The Way Home

Rating:
Summary: A Book About Everything
Review: The jacket copy of this page-turner rightly says that it springs from the tradition of WALDEN, and this is pertinent not only to the strength and beauty of the nature writing--the author's account of how she has found a second home in the Adirondacks--but to the complex ways she connects this experience and how she feels about it with every other important aspect of her life, her personality, and her way of making sense of the world. It's as much a book about her relationship to Bob, her partner, as it is a book about the woods, and one of its most impressive achievements is to dissolve those two subjects into one, to the point where they can't really be separated. More generally, Wein expands autobiography and self-scrutiny to take in all the things that surround them, which turns out to be just about everything.

I was deeply moved and affected by the troubling story of Jim, one of her neighbors, and her earlier account of getting lost in the woods is another classic example of how gracefully the prose can move from microcosm to macrocosm and back again. THE WAY HOME is a very exciting and satisfying piece of writing.


Rating:
Summary: FOR CITY FOLK WHO YEARN TO LIVE IN THE COUNTRY
Review: This is the first-person story of a 40-something writer and her boyfriend, Bob. Both city dwellers and frustrated nature lovers, they decide to buy a log cabin in the Adirondacks for vacations. The book is compelling, beautifully written (almost cinematically vivid at times) and often funny. In the first section, the couple gets hopelessly lost in the thick, unmapped woods for 2 days. At one point they are so frightened that they hear a gritty sceam and assume it's a bobcoat. With the next scream, they realize with embarrassment it was just a furious owl. The second section deals with community: Although Wein and her partner make several close friends, the issues of logging and pollution create conflict at some point. Nonetheless, most of their relationships recover and the couple thrives. And Wein, who had always felt rootless, finally feels peaceful and fulfilled--with a place in the natural world.