Customer Reviews

Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist (Library of Indiana Classics)

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The late Edwin Way Teale's "Dune Boy," originally published in 1943, entertained a hundred thousand American troops overseas during WWII and with his enamoring portraits of life at the turn of the last century in the Indiana Dunes; A special ribbon of land hugging the Hoosier Coast that most of those servicemen had probably never heard of prior, but a seemingly magical place where Teale and so many other writers, poets and artists were inspired (Nelson Algren; Meyer Levin; Elma Lobaugh; Majorie Hill Allee; Arnold Mulder; Julia Cooley Altrocchi; Earl Reed; Helga Sandburg; Thomas Rogers; Steve Tesich; the poets, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg and the artists Frank Dudley, John Templeton, and the `Furnessville Ten' alumni of the School of the Chicago Art Institute and also LeRoy Neiman who had painted an amazing 8' x 56' mural "A Day at the Indiana Dunes in 1965.)

Ironically Teale's setting of his childhood memories was a rural country only sixty miles down the Lake Michigan coastline from Chicago, but a charming farm community with a tiny English village, eccentric neighbors and vagabonds who camped and resided amongst the knobby sand dunes, dark virgin forests, marshes all abounding in wildlife and fauna. A time when slow moving milk and strawberry trains made local stops to picked up their harvests for the city markets and a time when young boys adventured with mail order cameras and witnessed the first airplanes take flight. Teale had touched the hearts of so many American servicemen overseas because he reminded them of the homes they longed to return to when so far away at war.

Teale's maternal grandparent's farm `Lone Oak' has long disappeared off any local maps and alas many of the local sand dunes were destroyed by the coming of even more steel mills and other industrial plants which have polluted the shore ever since. However, some of the people Teale portrayed and immortalized in `Dune Boy,' their headstones can be found in the quaint Furnessville cemetery, which is today surrounded by the surviving 1863 Lewry House; the 1880 Furness Mansion; the 1886 Schoolhouse Shop, and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore; A bountiful national preserve, home to the modern science of ecology, and habitats to wildlife and plant species not found anywhere else in the American Midwest. A charm that inspired Teale to become the prolific author and American Naturalist of his time remains in these Indiana Dunes. Teale's "Dune Boy" is a testament, which can inspire todays and future generations to save what remains of the great sand dunes of Indiana. It is one of our family Classics and a recommended reading for anyone who has a passion to Save the Dunes or who comes to visit our Indiana home.

I recommend reading `Dune Boy' with `Ann's Surprising Summer' by Marjorie Hill Allee, (published earlier in 1923) but concerning the Great Depression years and the portrait of a collegiate woman and that of her family camped in the dunes, and that fiction read with Thomas Rogers "At The Shores" (published in 1980) set between the World Wars, which continues the adventures of young adolescents in the Indiana Dunes. The recent publication "Moonlight in Duneland" an oversize tome by the historians, Ronald D. Cohen and Stephen McShane, illustrates the travel posters of the early 20th century that promoted the Indiana Dunes and can add depth to the above reads.

This book was so good it inspired jealousy. I wished every night as a child that I would wake up the next morning as Edwin, in that wonderful Indiana home of his Grandfathers! He writes with a visual-ness that truly puts you in the book with him. He sets the period very well, and the book is a pleasure to read and re-read.

An excellent look at the early life of one of the best naturalists this country has ever produced. This book will be an inspiration to every budding naturalist out there. It does bring to mind one flaw in the life of Edwin Teale - there is not a complete biography of his life.

This book gives a glimpse into the world of farm life in Northwest Indiana before the turn of the century. A child's view of the life on his grandparents' farm and the delights it offered a "city" boy on his summer vacations. Of special interest to local persons as it mentions people who lived in the area.

Anyone who lives in "The Region" section of Indiana would enjoy this book. So much has changed since the book was written, but the landscape, weather, and wildlife were there before the author and will be there long after the reader. It's a sweet reminder of how beautiful the world is.