Spring Jaunts: Some Walks, Excursions and Personal Explorations of Town, Country and Seashore

Features excursions to the Manhattan waterfront, to the Isle of Wight, along the New Hampshire coast, through Irish history, and down the Severn river

From his New Yorker pieces that cover 20 years of reporting, Bailey has selected five delightful personal adventures. He tramps round the Isle of Wight, recalling childhood summers; he walks the New Hampshire coastline (all 18 miles) in a single day; returns with his wife to the Cote d'Azur for a second honeymoon. In the company of poet Seamus Heaney, Bailey takes a tour through Irish history as they walk along the River Boyne from Trim to Drogheda. The chef d'oeuvre of this collection is "The Coracle, Eustace and the River." The profile of the aged Shropshireman who makes these small, fragile craft gives a wonderful portrait of rural England; then Bailey sets out in his own coracle on the River Severn for his most hazardous jaunt, proving that adventures do not have to be exotic to be satisfying.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The five chapters of this book originally appeared in the New Yorker , and all are fine examples of Bailey's quiet, perceptive, nonjudgmental style, which reveals as much of the author's own soul as it does of the world he so lovingly and unassumingly describes. His jaunts take him round the Isle of Wight (where in Hopkins country he catches, soaring, a windhover), along the Massachusetts to Maine coastline, across the Irish countryside of Tara and the Boyne, into the bizarre and often hilarious history of Nice's Promenade des Anglais, and down the Severn River. This is a book to savour, the way Bailey savours the worlda world of wise, funny, and always friendly conversation, of tranquil landscapes, antique churches, and country pubs. His prose lingers in the memory. Thomas M. Robinson, Philosophy Dept., Univ. of Toronto
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.