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Rating: 
Summary: A superbly crafted memoir of life, aging, and grieving.
Review: Donald Hall's memoir, The Old Life, is beautifully crafted in prose form. It is full of personal recollections as well as literary references. It is intense, deeply personal, funny, and wonderfully readable. One has a very real sense of who Donald Hall is - his views of life, his passion for baseball and his family, his trials with his own ill health, his love for his wife, Jane Kenyon, also a poet, and his agonizing grief when she dies quite unexpectedly. A beautiful, poignant, literary triumph
Rating:
Summary: Hall's best book
Review: I am a big fan of Donald Hall's writing, both poetry and prose. This is my favorite and the one that made me think the most. It allows one to put one's life in perspective, realize the importance of life and work. We all aren't as lucky as Hall has been to work at what we love, but the book makes you think about how work can become more worthwhile. Deep and enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Hall's best book
Review: I am a big fan of Donald Hall's writing, both poetry and prose. This is my favorite and the one that made me think the most. It allows one to put one's life in perspective, realize the importance of life and work. We all aren't as lucky as Hall has been to work at what we love, but the book makes you think about how work can become more worthwhile. Deep and enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: A Sense of Time, Place and Self
Review: Reading this book is work -- in the Donald Hall definition, for to read it is to become absorbed in each word to the exclusion of all else. Hall writes of his ancestors, of the rocky farms of New England, a small dairy, his father's early death, his wife's gardening, and then quite suddenly as his colon cancer recurs, of the possible end to life and the very prosaic tasks of cancelling readings, putting papers in order for survivors. Throughout, he achieves a sense of time, place and self which crosses generations. He charts both the constants and the increasing changes of the farm which has been in his family for more than a hundred years and the country around it. Hall, like God, love and grace--all of which are found in abundance in this book, abides.
Rating:
Summary: A Sense of Time, Place and Self
Review: Reading this book is work -- in the Donald Hall definition, for to read it is to become absorbed in each word to the exclusion of all else. Hall writes of his ancestors, of the rocky farms of New England, a small dairy, his father's early death, his wife's gardening, and then quite suddenly as his colon cancer recurs, of the possible end to life and the very prosaic tasks of cancelling readings, putting papers in order for survivors. Throughout, he achieves a sense of time, place and self which crosses generations. He charts both the constants and the increasing changes of the farm which has been in his family for more than a hundred years and the country around it. Hall, like God, love and grace--all of which are found in abundance in this book, abides.
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