Chronicle of a Last Summer

“Chronicle of a Last Summer” stands out for its modern structure. Rather than writing about what happens in the book, I can write what is in the book, since events are secondary to periods of time. The narrator, whose name never surfaces, lives in Cairo in a family house she describes as being like a castle, in relative socioeconomic privilege. The house is unchanged through all the nameless revolutions and power turnovers from one dictator to the next, through all the family deaths and disappearances.

Country Editor's Boy

What struck me most in “Country Editor’s Boy” was how much this memoir read like fiction, in style. Because Hal Borland was a writer by profession, he might have had a tendency to notice and remember more than his peers – or, he could have done supplementary research to tell his own story, told somewhat removed, as if another person. Because it's not fiction, it's not quite as interesting, but has the elements of any coming-of-age story. Most notably owing to the dialogue, it doesn't feel like the distant past, but breathes as if you stepped back in time and got to see firsthand how things were in Flagler, Colorado, just about 100 years ago. Written when he was an adult, he'd had the time to see the perspective he may have lacked as a youngster.

Sweet As Cane, Salty As Tears

Thirty years after arriving as a 20-year-old in New York City, time rushes back towards Katherine Fontenot. She tried to run from her family in Louisiana, but if she loses her job, if her sister dies, what is she going to do? Her younger sister, “the sane” one, gets gored by a rhinoceros, which after escaping the zoo where Karen-Anne was looking after it, was shot and killed. Much more than her work, the Fontenot family is the heart of this book, and the family lore – the same stories that get told every time, but still make people laugh – get told yet again, for the younger generations to inherit. But more personally, about a third to half of “Sweet As Cane, Salty As Tears” is actually flashbacks, Katherine seeing something, hearing or smelling or sensing, remembering what she left behind.

A Buzz in the Meadow

Dave Goulson is a fine natural history writer, and an important conservationist. His work centers around the less glorious taxa, the insects that underlie the world’s ecosystems yet receive less attention. He has a talent for expressing scientific results, when too often the findings are confined to a bubble where only people specializing in a certain field will read and understand the results. Books like “A Buzz in the Meadow” are needed if you feel you don’t know enough about large groups of life forms like plants and insects. However, if you don’t like thinking about insect parts and reproduction (or that of animals in general), know that this is not for everyone. Still, Goulson is a very good communicator, and this is an excellent book.