Steep Passages: A World-wide Eco-Adventurer Unlocks Nature's Spiritual Truths

Book Description

"Life's transitions are sometimes icy, often scary. The more we think about them, the more difficult they seem," writes David Lee Drotar in this collection of penetrating essays. Where others may see only trees or waterfalls, Drotar sees broader psychological, social and sometimes political implications in the outdoor adventures he pursues.

Steep Passages skillfully draws parallels between the natural world and the people who are finding their way through it. Whether describing the unusual reproductive mechanisms of lizards in the Galapagos Islands, dialoging with French teenagers about American television, or chronicling his September 11 experiences on the Rideau canal in Canada, Drotar's engaging stories yield surprise and meaning around every bend in the trail.

At a time when we're all less sure about where our lives are headed, Steep Passages takes us on a literary journey that is destined to become a classic of modern nature writing. From the ski slopes of New England to the mountain bazaars of Africa, Drotar weaves powerful sensory images, history and metaphor in an almost mystical narrative that crosses all cultural boundaries and captures the essence of what it means to be human.

Customer Reviews:

Provocative.......2002-12-10

This book left me spellbound. Drotar has a true talent for telling tales that move on several levels. A river journey in Southeast Asia becomes a backward journey in time... Riding a horse through the Adirondacks leads to deeper insights about the precarious nature of our daily lives... A ski expedition reveals truths about the frightening transitions we all face. The eighteen essays, categorized by season, span the globe, yet they all affirm our connection with nature and with each other. And, somehow, Drotar manages to accomplish this with without ponderous prose or heavy-handing philosophizing. Tuck this book in your backpack for thoughtful reading during your own travels, or keep it on your bedside table to inspire your dreams.

Enticing Collection of Short Stories.......2002-05-17

I enjoyed this book immensely. Drotar whisks us around the world in these captivating essays, riding an icebreaker in Finland at one moment, a mountain bike in Wales the next. Every person, every place, every event reveals so much more to Drotar than it does to most of us. Ski runs become metaphors for life's challenges. A night sky helps Drotar discover the planet beneath his feet. The author dances thru time and space in a way that bewitches the reader and enriches his travel experience. Struggles for democracy in Myanmar--and America--are reflected in a prism where time, Zen and Buddhist like, flows backwards. Landowners in the pacific northwest embrace redwoods and a new ethic. His characters come to life on the page: Cowboys at a roundup in Wyoming, rangers with eagle eyes in the Catskills, children in Quito carrying bundles of dignity amidst urban squalor.

Few writers can weave their thoughts and meaning into a travel experience without destroying the tempo or becoming preachy, but Drotar accomplishes both.

Intensely Rich Images and Inner Messages on Life.......2002-04-05

Steep Passages took me on a wild ride through nature, exotic places, and fascinating people. There were times when I felt as though I was right along side Drotar, feeling the cool winter wind on my face or tasting the salty sea air. The descriptions in the book are so intensely rich and full of life that at times you can't believe that one person has experienced what so many only dream of. From chapter to chapter, Steep Passages keeps you craving for more and more and in the mean while Drotar's inner messages on life, often make you reflect on whom you are and what you're doing with yours. It's a book that I could read over and over again and each time immerse myself into a scene that many of us only dream about feeling, tasting and believing.

Book Description

Due to fundamental similarities between the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and multicellular organisms at the molecular level, and the powerful range of experimental tools available for this yeast, S. cerevisiae is proving an ideal model system for studies on protein synthesis and targeting. The topics covered are: - Messenger RNA stability and translation.- The translation apparatus. - Translational control and fidelity. - Protein targeting to the mitochondrion. - Nuclear transport. - The secretory pathway. - Protein folding and degradation. - Protein splicing. Modern and often novel molecular, genetic and biochemical approaches as well as most recent data are provided. The reader will gain a comprehensive view of the current status of the field.

Amazon.com

Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, Tracy Chevalier's Falling Angels is a meditation on change, loss, and recovery. Her central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery modeled on Highgate. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well- schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia's mother, Maude's mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day, and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women's suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense.

Although the point of view shifts between many characters (with even the Coleman's maid and cook getting their say, sometimes unnecessarily), Falling Angels is essentially the children's story, since it is their lives that are most open to change. The narrative spans exactly the years of Edward VII's reign, from the morning after his mother Queen Victoria's death in January 1901 to his own death in May 1910. Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) deftly uses the nation's dramatically different mourning for these two monarchs to signal the social transformations of the period. Readers at ease with English history will find Falling Angels an unusually subtle novel, with an emotional range that recalls the best of the Edwardian novelists, E.M. Forster, and his quintessential novel of Edwardian manners, Howard's End. --Regina Marler

Book Description

A fashionable London cemetery, January 1901: Two graves stand side by side, one decorated with an oversize classical urn, the other with a sentimental marble angel. Two families, visiting their respective graves on the day after Queen Victoria's death, teeter on the brink of a new era. The Colemans and the Waterhouses are divided by social class as well as taste. They would certainly not have become acquainted had not their two girls, meeting behind the tombstones, become best friends. And, even more unsuitably, become involved with the gravedigger's muddy son.

As the girls grow up, as the new king changes social customs, as a new, forward-thinking era takes wing, the lives and fortunes of the two families become more and more closely intertwined-neighbors in life as well as death.

Against a gas-lit backdrop of social and political history, Tracy Chevalier explores the prejudices and flaws of a changing time. A novel that is at once elegant, daring, original, and compelling, Falling Angels is a splendid follow-up to the book The New York Times called "marvelously evocative" and The Wall Street Journal deemed "triumphant."

Customer Reviews:

Historical fiction that educates as well as entertains.......2007-04-25

The story of Maude Coleman, Lavinia Waterhouse and their families is told in the first person by each character involved so it reads very much like a diary. I like how the reader gets to see everyone's perspectives on a situation instead of hearing a story from just one angle. We hear the traditional and modern views of the time...in a changing world where the women's suffrage movement is getting more and more forceful leading (in this story) to the Hyde Park demonstration.

As someone who enjoys walking around old Victorian cemeteries it was lovely to have this one brought to life with the people who visited and worked there. I found the details of mourning etiquette during the Victorian period and the early 1900's fascinating: How long is acceptable to mourn, what to wear and what to do with it after the mourning period is over, and the views of the time on cremation and who should be buried where in the cemetery.

A sensitive and fascinating book.

Insight into history.......2007-01-03

Boy, a cemetary as the lead character! This was the way our book club handled the discussion of this book. We were able to tag each character with how the cemetary affected their lives. I liked the short bursts of narative in the small chapters. There was much to discuss regarding the customs of the time and the role of women. How the marriages worked out - or not - was quite surprising.
We left the book wanting to know what happened next.

"Absolutely loved this book!!!!".......2006-11-07

I could not wait till bedtime to pick this book up and read on. It was written so well and kept me wanting to know more. This book was fantastic and I would recommend it to everyone.

yawn...........2006-10-31

I typically loved historical novels but this one was a snoozer. Totally uneventful until the end--and then bad things happen to the only characters you can actually like! The constant change of voice was too choppy.

o.k........2006-08-06

i didn't find is quite as good as her other books, but it''s still a very good book.

Average customer rating:

Could have been more lively

Necropolis: London and Its Dead
Catharine Arnold
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster UK
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

ASIN: 0743268334

Book Description

Necropolis is a luminous, oddly beguiling account of how London has treated its dead, ranging from Roman burial rites to the horrors of the plague, from the founding of the great Victorian cemeteries to the more recent trends of collective grief and the cult of mourning, such as that surrounding the death of Princess Diana. Leaving no headstone unturned, Catherine Arnold unearths one of the great untold histories of the nation's capitol. Skillfully blending history, architecture, archaeology, and anecdote, she also explores phenomena like bodysnatching, public executions, and the rise of the undertaking trade. Ghoulishly entertaining and full of fascinating nuggets of information, Necropolis is destined to become a classic work on the city.

Customer Reviews:

Could have been more lively.......2007-07-20

A well researched presentation of burial rites in the city London since earliest known times to the very present, including medieval London facing the same problem that Catholic cities everywhere faced with the desire to preserve the body for Judgment Day and to bury the corpse in a churchyard, coupled with practically no common sense about health and hygiene, struggling to find room for the dead in the land of the living.
An interesting book without being too ghoulish or gory; there are plenty of anecdotes. One wishes that, instead of just giving the bare bones of some stories, the author had spent a little more time fleshing them out, such as she did with the affect of massive deaths in the World Wars and from the plaque. There is a very well done section on Victorian funeral attitudes and the creation of the undertaking business, including how attitudes on grief had changed coming up to the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
More drawings, lithos or photos would have been interesting.
Written by a Brit for Brits, there are some references to figures of the past that may be unknown to the American reader, but nothing that bogs the presentation.

Permanent Londoners: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of London

Average customer rating:

Nice work-
Terrific guide to London cemeteries
Excellent companion for a visit to London cemeteries
A good read but historicly innaccurate

Permanent Londoners: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of London
Judi Culbertson , and Tom Randall
Manufacturer: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Europe | Travel | Subjects | Books

General | Travel | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Permanent Italians: An Illustrated Guide to the Cemeteries of Italy (The Permanent Series)

ASIN: 0930031326

Customer Reviews:

Nice work-.......2002-08-28

I prefered this to Permanent Italians, perhaps because I knew who more of the people were? Nice biographical sketchs of many of the people mentioned and very nice directions on taking the underground to each cemetery.... well I have never been to London, I assume they are good directions :o) It has a small map of each cemetery with marks designating where the more notworthy monuments are located. It's a great boo if you love cemetries and possible valued beyond money if you are visiting London and love cemeteries. I believe it is part of a set with Permanent Italians and Californians.

Terrific guide to London cemeteries.......2001-05-07

Sixteen cemetery sites are listed and many graves discussed in this fine addition to the series by Culbertson and Randall: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Bunhill Fields, St. Paul's, Brompton, Kensal Green, Highgate and St. Michael's, St. John-at-Hampstead, Hampstead, Golders Green and St. Marylebone, Putney Vale and St. Mary Magdalene, St. Nicholas in Chiswick, and Windsor Castle and Frogmore.

I've used this book as well as Permanent Italians and Permanent Parisians, and have not had the bad experience others have mentioned; in my experience the directions are fine, and I've visited maybe half of all the places they've written about in these three books.

Names are highlighted so they're easy to find, and there are plenty of maps and photographs.

This is a great book if you are interested in adding these sites to your travels in London.

Excellent companion for a visit to London cemeteries.......2000-02-02

I used the book on visits to some of the most interesting London cemeteries. It has good maps and many details on the various famous residents. I found the historical data quite accurate and some of the stories very amusing. Highly recommended!

A good read but historicly innaccurate.......1998-05-04

I enjoyed the book but found at least one innaccuracy. It claims George Wombwell (1788-1850; buried in Highgate West) was the first person to exhibit the Elephant Man (Joseph Merrick). Mr. Merrick was not born until 1862, twelve years after Mr. Wombwell's death. Since the book is primarily a historical guide, I cannot trust it's research and therefore could not recommend it.

Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins and Development of the General Cemetery

Average customer rating:

It's really for the Cemetery Obsessive

Kensal Green Cemetery: The Origins and Development of the General Cemetery
James Stevens Curl
Manufacturer: Phillimore
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1860771947

Customer Reviews:

It's really for the Cemetery Obsessive.......2003-12-11

It's a chunck of change, but this is a limited edition, only 2,000 copies. It is a very comprehensive history of Kensal Green and has a detailed section on current restoration projects.

Average customer rating:

London Cemeteries
Hugh Meller
Manufacturer: Humanities Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Look Inside Travel Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 0861270045

Average customer rating:

London's Cemeteries
Darren Beach
Manufacturer: Metro Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

Landscape | Architecture | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books

Guidebooks | Reference & Tips | Travel | Subjects | Books

Tourist Destinations & Museums | Reference & Tips | Travel | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 1902910230

Book Description

The Explore London series of travel guides concentrates on the more permanent aspects of London life, from city churches to parks and gardens. Informative and discerning, yet thoroughly accessible, and packed with photos and maps, these are your ideal companions to exploring and experiencing the capital.

Book Description

This innovative work of social history is about the burial of the dead, and suggests why it is such an important historical issue. Vanessa Harding focuses on the turbulent worlds of early modern London and Paris, and makes use of rich contemporary documentation to compare and contrast their experience of dealing with the dead, profoundly questioned by the impact of the Reformation. Dr. Harding shows the over-arching importance of place and location, and of an urban social setting in which consumption and display were manifest everywhere, in shaping funeral ritual.

The Eastern Cemetery of Roman London (MoLAS Monograph)

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The Eastern Cemetery of Roman London (MoLAS Monograph)
Bruno Barber , David Browsher , and D. Bowsher
Manufacturer: Museum of London Archaeology Service
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Greater London cemeteries and crematoria and their registers

Average customer rating:

Greater London cemeteries and crematoria and their registers
Patricia S Wolfston
Manufacturer: Society of Genealogists
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Genealogy | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0901878553

Book Description

Her name is Jazmin, and like the music of her name, her life throbs and swings--a few flat notes to be sure, but also bursting with rich passages that rise and soar. Sitting on her stoop she fills her notebook with laughs, anger, and hope. There's the risky lure of luscious-looking men and the consequences of free haircuts. This is a fourteen-year-old so-real girl living in Harlem in the 1960's, born with clenched fists and big dreams, and strengthened by the love of a steadfast sister. Captured within pages of her tough, exuberant life are all the beauty, chaos, confusion, and clarity that accompany the excitement of exploring life's possibilities--and discovering they are endless.

Customer Reviews:

PLZ READ THIS BOOK.......2007-06-28

I am not much of a reader. I got this book for an airplane ride. I have read this book a million times since then.

THis book deals with some original themes (DIdn't I say I don't write love letters) and some usual themes (So I ain't no good girl). Some of the stories are happy and funny (Mookie in Love), some are serious and dark (I know a stupid boy when I see one).

This book has the ability to write about cheesy and done themes sounding fresh and modern, and never cheesy.

plz read this book!!

~Angel

Black Poet's Diary By Hatteras D........2007-04-02

Jazmin's Notebook by Nikki Grimes is about a poor african american girl who lives in foster homes with her sister CeCe, and Jazmin writes poems to calm herself in hard times and also uses her notebook to write about her life .
I thinks a great book and I relate to Jazmin because I write to calm me down but only I use story writing. I would recommend this to girls who have a diary because it is written in journal format. Read this book and get indide Jazmin's head.

Black Poet's Diary By Hatteras D........2007-04-02

Jazmin's Notebook by Nikki Grimes is about a poor african american girl who lives in foster homes with her sister CeCe, and Jazmin writes poems to calm herself in hard times and also uses her notebook to write about her life .
I thinks a great it's a great book and I would recommend this to girls who have a diary because it is written in journal format. Read this book and get indide Jazmin's head.

Jazmin's Life in New York.......2005-03-02

Jazmin is a fourteen year old African American girl living in New York in the 1960's whose father was killed in a car crash. Jazmin's mother became an alcoholic and couldn't raise Jazmin. Jazmin had to live with relatives or in foster homes her whole life. She moved from place to place and never lived in the same place for longer than one year. She wrote in a notebook to keep track of where she had lived and who she had met. She loved to write and dreamed about becoming a writer despite her past.
I think this is a good book for middle school aged girls or boys to read. It easy to read and you don't want to stop at the end of a chapter. It makes you think about what it would be like to not have parents to raise you. Jazmin is funny and tells stories about things that happened to her and how she felt about them. She can make bad things sound funny. This is the first book I have read by this author and it is very amazing to read.

Jackie's Great Book Review.......2004-03-12

Do you have something that you love very much? All she spends her time writing in her journal and writing poems about her week and when she was born and what happened when she was growing up. In one part she wrote a poem about aDay dreaming Yesterday I visited my favorite spot at macombs part three blocks away. I crept as far down the bank as my leather loafers would let me without slipping then I pulled up a slah of rock and beside the Harlem River. I think this was a good book and I think other people would enjoy reading this. This helped me think about what it would be like if you had know friends or family that would care for you except your aunt. This book shows a lot of courage and strength being without you family there by your side

Average customer rating:

Jazmin's Notebook
Nikki Grimes
Manufacturer: Dial Books c1998
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000ONN6KY

Average customer rating:

Jazmin's Notebook
Nikki Grimes
Manufacturer: Puffin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJ8FAY

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