I first read this book in 1972, the original 1947 edition. It is one of the few permanent items in my library. I read it again at least once a year. I have even tried some of the projects John describes including the radio set made out of bits laying around the cabin. If you want a relaxing and enjoyable read about life in the woods, get this!

Every true outdoors man and woman needs to read two books. One is Leopold's A Sand County Alamanac, the other is Cache Lake Country. If you've hunted, fished, and trekked the northwoods as much as I have, and love its brooding, dark beauty, this book will capture the sensations of the taiga. It is almost painful to read it if you find yourself trapped in someone else's idea of the good life, when what you really want to do is chuck it all for a cabin in the boreal forest.

I first read this book when I was 12 years old, I am now 46. I could not put it down and can not. I made my first knike sheath, first snow shoes, and my first moc;s (which remain my favorite type of moc's) from sketches from this book, as well as many of the other projects and they all lived up to expectations of a young teenager to present. You feel like you are there with the three men of the story. It is is one of the few books that I reread every couple of years. Worth every penney and then some.

I don't know much about Czech literature, so I don't know if the Prague Spring had anything to do with the writing of Karel Capek, but I would not be surprised to discover a connection. "Leaves wither because spring is already beginning, because new buds are being made, as tiny percussion caps out of which the spring will crack....if we could only see that secret swarming of the future within us, we should say that our melancholy and distrust is silly and absurd and that the best thing of all is to be..living.."

Karel Capek wrote those words in 1929 when he was 39 years old. By 1938, the year the Nazis invaded Prague, he was dead. His brother Josef died a few years later in Bergan-Belsen. But this book is not about those sad events. This book is about a year in the life of a good gardener, how ever extraordinary a writer he might have been.

During his lifetime, Capek realized that humans were becoming enslaved by fascism and run-amuck technology. The ancient and cyclical daily practices of humans were dying before his eyes --the beet farmers stacking their fall harvests at the railroad stations; the wagon loads of manure that could be delivered for garden beds; the nursury men who understood plants giving way to "market garden centers" staffed by those who regularly misidentify plants and stocked with items that "move" (produce a high volume of sales).

THE GARDENER'S YEAR is a reflective book. You don't have to garden to appreciate it, but if you garden, you will probably laugh on more than one occasion. Where is the gardener who has not struggled with a hose; Who has not looked with greed on a bald spot and attempted to squeeze six more phlox plants in, only to discover a dormant sping plant; And, where is the gardener who has not wandered about the yard with a plant in each hand trying to find just one more place for a perennial. Capek understood the gardener's soul. We are a greedy lot, obsessed with dirt, happy in a wagon load of s___, and hostile to many-legged life forms, but, we are also the best sort of human beings who understand the meaning and importance of life.

Capek's writing reminds me of that of Henry Mitchell who wrote two columns (one on gardening the other on "everyday" philosophy) for the Washington Post. Like Mitchell Capek had the gift of converting his own gardening experiences into tales that inform, enlighten, and illustrate the best and the worst of human nature. "I tell you there is no death, not even sleep. We only pass from one season to another. We must be patient with life, for it is eternal."

There is humor and self-deprecation in The Gardener's Year...This is a book that will appeal to the gardener, the philospher, and the Zen deotee, the reader of self-help books, as well as the humorist. Here are quotes: "After his death, the gardener does not become a butterfly but ... a garden worm tasting all the dark, nitrogenous and spicey delights of the soil." "I find a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil". "The life of a gardener is active and full of will." There are easy references to German philosophers, campanula alpina, Tolstoy, the perfume of manure. All this is presented with humor but there are no fools in this book. It could easily be subtitled "Zen and the Pleasant Art of Gardening." It didn't change my life, but it made it better. For Godsake, by this book!

I'll make this short. These essays are simply the best ever about the act of gardening and the gardeners themselves. Anyone who has ever tended a garden for any length of time will immediately relate to the situations and the people in these writings. They are humorous as well as accurate. You'll laugh at yourself and your friends through these wonderfull essays.

This is a wonderful visual description of the disappearing west that many of us know from folklore and honest movies. Lindy has an uncanny knack with the black and white photo and delivers a perspective that very striking and makes one think deep thoughts about what is a "cowboy." The book is the epitome of a coffee-table book and will spark many a constructive conversation.

Straight West seems to me to be the real west--people, animals and landscape in work clothes. Both text and pictures spoke to me of real people in real places doing real work and living real lives. How refreshing after a lifetime of Hollywood's version of The West. I found certain of Smith's pictures--Looking Toward Mexico, Going After Cattle, Sheep Convention, Ranch Cabin, and Dude Ranch String, to name just a few--so compelling I keep turning back to them, wondering about the stories they tell--or don't tell: the stories they are hiding, waiting for the reader's imagination to flesh out. Klinkenborg's essays are a valuable part of the book. I especially liked the artist-at-work explanations he gave of his wife's labor over developing and printing the photographs. It is really a book to treasure.

This rich story is a tapastry of who we are as a nation. It is our history. This book can teach us a lot about how to make our cities live again.

It has become almost cliche to say that modern writers make a character of the settings of their novels. But in this book, the author truly vitalizes Buffalo, N.Y. Through the novelized true story of his wife's Polish immigrant parents and details plucked from two centuries of municipal history, he weaves a story about a place that is arguably the most American of cities. Situated on a Great Lake, with the belching prosperity of smokestacks and a miraculous curtain of snow as backdrops, he tells the story of a family that finds a home in industrial America. Gritty urban scenes give way to a confrontation between the races which ends in a flight to the suburbs. In "The Last Fine Time" we find the story of a family, and of a once-great city, that is a fable about American life. He answers the question of how, in 100 years, puritanical farmers became the empowered factory workers that became alienated, shell-shocked suburbanites on the edge of the 21st century.

This is the best book ever written about Buffalo, the best book, fiction or nonfiction, that uses Buffalo as background. The decline of a proud city, enabled by its matter of fact certainty about destiny and greatness, is recounted with intelligence and a generous style. The sadness of change is inescapable, but people's memories, especially those of Polish Americans, create a light that still shines in the city's shadows.

Verlyn Klinkenborg's latest book has just been released and apparently it is flying out of bookstores everywhere (within 3 weeks of it's publication date, it had already gone into a second printing). Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, where, for the past five years, he has been writing a column entitled "The Rural Life." Some of us have been assiduously saving these essays, most no more that 700 words, not to mention the fact that we have been regularly sending them to our relatives and friends who don't read the Times. The fact that some 100 of them are collected into a single volume, ordered by the months of the year, seems almost too good to be true. This beautifully written book is about as close to poetry as prose gets.

The Rural Life is a book about observations, the observations of someone carrying the imprint of a childhood on farms Iowa and California, and now, in middle age, and somewhat to his own surprise, trying his own hand at farming on a small tract of land in upstate New York. One of the things that is so compelling about the book is the author's genuine sense of wonder and pleasure at noticing the small details of life in the natural world. By being quiet and gentle in his interactions, Klinkenborg finds himself receiving a free education where many have found only frustration. True, Klinkenborg has the luxury of not being dependent on farming for his livelihood. However, with so much bankruptcy in the world--financial, political, spiritual-we need somebody to remind us that if we just pay attention to the small change there's enough wealth for everyone.

Richmond, MA 12/20/02

The two-star review from the farmer in Iowa is well-meaning and correct about his life, but Verlyn Klinkenborg--although he hails from that background--is writing from another place. No, Klinkenborg is not out doing the tough physical work to earn his living, but what he tells us about living is essential to those of us who often imagine ourselves in his shoes and appreciate what he shares. If you want a sense of the book, read the Editorial Reviews, which well describe his poetic love for the rural experience.

Industrialized farming has provided our society with a steady supply of cheap and convenient food. Verlyn Klinkenborg's family was / is part of that industrialization success story. Even if that food from that industry has acceptable nutritional quality, many of us recognize that industrialized food is lacking in culture and spiritual substance. Something has been lost.

But it does not make sense for our society to ask for more expensive food or give up convenience. Those attributes afford us the opportuntity and resources to advance further. Collections like "The Rural Life" allow our society to critically, collectively explore, debate and evaluate our alternatives. This collection is particularly important because of the questions and hopes it raises regarding transcendent nature of agriculture.

The alternative to the transcendant approach is massive subsidization of an old, inefficient industry. Subsidization is politically expedient, but it's a zero sum game. We can do better -- we must expect more. Transcendance will require patience, wisdom and vision ... and a few good books like "The Rural Life."

I'm not sure how to feel about this book. While reading it, I really could not become absorbed by Conrad's dense prose, though, while occasionaly eloquent, is very thick, and, well, British. But now that I am finished with it, I can not get the images the novella invokes out of my head. The conquest of Africa by the Imperialist on the surface, and the corruption of man's very morality underneath. The story is deceptively simple, merely a man working for an Ivory trading company, ominously called "The Company", going up the Congo river to meet up with Kurtz, the archetype of Western Imperialism. During this trip, we are shown the inner workings of man and his heart of darkness. The novella is not perfect though. Conrad's condemnation of Imperialism is uneven. Yes, the only discernable cause of Kurtz's descent into evil and madness is the imperialist ethic of master-slave, and it is fairly clear that Marlowe (conrad) is condemning that ethic, but at the same time, he doesn't work very hard to elevate the view of the African natives any higher in the esteem of his western readers. Anyway, as the novella is only about 100 pages, it is something that can be read in a day. Invest an afternoon in it, and decide for yourself.

Heart of Darkness is a novella that really needs to be read more than just once to fully appreciate Conrad's style of writing. The story is an account of one man's simultaneous journey into the darkness of a river as well as into the shadows of a madman's mind. There is a very brilliant flow of foreshadowing that Conrad brings to his writing that provides the reader with accounts of the time period and the horrible events to come. Through Conrad's illuminating writing style we slowly see how the narrator begins to understand the madness or darkness that surrounds him.

I recommend this particular version of the novella because it contains a variety of essays, which discusses some of the main issues in the reading and historical information. Issues like racism and colonialism are discussed throughout many essays. It also contains essays on the movie inspired by the book Apocalypse Now, which is set against the background of the Vietnam War. I recommend reading Heart of Darkness and then viewing Apocalypse Now, especially in DVD format which contains an interesting directors commentary.

You can sit in your office on your lunch break and read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness while, perhaps, eating a chicken salad sandwich. And while sitting there with an air-conditioned breeze blowing from a vent, you can imagine you are vicariously experiencing a trip up the Congo River in nineteenth century Africa. You can suppose your imagination is powerful enough to project you mentally into the circumstances Conrad relates. It is true Conrad's power of description is such that the reader can almost feel the thick, hot gush of blood fill Marlow's shoes as his assistant dies at his feet -- on his feet. Reading this story in the dead of winter will bring sweat to your brow. The torrid heat of the African night drips from every sentence. But more than anything, this story fills one with a sense of mortality -- it beats bluntly like an indefatigable drummer between every line. Lives like waves crashing against the merciless rocks of time. No man able to escape the malignant truth of his inevitable demise. Not even Kurtz, who wielded the reaper with such dexterity that it seems impossible he would ever have it turned in his own direction.

Heart of Darkness -- heart of virulence. Conrad takes us to a land of death -- a hundred-page trip through a tropical tumor. "The horror -- the horror." Yes! The horror fills every page, every twitch of every character. All is corrupt and dirty, like slime on the edge of a desecrated grave. It is the genius of Conrad that he can so deftly deliver his reader from the most opulent ivory tower of modern comfort, to where the darkest places in nature meets the darkest places in the human soul.

The jacket blurb compares this book to McPhee's "The Survival of the Bark Canoe." While Klinkenborg tries manfully to achieve something like McPhee, he doesn't make it. He comes close at times, but only close and that not often enough.

From Klinkenborg I got only glimpses of the places and people living a life I know next to nothing about. He took me to the edge of the field, but not up close enough to understand what they are doing and why. A few times he describes machinery or processes well enough for me to see them, but most of the time he drops names with only the barest description, leaving me in the middle of nowhere. In contrast, when I finish one of McPhee's many books, I feel like I could BUILD the canoe, pick the oranges, or pilot the ship.

Klinkenborg does better with the people in the story, many of them family of his, and those parts were fine. But the heart of the story is in its title, and I was left wanting much more than I received.

Klinkenborg knows this topic is off the beaten track. No puns, metaphors or euphemisms intended, it is literally a book about the production of hay in the vast fields of Minnesota and Iowa. His fascination perplexes no one more than the author's relatives, who make a living at it and observe his enthusiasm for the work with benign bemusement. Of course in the process of learning the family trade, Klinkenborg learns something about his own heritage, but he presents this as mere incidental observations, like an old friend waved to at the end of a row just before turning the combine around to get back to business. The writing is superb. I'd give it a 10, but he does tend to go a tad overboard with loving descriptions of the machinery.