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life on Earth is at stake, and John Kunich brilliantly explains how the law has been unable to stop the mass extinction now underway. He painstakingly describes the international laws and the laws of dozens of foreign nations that attempt to preserve biodiversity, and he leaves no doubt that all these laws have failed miserably. But more than that, Kunich has a proposal for how law can still save the day, and the planet. I've never seen anything in print as phenomenal as the concluding chapters where
Kunich makes the case for his alternative legal approach. Sheer
genius!
In the book, Professor Kunich persuasively argues for a shift from a worldwide species-based strategy to a prioritized location-based strategy as a means to have the greatest effort with limited resources. Going beyond the normal academic approach of stating a generalized solution to a problem, Professor Kunich offers a complete solution, starting with proposed legislation, to a viable means of implementing the strategy in the U.S., to workable incentives for third-world nations to support it.
"Ark of the Broken Covenant" should be the game plan for preserving endangered species. It is a must read for environmentalists, lawyers, scientists, poltical leaders, and concerned citizens.
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The two of them met in Wyoming, in 1905, when Ethel accepted a teaching assignment there. After the school year was over, Ethel left to continue her education, and subsequently took teaching assignments elsewhere in the country, adventures documented by her letters to John Love. It is evident that Ethel felt keenly the conflict between a poorly-paid, but independent career, and a more comfortable but narrow married life.
Meanwhile, John Love was apparently building a sheep empire. His adventures were of a more dangerous variety: rounding up and taming wild horses, herding sheep in the middle of Wyoming snowstorms, travelling 80 miles through horrific weather to spend a day or two by Ethel's side.
The two principals in this play are engrossing enough. However, there is a whole extended cast of characters contributing sub-plots: Ethel's close circle of college friends and co-teachers, who write to her from the four corners of the US. Their letters provide a glimpse into the lives of young, educated, intelligent, ambitious, and surprisingly (to this reader) modern women. Among them were socialists, vegetarians (Ethel herself!), suffragettes, women pursuing graduate degrees and medical degrees, women teaching in Paris or Texas or California or Illinois. It is inspiring and encouraging to be reminded that women were doing such things long before the Baby Boom generation "invented" women's lib, slowly pushing out the social and political barriers to what women could be and do.
This is personal history, however, not political, and it has all the intimate appeal of narratives which are not varnished, interpreted, collated or generalized by the historian. Peek inside the classrooms, boarding-house bedrooms, and isolated ranches where Ethel and her contemporaries lived, taught, and wrote warm missives to distant friends under dim lamplight. They are our pioneers.
LADY'S CHOICE is Ethel Waxham Love's story. Her granddaughters, Barbara Love and Frances Love Froidevaux, have collected her writings -- journals, letters, poetry, essays, stories -- present them in combination with letters from her friends and classmates as well as from the man she would marry.
Her story begins in the Fall of 1905. She has graduated from Wellesley and spent the Summer working as an assistant to her doctor father in Denver. When she gets the opportunity to teach in a log cabin schoolhouse in Wyoming, she accepts the offer. Her first journal entry describes her journey into the wilds of Wyoming by train, stage coach and wagon. With a sure pen and a sympathetic eye she records her impressions of the land, the people and events. Her observations are those of a sharp mind (she had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Wellesley, specializing in Greek, Latin and French), her descriptions are those of a major literary talent.
Of one acquaintance she writes, "Mrs. Butler. . .is a little war-horse of a woman, with a long, thin husband. I'm telling you about her because she has been improving him for twenty years and it is beginning to tell on him."
Her year in this community is surprisingly eventful, considering the isolation and the seeming lack of resources. But Ethel is a resourceful person, full of imagination, the kind of person who makes things happen. She visits friends, attends church services and "sociables," and dines in local restaurants. There are dances and suppers and school entertainments. And there is John Love, the man she will marry after the five-year courtship that is recorded here.
She is enchanted by her surroundings. "The color of the white hills against the pale of the blue sky is most exquisite i the world. The cedars are gray with snow, the sagebrush white clumps of crystals. Where a long way off the sun touches the tops of the snow-covered hills there are shines a streak of silver. A whole white world was there, rising around us, as far as we could see; there did not appear to be such a thing as direction. Everywhere the whiteness, everywhere the hills. Where the stubble of the fields of the range rose above the snow,there was a shading of gold over the white. . .and when the full moon shines out of the deep dark night sky, the hills are like shining silver."
You, too, will find a lady to love in these pages. Her journal begins as she stands on the threshold of her life, emerging from the chrysalis of a protected girlhood toward the challenge of womanhood. Here she records a land, a people, a life, a love, welcoming them as unequivocably and eagerly as only the young do.
LADY'S CHOICE eclipses others of its type. It not only showcases the lady's life and the choices she made, it reveals a true literary talent and a rare human being. Wallace Stegner (ANGLE OF REPOSE, SPECTATOR BIRD, CROSSING TO SAFETY)once spoke of the "inextinguishable western hope" expressed by writers of history as they look at the world and at humanity's place in it. Ethel Waxham Love's letters and journals provide a major contribution to that hope as well as to the history and the the belles lettres of the American West.
(c)2002 Sunnye Tiedemann
(Ruth F. Tiedemann)
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These essays are engaging and readable, informed and informative without being pedantic. There are anecdotes, too (about Riding, most notably, who is aptly diagnosed by Ashbery as "a control freak"). We notice that half of the authors are homosexual or possibly so, most either committed suicide or had a parent who did so, three were affected by mental problems, and the majority were ardent leftists (Riding being an exception).
To this reader, the two Johns, Clare and Wheelwright, are the most immediately endearing, and David Schubert's disjunctive colloquial tone does fascinate. Some of the comments about the gang of six do shed some light into Ashbery's curious methods: Clare's mucky down-to-earthiness and Beddoes' elegant, enamelled "fleurs-du-mal" idiom both being "necessary" components of poetry, in Ashbery's view. Some of Wheelwright's elastic sonnets have a Saturday Evening Post-type folksiness that is often found in Ashbery's own poetic inventions; Schubert's poems (in Rachel Hadas's words) "seem(ing) to consist of slivers gracefully or haphazardly fitted together." An aside: Look at the first two lines of Schubert's "Happy Traveller." Couldn't that be John Ashbery? About Raymond Roussel, whose detractors accuse him of saying nothing, Ashbery mounts an impatient defence that reads like a self-defence: "If 'nothing' means a labyrinth of brilliant stories told only for themselves, then perhaps Roussel has nothing to say. Does he say it badly? Well, he writes like a mathematician."
We learn that Ashbery is not fond of E E Cummings, and he is unconvincingly semi-penitent of this "blind spot": Cummings, with his Herrick-like lucidity, his straightforward heterosexuality, and his resolute nonleftism, would not appear to fit nicely into Ashbery's pantheon. Ashbery even takes a few mischievous swipes at John Keats -- rather, he quotes George Moore doing so. Ashbery will doubtless forgive his readers if our enthusiasm for the poetry of Keats and Cummings remains undiminished.
There is much in the poetry explored by "Other Traditions" that is dark and bothersome; but there are felicities. These lectures form a fascinating kind of ars-poetica-in-prose by one of America's cleverest and most vexing of poets.
I have always had a love for, but limited knowledge of, Poetry. It was Edward Hirsch's great book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry that first introduced me to Ashbery's work. He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living poets. Therefore, I jumped at the opportunity to read Other Traditions.
Other Traditions is the book form of a series of lectures given by Ashbery on other poets. Ashbery writes about six of the lesser-known artists who have had an impact on his own life and work. All of them are fascinating. They are:
-John Clare, a master at describing nature who spent the last 27 years of his life in an Asylum.
-Thomas Lovell Beddoes, a rather death obsessed author (he ended up taking his own life) whose greatest poetry consists of fragments that must often be culled from the pages of his lengthy dramas.
-Raymond Roussel, a French author whose magnum opus is actually a book-length sentence.
-John Wheelwright, a politically engaged genius whose ultra-dense poetry even Ashbery has a hard time describing or comprehending.
-Laura Riding, a poet of great talent and intellect who chose to forsake poetry (check out the copyright page).
-David Schubert, an obscure poet who Ashbery feels is one of the greatest of the Twentieth Century.
The two that I was most pleasantly surprised by are Clare and Riding.
Clare has become (since I picked up a couple of his books) one of my favorite poets. He is a master at describing rural life. I know of no one quite like him. Ashbery's true greatness as a critic comes out when he depicts Clare as "making his rounds."
Riding, on the other hand, represents the extreme version of every author's desire for the public to read their work in a precise way--the way the author intends it to be read. Her intense combativeness and sensitivity to criticism is as endearing as it is humorous.
Other Traditions has given me a key to a whole new world of books. For that I am most grateful.
I give this book my full recommendation.
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