Fear Falls Away: And Other Essays from Hard and Rocky Places [Paperback]

Janice Emily Bowers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1997

Jan Bowers lives in the right place. A lover of nature and the outdoors, an avid hiker and backpacker, she is surrounded by mountain ridges, peaks, and canyons of almost every description. In this book, she invites us to come along and find out why some of these places are special, why some of them stay in her mind long after she has returned to the workaday world of the city. Readers have come to expect the best from this writer, termed "a rare talent. . . uncommonly good at the craft" by Wilderness magazine. Her new book is filled with creeks and meadows, tiny ferns and towering oaks, bears and butterflies and Red-tailed Hawks. We see gray clouds clogging the sky in a canyon, "wildly, almost tastelessly romantic, as full of clouds as a tea kettle with steam," and we startle a female grouse and her half-dozen fuzzy chicks "exploding from underfoot like billiard balls scattered with a cue stick." Faced with the prospect of moving to another place, Bowers finds herself thinking about the familiar world in new and unfamiliar ways. Through her eyes, too, we see how an interest in nature and the outdoors developed from early childhood and how simple curiosity has led her to the most surprising discoveries. At odd and unexpected moments, her work also seems to bring new insights into herself and her life as a writer, a wife, and a mother. These pages promise a new adventure at every turn in the trail. For sheer terror, there's a climb up the face of Baboquivari, for laughs, there's the great bagworm caper, and for some quiet truths, there are themes of gain and loss, of connection and reconcilliation. Crunching through winter snow or sweating under summer sun, we know we're in the hands of an experienced guide. And we know we couldn't ask for a better companion.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Bowers writes here about a part of the country that she cannot bear the thought of leaving?the mountains, deserts, and canyons surrounding Tucson, Arizona. Based on a series of hikes taken during a year when she and her husband awaited the outcome of his bid for tenure at a local university, each short essay is filled with descriptions of natural history, reflections, and reminiscences experienced during a particular hike. A botanist for the U.S. Geological Survey, Bowers also reveals a vast knowledge of animals, as in her entertaining essay "Encumbered," about giant egg-carrying male water bugs, or her humorous tale of the bagworm in "From Botanist to Bagworm Lady." Readers of SueEllen Campbell's Bringing the Mountain Home (LJ 10/15/96) will enjoy this work. Recommended for popular natural history and nature-writing collections.?Maureen Delaney-Lehman, Lake Superior State Univ. Lib., Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Delicious, closely observed place vignettes of southeastern Arizona, from naturalist Bowers (A Full Life in a Small Place and Other Essays from a Desert Garden, 1995). The Santa Catalinas, the Pinalenos, the Huachucas, the Santa Ritas, Baboquivari--these southwestern mountains are for Bowers ``the stuff of wary beauty and abiding love . . . a love that lies less in easy responses than in intimate acquaintance, doggedly pursued.'' After 20 years, she is still going about making the place her home, finding, synecdochically, a vastness in the details: in the petroglyphs of the Hohokam, artist-farmers, contemporaries of Chaucer; in an old snag, perforated like a Chinese checkerboard, an acorn in every hole, tucked there by a woodpecker (``The tree seemed to have a hundred brown eyeballs''); in a melancholy walk on Mt. Graham, home of an endangered squirrel threatened by a new observatory. She is unhappy with the human degradation of her dreamscape, angry at the roads cutting through the wild, jarringly like ``rough footsteps in the dark, a banging door, the sound of gunfire,'' but she does not beat the reader senseless with such things. Rather, like a good pilgrim, she dawdles, lets the landscape move through her, tunes her fine eye to the exigent art of seeing--``the cliffs stand on the rim like the fur on an angry cat's back.'' Her delineations of the land are sharp as crystal, and fragile and melancholy, too, as if the land might melt into air, ephemeral as a desert flower. The desert Southwest is blessed with superb place portraitists: Edward Abbey, Charles Bowden, Jack Dykinga, and many more. Add Bowers to that embarrassment of riches. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 158 pages
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press (July 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816517185
• ISBN-13: 978-0816517183
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,343,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Naturalist's Journey Takes You With Her, February 24, 2000

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SeashellPoint "Nancy" (Fort Myers, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fear Falls Away: And Other Essays from Hard and Rocky Places (Paperback)

Janice Emily Bowers writes from the heart, taking an unflinching look at nature - and herself - reflected in the ecology of Arizona: desert, mountains, peaks and canyons. I felt that I was right along with her on these explorations, and I highly recommend this book for those who enjoy outer - and inner - exploration.