“Evocative ruminations on getting older and discovering the links between nature and self.” from out of the woods
OUT OF THE WOODS A Memoir of Wayfinding
If Cohen’s book can get more obese people onboard that aforementioned bus, perhaps the conversation can finally move forward.
Darling, Lynn Harper/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $25.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-06-171024-7
THE PARTHENON ENIGMA
Connelly, Joan Breton Knopf (512 pp.) $35.00 | Jan. 30, 2014 978-0-307-59338-2
Get out the dictionary and brush up on your Greek. Classical archaeologist Connelly’s (Classics/New York Univ.; Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece, 2007, etc.) history and analysis of every square inch of the Parthenon requires close attention. “Never before in human history has there been a structure that is at once so visible to the world, so celebrated, so examined, so invested with authority, and yet, at the same time, so strangely impenetrable at its core,” writes the author, who devotes the first third of the book to a deeply detailed history of the gods and myths of the Acropolis. The Parthenon is a portrait of the Athenians, their identity and perception of belonging. Greece had no sacred text and no culture media, but they stressed the importance of myth, landscape and memory. Myth and history were one and the same. When Connelly gets to the story of the founding family of Athens—Erechtheus, his wife, Praxithea, and their three daughters—the book picks up considerable speed. Much more than a sacred space, the Parthenon is the symbol of Athens’ democracy, and the East Frieze explains the meaning of that democracy, the language of images paralleling the language of text. It shows how Erechtheus and Praxithea were prepared, even willing, to sacrifice their youngest daughter to avert an impending siege. Unknown to them, their daughters had pledged that if one died, so would they all; thus, the two remaining sisters threw themselves off the Acropolis. When Erechtheus was swallowed by the Earth, Athena instructed Praxithea to build the two temples we now see. It is not their sacrifice that illustrates democracy but the fact that no life is above another or the common good. The carvings of the Parthenon, the greatest masterpiece of Greek art, teach us the meaning of democracy. A book for all who seek direction and are capable of seeing the bigger picture—erudite if esoteric, edifying if somewhat exhausting. (132 illustrations, 8 pages of color)
One woman’s melancholic search for herself amid the woods of Vermont. Darling (Necessary Sins, 2007) takes readers on a slow journey of self-discovery, chronicling how she learned the ins and outs of living in rural Vermont. Once her daughter had started college, the apartment they shared in New York City after Darling’s husband had died seemed too full of past memories. The author was ready to try her hand at a new adventure: “I would move to Vermont, to the little house I bought. I would buy a dog and live in the country. I would reinvent myself, a woman alone, solitary and self-contained.” With that spirit, Darling packed up some belongings and moved to a small, owner-built, somewhat funky house tucked into the woods. Alone and dependent on her own resourcefulness, the author had to learn to navigate the tricky solar-power system and cranky generator, the mice in the ceiling and the collapsing roof on the woodshed. But she was stuck in limbo, unable to unpack, unable to write, unable to face the task of doing, so she ventured outdoors instead. The forest around her was an alien and unreadable landscape, as foreign as the woman she was trying to discover in herself. She stuck to the known paths while the narrow deer trails beckoned to her, egging her on to venture past the safe and narrow roadways. A routine doctor’s visit and the unexpected diagnosis of cancer quickly catapulted Darling into foreign territory. From that point, she slowly and methodically discovered her route back to health and self-awareness. Haunting and lyrical, Darling’s journey through unknown forests, both physical and emotional, resonates with longings, hopes, fears and a stalwart courage to conquer them all. Evocative ruminations on getting older and discovering the links between nature and self.
THE MONKEY’S VOYAGE How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life
de Queiroz, Alan Basic (304 pp.) $27.99 | Jan. 7, 2014 978-0-465-02051-5
An evolutionary biologist disputes the hegemonic theory of how animals have populated the planet, challenging prevailing assumptions about the time frame in which species separations necessarily occurred. De Queiroz suggests that in many instances, species migration has occurred much more recently than has been commonly accepted. He and his associates have taken advantage 48
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15 november 2013
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nonfiction
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kirkus.com
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