Writing and Nature: A Love Story
348137
I was hoping to keep this review to 26 words (you'll understand when you read this brilliant book), but it just wouldn't do it justice. Whether you're an aspiring writer or an established pro, WRITING ON THE LANDSCAPE is a stunning read, offering new riches on every page. The author, Jennifer Wilhoit, is not only a skilled writer but a devoted child of Nature as well. Nature permeates this work, and Jennifer shows you how to use the natural world to access those voices inside and outside of you that you may have forgotten or never known existed. The book contains many helpful exercises, but what sticks with me most is Jennifer's passion. She loves being a writer and she wants you to love being one, too. It's entirely contagious. I highly recommend WRITING ON THE LANDSCAPE to you.
170968
Love, death and the wild, wide world

Helen MacDonald's aching, raw story of loss and relationship speaks so much of longing that reading it is as much about being fed, sustained by grief, as her hawk is fed by the death it has dealt. Indeed the two, love and death, are linked.

We love because we will lose, or be lost to, that which we love. It's the presence of death which fiercens the love. Mabel, Helen's hawk, is of course overwhelmingly real - but that reality is thickened by all the metaphors accreting to her. The potency is the potency of what the hawk represents, in history, in literature, in imagination to us.

There are 3 major strands in this book. The first, which created or re-created all the rest, is the loss of MacDonald's father, and the bottomless grief that brought a sundering of relationship, an absence.

As a child, MacDonald had been obsessed, possessed by falcons, birds of prey, and then, specifically, the goshawk. So the second strand is the making of relationship. She returns to everything that initial possession was about, and engages on building a relationship with a goshawk. Which she discovers can only be done by negating herself, becoming an absence, as, initially, in any way, the presence of human is too harsh for the incredibly highly charged, responsive, awareness of a terrified hawk. Human space can only become tolerable to hawk by the patience to not intrude

And, finally, she examines another writer T.H. White. White was also a passionate hawker. He was a man painfully within his challenging contradictions. Like the goshawk, one with a charged, reactive  nervous system. White had recorded his own story of relationship with goshawk, The Goshawk. I hope that the success of MacDonald's book encourages the re-publishing of White's, as I'm now anxious to read it.

Much of White's account (there are plenty of extracts in MacDonald's book) is dark, anguished, irrational. And much of MacDonald's book is also outside the rational - there are many accounts of her vivid dreams, the boiling of raging emotions, the unendurable overwhelm of feeling. But this is part of the power of this book. We are not creatures of reason alone, reason the visible tip of a fiery iceberg beneath.

MacDonald's book was another one of those which I read with a sense of some deep value I can't articulate - through a mist of weeping. The value is that of having, often, no idea at all of the why of that weeping. All I can say is that, for me, weeping without any obvious, recognisable emotion behind the weeping is a way in which my body seems to respond to something being named from a place of authenticity. Reason says `I don't understand' but, on some deep level, the fabric of my being responded

A book this raw and personal somehow calls forth the raw and personal response from the reader. I would have liked to have read it slowly and savouringly, and maybe this is what I'll be able to do, at some point, on a re-read, as I know the writing is very fine, and the information, about hawks, landscapes, T.H. White, and more, of interest. But I was not able to read it like that. Instead, a savage gulping down of chunks of it, thrown this way and that by feeling and sensation. Longing, I suppose. That desire to experience the world through the sinews of some other than human understanding.
481588
Melanie Challenger's first prose book ("On Extinictions") is a wonderful read.  Let me begin by saying what it is not.  It is not a strident siren song beckoning action on the issue of species extinctions, not an objective nor a coherently crafted argument for reevaluation of humans' interaction with nature.  In comparison with, say, with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, it is only a soft brush of reality.  The subtitle is not effectively described or argued at all.  Yet, the author manages to make the point in a remarkably compelling manner, and the overall effect is soul chilling.  She treats not just species extinctions, but extinctions of languages, of cultures, of industries, and of livelihoods.  She does this by probing deeply into her own past experiences, beginning with her youthful forays in Cornwall, and continuing to her recent excursions to the polar regions.  Along with that, she weaves seamlessly into her discourse the observations and thoughts of innumerable past authors, from the ancient Greeks to the writers of recent decades.  Clearly the author is well read, and she easily draws on the contributions of others even though she seems to be able to see things with a thousand pairs of eyes herself.  The early chapters are narrative, often in a seemingly florid prose which may not appeal to all -- consider, for example: "MIsts moved against the still hedges, slow exhalations of the failing day."  But within this, slowly a thesis builds as the author leads us from the fallow pastures of Cornwall through the hulks of the whaling industry in the southern ocean and finally into the native people's lands of far northern Canada.  Along the way, we are presented with the parallel between human's extinction of species and of culture and language, even our own in cases.  Although our estrangement from nature is not directly argued or treated, it is adequately revealed by example.  It is not clear from this book whether that is indeed a good or bad development.  It seems that humans left a very poor record on species, and other, extinctions when they were well connected to nature.  Perhaps our estrangement from nature will allow us a perspective by which effective action can be deployed and cultural changes made to arrest extinctions.  This is a book which should draw the reader to think along with the author.  In all the extinction narrative, the author continually points to the nostalgia that humans feel for things lost and destroyed.  For this reviewer, a true nostalgia will be simply: the first reading of Challenger's book in the cold, gray days of December.
2928375
What a beautiful book....I learned a lot about parks and wildlife management in Tasmania, a tremendous amount about butterfly habitats, and a sweet love story to top it all off. Introverted lepidopterist Lawson Gale is cautious about having sex with a relative stranger, which was refreshing if you read enough m/m romances......I wish there was a way for N.R. Walker to write a sequel,....I fell in love with the characters!
2076122
Please God, let me write one paragraph as good as any one in this book.  The love story to beat "The Love Story."
Yes it is about a Gay man.  This happens to be incidental.  Love in all its wrenching, wonderful, let me have one of these and I'll take the ending as well.
4965749
Naturalists and followers of the organic-food movement will love Prodigal Summer, which weaves together ecology lessons with the stories of three independent, tough-minded, nature-loving women.

Forest ranger Deanna Wolfe lives alone in the Zebulon Natural Forest, protecting the land from poachers and writing her master's thesis on coyotes.  She thrives in her solitary, nature-oriented life until the arrival of sexy, enigmatic hunter Eddie Bondo.

Lusa Widener is a scientist trying to adjust to a new marriage and farm life in the valley below Zebulon Mountain.  Sudden tragedy forges a deeper relationship with her in-laws and the land.

Nannie Rawley is the owner of an organic apple orchard, and her story is told largely through the eyes of her chief antagonist, elderly, crotchety Garnett Walker.  Garnett is attempting to revive the American Chestnut, almost extinct from the blight that wiped out the trees some fifty years before.  To keep his land tidy and his saplings protected, Garnett enlists the help of powerful insecticides and weed killers, which draws him into constant conflict with Nannie, who cultivates organic apples and vegetables on the land next door.

I loved this book and would have given it five stars when I read it three years ago, but it does not hold up quite as well now, on my second full read.  Kingsolver uses these characters to teach numerous biology lessons:  the importance of predators in an ecosystem, the dangers of pesticides, and man's destructive impact on the environment.  I learned a great deal from the book:  I had not known about the chestnut blight, for instance (though it had occurred to me to wonder why I had never actually seen "chestnuts roasting on an open fire").  I also started thinking more about our own use of pesticides and weed killers, and even began using an organic lawn service!  However, on second read, I found some of the dialogue between the characters a bit preachy and contrived; people in my experience don't tend to converse in passionate, educational paragraphs about food chains and ecosystems.  By the end, however, I was once again enjoying the heroic and passionate struggles of these characters in their relationships with each other and with the land.

I recommend Prodigal Summer, though it will not be everyone's cup of organic, herbal tea.
2515796
Absolutely beautiful prose and insight in a voice both sincere and reflective. Helen Macdonald shows herself and her falconry world as one, and we feel a part of the natural world in a way only rare naturalists can share. One thinks of Thoreau and Muir and others. Honestly, the writing deserves to be read with the care with which it was created. I love this book.
3232634
The following is an excerpt from my Squidoo review of this original work:

"In the stillness of life, in the silence of every moment, is an invisible energy that fuels us all," writes Stewart St. John as he begins his narrative. He then tackles one of the most obvious, yet most difficult subjects available: Love.

At first, you think love is an easy subject. Hasn't everyone written a song or a book about love? Make that assumption at your own peril. As I've written before, when you start out knowing that people express their love for peanut butter as easily and sometimes as enthusiastically as they express their love of God, you are hung up on the most complexly layered and textured subject you can take on. As I writer, I, for one, have gotten lost in a morass of making verbal sense of it.

Happily, Stewart St. John, ably and crucially assisted by Todd Fisher (shown here), has pulled it off as well as anyone I've ever read.

Fisher's design is critical in making this book a success. In a style I've never seen so well executed before, he anchors text-driven ideas about the meaning of love throughout the story in a way that intensifies and strengthens a reader's grasp on the theme. This brilliantly done and stays above the debilitating drop off into cliche that can threaten similar works. Giving Fisher co-credit for this book, if he did only the design, recognizes and achievement well-earned.

Emily, the first person narrator of Love: A Story, tells her tale with casual simplicity that, beneath the surface, is powered with emotional depth. The relaxed style, as if you're sitting across a table from her, coffee cup being refilled from time to time, is seductively easy to read. You are drawn into a story that you come to realize is about the day Emily has chosen to end her life and the startling encounter that changes everything for her.

Emily's personal traits are as familiar as they are common. She worries about her weight. She is deceived by a trusted love. Her own compass is so ineffective that others, especially her children, routinely volunteer advice. Finally, one more romantic hurt leads her to the conclusion that happiness will never be hers. Then, the story takes off in a stimulating new direction you may never forget.

Stories such as this are fraught with the potential for self-pity, mawkishness and overwrought emotionalism. With some trepidation, I watched for St. John and Fisher to fall into these traps, having seen it many times in my own work and that of others. But the deftness and ease with which they kept to the true heart of their tale showed great discipline and grace.

As this book is the first of a series about Emily and her journey into the discovery of love, this book is a satisfying place to start that, while complete in itself, leaves you eager for more.

I also highly recommend these works by Stewart St. John:
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Global-Symphony/dp/B0042KZZ3G/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Global Symphony</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Dark-Metropolis/dp/B003IY48EY/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Dark Metropolis</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Cloudwalking/dp/B001EN4238/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Cloudwalking</a>

David Stone, author of:
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Garden-of-What-Was-and-Was-Not-The-Autobiography-of-X/dp/0595439454/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Garden of What Was and Was Not: The Autobiography of X</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Traveling-Without-A-Passport-The-Autobiography-of-X-Book-Two/dp/1452809607/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Traveling Without A Passport: The Autobiography of X-Book Two</a>
<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/25-Ways-to-Win-with-People-How-to-Make-Others-Feel-Like-a-Million-Bucks/dp/0785260943/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">25 Ways to Win with People: How to Make Others Feel Like a Million Bucks</a>
1063995
A Sea Change by Annette Reynolds

In her second novel, Reynolds had penned an elegant and flawless contemporary love story set in a Puget Sound art colony.  Meet Maddy and Nick, first neighbors then lovers too soon, and after healing and howling their real love can burst into bloom.  The Greeks promised us three flavors of love - passion, family and divinity.  All three are exercised and exorcised here, including a wayward brother beyond redemption.

The community of Salmon Beach comes alive in rich environmental detail.  Here beach homes hang on a cliff.  With the ocean as intimate neighbor, Maddy and Nick are drenched and buffeted to undergo a sea change of personal evolution.  Cue Jimmy Buffet to sing, "Mother Ocean I can hear your call."  Maddy, with camera in hand, communes  with a personal totem of renewal -- the mermaid on the rock. In the role of mentor and Madonna we have a grandmotherly tea-time potter whose nature is pure nurture.

At times I might have locked these two in the bedroom until they worked it out by wrinkling the sheets. Alas, human nature is often more frail than that.  Struggle is the compost than makes people strong, capable of enduring love.  If you're a mother, a lover or on the rebound, then this love story is for you.

With luck, human beings grow about as fast as house plants.  Reynolds enriches her characters with inner dialogs and revealing journal entries as they move through four  seasons of healing. Some need forgiveness; others must trust again or simply grow up.  Fractured and in emotional recovery, each gains a degree of solace before being brave to open their hearts anew. Oprah will love this book; Dr. Phil will ask what took you so long?

The lesson here is that love cannot be rushed. It must be nurtured through the elements, protected from sleet and sun, until it can bloom again with a scent that captivates the spirit. Old baggage must be unpacked, processed and let go.  Salmon Beach holds a wonderful community of folks with whom to do so.  Five Stars.&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/A-Sea-Change/dp/B009ED2BJ2/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">A Sea Change</a>
1630615
The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life

What if everything we have been taught about learning to write was wrong? To what extent do you attribute to articulating words to paper? If you are a writer, what does writing mean to you? These are questions that have been asked one way or another to any aspiring or established writer. One author in particular has given readers her own version of why the writing life is so essential to her existence. The Right To Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into The Writing Life is a revelation. It was written by Julia Cameron who has written all over the literary landscape. Here, she intones with eloquence why it is a way of life, and shares with readers her rhyme and reason to enjoy writing as a natural process. As much as I read, I found this book to be just the anecdote for me to realize why I write! The more than 40 brief personal essays that make up The Right to Write are an unyielding affirmation of the writing life and should hold the readers attention long enough for it not to be a bore.
Let's take the time to examine the book. It flows judicially in a sequential phalange of personal essays and exercises to garner ways to keep the interest level up, and give credence to idealize thoughts for future reference.  She invites readers to make use of the many trials and tribulations as well as the sensual pleasures of their lives in formulating fodder for a good write.  Acknowledging that she is "a perfect example of a practitioning nurse," Cameron, telling the stories behind some of her own stories and poems, shows how writing can lead us down into the most vibrant parts of ourselves, to extract the source of good vibes. Cameron's prose and anecdotes sparkle with fresh, lived experience, demonstrating that when the subject is creativity, a writer should be able to make the words dance with synchronized rhythm. Cameron declares that "it is human nature to write" and sets about proving it in this demonstrative book.
I can't imagine anything close to conventional writing being a false doctrine that would stifle creativity, but in The Right to Write, the author alludes to this and other tidbits of information in the same mold. Much of this I found to be quasi-believable due to her penchant for giving good analogy to illustrate well her points of view, and her belief that readers should learn to make writing a natural, intensely personal part of life.  Anyone ascribing to write for the first time should not be intimidated by the authors' bodacious style, and those already living it will discover the art of writing is never the same after reading this book. The Right to Write gives all the real meaning to wanting to do what is write!
602486
1. General facts

The title of the book I've chosen is `Message in a Bottle'. It has got 354 pages and it was published in 1999. It's written by Nicholas Sparks, a world known novel writer, he's famous for his love-stories. `Dear John' or `A walk to Remember' are some of them. Many of his books are also filmed, `Message in a Bottle' too.

2. The content

Theresa Osborne is a good-looking woman in the age between 30 and 40. She's journalist by a newspaper in Boston. On her vacation in Cape Cod she finds a bottle while she was walking at the beach. As she opened this bottle, she realized that this was a letter from a guy, called Garrett, to his love Catherine. This letter is deeply moving and Theresa has to public this letter, because it's just wonderful to read. Accidentally she received two other letters, which were also written by Garrett. One letter was more beautiful than the other letter. The Boston newspaper wants that Theresa interviews this guy, so she travels to North Carolina where Garrett lives. By meeting him, she got to know that he lost his wife Catherine. He treats with this pain by writing these adorable letters. The more time she spends with Garrett, she comes closer to fall in love with him. Garrett also develops feelings for Theresa but there is always Catherine in his mind, too...

3. My opinion

I absolutely love this book; it's a beautiful love-story. I couldn't stop to read. Nicholas Sparks is really talented and he writes exactly what Theresa or Garrett feel. It's not a typical love-story, because you don't know how the end will be. I was very surprised by the end. It's always gripping. It's for everyone who likes love-stories.
4956544
Beautiful writing full of the wonders of the natural world, and a poignant study of the relationship of human and animal.
3251969
Her Dead Husband is the story of a man and woman in an age and place that remains unclear and undefined, a metaphor for the nature of true love triumphing the boundaries and borders of time and geography. It is Love alone that can defeat Time, Fate, and Death, as the romance between these two characters shows the readers of this story.

The story is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which de Sev evokes a literary style evocative of Marquez's magical realism, as well as that of Coelho's Fifth Mountain. The narrative's landscape is bare, allowing us to engage with the main characters and the passionate movement of their undying love for each other throughout time and place.

The manuscript itself, de Sev claims, was found after a long, tireless search into the nature of the human soul and the bearing it has on the purpose or meaning of life. The story is concerned with the parallel lives of two immortal souls that live through several incarnations until they are eventually reunited, having been parted by death in an earlier existence together. In the end, the narrative resolves itself with an unexpected, charming beauty, without the flowery, artificial language of sentimentalism and mass-market romance.

Her Dead Husband examines the power of love over death, time, and fate. It is a story that asks its readers the one question philosophers and psychologists have faced for centuries: is there a destiny set before us, or do we have the power to choose, to break the straitened path circumscribed for our lives by Fate, and so remake the pattern and progress of that path?

No matter where the thread of our lives leads, is it Fate or ourselves, our own will and action, that has lead us to that ending? These are the questions that Her Dead Husband leads us to ask, leaving us with faith and hope in the indestructible power of love.
4167534
The Lovers Dictionary by David Levithan

This book is a story, but its also poetry that flirts with word play. Its obvious the author has put a lot of work into selecting specific words that form the meaning of love for him. Underneath every word hes chosen, he relates it to his last relationship through a small story or sentence.
While love is probably one of the most subjective words in the history of English, he has somehow chosen words that are always relatable. Every relationship is different, but hes brought the feeling of union to an emotion weve all felt as some point. The reader can relate to snippets that he chooses from that relationship; the intimacy of moving in together, the heartbreak of the first argument, his need to fill the silences with chatter for fear that theyll suddenly have nothing left to say.
His idea of choosing specific words in relation is intoxicating, and I read the entire book in one sitting. I loved that I was expanding my vocabulary as I was reading, and I was excited to find out that the story was chronological, except for one specific part that was only expanded, sentence by sentence, throughout the story.

I wanted to know more. I wanted to feel more of what the author is feeling. My only regret is that the story wasn't longer. Im really looking forward to reading more from this author in the future.
437435
A Love Story.  Yes, A Love Story.  But not what you may be thinking...

It is about the love between the 'Old Man' (Santiago) and a young boy, his protege, his apprentice, his beloved companion, and about the boys love for him, too.

And if love is also 'committment,' as it surely is, this, too, is what this book is about...The 'old man's' commitment to break his streak of 84 days without a catch. His willingness to to row way, way, way out, way beyond where any of the other fishermen were toiling...and to do this by himself, alone.

And it's also about his love of (commitment to)  fishing and, yes, his love of the 18' marlin (over one thousand pounds) that he caught, and with whom he dialogues throughout this wonderful tale..AND dialogues with him even after he had killed him, and, then, finally his ferocious committment to preserve the fallen fish, now dead, from the sharks that relentlessly tore into its carcass.

This is also a book about nobility, about singleness of purpose, about purity of heart and bravery, endurance, and  about friendship....about the love of the 'old man' for the boy, and of the boys love for the 'old man.'

For Hemingway, who wrote 'The Old Man' when he was in his  early 50's, this book was, I believe,  a plaint, a cry about beauty, and about man at his best, and about good fortune and bad fortune, and about loss and sadness, and, in the end, about emptiness.

This book is a treasure of dialogue...dialogue between the man and the boy that is exquisite, but even more, much more exquisite, about the dialogue between the man and himself, his reveries, and also between the man and his fish, the huge marlin, both when the fish was living and when he was dead.

The Old Man and the Sea is artistry, pure artistry at its greatest, nary a spare word, never complicated...always lucid, aways compressed, transparent, pure.  I have read that Hemingway labored over each and  every word, each and every phrase, and edited and re-edited it endlessly.

Only 127 pages, it is an easy read that bears periodic rereading...For this review, I have read it twice, and listened to it on tape twice...and I had read it before when I was in college in the late 1950's.

Hemingway died about 9 years after this book was published...In some ways, The Old Man and the Sea can be considered his last and final testament...and what a beauty it is...A true treasure.  And, of course, it did win both a Nobel and a Pulitzer...

Finally, I don't want or  mean to suggest or imply that this book is 'heavy.' Anything but...It catches perfectly the 'lightness of being' in it's descriptions of the weather, the processes of fishing, and the Old Man's love for baseball and Joe DiMaggio, and his arm wresting with a huge black man in Havana...In short, this book is also fun...
3980026
I read and enjoyed your book some time ago. It was fun to read something written by someone my own age so I could appreciate the allusions. Making associations with the past we knew is a pleasure.

I loved your naturally fluid writing style. The literary device I most enjoyed was the use of the leit motif of the wind that opened several of your chapters. The writing made it a very good book about a very good life.
372441
The Biology of Luck by Jacob M. Appel, MD, Esq.

This is the love story between Larry Bloom, an average looking New York City tour guide and struggling writer and his fictionalized love interest, Starshine Hart, a woman in love with her youthful beauty and an insatiable appetite for sex.

Starshine and Larry are very good friends.  She tells Larry everything about herself, so every day as he crosses the Brooklyn Bridge with his group of tourists, Larry writes about her.  He has finished his book and has a date with Starshine, which coincides with Larry receiving a response from his publishers Stroop & Stone, a sign Larry interprets as a sure thing on his love proposal to Starshine.

The book is a quick and wonderful tour of NYC.  Told from juxtaposed third person points of view - from Larry's and Starshine, from the real world and a fictionalized novel -  the book is a combination of Christopher Isherwood's A single man - sort of "a day in the life" and Carlos Ruiz Zafn's The Shadow of the Wind, where you can't tell the difference between reality and fiction because they are one and the same.  Just as with Zafn's book, the lines between a written page and reality are blurred.

The characters, both major and minor,  become alive - whether in real life or as part of Larry's book -  and each one has a duty of exploring the book themes:  Starshine represents beauty and fleeting youth.  Larry becomes the plight for every "ordinary man."  Eucalyptus, Starshine's roommate, stands for the fact that "It's easier to start sleeping with a guy than to stop..." John Khalkhazian, the Armenian florist, represents the biology of fortune - the concept that luck is inherited.  Garfield Lloyd Parker, Starshine's boyfriend's father, stands for the concept that dead is not negative, but a neutral.

Finally, New York City, which is as much a character as anyone else in the book, stands for a weird lost and found.  When Larry temporarily loses his letter from his publisher, Stroope and Stone, he wishes NYC had a lost and found.  After finding Garfield Lloyd Parker dead in the street, Larry realizes that NYC's municipal morgue is the lost and found for the dead....

The book is ingenious, funny, seductive, and thought provoking.  A delightful book about the act of writing and the power of love.  Highly recommended!