Set Free in China: Sojourns on the Edge - Hardcover

Heller, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0930031539 ISBN 13: 9780930031534

Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co, 1992

Synopsis

A young world traveler recounts his restless adventures, from his experiences at a logging camp in Vermont, to his fish-packing job in Alaska, to his wrestle with death on a Chinese river.

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Reviews

Blood Brook is an unpretentious stream in Vermont, one of two main feeders of Lake Fairlee. It also runs through the homesite of Levin, a talented naturalist and storyteller who imbues these 18 essays with both a sense of nature and an intimate sense of place. From the sequential ripening of fruits with their concurrent displays of colors, timed to satisfy the needs of migrating birds, to the travails of transporting a 30-pound snapping turtle in a stick-shift car, Levin weaves the various aspects of Blood Brook into an accessible whole. When his small son wearies of a nature talk about insects, Levin challenges him to a game of "Let's get the Cricket." When his wife incinerates a black widow spider nest near their son's play area, there are no crocodile tears for the arachnid. For Levin, death's shroud is part of the cloth of nature. Indeed, his description of a bee, destroyed by two ambush bugs as it sips nectar, is strangely, hauntingly beautiful. He even sees extinction as part of nature, dismissing as folly the attempt to save the California condor. Levin ( The Curious Naturalist ) doesn't sugarcoat nature, but his work is all the more fascinating for that.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A young journalist-adventurer takes to the road in the time- honored Kerouac tradition. After a limp first chapter in which he pens sticky, self- referential homage to everyone from Merle Haggard to Robert Frost (``About the poetry: I loved the idea of Robert Frost, a farmer- poet whose hands were calloused, who knew things....I didn't feel like I knew jack''), Heller hits his stride recounting a series of wild, often dangerous adventures, usually in the outdoors. He writes of living with a mercenary in Alaska while working in a cannery, of building sea walls on the Olympic Peninsula, of lobstering with a near-maniacal fisherman in Rhode Island, of kayaking the treacherous rivers of the Soviet High Pamirs, and of witnessing the death of a friend in China. Heller is not so much concerned with place as he is with people, and most of his essays have the fine-tuned dramatic timing of quality fiction. His prose is crisp and filled with many quiet yet effective moments, as in his description of logging in Vermont: ``There is a shuddering of air, a rush and crash of limbs, and you stand in the murmuring stillness, saw idling, as full of life as you've ever been.'' Simple yet often powerful, capturing both the loneliness and the romance of the nomadic life. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Levin lives on 70 acres overlooking Blood Brook in east-central Vermont. In the early chapters of his book, Levin discusses, among other things, the brook, the surrounding landscape, tadpoles, wildflowers, fall colors, the demise of the American elm, and a trip to a windswept Mount Washington. These essays are, for the most part, pleasant and informative. The remainder of his book takes a different turn, in which Levin defends a friend in trouble for apparently trading in protected animal parts, goes afield to a Quebec power company and notes the trouble that development has brought to the native Cree population, and attempts to build a case that animal dissection in high schools is necessary. These chapters are not well developed enough to be totally satisfying or opinion changing. Part pleasant nature writing and part soapbox, this book is recommended for regional libraries or those with extensive nature essay collections. (Bibliography not seen.)-- Nancy Moeckel, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Pub Co
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0930031539
• ISBN 13: 9780930031534
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 166