From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. If at their most basic level anthologies are simply a matter of taste, editors Schmidt and Felch fashion a sumptuous banquet with this, their third spiritual biography of a season (
Autumn and
Winter). These pieces are not
about summer so much as they
embody summer, a season of heat and reach that expands the heart. These (mostly prose) selections lift up an exquisite wholeness found within an everyday sophistication. As Mary Oliver wrote of a summer morning in the excerpted
Long Life: "As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world." Oliver resides in equal company alongside the other "ordinary" accounts of Anne Lamott building a sand castle with her son, N. Scott Momaday visiting his deceased grandmother's house and G.K. Chesterton doodling away an afternoon. The volume synergizes such considerable talents, structuring them within five themes: play and leisure, tillage and cultivation, family and community, nature and grace, retreat and return. Each section includes introductory material as well as a recipe, a prayer and, quite fittingly, a psalm. For fans of nature and literature, this thinking person's anthology is a must have.
(June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
About the Author
Gary Schmidt teaches literature at Calvin College. He is coeditor of
Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season and
Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season (both SkyLight Paths). He is also author of
Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, a Newbery Honor book;
Mara's Stories: Glimmers in the Darkness, a Fanfare 2002 Horn Book honor list book;
Straw into Gold; and, with Lawrence Kushner,
In God's Hands. Susan M. Felch teaches literature at Calvin College and is coeditor of Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season and Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season. She also edited The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock and Bakhtin and Religion.
Barry Moser, one of the foremost illustrators working today, has illustrated many books for adults and children, including The Pennyroyal Caxton edition of the King James Bible and Lewis Carroll's Alice: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
