Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life [Hardcover]

Hoagland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1999

Very few writers have explored the natural world with the distinctive flair and insight of Edward Hoagland. Now, in Tigers & Ice, he provides what might be his most compelling work yet.

Edward Hoagland was legally blind for three years until surgery miraculously changed his life. In this powerful essay collection, he serves up a literary banquet celebrating his renewed vision. With the penetrating and entrancing prose that has marked his career as one of the most celebrated essayists, he guides us along the full spectrum of a fascinating life - from the painful stuttering of prep-school days to a vagabond existence as a tiger cage boy in the circus, from enthralling travels in Antarctica to settling into the luscious surroundings of his home in Vermont. Indeed, Tigers & Ice serves full notice of this one-of-a-kind writer at his most evocative, powerful best, exploring his own life and the natural world with trademark honesty and grace. (53/4 X 81/2, 228 pages)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A few years ago, when he was in his late 50s, noted nature writer and essayist Edward Hoagland went blind. For Hoagland, whose work relied on the close study of plants and animals as well as on documentary research, the loss was staggering; as he writes in one of the essays collected in Tigers & Ice, he contemplated suicide after falling victim to near-constant depression. Before he could act, however, an enterprising surgeon restored his sight, and, as Hoagland writes, "In the exalting aftermath of regaining my eyesight, I was incapable of being depressed." His essays--recounting natural-history travel to far-off places like Antarctica, backyard adventures in bird-watching, and explorations within his soul--reflect a change of sensibility: now in his 60s, he finds himself "more moderate, gentler in judgment, less self-conscious, though quite cranky." That self-avowed crankiness shows up seldom in this book, which is instead shot through with the joy of being alive in the world, natural and human, and with great affection. "If 'biology is chemistry with history,' as somebody has written," Hoagland avers, "then nature writing is biology with love." His enthusiasm is contagious, and the result is a hopeful book that, as with all Hoagland's work, is beautifully thought-out and written. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Hoagland's (Balancing Acts, etc.) first essay collection in several years is a mixed bag, by turns celebratory, meditative, curmudgeonly and autobiographical. He poignantly describes his three years of legal blindness during his late 50s, when he couldn't write, friends dropped him and he courted suicidal thoughts, until two eye operations restored his sight. In another piece, he reveals that a stutter from childhood instilled in him empathy for the underdog. His exhilarating account of his recent voyage to Antarctica aboard a Russian research vessel?a mosaic of natural history, personalities, exploration, penguins and geopolitics?is a grand adventure. Close to jungle cats since 1951 when, at age 18, he crossed the U.S. with the Ringling Bros. circus working with tigers and elephants, Hoagland files a heartbreaking dispatch on his 1993 trip to southern India, where he witnessed the vanishing of species like tigers and elephants, shrinking wildlife preserves and tribal clashes. He writes affectingly of the rhythms of rural living in his home in Vermont; mountain climbing; writing as a form of creative play; his love of ponds; the challenges of middle age. While charting his trajectory from Christianity to Transcendentalism, Hoagland ascribes the roots of the ecological crisis to a man-vs.-nature duality that he traces to the Old Testament. Elsewhere, he condones suicide as a life choice and, in a tongue-in-cheek, misanthropic mood, hopes for "a new variety of the neutron bomb" that would kill people but leave behind the rest of creation. Notwithstanding such indulgences, these essays grasp life whole, shuttling easily from idea to memory to astute observation.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 228 pages
• Publisher: The Lyons Press; 1st edition (February 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558217428
• ISBN-13: 978-1558217423
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,449,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Accurate in essence and design, March 25, 2000

By 

john adrean (Chaska, Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life (Hardcover)

I was privately pleased to learn that my favorite essayist, Edward Hoagland, became blind--just like I. Well, almost. I am Deaf as well as blind. I was even more delighted to read about how he reacted to the loss of his vision and coped with it. Because of his short life in blindness, his insight became breathtakingly/breathgivingly sharp. He may view his loss of vision as a loss in some degree, but it has given him a gift; a gift in which his writing reaches and caresses a deeper level in essay-writing. I strongly believe that if he becomes exactly like myself in the respect that he is BOTH blind and deaf, he would still capture deafness with grace, wit, and intelligence as he did with blindness.

Any one of his essay collections is wonderful, but Tigers and Ice transcends them all--and this, coming from one of the best essayists ever, makes this quite probably the very best volume of essays ever.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-written essays with an unfortunate background misanthopy, April 25, 2008

By 

Mark E. Baxter "Inquirer" (Layton, UT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life (Hardcover)

Although some of the essays and all of the writing of this collection of essays are good, I'm really getting tired of the misanthropy of many prominent nature writers, and Hoagland infuses what would otherwise be a decent collection of nature essays with bias, mean-spiritedness and outright hate.

In an introduction that starts with defining nature writing as "biology with love", Hoagland switches to criticizing society, religion, people in general, and then proposes we "be taxed heavily by the United Nations". Like many current nature-writers, none of the above makes any sense, nor is there any evidence provided to back it up, but it quickly divides the world into "them" and "us", and emotionally and sincerely promotes an unworkable but feel-good scheme as a solution. As if 150 dictators and despots who have raped their own countries since time immemorial could do anything with a trillion dollars other than buy more drugs, thugs, guns and hookers.

Essay one, "Behold Now Behemoth" ties Job's sufferings to the author's loss, and regaining, of his sight. Hoagland's admiration of the beauties of Creation are eloquent. Unfortunately, these eloquent ruminations are interspersed with hate. For example, he blames Genesis for exploiting nature, when God commands us rather to be good stewards. He also slurs Chrisianity by blaming it for "slavery, child labor, racial prejudice", and genocide. Of course these societal ills existed before Christianity and were fixed only by Christianity. Slavery, for example, still exists in Asia, Arabia, and Africa, and is only wiped out where Christian ethics flourished. States in the US were the first political entities to outlaw slavery, quickly followed by nations such as England and then the US as a whole after our Civil War. But like all good modern "environmentalists", Hoagland doesn't let fact get in the way of some good hate-mongering. He also throws in the tired nonsense about the massive extinction of species by man. Of course, Hoagland can only name a few since that is all there are. These extinctions of the dodo, moa, passenger pigeon and a very few others are tragic, but they do not number in the millions. When you divide the number of extinctions from the fossil record by the number of years you get a rough number of about 2 extinctions a year. Humans seem to have cut this rate to almost none - a record of distinctive success showing that most humans do their best to protect the environment and that the Chicken Little school of half-wit environmentalists is made of simple political hacks with no concern for the truth or nature.

There are quite a few very short essays on subjects such as aging, friendship, work and other subjects that are excellent. The two longest essays, "Wild Things", and "I Have Seen the Elephant", are about Hoagland's safaris into India and Antarctica, respectively. I enjoyed these accounts immensely and Hoagland manages to leave out the bitterness in most of the middle of the book.

Hoagland does throw in a few obligatory slurs on human kind here and there with comments about hoping for neutron bombs that will not just kill people but also their buildings without scarring the land. This insane wish of so many current "environmentalists", this "starvation theology" as I call it referring to these nuts continually hoping for plague, starvation or other disaster to wipe out all but the favored few (themselves and a few friends), is becoming so prevalent that it isn't funny any more. Kooks like Ted Turner, Eric Pianka and Al Gore really do seem to hope for the miserable deaths of large chunks of humanity. They push junk science and political slavery for the masses even as they jet about the world from debauchery to debauchery, charging giant speaking fees as they go.

Hoagland has one whole essay and frequent mentions in the other essays devoted to his suicidal ideation. He hides his guns and won't walk close to the ship railing lest he blow his brains out or drown himself. As a physician, I would suggest some time in a psych ward and some anti-depressants would greatly help the author. I found this aspect of his "nature" writing puzzling at best.

Anyway, overall there were excellent parts when the author stuck to nature, but when he switched to politics or personal stories, watch out. Three stars overall.