5 Lives Worth Reliving From Summer 2016

Memoir

Other people’s lives can be fascinating. We can learn from their hard-earned wisdom, marvel at their achievements. To live many lives, all in the span of one, pick up an autobiography, biography, or memoir. Whether they are teaching us something or just taking us on a fantastic journey, these five lives, featured in our Summer 2016 edition, are worth reliving.

The Confluence

Fly-Fishing & Friendship in the Dartmouth College Grant

Book Cover
David Van Wie
Phil Odence
Norm Richter
Bob Chamberlin
Ed Baldrige
Dave Klinges
Bill Conway
Peter E. Randall Publisher
Softcover $24.95 (228pp)
978-1-942155-12-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon

Outdoorsmen (and women), fishing enthusiasts, and fans of nature writing will want to visit this book at will.

This collection of essays, sketches, and tall tales centered on fishing is well worth getting reeled into.

The contributors in Fly-Fishing and Friendship are jovial Ivy Leaguers who refer to themselves as “The Boys,” even into their 50s, and who plan their years around their guys-only trip to the north woods of New Hampshire. They meet at the confluence on the Grant, land granted to Dartmouth College long ago.

But their fishing trips aren’t so much about catching fish as they are about renewing friendships. “All of us are trying to re-energize ourselves by unplugging our computers and iPhones and plugging into nature,” one puts it. “The Grant trip is really about sharing our lives,” writes another.

Male bonding factors in as well. The guys in the collection prove to be a close-knit family. When they aren’t fishing, they enjoy sitting around drinking beer, or wine nowadays, reminiscing, discussing art and literature, and trying to figure out what is going on under the surface of life, like the hidden trout holding down low. There is some witty wordplay throughout—in “Thinking on the Fly,” for instance, in which each of the Boys weighs in on the One Fly question: “there is nothing quite like a dry fly that rides high in the water bristling with spiky fur and the suggestion of gossamer wings.” There’s also a good piece on the ancient Japanese method of fly fishing, tenkara, that lets you “spend more time fishing and less time fussing with strike indicators, selecting flies, or worrying about how much weight to add to the line.”

This collection is best approached with the catch-and-release ethic that the Boys practice: outdoorsmen (and women), fishing enthusiasts, and fans of nature writing will want to visit these sections at will before returning the title to the shelf from whence it came.

TRINA CARTER (May 25, 2016)

The Garden Interior

A Year of Inspired Beauty

Book Cover
David Jensen
Morgan James Publishing
Softcover $17.95 (280pp)
978-1-63047-682-3
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon

Jensen broadens The Garden Interior through recollections of a traveled and well-read life.

David Jensen’s The Garden Interior beckons down the garden path—literally, and without a single bud of deception. In this memoir of gardens past, present, and even imaginary, Jensen recounts a near lifelong fascination with plants, soil, and sun, and how he and his particular plot of land have “formed and cared for each other” for decades.

With rich and thoughtful language, Jensen sets out a course of monthly chapters, detailing how each season has its purpose in the yearly creation of a garden. Focusing on his south New Jersey home and the grounds therein, Jensen begins with January, which despite its frozen quiet just can’t keep a true gardener from dreaming of spring’s arrival. After weeks of planning and contemplating, active growing season begins, followed by summer’s heat and garden glory, then the autumn chill and dormancy of winter again.

Though his knowledge of flora, fauna, and things that buzz and fly is quite impressive, Jensen broadens The Garden Interior through recollections of a traveled and well-read life. His painterly eye is keen, with allusions to Van Gogh’s irises, Renoir’s brushstrokes, and landscapes reminiscent of Thomas Moran. Jensen’s wife and children are also a warmly vivid part of his gardening experiences, as is the faithful presence of Cosimo, Jensen’s Sheltie dog and “assistant gardener,” almost always by his side.

The Garden Interior will surely appeal to both veteran and novice gardeners, but it has an accessibility that reaches beyond the technical aspects of seeding, weeding, and horticulture. Seasonal recipes are included—enticing dishes like Farmer’s Market Pie, Spring Harvest Salad, and Savory Sweet Potatoes—and along with the flow of prose and love of place, The Garden Interior brings to mind Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun, though in a more stateside and family-focused manner.

Jensen best describes his memoir himself, as “eclectic and idiosyncratic, and made up of many parts and pieces and ornaments, just like any good garden is.”

MEG NOLA (May 27, 2016)

God Almighty Hisself

The Life and Legacy of Dick Allen

Book Cover
Mitchell Nathanson
University of Pennsylvania Press
Hardcover $34.95 (416pp)
978-0-8122-4801-2
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon

This significant work clarifies the challenges that black players encountered during the pre-free agent era.

Mitchell Nathanson hits a four-bagger with this richly researched biography of baseball legend Dick Allen that reveals the player’s complexities in the context of the racial discrimination of his era, incorporating factors like the club owners’ control over the game and its players.

Allen was one of the best and most controversial baseball players of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, George Myatt, a frustrated Philadelphia Phillies manager, complained that “God Hisself” could not control Allen. Mitchell Nathanson, professor of law at Villanova University and the author of four previous books on baseball, shows that Allen’s actions came more from his rebellion against the “plantation mentality” of baseball than from a lack of divine intervention.

Allen played for five teams during his controversial fifteen-year career. He demanded high salaries and received them, becoming, at the time, the highest-paid player in both Phillies and White Sox history. He backed up his demands with impressive statistics—the 1964 National League Rookie of the Year, the 1972 American League MVP, 351 career home runs, and a .292 lifetime batting average.

Robert and Ruly Carpenter, the Phillies owners, were indifferent to their African American players, though, and the fans were worse. After a hellish 1963 season in Jim Crow Arkansas with the Phillies AAA affiliate, Allen suffered racial taunts and had to dodge smoke bombs and bottles hurled at him during games. He, like all “second generation” (those who followed Jackie Robinson) African American players, was also paid less initially and had fewer endorsement opportunities than white players, and he was bound to his team by a reserve clause.

Nathanson concludes his biography by positing that Allen would have been a revered member of the Hall of Fame had he played twenty years later. This significant work clarifies the challenges that black players encountered during the pre-free agent era, and shows how Dick Allen fought the system for his rights as a player and a man.

KARL HELICHER (May 27, 2016)

My Journey Through War and Peace

Explorations of a Young Filmmaker, Feminist and Spiritual Seeker

Book Cover
Melissa Burch
Gaia Press
Softcover $12.30 (180pp)
978-0-9893429-7-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon

A poignant and informative feminist memoir that spans world landscapes, wars, and spiritual quests.

At twenty-two, Melissa Burch headed to Afghanistan with a camera and a vague internal directive, determined to film a war for CBS and to find herself in the process. She would have to traverse desert sands, Soviet landscapes, and several decades, though, before being fully ready to declare herself awake in the world. My Journey Through War and Peace is the dizzying and dazzling account of that journey.

The feminist underpinnings of Burch’s work have parallels in sister biographies, particularly Gloria Steinem’s: her mother was determined to have both a career and a family, and her father was better at dreaming than accomplishing. Family tensions informed her sense of well-being, and by adulthood she was ready to vacate home. Afghanistan, its war stories then only freshly unveiled by Dan Rather, called.

Her book puts her courtside for explosive battles between Soviet and Afghani forces, as a guest of the mujahedeen and in the company of leaders who would go on to shape Middle Eastern history. Uncomfortable treks across dangerous landscapes lead to blurry ethical questions and heady sexual encounters.

But disillusionment followed, particularly when no one back home wanted to buy a nuanced portrait of the Afghanistan conflict. Burch traded the Middle East story for Cold War landscapes, accompanying a friend-cum-lover to Russia to highlight the humanity of those declared America’s sworn enemies. When an intricate account of Soviet life proved no more salable than her previous ventures, Burch traded in showing for telling, helping to initiate a woman’s speaking collective which gave her and fellow feminists a literal stage from which to declare their truths.

Yet the particular enlightenment at the end of Burch’s Journey proves to be one that even those traveling with her may fail to anticipate: reconciliation with the mother who once seemed to make her life hell. As Burch grows into a woman who learns to embrace her particularities, she draws closer to understanding her mom, and to appreciating the pressures placed upon women both pre- and post-Friedan. Her conclusions, and spiritual awakening, serve to poignantly bely the notion that we must travel to the ends of the earth to find ourselves. A lovely and enlightening feminist memoir.

MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 29, 2016)

You Come Too

My Journey with Robert Frost

Book Cover
Lesley Lee Francis
University of Virginia Press
Hardcover $34.95 (288pp)
978-0-8139-3745-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon

Robert Frost’s granddaughter travels roads not taken by previous biographers.

Lesley Lee Francis pays loving tribute to the life and work of her grandfather Robert Frost in a work that melds literary criticism to family biography. You Come Too is an intimate and inquisitive undertaking and a fresh addition to Frost scholarship.

Lesley Lee Francis is the daughter of the poet Lesley Frost, Robert’s eldest daughter. The author so grew up beneath two literary shadows: the great American poet tapped by presidents and dignitaries, and the bookish dynamo who, for all of her creativity and daring, could never quite shake the pressures of her father’s reputation. In the wake of both figures, Lesley attempts to make sense of her family inheritance: “I returned to the Frost biography … looking for answers … about [them and] about the meaning of my own life.”

You Come Too integrates past Frost scholarship, family letters, literary heirlooms, and the author’s own memories, to form a portrait of the Frost family that is both unfamiliar and illumining. Previous biographers have tended to portray the poet in a not-always-flattering light: as someone who abused his wife’s support, was emotionally reserved, and resented early publishing struggles. Francis’s account rejects such readings as the narrow consequence of viewing Frost from the outside. The grandfather she recalls was intimate, caring, encouraging, and the grateful beneficiary of time spent among generous women.

Those who love Frost’s poems will appreciate Francis’s contextualizing insights. His biographers will benefit from her fresh views of the tragedies and challenges that the Frosts lived through, which, even when Frost mentioned them publicly, the poet played close to his chest. Insights into how children and grandchildren weather the reputations of their notable family members are both touching and illumining. Snapshots of the Frost children in their adulthood undertakings also make this an invaluable piece of Americana.

Francis’s tone is, at various points, both academic and affectionate. She resists making absolute declarations about her grandfather; at the end, he remains somewhat of an enigma even to her. Yet the quiet affection with which she gathers the various pieces of his biography together renders even her unanswered questions a powerful inroad to the poet.

You Come Too breathes new life into Frost’s story and is sure to initiate interesting conversations in college classrooms.

MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (February 29, 2016)

Hannah Hohman

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