BOOKPATHS

Bookpath: Walden Pond, Massachusetts

Henry David Thoreau "came to live" at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845. New commemorative editions of Walden celebrate the 150th anniversary of Thoreau's life on its shore.

Walden : Or, Life in the Woods (Boston : Shambhala Publications, Inc., 2004)
"This special 150th anniversary edition...features exquisite wood engravings by Michael McCurdy, one of America's leading engravers and woodblock artists. McCurdy's engravings bring the text to life -- and illuminate the spirit of Thoreau's prose."

Walden : 150th Anniversary Illustrated Edition of the American Classic (New York : Houghton Mifflin, 2004)
"The new edition features spectacular color photographs by Scot Miller that capture Walden as vividly as Thoreau's words do. The book is being published in association with the Walden Woods Project, which is dedicated to preserving the lands Thoreau wrote about. For each copy sold, Houghton Mifflin and Scot Miller are making a donation to the Walden Woods Project."

Walden : a Fully Annotated Edition (Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor. New Haven : Yale University Press, 2004)
"This edition of Walden is the first to set forth an authoritative text with generous annotations. Thoreau scholar Jeffrey S. Cramer meticulously corrected errors and omissions from previous editions of Walden and here provides illuminating notes on the biographical, historical, and geographical contexts of Thoreau's life."

Walden (150th Anniversary Edition) (J. Lyndon Shanley, editor. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2004)
"This new paperback edition -- introduced by noted American writer John Updike -- celebrates the 150th anniversary of this classic work... This is the complete and authoritative text of Walden -- as close to Thoreau's original intention as all available evidence allows."

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. Walden was first published on August 9, 1854.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Related Websites

Walden Pond State Reservation
http://www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/northeast/wldn.htm

The Walden Woods Project
http://www.walden.org/About/index.htm

The Thoreau Society
http://www.aa.psu.edu/thoreau/

The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the south-east and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred fifty feet respectively, within a quarter of a mile and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Bookpath: Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts

Five Thousand Days Like This One : an American Family History, by Jane Brox (Boston : Beacon Press, 1999)

Five Thousand Days Like This One : an American Family History is Jane Brox's second book. In her first, Here and Nowhere Else, Brox shared her initial return to the family farm. In Five Thousand Days Like This One, she delves into the history of her family, farm, and the Merrimack Valley. Brox writes about her Lebanese ancestors and their eventual purchase of the farm she's run since her father's death. She tells readers about the joys and struggles of farm work, from financial challenges to the pleasures of summer corn and the "sharp scent of apples." Brox also shares some of her Italian ancestry, how her grandfather "was a weaver in the Wood mill, tend[ed] bar at the Sons of Italy on weekends, and bicycle[d] to his garden plot in Pleasant Valley." "He would have loved to have been a farmer," her mother said. Other immigrant stories are also related, especially those of textile workers in Lowell and nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts.

The landscape of farm and valley comes to life as Brox describes how it must have looked to the "Pawtucket Indians, early inhabitants of this place," before the "first faint paths of settlement." She compares Henry David Thoreau's descriptions of the land in A Week on the Merrimack and Concord with the ever-encroaching suburbs of today.

Jane Brox has written a personal book that reaches out and brings readers into the lives and landscape of the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts. By looking back, describing the present, and voicing concern about the future, readers not only share "an American family history," but a history of place as well.

...I keep coming back to how much my father belonged to this place on earth. I can't imagine more than all he had in his keeping: three houses, forty cleared acres, a hundred of woodland, and a dozen in fruit trees. Thou canst not follow me now, but thou shall follow me afterwards. If after is a word that doesn't come near, if what's to come can't be imagined from his life, then why does his farm seem to mean all the more to me now, as I stand in the orchard when the moon is down and watch the comet passing.? -- from Five Thousand Days Like This One : an American Family History, by Jane Brox

Other Books by Jane Brox

Here and Nowhere Else : Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family (North Point Press, reprint 2004)
Clearing Land : Legacies of a Family Farm (North Point Press, 2004)

Related Websites

City of Lawrence
http://www.ci.lawrence.ma.us/

Greater Merrimack Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau
http://www.merrimackvalley.org/

American Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts
http://www.athm.org/home_framemiddle2.htm

Lowell National Historical Park
http://www.nps.gov/lowe/textiletreasures.htm

My grandfather died when I was four and I only remember an old and ill glimpse of him. But I can imagine a Sunday supper... After so many years he still spoke with the rough accent of Caserta Province, the place he'd left before a quarter of his life had passed. After so many, he raised a toast in his old tongue: Cinque mille questo giorno. The same every time, a four-word shorthand for May there be...may you have...may we all have five thousand days like this one. -- from Five Thousand Days Like This One : an American Family History, by Jane Brox

Shelby Foote, novelist and historian, died Monday night. He was 88. A native of Mississippi and a resident of Memphis, Tennessee, since the early 1950s, Foote was best known for his three volume The Civil War : a Narrative. There is a thoughtful tribute in The New York Times.

Shelby Foote was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 1999. Visit their website for biographical information and an in-depth interview. The University of Mississippi's Mississippi Writers Page also salutes Foote with a biographical essay and a bibliography of books by and about him.

"Most of my inspiration, if that's the word, came from books themselves." -- Shelby Foote, Academy of Achievement Interview

BOOKPATH: Bregenz Forest, Austria

Homestead, by Rosina Lippi (Boston : A Mariner Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999)

"Rosenau, the setting of Homestead, is an amalgam of many of the villages of the Bregenz Forest in Voralberg, Austria's westernmost province." -- from "Author's Note" in Homestead

Twelve interlinking stories span the years between 1909 and 1977. Based on the four years Rosina Lippi spent "in the Bregenz Forest, first going to college and teaching, then collecting data for a study of the incredibly beautiful and challenging dialect spoken there..spend[ing] many hours talking to women of all ages," readers are moved into the lives and landscape of women in three different clans. Through their stories, we learn about life in this westernmost province of Austria. Husbands, children, lovers, farm and village life, the mountain landscape, seasons, the devastating intrusion of two world wars, the ties between generations, and so much more, enlighten minds and touch hearts. Homestead is a beautifully written book, one that brings a tiny corner of the world into readers's hands, while also tugging at our own connections with place and family history.

Homestead deservedly won both the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.

The mountains are shimmering with autumn. There are great rustlings of color, brighter this year than for many years past. The sky clutches, ready to give way to winter; any time now my sister and her family will drive the livestock down from fall pasture at Gunta Steeple and back to the homestead at Bent Elbow. Then my nephews will return to my classroom, and at recess Laura will have to make room at Godmother's knee for one or two or all five at once. The children sit with Hanna because she is a natural-borm storyteller. Her secret, I have observed, is that she does not give her stories away cheaply. She makes those children earn them; she doles them out like the treasures they are." -- from Homestead, by Rosina Lippi

Related Websites

Reading Group Guide
http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/homestead-author.asp

Bregenzerwald
http://www.bregenzerwald.at/frameset_en.asp

John Irving discusses his newest novel, Until I Find You, with Dinitia Smith in the June 28th New York Times. There is also a link to an earlier retrospective.

BOOKPATHS: July Literary Events

"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company." -- Andre Gide

China

Hong Kong Book Fair
July 20-25, 2005
Wanchai, Hong Kong

"Share the sheer joy of reading."

United States

California

Sierra Storytelling Festival
July 22-24, 2005
North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center, Nevada City

"The North Columbia Cultural Center continues keeping the tradition of storytelling alive in the historic Schoolhouse and in the pine-shaded amphitheater (the first and maybe the only one in America built specifically for storytelling)."

Illinois

Newberry Library Book Festival
July 28-31, 2005
Chicago

"Feed your bibliomania at the Newberry's annual Book Fair! More than 100,000 donated books have been sorted into 50 categories for your browsing convenience."

Michigan

Michigan Storytellers Festival
July 8-9, 2005
Flint

Mississippi

The Thirty-Second Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference (Faulkner's Inheritance)
July 24-28, 2005
Oxford

"The thirty-second annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference will attempt to take the measure of Faulkner's 'inheritance': the varied elements that went into his making and the making of his work."

New York

QPR's Harlem Book Fair
July 20-25, 2005
Harlem

"QBR's Harlem Book Fair, the largest book fair of its kind, celebrates its 7th Anniversary on Saturday, July 23!"

"Read books. They are good for us." -- Natalie Goldberg

BOOKPATH: Manhattan

Visit A Literary Map of Manhattan, by Randy Cohen and Nigel Holmes.

"Here's where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks." --from Website

BOOKPATH: Barcelona, Spain

The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (New York : Penguin, 2004)

Step into The Shadow of the Wind and you step into Barcelona, Spain during the Franco years. When 10-year-old Daniel Sempere's father, a rare book dealer, introduces him to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books and allows him to choose one book, the adventure begins. Place, colorful characters, and themes mingle to give readers a fascinating, hard-to-put-down read.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón has told a story for lovers of books and place.

Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later -- no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget -- we will return. For me those enchanted pages will always be the ones I found among the passageways of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. -- from The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Websites

Reading Guide
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/shadow_of_the_wind.html

BOOKPATH: The United States

The Graywolf Annual Five : Multicultural Literacy : Opening the American Mind, Rick Simonson and Scott Walker, editors (St. Paul, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 1988)

The threat to PBS and NPR sent me back to an essay in The Graywolf Annual Five : Multicultural Literacy : Opening the American Mind, edited by Rick Simonson and Scott Walker. Published in 1988, the anthology was a response to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and E. D. Hirsch, Jr.'s Cultural Literacy. I return to Multicultural Literacy frequently, particularly when a current event reminds me of one of the essays, when I need to hear a sane, contrasting voice.

For the last day or so, it's Michael Ventura's essay "Report from El Dorado," that's been begging me for a re-read. His thoughts on culture and the media didn't disappoint. If I didn't have such a healthy respect for copyright, I'd include the entire essay here. Instead, I'll share a few passages in the hopes that they inspire a re-reading or the purchase of The Graywolf Annual Five : Multicultural Literacy : Opening the American Mind. You won't be disappointed -- the voices are wise and contemporary, each one challenges the way we think and encourages dialogue. Maybe these essays are even more important NOW.

Quoting Michael Ventura:

It is one thing to accuse the media of lying. They are, and they know it, and they know we know, and we know they know that we know, and nothing changes. It is another to recognize the rampant lying shallowness of our media as a massive united longing for...innocence? For a sheltered childlike state in which we need not know about our world or our past. We are so desperate for this that we are willing to accept ignorance as a substitute for innocence. For there can be no doubt anymore that this society knowingly accepts its ignorance as innocence -- we have seen so much in the last twenty years that now we know what we don't see. Whenever a TV show or a movie or a news broadcast leaves out crucial realities for the sake of sentimentality, we pretty much understand the nature of what's been left out and why.

But American media forgives the emptiness and injustice of our daily life by presenting our daily life as innocent. Society, in turn, forgives American media for lying because if we accept the lie as truth then we needn't do anything, we needn't change.

"The culture itself is in the infantile position of needing to be assured, every day, all day, that this way of life is good for you. Even the most disturbing news is dispensed in the most reassuring package. As world news has gotten more and more disturbing, the trend in broadcast journalism has been to get more and more flimflam, to take it less seriously, to keep up the front of 'It's really quite all right...."

"Media is not experience. In its most common form, media substitutes a fantasy of experience or (in the case of news) an abbreviation of experience for living fact. But in our culture the absorption of media has become a substitute for experience. We absorb media, we don't live it -- there is a vast psychological difference, and it is a difference that is rarely brought up."

Michael Ventura currently writes a column, "Letters at 3AM," for the Austin Chronicle. You can visit the archive.

Like so many, I’m concerned about the future of PBS and NPR. I urge you to sign one of the petitions currently circulating, such as the one on the Common Cause Website, or to take a moment to send a letter or e-mail, or make a phone call to our Representatives and Senators in Washington. It’s important that our voices be heard.

If you're curious about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting' beginnings, you can read The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, as Amended on CPB’s website.