Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece (Concord Library) [Paperback]

Emily Hiestand (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Concord Library | Publication Date: September 30, 1993

Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece. "A tour de force of personal narrative. . . . Astonishingly fluid and keenly observant." --The Boston Globe

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Kirkpatrick Sale says Emily Hiestand travels with "the mind of an ecologist, the heart of a pagan, and the words of a poet." From peat moors to mangrove roots, from fire corals to pelagic caves and underwater sponges named after "black chimneys, orange softballs, stinking pillows and vases, chicken livers, and lavender tubes," Hiestand's descriptions of nature are hard to resist and the rest of her travels are every bit as delightful.

From Publishers Weekly

The exquisite prose and erudition displayed in these essays by National Poetry Series Award-winning poet Hiestand ( Green with Witch Hazel Wood ) may awe some readers as she brilliantly portrays four very different, far-flung localities. Their geology, history, and people are animated by an artist's vision, a naturalist's curiosity and an intellectual disposition. Accompanied for most of her travels by another "middle-aged bookish woman," Hiestand explores the former Mayan stronghold of Belize--an environmentalist's unspoiled paradise inhabited by a rich mixture of people who have descended mainly from slaves of the colonial past. The fog-shrouded, windswept, rainy Orkneys, with their monolithic cairns and circles assembled by Neolithic humans, offer a stark contrast to the idyllic, sunbathed islands of Greece "saturated with myth." The reader will long remember Hiestand's chilling and masterful account of her meeting with a "primal" Everglades alligator.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (September 30, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080707117X
• ISBN-13: 978-0807071175
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,839,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Praise by a reader familiar with Hiestand's work, July 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece (Concord Library) (Paperback)

The Very Rich Hours does not merely tell; it transports. And if this is not enough, it also entertains. Hiestand has an eye for the humor innate in most situations involving human beings, a sense communicated delicately and wryly rather than broadly. The tableau which features Hiestand and her travelling companion learning how to navigate a houseboat in the Everglades is as funny as choice parts of Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See. Like Adams, Hiestand does not allow her own discomfiture to eclipse the enjoyment her audience might obtain from her experience. Hiestand also knows that the real adventure in travelling lies in discoveries like the Stromness Natural History Museum, with its "hundred frozen-in-flight, frozen-on-a-branch, or frozen-in-defense-of-their-young stuffed birds," or the sudden appearance of an herbalist shop, populated by "crones," on a busy Athens street. She finds many marvelous surprises, and she invests the time and att! ention required to appreciate and understand them. The Very Rich Hours deserves the same attention.

5.0 out of 5 stars Adventures of the mind and heart, June 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece (Concord Library) (Paperback)

What fun, what vision, what a great shipwreck story. I've read plenty of sea adventures, but never one that merged grit, adrenaline, and fear with a lyrical excursion worthy of Calvino or Marquez. And that's one part of one essay. Like a travelogue shot by a feature filmmaker, this beautifully wrought book offers sharp, compelling storytelling images set in luminous portraits of the natural world.

5.0 out of 5 stars Yet more praise!, June 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece (Concord Library) (Paperback)

"If one must travel, one should do it with the eyes of a child, the mind of an ecologist, the heart of a pagan, and the words of a poet. Astonishingly, Emily Hiestand has all of that." --Kirkpatrick Sale, author,The Conquest of Paradise

"The prose quivers with grace and wit as it charges the large questions with luminous details." --Bonnie Costello, author, Marianne Moore:Imaginary Possessions

"In these fresh accounts of far-flung locations, Hiestand keeps returning us to the profound questions not of exploration, but of home. That is the book's great discovery: we're in this together, wherever we are." --Patricia Hampl, author,A Romantic Education

"The most exciting travel writing I have read in years.... These pieces are, in the best sense, world-views... The poetic eye is their greatest strength; or rather, a poetic sensibility and intuitive perceptiveness combined with a remarkably cultivated and civilized intellect... The style seems to be an expression of good manners, good intellectual manners. She confronts head on some of the basic issues of writing and thinking about nature." --Robert Finch, ed.,The Norton Book of Nature Writing

"Her range of references is wide and unexpected, and she is a wonderful observer... [W]hat holds the book together is a wry and elegant dexterity of intelligence, a sense of humor that engages both the solemn revelations and the undignified exasperations of travel with precision and elan." --Franklin Burroughs, author, Billy Watson's Croker Sack