Drinking the Rain

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Summary: Enough already!
Review: Drinking the Rain did not leave me thirsting for more. Alix Shulman's subtle male-bashing and her forlorn nostalgia for the "failed" women's movement tarnished this book. Her quest for solitude did not leave her with an epiphany or any great enlightenment. She remained, at book's end, not very much different from the middle-aged woman who journeys to a remote island in Maine to lead a rustic, uncomplicated life. For this she is to admired; no running water, no electricity, a cantankerous gas-fueled refrigerator and a autodidactic living off the land (and sea). She never reaches Gurdieff's "long thought". Shulman hides from the reader, offering somewhat brittle comments in lieu of insight. Her record as an "activist" has given that word a new definition, "someone who feels passionately about a subject, talks it to death and ultimately does nothing about it." Shulman seems incapable of taking the truly courageous next step, which is to tell us what she's learned.

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Summary: Drinking the Rain review
Review: Drinking the Rain is a memiorthat moves slow like honey letting you savor every detail of this lovely book. It is about a woman who divides her time between loud, busy, NYC and the quiet coast of Maine. Her home in Maine has no running water to electricity or plumbing.It is a good book to buy your mom for the holiday season if she is of the baby-boomer generation. The woman in the story has a difficult time turning 50 but then learns to embrace herself and her age. Buy it for your mom or yourself if you are going throgh a mid-life crisis.

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Summary: Worth the time
Review: I found this book to be one of the best books I've read. She really hits home.The way Alix Kates Shulman writes about her kinship with her inner self just makes me want to know more. This is a book all women should read to gain self confidence and independence.This book shows the simplicity that all women should have at some point in their lives.Truely an inspiring book. A must read.

Rating:
Summary: Stay with it
Review: I must confess I almost couldn't get through "Drinking the Rain". Kates Shulman's account of a citified feminist's return to nature seemed an unintential parody, not helped by the comically overstated title. But midway through Ms. Shulman's story I became hooked. What seemed at first a pretentious and self-important rant transformed into a thoughtful and evocotive musing on what it is to be an artist. Ironically, it's only after Shulman returned to the city (and later goes to teach in Colorado) that the book came alive for me. Her descriptions of dinner with an old feminist friend left me teary eyed at their simple eloquence, and the descriptions of a snowy Colorado reunion with her kids kept me reading. By the end, I adored this story.

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Summary: Living off the land is an attitude of appreciation
Review: Living off the land is something I've always thought it would be neat to do. I've never (yet) had the courage or opportunity to do what Shulman did in her months at "the nubble", her Maine island cabin. But more powerful than her experience there was integrating that special time into her own life to realize that all life circumstances (she lives in the Colorado mountains for awhile, travels abroad, has spent most of her life in NY City) have their special gifts to be accepted and appreciated. The theme of balancing the acceptance of life with the urge to act against injustices is a central theme in her book. She definately made me think about that balance in my life. A thoroughly enjoyable book. I love memoirs and am concerned about our world's ability to support humans. She spoke to these concerns through her personal experience. Highly recommended

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Summary: drinking the inspiration
Review: Shulman raises many provocative ideas in her memoir. Among the ones that affected me most profoundly are Solitude, Rebirth, Self-Sufficiency, and the utilization of the resources in your own environment.

If you've ever feared that the possibilities for excitement, adventure, wonderment, or simply change- shrink with age, you will be inspired by Shulman's resolve to continue searching for meaning and discovery in her life at fifty and well beyond. What courage to embark on a new and thoroughly independent life after decades of playing the role of wife and mother. But Shulman is not a super human. She does not possess some rarefied quality that we could not all find nestled in our spirit. We walk with her down the beach of her island past a barking and threatening dog. She has always held an irrational fear of dogs though never has she actually had a bad experience with one. Her instinct is to turn back, but instead she contemplates the nature of fear and how best to conquer it, and she decides the best thing is to face it. So she continues on, if somewhat cautiously.

This book will mark you, if you let it. I come away feeling better equipped to face my barking island dogs. I am more observant and appreciative of my surroundings. And I will never see myself as stuck in a single way of life, never let the light of change and possibility elude me.

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Summary: A passionate, intimate memoir
Review: Ten years ago Shulman went to her family's primitive cabin on Long Island, Maine, for a summer of solitude. A New Yorker through and through, she was apprehensive and fearful, but also excited and determined. Her life was vaguely dissatisfying and she was looking for a change.

Reading her memoir is like having a personal conversation with the author. Her tone is personal and intimate. When she stands back for a moment, picturing herself through a passing stranger's averted eye - a middle-aged lady in floppy hat and mismatched tennis shoes, gathering weeds in a basket - we too are startled and amused, having been looking from the inside out.

Shulman, recognized for her novels and feminism, reaches her cross-roads at age 50. Her children are grown, her relationship with her husband is a distant truce, the feminist movement has stalled, and her life is overfull of busyness.

But the birth of a new passion in her life is serendipitous. Always an adventurous cook, she finds her lengthy trips to the uninspiring island grocery a jarring intrusion on her pleasing solitude and a chore contrary to her new motto, "Do only what you like, nothing you don't!"

From years before she remembers mussel gathering, one of the few pleasures of the hurried vacations she had always hated. In those years, with small children and a domineering, orchestrating husband, the summer cabin, with no electicity or plumbing had meant a round of endless drudgery.

Now that she has only to please herself, mussel hunting is merely the first of her pleasures. Around her a world unfolds. Armed with Euell Gibbons and determination, she reaps the bounty of wild things, spending her days in exploration and discovery.

She finds in herself a new tranquility and simplicity which, as she feared, is invaded by New York's cosmopolitan pace and abundance. The reader is a bit ahead of her here, exhorting Shulman to enjoy what the city has to offer, just as she enjoys her island.

And when the author does absorb our advice (given to her by an old childhood friend at a party), she embraces it fully, applying this tactic to her whole life. Thus, when she accepts a position at the University of Colorado, she plunges into an exploration of New Age mysticism, health foods, mountain hiking and Buddhism. You don't have to share her interests to find her open-minded approach admirable.

There are upheavels too. Her children are less than thrilled in the back-to-nature changes in their New Yorker mother. Her husband shatters a summer's idyll at the island by sending divorce papers. And romantic love, with all its joy, threatens to disrupt her solitary self. As I said, you don't have to agree.

But through it all, Shulman struggles to maintain her equilibrium, making deliberate choices, letting her thoughts range free. She is enchanted by the wholeness of things - how all of nature interrelates - and then dismayed as pollution from the cities and radiation from Chernobyll threatens her island haven.

This is a memoir of continuous awakening and endless dialogue with the self and the world. There's helplessness, anger, hope and love and inspiration. It's a joy to read.

Rating:
Summary: Drinking The Rain
Review: This memoir was extremely well written. The descriptions of life for a 50 year old city woman living in Maine are unique and beautiful. Each sentence and each page is capturing. Although slow starting gets much quicker as you go. I immediately thought of my mother while reading and afterwards. For me it did not have much meaning besides the writing aspect, though as a fifteen year old girl having lived in the country her whole life I do not expect that. I will definately reread it at a later point. A very wonderful book!