. The Rough Guide was extremely valuable for this. One thing about the Rough Guides is that they offer sage advice for those on a modest or very modest budget, and favor those with an affection for camping and hiking. Sadly, that does my old bones little good, but there is plenty of information in the book to warrant its inclusion in the library of anyone planning a trip to number 49. And if I had to pick one, among the several guides I have read, it would be this one. I would suggest, however, checking for the latest update. As of this writing (July 2010) the 2007 version is their latest.
...more
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Jul 05, 2010
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Jul 05, 2010
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Paperback
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9812820531
| 9789812820532
| 9812820531
| 4.67
| 3
| unknown
| Jan 15, 2010
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really liked it
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This is a rich source of information for anyone planning a visit to our largest state. It is visually stunning, printed on high quality paper, with a
This is a rich source of information for anyone planning a visit to our largest state. It is visually stunning, printed on high quality paper, with a generous quantity of photographs and maps. For those with minimal patience, there is even a handy best-of section at the front. It offers a comprehensive range of options for not only the cruise traveler but for those who are into more challenging explorations. The wife and I are planning a 2011 journey north and this was our first stop. Planning our trips is half the fun and reading this book was very exciting, offering useful tips, plenty of web links, phone numbers and a wealth of ideas. No one book is likely sufficient for planning a trip to such a vast place, but the Insight Guide was a wonderful introduction. Highly recommended. One caveat, and this may be a hazard common to the genre, there is a lot of what looks like direct flogging for particular vendors. Hard to tell if all recommendations are straight up, or may have been influenced.
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2010
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May 30, 2010
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Paperback
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0061710253
| 9780061710254
| 0061710253
| 3.49
| 474
| May 01, 2009
| Apr 28, 2009
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liked it
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Miranda Weiss writes of her experiences as a new resident of the south central coast of Alaska. She moved there to be with her boyfriend about ten yea
Miranda Weiss writes of her experiences as a new resident of the south central coast of Alaska. She moved there to be with her boyfriend about ten years prior to the publication of the book. Bred to Maryland suburbs, it was a large shift from what had come before. But clearly she had a desire for that sort of experience. Her significant other was very much into the self-sufficiency that is requisite for life in such a place, and she was attracted to that, wanting not only to enjoy his skills, but eager to build her own. There are passages in this book that I found almost magical. My favorite paints a picture of the community all out at once, participating in a mass orgy of dip-netting (only locals are allowed to use such nets—outsiders are restricted to hook and line) to take in a share of the annual salmon run. It was riveting. [image]She tells of life and culture in Homer, Alaska, with an emphasis on how the external world defines the rhythms of one’s life. Her naturalist point of view was appealing. She writes also about the difficulty of finding friends in such a small place. That loneliness was clearly problematic for her, at least during the time of which she writes. I was of two minds about the book. I enjoyed the content of what Weiss was describing. There was new information in the book. One section tells of a religious community known as the Old Believers descendants of early Russian settlers, and committed to many ancient customs. Although it did not stop them from tooling around in the latest SUVs. It was interesting to learn about the challenges faced by the everyday locals, particularly new ones. And the nature writing was satisfying. But can one like the book and not the author? I found it difficult to relate much to Weiss, at least what she chose to reveal of her inner thoughts. I always got the sense that she was holding back a huge chunk of herself from the reader. Of course that is her right. And her purpose was to tell of Alaska, not her personal travails, necessarily. But she tells enough about her personal dealings, particularly her relationship with her boyfriend, to make one wonder, when a large event takes place at the back end of the book, exactly what went into it. I found her minimal treatment of this annoying. I felt that it was a sort of tease, merely the visible tip to a calved slab of glacier. Ultimately, I would have much preferred for her to have omitted her personal relationship issues and stuck to a description of the externalities of her northern world, if she was not prepared to write of both with equal forthrightness. PS - It would also have been nice to have some maps in the book, the better to gain a sense of her environment, both in Homer and when she and her boyfriend were out in the really wild delta near Bethel on a summer project. Yes, we do have internet access here in wildest New York City, (even where I live now, in Wilkes Barre, PA) but still. Published - 5/1/2009 =============================EXTRA STUFF Weiss's personal and FB pages Weiss's articles for the Anchorage Daily News ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 2010
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Feb 25, 2010
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Hardcover
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