reviews
From Charles Wilkins:
Finished Waking with Thoreau yesterday.
My dad used to say, “Read with a pencil”… which I did in
this case (appropriately enough, given that it’s Thoreau) and could not
stop marking passages, images, turns of phrase, insights, etc., that I
found memorable. Your sister’s art is stunning… a fine expansion of the spirit and details of the book. I loved the tarot pieces, the reinterpreted daguerreotype of Thoreau, . .The House of Pi (quilt).
Your chapter on the Greek letter was wonderful… gave me a whole new perspective. And I was completely transfixed by the passages from the woods, with their echoes of HDT, his message, his poetics, his elusiveness…all of which rattle through your own writing and ideals. Your (and Henry’s) fine musings on the white pine were impressive… as was your dreamy and artful nocturne under the stars and northern lights with Emily, Henry, Vincent and August.
That’s a fine chapter on your first pilgrimage to Walden I was very taken with the whole family motif… quite a bunch you are and were… Your dad’s thoughts of staying in Paris must have come back to him often in Wisconsin after the war. It’s a long way.
I hadn’t realized, or had forgotten, that Henry published so much of his own work… and that Lowell slammed *Walden*. That was quite a letter Henry sent to the Atlantic. Loved that verse from “Orca” that begins, “There is a mighty bald eagle”… “a refugee from the dollar bill/And the land of liberty.”… Marvelous book.
Charles Wilkins is the author of fifteen books, including The Circus at the Edge of the Earth (about his travels with the Great Wallenda Circus), Walk to New York (about his 2002 walk from Thunder Bay to New York City), and In the Land of Long Fingernails. Four of Wilkins’ books have been named to the Globe & Mail’s annual Top 100 Books (1999, 2001, 2004, 2008), and he has won five National Magazine Awards. He has been a finalist for the Writers Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Trillium Literary Award, the Stephen Leacock Award and the Toronto Book Award.
From Christina Zawadiwsky:
Eschewing commercialism and superficial social fanfare, Henry David Thoreau preferred the wisdom of the woods where he discovered lichen plants like the lungwort, the lungs of our planet. Simple and natural states of being appealed to him even though he was well-spoken and basically an intellectual. Author Jeffrey Riordan Hinich walks alongside Thoreau as a fellow botanist and magician, and even though they live(d) in separate times and spaces, their philosophical affinities bring them together. Unlike the time of Thoreau's Walden, Hinich tells us that "the stakes are higher today. The environment is now increasingly under threat, exponentially..... The political drama also crescendos, as does the demand on each of us to locate and follow higher laws." Thinking that Thoreau would be appalled at our post-modern living in which "the very air is now polluted," Hinich learns that the lungwort lichen is "an old growth indicator species and will not tolerate conditions where the air is foul or where the woods are over cut." If we allow timber to age, the lungwort and other species will grow and we will know that our planet is thriving, as the earth and health were two of Thoreau's major concerns.
The title of this book comes from Thoreau's assertion that "only that day dawns to which we are awake," and the cover illustration is a 158-year-old daguerreotype with "delicate spheres" that "have orbited in the ether," reminding us of "the mysticism we have come to associate with the caretaker of Walden Pond." The author leaves us blank pages for our own lungwort sightings, implying that we may still be touched by magic and natural healing as long as we pursue this search. But Thoreau himself did not want blind faith followers, writing that "I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on my account....I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible....pursuing their own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead."
Certainly believing, as Thomas Jefferson did, to "Never fear your government - your government should fear you," Thoreau felt that we should engage in civil disobedience when necessary, and also cling to solitude (as does the hermit) for pause and reflection, since so much is dissipated in idle social banter.
And how did the author of this book learn to love Thoreau? From his father, Robert Eugene Hinich, who showed him copies of Walden and Civil Disobedience while saying "someday you're going to want to read this," his father who taught him how to span "a bridge from one world to the next," his father from whom he never heard a racist or a sexist joke and who believed in his son finding his way "to Achigan Lake, a later twentieth century version of Walden Pond," his father who in a dream joined him amidst "every kind of people....every time, both genders, every race, all religions, no religion, each age and manner of dress." This book is a great tribute to his father and to music, which unites us, and, as Thoreau said, "When I hear music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest."
Waking With Thoreau is also a paean to pine trees, whales, deep snow, survival, coyotes, freedom, close relatives and those who lived before them, Emily Dickinson, Vincent Van Gogh, compasses that help us find our way and all of us who sleep under the stars. "A shared experience with nature is within our sights," the author acknowledges, even if the right way has been lost for a very long time.
Without nature we are just living skeletons, and without individuality we may as well not even have names. In Waking With Thoreau Jeffrey Riordan Hinich leads us back to what's sane and tribal, and beyond that, to a higher order and a better way of living replete with mysticism, splendor, regeneration, transcendence, awe and an appreciation of the natural world that we've been so generously and graciously given.
Opening doors to our imaginations with her visuals, artist Leslie Ann Cochran leads us to new vistas. Her dramatic rendition of Thoreau's daguerreotype (replete with an added sprig of lungwort) is gripping, as are carefully-wrought family portraits. Her re-interpretation of Tarot cards (Dreamythology) shows us that wisdom has many faces. No one will ever forget the illustration of a hand lifting up beautifully green lungwort, symbolizing to us that our planet's still breathing.
Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist, critic and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment For The Arts award, two Wisconsin Arts Board awards, a Co-Ordinating Council Of Literary Magazines Award and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of Where The Waters Meet, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards and a Commitment To Community Television Award. She is a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology (and has received one herself), the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, has published books of poetry and has had poetry and fiction in hundreds of literary periodicals. She has reviewed music for Music Room Reviews, films for Movie Room Reviews, Movie Scribes, and FilmSay, and books and films for Book Room Reviews. She also shows her original visual artwork professionally.
Finished Waking with Thoreau yesterday.
My dad used to say, “Read with a pencil”… which I did in
this case (appropriately enough, given that it’s Thoreau) and could not
stop marking passages, images, turns of phrase, insights, etc., that I
found memorable. Your sister’s art is stunning… a fine expansion of the spirit and details of the book. I loved the tarot pieces, the reinterpreted daguerreotype of Thoreau, . .The House of Pi (quilt).
Your chapter on the Greek letter was wonderful… gave me a whole new perspective. And I was completely transfixed by the passages from the woods, with their echoes of HDT, his message, his poetics, his elusiveness…all of which rattle through your own writing and ideals. Your (and Henry’s) fine musings on the white pine were impressive… as was your dreamy and artful nocturne under the stars and northern lights with Emily, Henry, Vincent and August.
That’s a fine chapter on your first pilgrimage to Walden I was very taken with the whole family motif… quite a bunch you are and were… Your dad’s thoughts of staying in Paris must have come back to him often in Wisconsin after the war. It’s a long way.
I hadn’t realized, or had forgotten, that Henry published so much of his own work… and that Lowell slammed *Walden*. That was quite a letter Henry sent to the Atlantic. Loved that verse from “Orca” that begins, “There is a mighty bald eagle”… “a refugee from the dollar bill/And the land of liberty.”… Marvelous book.
Charles Wilkins is the author of fifteen books, including The Circus at the Edge of the Earth (about his travels with the Great Wallenda Circus), Walk to New York (about his 2002 walk from Thunder Bay to New York City), and In the Land of Long Fingernails. Four of Wilkins’ books have been named to the Globe & Mail’s annual Top 100 Books (1999, 2001, 2004, 2008), and he has won five National Magazine Awards. He has been a finalist for the Writers Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Trillium Literary Award, the Stephen Leacock Award and the Toronto Book Award.
From Christina Zawadiwsky:
Eschewing commercialism and superficial social fanfare, Henry David Thoreau preferred the wisdom of the woods where he discovered lichen plants like the lungwort, the lungs of our planet. Simple and natural states of being appealed to him even though he was well-spoken and basically an intellectual. Author Jeffrey Riordan Hinich walks alongside Thoreau as a fellow botanist and magician, and even though they live(d) in separate times and spaces, their philosophical affinities bring them together. Unlike the time of Thoreau's Walden, Hinich tells us that "the stakes are higher today. The environment is now increasingly under threat, exponentially..... The political drama also crescendos, as does the demand on each of us to locate and follow higher laws." Thinking that Thoreau would be appalled at our post-modern living in which "the very air is now polluted," Hinich learns that the lungwort lichen is "an old growth indicator species and will not tolerate conditions where the air is foul or where the woods are over cut." If we allow timber to age, the lungwort and other species will grow and we will know that our planet is thriving, as the earth and health were two of Thoreau's major concerns.
The title of this book comes from Thoreau's assertion that "only that day dawns to which we are awake," and the cover illustration is a 158-year-old daguerreotype with "delicate spheres" that "have orbited in the ether," reminding us of "the mysticism we have come to associate with the caretaker of Walden Pond." The author leaves us blank pages for our own lungwort sightings, implying that we may still be touched by magic and natural healing as long as we pursue this search. But Thoreau himself did not want blind faith followers, writing that "I would not have anyone adopt my mode of living on my account....I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible....pursuing their own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead."
Certainly believing, as Thomas Jefferson did, to "Never fear your government - your government should fear you," Thoreau felt that we should engage in civil disobedience when necessary, and also cling to solitude (as does the hermit) for pause and reflection, since so much is dissipated in idle social banter.
And how did the author of this book learn to love Thoreau? From his father, Robert Eugene Hinich, who showed him copies of Walden and Civil Disobedience while saying "someday you're going to want to read this," his father who taught him how to span "a bridge from one world to the next," his father from whom he never heard a racist or a sexist joke and who believed in his son finding his way "to Achigan Lake, a later twentieth century version of Walden Pond," his father who in a dream joined him amidst "every kind of people....every time, both genders, every race, all religions, no religion, each age and manner of dress." This book is a great tribute to his father and to music, which unites us, and, as Thoreau said, "When I hear music I fear no danger, I am invulnerable, I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times and to the latest."
Waking With Thoreau is also a paean to pine trees, whales, deep snow, survival, coyotes, freedom, close relatives and those who lived before them, Emily Dickinson, Vincent Van Gogh, compasses that help us find our way and all of us who sleep under the stars. "A shared experience with nature is within our sights," the author acknowledges, even if the right way has been lost for a very long time.
Without nature we are just living skeletons, and without individuality we may as well not even have names. In Waking With Thoreau Jeffrey Riordan Hinich leads us back to what's sane and tribal, and beyond that, to a higher order and a better way of living replete with mysticism, splendor, regeneration, transcendence, awe and an appreciation of the natural world that we've been so generously and graciously given.
Opening doors to our imaginations with her visuals, artist Leslie Ann Cochran leads us to new vistas. Her dramatic rendition of Thoreau's daguerreotype (replete with an added sprig of lungwort) is gripping, as are carefully-wrought family portraits. Her re-interpretation of Tarot cards (Dreamythology) shows us that wisdom has many faces. No one will ever forget the illustration of a hand lifting up beautifully green lungwort, symbolizing to us that our planet's still breathing.
Christina Zawadiwsky is Ukrainian-American, born in New York City, has a degree in Fine Arts, and is a poet, artist, journalist, critic and TV producer. She has received a National Endowment For The Arts award, two Wisconsin Arts Board awards, a Co-Ordinating Council Of Literary Magazines Award and an Art Futures Award, among other honors. She was the originator and producer of Where The Waters Meet, a local TV series created to facilitate the voices of artists of all genres in the media, for which she won two national and twenty local awards and a Commitment To Community Television Award. She is a contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology (and has received one herself), the recipient of an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, has published books of poetry and has had poetry and fiction in hundreds of literary periodicals. She has reviewed music for Music Room Reviews, films for Movie Room Reviews, Movie Scribes, and FilmSay, and books and films for Book Room Reviews. She also shows her original visual artwork professionally.