Written over 50 years ago, this classic book of nature writing captures the near timelessness of the southern Arizona desert in a series of essays describing the author's fifteen-month sojourn there. While Krutch harks back to Thoreau, his perspective, turns of thought, and style of expression are similar to the reflective essays of E. B. White. They begin with observations of plant and animal life and evolve into ruminations on the nature of human life.

Krutch writes of birds, the night sky, bats, saguaro cactus, ocotillo, and desert flowers. Considering them, he rediscovers the truth in ideas he has so long held as true that they've become near platitudes. Where there is plentitude in some things, for instance, there is no need for it in others. Nature cares for the species but not individuals, while human values tend toward the opposite. While every rose has its thorn, the blooming cactus shows us that the reverse is also true. A visit to the vastness and forbidding desert monuments of Cathedral Valley in south central Utah reminds him of the precariousness of human life.

The desert leads Krutch to contemplation of its paradoxes, as well. For instance, the struggle for life here where conditions for survival are more restrictive actually create an uncrowded and more serene ecosystem by comparison with the tropics. The varieties of bird life are vastly greater here than in more temperate climates. A species of toads can live unseen and unheard for 363 days of the year, emerging after a rain fall to sing and reproduce, then disappear and survive somehow in the waterless months between. Finally, there's one question he's never able to answer: why bats fly clockwise from Carlsbad cave.

You can't really know a place, he believes, until you have seen it both as novel and as familiar. A landscape is no more than a picture postcard until you have spent time there and discover yourself in the midst of it. "The Desert Year" is a wonderful account of that process and a celebration of the joy that can be found in settling down for a while in a place that gradually comes to feel like home.

Here is a converted desert romantic with an interest in not only nature but man. Krutch writes and hits the mark like Thoreau and Eiseley and you won't want to miss him or this book if you're looking for a little sanity in a world gone mad.

If you have an interest in the desert and why we live here with JOY you must read this book. Krutch was an extraordinary man and he lived an extraordinary life his first year here. This book is the story of why he stayed instead of returning to New York. It is perhaps the most admired book about Tucson that has ever been written.

In his book The Modern Temper, Joseph W. Krutch defined the title concept to mean the angst-ridden state of mind exhibited by people in the 1910's and 1920's who wanted to return to the simpler ways of Victorian certainties and principles, such as the concept of man radicaly differentiated from animals, the existence of universal moral truths, and the certain existence of God. Unfortunately for them, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution hit the Victorian fan, thus beginning the gradual unravelling of God, absolutes, and other Victorian principles. William James himself added fuel to the fire by espousing pragmatism as a method to actively find out a belief system that fits in with people's experiences.

The situation of people exhibiting that modern temper was akin to an adult nostalgically looking back to at his simple childhood, a world of poetry, mythology, and religion that was upset by the world of science. The ideal world was replaced by the world of Nature. The anthropomorphic God and human needs and feelings were ousted by Nature. Yet, there was a need to crawl back into the womb, as "the myth, having once been established, persists long after the assumptions upon which it was made have been destroyed, because, being born of desire, it is far more satisfactory than any fact".

The failure of the laboratory and hence of science underlined this dilemma. The scientific method came to be applied in fields such as history, philosophy, and anthropology, so why not lay out the human soul on the dissection table and start hacking away? However, science was used to seek out a light, such as ultraviolet or infrared, that man, limited in sight by the visible spectrum, was unable to see. Mankind thus lost its faith in its findings to discover that sought-for moral world.

The implications for love were likewise devastating. Formerly the thing that brought man closest to the divine state or the highest level possible, depending on how man saw himself, the value of love became a hormonal thing. Sex replaced love by demystifying and desanctifying it, increasing its accessibility.

The long-term implications of the modern temper and the yearning of returning to the pre-Darwinian womb hints at the collapse of the American Empire. Krutch mentioned how philosophical debates sapped the vitality of Greece to the point that it was conquered by the Romans, who after building an empire yielding enormous riches and comforts, suffered the same fate under philosophically innocent barbarians.

Metaphysics, which operated outside the realm of observable and objective reality, established certitudes such as ethics, whose realization caused a blooming of the human spirit. Yet science and applied Darwinism knocked down those certitudes like nine-pins, causing that human spirit to wilt as man realized the dissonance between the idealized world of his childhood and the harsh unrelenting world of Nature. The solution was to create the beneficent "fiction," transforming life to an art. All one has to do is to assume the existence of some moral order "and ... construct in his imagination a world where they actually do." And if the foundations of that fiction can be destroyed by science or the physical world, so what? One protects his world by erecting a Great Wall between it and the physical world. The trouble is twofold. One is the lack of ultimate conviction belied by any self-created world. The other is the believer's self-deceptive slide away from reality.

The advent of postmodernists and their struggles against premodernists and modernists in America seems to be that same debate that will make us soft and while we are busy arguing, the underbelly of our empire will be slit open by another country in the vitality stage. The question is who? A very thought-provoking book on the conflict between modernism and absolutism.

Written in the pivotal year 1929, Krutch captured in this series of essays the sense of foreboding that led into the nightmare decade and a half spanning the Depression '30s and the conclusion of World War II. His essential theme is that "the modern temper," one of questioning and skepticism, had led Man to a frightening crossroads where the old myths of the past -- religion, dramatic tragedy, devotion to family -- no longer worked, yet the technology and psychological insights that had remorselessly torn these values apart offered no consolation other than the promise of more objective knowledge.

Man was left instead, Krutch felt, with what is best described as the existential dilemma, although of course he didn't use this term. He saw Man as struggling to come to terms with the paradox of expanding knowledge. That is to say, the more we understand, the more it becomes clear that the universe of which we are only a tiny part spins according to its own laws, with no regard for Man's deep and abiding need for spiritual sustenance. Yet once Man has released the genie of technology and of skepticism, it is difficult to return to the old myths, in which Man was always placed at the center of the moral and spiritual universe.

This is a bleak book, yet it does much to explain the blind adherence to ideology that characterized the disastrous fascist, totalitarian movements of the 1930s. In this regard, a good companion read (and one that reaches a very different set of conclusions) is Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."

This biography essentially takes the (to my mind) correct and psychological tack to validating Poe's genius, though it be of a very peculiar sort. The problem (as any lost soul who chances upon this esoteric review of an out-of-print biography has probably guessed) is that the psychology of the time (1926) was inundated by Freudianism. Thus, we have the word "neurotic" and "neurosis" springing up time and time again when it is not at all clear that this verbal crutch serves as more of a hindrance than a help to understanding Poe. But perhaps this is just a semantic quibble. For, whatever you may call it, there was something truly out of the ordinary in Poe's psychological makeup and this, Krutch contends, is what makes for the genius of his works: They were born of the living realities that tormented his own mind, not concocted artifice.
I think Poe's quote on pages 127-128 serve best to illustrate this point, "-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awaking, to find that they have been upon the verge of a great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is good, and more of the mere knowledge of which is evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable."-To anyone associated with Romantic poetry or mystic religious literature, the adjective that springs to one's mind here is not "neurotic" but rather mystical and/or Romantic.
Poe like all the great mystics and Romantics (St. John of The Cross, Shelley, Yeats etc.) actually lived his particular credo: in his case that the most poetical topic in the world is the death of a beautiful woman. From "Annabel Lee" to (my favorite) "The Fall of the House of Usher" there is that consecrated worship of the waiflike unworldy female by the poet or his alter ego. The thing is, Poe actually LIVED this life, as any writer worth reading does in re his works. He died a virgin, and married a thirteen year old whose strange beauty made the act of sex unthinkable and evil. In short, Poe inhabited his own unique world which his works were mere manifestations thereof. This, I agree with Krutch, qualifies him to the title of genius.
Where I diverge with Krutch is in his failure to see where Poe fits into any kind of tradition, save in isolated cases such as the chord Poe struck in Baudelaire. The tradition of "morbid purity", as Krutch would have it, stretches from the Gnostics and early Christians (Origen went as far as to castrate homself) to Shakespeare "Lovers, madmen and poets are of imagination all compact" to such 20th century figures as Yeats and the novelist Malcolm Lowry (who wrote a story after visiting Poe's memorial in Baltimore entitled "Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession"). What is most surprising to the modern reader is that no mention at all is made of Herman Melville, the American writer of the time who most resembled Poe in his psychology, who told Hawthorne of his desire "to annihilate himself."
The Gothic morbidity of Poe is unique in literature, and its correspondence to the reality of the Poe's own life is what makes it genuine. It is unfortunately true that much of what Poe wrote was inane, vulgar, or simply untrue. Yet, in his best work (such as "The Fall of the House of Usher") that morbid purity Krutch mentions is manifested as in no other writer or artist.
Krutch is at his best regarding Poe when he propounds, regarding those critical of his works, that "it is bound to seem mere artifice unless they happen to have chords in their tempraments which respond to the neurotic melodies which are the secret of his fascinations."
Again, my problem is with this Freudian "neurotic" business. The great traditions of spiritial mysticism and Romanticism cannot be simply filed away under this all too convenient convenient rubric.-Aside from this reservation, however, the biography is an exquisite and well-written description of Poe's unique contribution to literature, of his genius.

I had read and enjoyed other essays by Joseph Wood Krutch before I ventured on to this biography of Henry David Thoreau, and I must admit that I was surprised and disappointed. The writing is fine, the essence of Thoreau appears, the major life details are all there, and Krutch is obviously familiar with his subject matter. But whenever he quotes the naturalist, he never includes specific citations locating those words. How frustrating for any reader who is enticed here by a turn of phrase or an idea and wants to pick up _Walden_ or Thoreau's _Journal_ to find them for himself / herself! If other sources or friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Ellery Channing are quoted, no further information on origin is provided. We have no clue where Krutch found those communications. He wasn't in Concord in the mid-1800s, so he must be repeating words written in other documents or published works. For the casual reader, maybe this major omission is not a problem. If you just want the basics of Thoreau's life and philosophies and writings, then maybe this volume is enough for you. But with no citation notes and no credits and no bibliography, I found it wasn't enough for me.

If you are sincerely interested in the man who is most often identified with Walden Pond and with the concept of civil disobedience, then pick up one of the classic biographies of him -- either _The Days of Henry Thoreau_ by Walter Harding or _Thoreau_ by Henry Seidel Canby. Those two volumes are a little longer and more extensive than Krutch's (especially Canby's), but they will serve you better. I believe they serve Thoreau better as well.

Joseph Wood Krutch, professor and conservationist, paints a word portrait of one of the great minds of American literature. Using source material from Henry David Thoreau's better known works, including Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as well as depth materials from Thoreau's Journals, Krutch lets us inside Thoreau's thoughts and character. "Rich and full bodied", "an ornament of contemporary American criticism", and "brilliant" characterize the reviews from Dell Publishing, Saturday Review, and Commonweal. Rich and full bodied because Krutch carefully weaves a deepening apprehension of the dimension of the man through carefully selected examples of the way Thoreau's mind and thought process worked. An ornament because few critics capture the spirit let loose here. And brilliant because the book is packed with new information and insights. For any fan of Thoreau, and of good contemporary criticism, this is must reading.