Thomas Hardy's (1840-1928) sixth novel is about doomed love and chance, and when it is measured against his masterpieces, TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1878) and JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895), THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE (1878) succeeds as one of the Victorian novelist's most powerful works. The plot unfolds on Hardy's fictitious, wild Egdon Heath, a dark Wessex moor associated with tragic possibilities. As Alexander Theroux observes in his Introduction to this edition of Hardy's novel, Hardy was committed to the deep expression of nature's ironic chaos and strange apathy, even hostility toward man (p. x), and in this respect, Egdon Heath could be described as a major protagonist in the novel.

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE tells the tragic tale of Clym Yeobright (the "native"), who returns to Egdon Heath from his studies in Paris, and his troubled relationship with Eustacia Vye, a darkly complicated young woman (and one of Hardy's most fascinating characters) hoping to escape her dreary existence on the Heath for a more cosmopolitan life in Paris. (In a heart-wrenching subplot, Clym's passion for Eustacia leads to his estrangement from his mother, Mrs. Yeobright, who disapproves of the union.) Prior to Clym's return, Eustacia loved Damon Wildeve; that is, until he proposed marriage to Clym's cousin, Thomasin Yeobright. To further complicate things, Diggory Venn, a reddleman, secretly admires Thomasin. For his self-destructive characters, the course of love is never happy in in Hardy's cruel universe. "Black chaos comes," he writes, "and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light" (p. 15).

Reading Victorian fiction does not get any better than reading Thomas Hardy. Returning to Hardy's brooding, melancholy novels after first reading them more than twenty five years ago, I am re-discovering Hardy's brilliant ability to convey familiar, primordial truths through his fiction, making him worth reading again and again.

G. Merritt

Author of TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) and JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), is by far my favorite Victorian novelist. In this second of a two-volume collection of Hardy's short stories, editor Kristin Brady (THE WITHERED ARM AND OTHER STORIES 1874-1888) focuses on stories that were first published between 1888 and 1900, a period shortly after Hardy's completion of his most compelling novels. This book, which includes an excellent history together with appendices of the texts, may be read as a collection of Thomas Hardy love stories. For Hardy, love was just another form of human suffering.

As his ordinary characters follow their hearts, they discover the course of romantic love is never easy and rarely happy in Hardy's cruel universe. Set primarily in The Wessex of Hardy's novels, and with all the pathos of TESS and JUDE, the eleven short stories collected here ("The Melancholy Hussar," "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions," "The First Countess of Wessex," "Barbara of the House of Grebe," "For Conscience' Sake," "The Son's Veto," "On the Western Circuit," "An Imaginative Woman," "A Changed Man," and "Enter a Dragoon") reveal romantic love thwarted by tragedy, disaster, betrayals, and cruelty. These haunting stories have parallels to Hardy's more controversial, major novels, and they are certain to satisy readers (like me), who love reading Victorian literature.

G. Merritt

It is hard for me to say why I enjoyed reading this book so much. It has no real plot to summarize, and it is somewhat predictable in its happy endings. Fowler's novel is about a California book club consisting of five women (Jocelyn, Bernadette, Sylvia, Allegra, and Prudie) and one man (Grigg), which meets on a monthly basis to discuss the novels of Jane Austen (EMMA, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, PERSUASION). During their discussions, each member of the Jane Austen Book Club reveals their own "private Austen" (i.e., confusion about love) to the others. We learn that Sylvia is suffering through the breakup of her 32-year marriage to her husband, Daniel. Adventurous Allegra (Sylvia and Daniel's lesbian daughter), is no longer talking with her partner. Jocelyn is a single, controlling, dog breeder. Prudie, though married, fantasizes about having sex with other men. In her sixties, Bernadette has apparently given up on much in her life. Middle-aged Grigg, still single, leaves the others wondering if perhaps he is gay. Austen not only proves to be the ultimate matchmaker in her own novels, but in Fowler's as well. "The mere habit of learning to love is the thing," Austen wrote, and it is also the real story in Fowler's novel.

Reading Fowler requires some sophistication on the part of her reader to connect the dots in her storyline, which is one reason I liked this book so much. With a careful eye for home furnishings, appetizers, and wine, and through the club's literary discussions, Fowler demonstrates her Austen-like insights into her characters and their ordinary relationships. While a basic familiarity with Austen's novels is not a prerequisite for enjoying this novel, it would definitely lend itself to greater delights in reading Fowler's book. That is, readers (like me) who like Jane Austen will most likely enjoy this book.

G. Merritt

If you don't have a vigilant populus, Thomas Jefferson warned, anything can happen. National Book Award-winner, Barry Lopez (ARCTIC DREAMS), understands that finding meaning in and surviving difficult times is not easy, and RESISTANCE is his provocative response to the current administration's war on terrorism and what it really means to be a patriot. With his unique insights into what it means to be human, like Jefferson, Lopez encourages his reader to "pay attention" (p. 78). In the opening piece, "Apocalypse," an American curator, Owen Daniels, living in France receives a disturbing letter from the Department of Inland Security, advising him that the government would like to interrogate and possibly punish him and his fellow writers, scholars, and artists for "terrorizing the imaginations of our fellow citizens" (p. 13) with their antidemocratic books, paintings, and performances. As a result, the group decides to simply vanish, leaving behind this collection of nine haunting testimonials opposing their country's policies on war, globalization, wealth and consumption, the environment, conformity, and political and cultural intolerance. Each of these fictional testimonials tells the story of a powerful awakening. In Rio de la Plata," Lisa Meyer, an artist and landscape architect, looks to Viktor Frankl's MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING to find meaning in her own troubled life. In "Mortise and Tenon," Gary Sinclair, a cabinetmaker, land activist, and a victim of childhood abuse, responds to a random act of violence with excessive violence. In "The Bear in the Road," Edward Larmirande, an attorney and writer, searches for meaning in the form of a grizzly bear. Nine mesmerizing monotypes by Alan Magee compliment these testimonials. RESISTANCE is Lopez at his astonishing best.

G. Merritt

Before returning to America from England in 1994, Bill Bryson (A WALK IN THE WOODS, A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING) embarked on a grand farewell tour around the "green and kindly island" that had been his adopted home for twenty years (pp. 5; 118). On his seven-week pilgrimage, Bryson happily travels (via public transportation and by foot) from Dover, through Bournemouth and coastal villages, to London, Liverpool (his favorite English city), the Lake District, Wales, Scotland, and back to his home in Yorkshire. With its 445,000 ancient or historic buildings, 12,000 midieval churches, 1.5 million acres of common land, 120,000 miles of public footpaths, and 600,000 archeological sites, Bryson observes, "you could spend your life moving from stone circle to Roman settlement (remains of) to ruined abbey, and never see but a fraction of them even in a small area" (p. 94) of the country where people put milk in their tea, drive on the left side of the road, and eat cheese-and-pickle sandwiches.

NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND is Bryson at his best. In his book, NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, having lost his sense of "private astonishment" for Europe, Bryson found very little to praise about his midlife, rucksack travels through Paris, Florence, Brussels, Stockholm, Rome. As hard as he tried in that book, Bryson was unable to recapture his youthful sense of wonder for Europe again. But this is not the case with NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND, which is a series of Bryson "notes" written from the heart. We find Bryson exclaiming, "God, I love this country" (p. 261), and describing his "new and mysterious and exciting" (p. 14) subject with a "sense of wonder" (p. 5) and a sustained "state of small excitation" (p. 53). In his travel narrative of this "small, enchanted island," Bryson comes to recognize what he loves about Britain--"which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad--old churches, country lanes, people saying 'Mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but,' people apologizing to [him] when [he] conks them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers, Ordinance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings--evey bit of it" (p. 316. The end of this entertaining travel memoir will leave readers wondering if Bryson will truly find such happiness back in the States, where he says he is needed by the 3.7 million Americans who believe they have been abducted by aliens (p. 5).

G. Merritt

Situated in the foothills of the Rockies, surrounded by lots of Open Space, and with miles of trails within fifteen minutes of the downtown, Pearl Street Mall area, Boulder is truly a hiker's paradise. Whenever Boulder tourists ask me to recommend a good hiking trail, I always refer them to this trail guide instead. Although it is "intended chiefly for newcomers and visitors to the Boulder area" (p. xi), as a resident and avid Boulder-hiker-dude, I have also relied upon it as a valuable reference for determining trail connections, distances, and elevation gains. Having hiked most of the seventy-five trails in this book mostly alone, I can say that the book's trail and map details are accurate.

This "best of" hiking guide is organized by trails found in the Boulder plains, foothills, and mountains, and offers hikers Boulder's most popular trail options, including the Boulder Creek Path (p. 25), the Mount Sanitas Loop (p. 68), and the Chautauqua Park Mesa Trail (p. 84), as well as many less-crowded trails, like my personal favorites, the Bear Peak trail via Fern Canyon (p. 104) and the Green Mountain trail via Gregory Canyon and Saddle Rock trails (pp. 77; 79; 81), and my favorite higher-elevation trails in the spectacular Indian Peaks Wilderness, 13,223-foot Mount Audubon (p. 139) and 12,541-foot Pawnee Pass (p. 143).

Although the authors obviously have Boulder trail dust in their blood like me, I have never met them. Ruth Cushman is a retired librarian and author of the COLORADO NATURE ALMANAC and BOULDER COUNTY NATURE ALMANAC. Glen Cushman has an aerospace engineer's eye for important details. Whereas they recommend that you don't hike these trails alone for safety reasons (p. 241), I say don't hike Boulder trails alone if you're afraid of encountering silence, wildlife, or yourself.

G. Merritt

"Traveling is more fun," Bill Bryson (aka "Bernt Bjornson") observes in this hilarious account of his backpack travels through Europe, "hell, life is more fun--if you can treat it as a series of impulses" (p. 131). After first backpacking through Britain, Ireland, Scandanavia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy in 1972 (p. 13), as a "skinny, shy" 20-year-old American from Iowa, lost in "private astonishment" (p. 20), and then returning with Stephan Katz (Bryson's memorable hiking companion in A WALK IN THE WOODS) the following summer (p. 20), Bryson attempts to recapture that experience nearly twenty years later in NEITHER HERE NOR THERE. Bryson lived in England for fifteen years before setting out on his midlife pilgrimage from Hammerfest, Norway to Oslo, Paris, Brussels, Belgium, Cologne, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Stockholm, Rome, Naples, Florence, Milan, Como, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Yugoslavia, Sofia and Istanbul. While the result is characteristic Bryson, this book doesn't quite hit the mark of some of Bryson's other books (e.g., A WALK IN THE WOODS, A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND), primarily for the following reason.

Somewhere along the way, Bryson lost his sense of "private astonishment" for Europe. Wherever he travels in this book, and as hard has he tries, Bryson is unable to recapture his youthful sense of wonder for Europe again; it is neither here nor there. As a result, and as numerous other reviewers have previously noted, this is the travel narrative of a xenophobic tourist, who finds very little to praise about his experience traveling through Europe. Instead, we find Bryson tramping through Europe, rather indistinguishable from the hordes of other boorish tourists who overrun major tourist destinations like Paris, Florence, Brussels, Stockholm, Rome, in search of inexpensive American food like burgers and beer, offering us very few original insights along the way, attempting instead to entertain us with sophomoric and mean-spirited humor. While many rucksack travelers (including me) have known the "private astonishment" Bryson experienced while traveling through Europe in his younger years, few readers would ever want to visit the Europe Bryson has described in this book.

G. Merritt

Before writing about his attempt to hike the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail in A WALK IN THE WOODS, and then describing his journey through the scientific universe in his more recent A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, Bill Bryson took an encyclopedic trip through the history of the English language, from man's first Neanderthal grunt 30,000 years ago, to the language as we now know it. As Shakespeare was inventing words like "critical," "leapfrog," "majestic," "obscene," "frugal," "radiance," "excellent," "gust," "hint," "hurry," "lonely," "summit," and "monumental," words which had never been used before, a British scholar was predicting that "the English tongue" was of "small account, stetching no further than this island of ours." Neither writer probably had any idea that the English language would someday evolve into the predominant language of the world (p. 66). In his book, Bryson retraces that fascinating evolution through fascinating chapters on pronunciation, spelling, usage, swearing, and wordplay, revealing along the way that "one of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to presssures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees" (p. 145).

This book is characteristic Bryson, and Bryson fans won't be disappointed. I especially enjoyed this book, but then again I'm biased. I must confess English has always been one of my favorite subjects. (My undergraduate degree was in English, and I studied linguistics and rhetoric in grad school, while simultaneously devouring all the Victorian novels.) Other readers may find reading Bryson's book about as much fun as diagraming sentences. Still other more academic readers may find it a bit of a scholarly disappointment. But, written with Bryson's distinctive wit and plenty of entertaining anecdotes, it will nevertheless appeal to a general audience of readers, rewarding them with a greater appreciation of the language in all of its idiosyncratic forms.

G. Merritt

"Call it swarm logic" (p. 74). In his fascinating examination of slime molds, ant colonies, cells, cities, and computer software, Steven Johnson (MIND WIDE OPEN) introduces his reader to the cutting-edge theory of emergence in his 2001 book. He simplifies this complex field of research initiated in the mideighties (p. 85) through example and analogy. Examining ants, for example, Johnson demontrates how these unintelligent insects, "which dominate the planet in a way that makes human populations look like an evolutionary afterthought" (p. 73), organize into complex colonies that adapt in size and behavior to their environment as a single entity, thereby exhibiting a spontaneous and collective intelligence. Johnson then reveals that what connects ant colonies with slime mold, computer games, other living ecologies, the guild system of twelfth-century Florence, cell divisions, and software "is a recurring pattern and shape: a network of self-organization, of disparate agents that unwittingly create a higher-level order" (p. 21). "Just like the clock maker metaphors of the Enlightenment, or the dialectical logic of the nineteenth century," Johnson writes, "the emergent worldview belongs to this moment in time" (p. 56). Although this book may lack depth and detail at times, it is nevertheless an excellent starting point for readers (like me) interested in exploring this revolutionary scientific theory.

G. Merritt

The human brain consists of a hundred billion neurons that ultimately result in consciousness and self-awareness. It doesn't require much gray matter to appreciate the complexity of this process. In his fascinating study of this experience, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman attempts to answer the challenging question: How can the firing of neurons give rise to human sensations, thoughts and emotions (p. xii)? As a Nobel laureate, the Director of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, and author of several important studies on consciousness, Dr. Edelman certainly has the credentials. He recognizes his subject is a challenging one, and has written WIDER THAN THE SKY for "the general reader" (with no background in neurobiology, like me), who is willing to expend "a concentrated effort" to understand the subject, promising readers who stick with him on his trip through the human brain a "deeper insight into issues that are the center of human concern" (p.xi).

In his short, 148-page book (exclusive of the glossary and index), Dr. Edelman first considers global brain theory encompassing evolution, development, and function of the most complex of human organs. He basically proposes that in the transition between reptiles and birds and reptiles and mammal, a new reciprocal connectivity evolved in the thalamocortical system of the brain (p. 54), and that consciousness then emerged from increasingly complex and integrated neuronal groups. In the end, WIDER THAN THE SKY provides readers with a concise, scientific explanation of consciousness unique to humans.

G. Merritt