From Booklist
Gessner spent a year writing a book of essays in his family's home on Cape Cod. The result is part natural history, part literary history, and part personal history. He reflects on his father's death from cancer and his own recovery from the disease; he writes of his walks through the salt marshes, observing the grasses, flowers, birds, and trees. He fondly reviews such writers as Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, and Joseph Wood Krutch, and bemoans the existence of Dairy Queens and convenience stores. Reveling in the smells of the sea, freshly cut grass, honeysuckle, sawdust, and even dead kelp, Gessner quietly provokes us into a heightened understanding of both nature and ourselves.
George Cohen
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
While spending a year at the family cottage on Cape Cod, Gessner (a journalist and political cartoonist) aggressively mulls over life, death, and the literature of his elected place. Gessner came home from the Rockies, back to the place where he grew up, after a tangle with cancer. Forget broccoli and phytochemicals. To ward off cancer, he knows his route: ``I'll take salt water.'' The ocean, he believes, will cleanse him, body and soul, but nearly everywhere in this collection of essays--from his anger over the inorganic, hubristic new Cape architecture to a marsh walk while under the influence of psychotropics to a spirited defense of the political cartoonist's pamphleteering art--decay and death insistently preside in the ``stench of the sea,'' a death in the family, the very title of the book. There are moments when Gessner displays a witty, light touch, as in his preoccupation with Thoreau, who pops up again and again, among the stinkhorns, on hikes, beside Gessner's writing table, goading, educating, inspiring. But for the most part, Gessner is a brassy writer, four-square to his issues--environment, literature, family-- subjective and romantic in a quietly effective way, for his personal obsessions translate well into universals, as when he witnesses the last months of his father's life, this time cancer claiming its quarry. His father was very much his own man, fastidious by day, refulgent by night after the wine went to work. It is an unflinching portrait Gessner paints of his parent, though also the only time in the book when he allows notes of tenderness and understanding to color his judgments. It must have been an uneasy year on the Cape for Gessner; if this book is any reflection, it couldn't have been a year better spent. (18 drawings, not seen) --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
