This book is great, has many easy recipies with ingredients you have at your home. A+++

Andrea Olsen's book wakes up your conscious being and brings back your connectedness to earth. It makes you grateful for gravity and the nature that surrounds you and you might begin to be in awe of yourself and others. As Bebe Miller already said, this book will be with you for a long time. Body and Earth touches all your senses with its beautiful art work and its suggested exercises are easy and joyful to complete if you wish to do so. Here are just some of the "exercises" the book suggests: Water - notice how just by sipping some nice clear water it transitions from an external to an internal state. Movement - imagine creating a short dance for every day of the week and how this might wake up your senses and might relate to your sense of space. Food - write your own story of digestion as food moves through you to nurture you. Oh, and your place. Choose a small area outside and investigate it: where is water, what insects live on it, how is life like from the perspective of an insect, what plants are on this chosen place of yours and how do they smell and even taste? The book truly invites you to investigate yourself and all that surrounds you. This book is so much fun and so enjoyable that you learn a lot along the way without even noticing. It's a great gift for anyone.

This is also a wonderful book for body workers and their students. As a Yoga teacher I have had the opportunity to work with Andrea and I know that her suggestions really work because you have a chance to experience yourself what she teaches. It brings anatomical teachings back to life. To paraphrase Andrea, this book will make you feel and as you feel you are becoming a caretaker of body, a caretaker of earth. I think we have already caused too much pain to both, so this book might encourage us to heal and act.

Gamaliel Painter: Biography Of A Town Father is the story of how one adventurous pioneer transformed a cluster of log huts into a thriving village and one of Vermont's most influential towns. Gamaliel Painter, a man of forceful personality that combined daring, shrewdness and caution, arrived in Middlebury from Connecticut in the mid-eighteenth century. He took on many trades and professions including pioneer town founder, college founder, associate of Ethan Allen at the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, Captain of Artificers in the Continental Army, a two-fisted sheriff, judge, singer of Vermont's Declaration of Independence, legislator, surveyor, land speculator, industrialist, and toll-road tycoon. Biographer Storrs Lee has drawn upon a wealth of historical material to produce a vivid, lively, accurate, and impressive account of Gamaliel Patiner, a most remarkable and accomplished man who left a lasting imprint on Vermont's colonial and revolutionary history.

You probably haven't heard of any of the poets collected in this exciting anthology. That's okay. They publish their poems in little literary journals and their books are mostly published by obscure presses. Most of these poets haven't published more than one book. I'm pretty familiar with contemporary poetry, but the majority of the writers collected here were unknown names to me.

Now I know their names, and better than that, I know their poems. My life is fuller, and I'm grateful to Michael Collier for creating such a diverse and vibrant collection. There is truly something for just about everyone here, from the lover of the bizarre and experimental to the traditionalist yearning for poets who know what meter is (there's not much rhyming, though).

Where do you start with a book like this? You could just dip in somewhere at random and see what you find; with this collection, you're probably going to pull out a moment of wonder no matter which page you flip to. If you've got to start somewhere, check out Olena Kalytiak Davis -- she's one of the most amazing poets alive, I think, and Collier has collected some brilliant recent work which didn't make it into her book And Her Soul Out of Nothing. But maybe you prefer something a little less daring for your first try -- check out the amusing, thought-provoking poems by Roger Fanning, written with perfectly accessible diction and syntax. You'd certainly like the poems by Richard Blanco, for I've shown his work to a number of very different people, all of whom liked it very much. If you want something which makes you feel like you're really reading cutting-edge poetry, check out D.A. Powell -- you'll have to hold the book sideways to read his poems. Don't miss Nick Flynn's "Bag of Mice" or Adrienne Su's "I Can't Become a Buddhist", or Campbell McGrath's wonderful "Capitalist Poem #36", which begins, "We've got this cheese down here to give away,/ tens of thousands of pounds of cheese."

The New American Poets was published in celebration of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference's 75th anniversary, and I can't think of a better tribute to the conference which has played such an important role in the lives of many of the greatest poets in the U.S. than this anthology, a wonderful gift to all readers of poetry.

There's an old Russian saying which translates roughly into English as "The Road to the Garden is Often the Hardest". Such is certainly the case with most mid-19th Century Russian history. But Pozefsky succeeds in bringing Petrev and the roots of Russian Radicalism to light with an energetic style and a brilliant new format for footnoting. I also enjoyed the many cartoons that helped illustrate this significant period of Russian history.
Perhaps my review of Pozefsky's incisive text can best be captured in this Armenian poem, written in 1794 by Stefan Gorganerian.

The dust of youth
The cries of mute farmers
All converge on the yawns of history.

But no blind horses or mules
Can carry so harsh a burden
As that of our elders.

Publishers Weekly review of "Tell Me Everything, and Other Stories," July 6, 1998.

Like a long song with an unchanging sad refrain, the 14 stories in Hinnefeld's first collection are melancholy, varied and yet very much of a piece. Some, like "Echo Guilt," evoke an Edward Hopper-like solitude in which the narrator stands back from her world as if from a painting, trying to figure it all out. In others, such as "The Slow and Painful Demise of the American Family," Hinnefeld conveys a sense of how close to the surface old angers and horrors linger, and of how we torture ourselves in essentially transient lives with the hope of permanence. Whether she shows them in a silent summer pool in a glade in Northeastern Indiana or trapped in New York squalor, Hinnefeld's female protagonists tend to cling to the same traditional, domestic fantasies and are confused when their choices leave them lonely and embittered. "I can't stop dreaming of empty buildings," reflects the woman in the title story, an intimate portrait that explores the self through landscapes of dreams, suburbs, and cities. Intelligent and moving, Hinnefeld's debut should attract discerning readers.

I came to this book as a relative beginner in nature observation, I could pick out the major tree species, but not much more than that. This guide was of tremendous help to me in learning to see relationships between tree types and the soil, exposeur, water, and other plants. The text is focused on Vermont, but I found it very helpful in New Hampshire, and I am sure it would be useful in Maine and New York as well as some of the Great Lakes areas. It is also very beautiful to look at, though some what difficult to read straight through from cover to cover. Take it with you on a hike, or during fly season look at it when you get back.

I hope there are or will be additional books of this type for other areas of the country / world. The authors and artist have set a high standard.

Bravo to Katherine L. Hester.

"Eggs for Young America" reminds me again why I so enjoy reading quality short fiction. Not only does she nail down thought mentalities from the modern South... she brings the scenes in her stories alive with vivid descriptions of detail. Her characters draw you in, her scenes show you around, and the plots force you to empathize with the main characters. After each story you end up thinking, "I know someone like that."

Think: a chatty Flannery O'Conner without the gore.

I can't wait to read what Katherine Hester writes next.

This is a very moving, understated collection of stories reflecting working class lives. Hester chillingly portrays the despondence, angst, lethargy, fantasy of escape, and tragic waste inherent in many blue or no collar lives. A melancholy, but profound set of stories which describe the typically "invisible" lumpen proletariat.

Great book. The author's range is phenomenal, with memorable, real characters of different ages and walks of life. Although Hester is a woman, she is very effective at presenting situations from the point of view from both her male and female characters. Her stories made me think and I enjoyed discussing them with my friends. I'm looking forward to Ms. Hester's next book!

This book is multifaceted and some facets are better than others. I found the author's descriptions of his experiences with chronic mood disturbance enlightening and interesting. His attention to the interpersonal impact of dysphoria was especially good. As a book about the natural world, I was less satisfied. Moreover, I didn't find myself drawn to the connections he was making between processes in the natural world and the internal processes of a mood disorder. His accounts of his homelands lack the vividness found in works by Rick Bass or Richard Nelson. I don't want to overstate these criticisms; the book is well written and this is exactly the "type" of book I like: it's about a person who loves the land that surrounds him. However, better reading of this sort is found with the above-mentioned authors, or I especially want to recommend a couple of works by lesser known authors, "Purple Flat Top" by Jack Nisbet, and "Teewinot" by Turner.

Terry Osborne's coming-of-self narrative is brave, honest, and poignant. I have recently left New England after seven years, and Osborne's careful and tactile descriptions truly stirred me. But even for anyone who's unattached to a Vermont landscape, there's an important lesson here. Osborne shares with us his very personal journey to the discovery of how deeply our environment can inform our sense of self - in Osborne's case, how the complex "mosaic" of land, water, and air reflects the contours of his struggle with depression. Even now, living so far from all the swamp-and-peaks nature of Osborne's journeys (I'm a Paris resident), Sightlines has inspired me to explore my surroundings with a renewed energy and curiosity - to understand how much self-discovery can unfold through such an investigation. For that - and for his pure, graceful prose - I thank him!

Every so often a book reminds us of why we seek out the woods for solitude and comfort. "Sightlines" accomplishes that considerable feat with resounding success.

But it doesn't stop there. This elegant and deeply human narrative about the contours of landscapes (both inner and outer) lets us walk several paces behind the author and view his journey through years of depression even as we pause to lean against a nearby birch tree and admire the surrounding beauty of his rugged New England. The book is a remarkable achievement for combining these two storylines--and very often it is downright mesmerizing.

Osborne's writing--understated and controlled, what you'd expect from a Vermonter--soars to its greatest heights when framing the smallest things: a seemingly uprooted tree, a dark swamp, a river sand bar. Those images, and many others, stay vibrant long after the book is done.