Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life - Hardcover

Hoagl, Edward; Hoagland, Edward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1558217428 ISBN 13: 9781558217423

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 1999

Synopsis

A collection of essays revealing the excitement and splendor of the natural world by the author who had his sight surgically restored after being legally blind for three years

About this title

From the Back Cover

Very few writers have explored the natural world with the distinctive flair and insight of Edward Hoagland. Now, in Tigers & Ice, he provides what might be his most compelling work yet.Edward Hoagland was legally blind for three years until surgery miraculously changed his life. In this powerful essay collection, he serves up a literary banquet celebrating his renewed vision. With the penetrating and entrancing prose that has marked his career as one of the most celebrated essayists, he guides us along the full spectrum of a fascinating life - from the painful stuttering of prep-school days to a vagabond existence as a tiger cage boy in the circus, from enthralling travels in Antarctica to settling into the luscious surroundings of his home in Vermont. Indeed, Tigers & Ice serves full notice of this one-of-a-kind writer at his most evocative, powerful best, exploring his own life and the natural world with trademark honesty and grace. (53/4 X 81/2, 228 pages)

Reviews

Hoagland's (Balancing Acts, etc.) first essay collection in several years is a mixed bag, by turns celebratory, meditative, curmudgeonly and autobiographical. He poignantly describes his three years of legal blindness during his late 50s, when he couldn't write, friends dropped him and he courted suicidal thoughts, until two eye operations restored his sight. In another piece, he reveals that a stutter from childhood instilled in him empathy for the underdog. His exhilarating account of his recent voyage to Antarctica aboard a Russian research vessel?a mosaic of natural history, personalities, exploration, penguins and geopolitics?is a grand adventure. Close to jungle cats since 1951 when, at age 18, he crossed the U.S. with the Ringling Bros. circus working with tigers and elephants, Hoagland files a heartbreaking dispatch on his 1993 trip to southern India, where he witnessed the vanishing of species like tigers and elephants, shrinking wildlife preserves and tribal clashes. He writes affectingly of the rhythms of rural living in his home in Vermont; mountain climbing; writing as a form of creative play; his love of ponds; the challenges of middle age. While charting his trajectory from Christianity to Transcendentalism, Hoagland ascribes the roots of the ecological crisis to a man-vs.-nature duality that he traces to the Old Testament. Elsewhere, he condones suicide as a life choice and, in a tongue-in-cheek, misanthropic mood, hopes for "a new variety of the neutron bomb" that would kill people but leave behind the rest of creation. Notwithstanding such indulgences, these essays grasp life whole, shuttling easily from idea to memory to astute observation.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Discerning and lucid meditations on life, sight, death, the land, friendship, and virtue and hope and God, from Hoagland (Balancing Acts: Essays, 1992, etc.). After having gone virtually sightless for three years, Hoagland had his vision surgically returned to him. Evidently, his new plastic implants are of the unalloyed variety, for these essays are altogether perspicuous (``When negotiating with the force of gravity, or with a pride of lions, you foil, not crush, the lions' charge, so you will have their partnership tomorrow, and make light of gravity's pull''). He wades right into touchy subjects: suicide, that subversive judgment on the social polity, ``grandiose . . . or drably mousy,'' and how surviving the impulse makes one warier and chastened, like surviving a heart attack or a cancer operation. On friends: ``You give me vitamins; I'll give you minerals. You give me understanding; I'll give you patience . . . we muddle through the middle territory of life with their assistance,'' sharing ``the promiscuity of total, casual confidences.'' Five of the eleven pieces involve the celebration of place, from his Vermont home and the ``springs in the high woods where the brooks begin'' to the rude seas, gelid weather, and all-around stern medicine that is Antarctica, the last being the longest essay in the collection and an exquisitely transporting narrative of wayfaring. For Hoagland still wears his American Transcendentalism on his sleeve, with his ``lifelong belief that heaven is on earth,'' and the ineradicable astonishment of his ``generation's failure to push past token gestures to change the world for good and to be less greedy and violence-prone than the generations before.'' Perhaps it is because Hoagland doesn't want anything to blur his new eyesno poetic fog, no lint from overwritingthat these essays are as crisp as those Antarctic vistas, or perhaps turning 60 has made him less chary. Whatever, they are pure food for thought, each chapter a multicourse meal. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hoagland (Balancing Acts, LJ 9/15/92; Heart's Desire, LJ 9/15/88), a former serviceman, firefighter, and circus hand turned college instructor, has returned to the same isolated rural Vermont homestead for some 30 springs to write and to observe the rhythms of nature. During the past decade he lost and regained his eyesight, turned 60, and traveled extensively. The tranquility and the turmoil have provided material for the 11 essays (all previously published) that comprise this collection. The most engrossing selections are travelogs on India and Antarctica, the lands of tigers and ice, respectively; the least compelling is a fragmented "journal sampler." All contain lyrical if sometimes melancholic mixings of Hoagland's observations of the natural world and his contemplation of his own singularly varied life. Recommended for public and academic libraries.ANancy Curtis, Fogler Lib., Univ. of Maine, Orono
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lyons Pr
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1558217428
• ISBN 13: 9781558217423
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 206