According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and then into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an
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Like Dante’s Inferno, Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods begins in a dark forest, ends on a mountain, and passes through nearly every form of sin in between. The hero of this third novel by the author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons is no middle-aged poet, though. She’s a young woman named Luce, most of whose life has been a recurrent dark night of the
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In July 2010, I wrote a blog post about Letters of a Woman Homesteader, by Elinore Pruitt Stewart, whose wonderful letters, written in the early 20th century, described her life as a Wyoming rancher. The book had been one of my longtime favorites, and writing the post gave me great pleasure. I’ve always admired Elinore Stewart, not only for the obvious
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