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bobbo49's review against another edition
5.0
Like almost all collections of essays or stories, this one is a bit uneven, but I have to conclude that the six star essays balance out the three star essays and, in the end, this is a great collection. Written from the 1960s to the late 1990s, the essays range from flyfishing and hiking, to the politics and pragmatics of getting books published and movies made of those books, to Nichols' own radical politics from his awakening in the mid-60s to the movements of the late 90s. The middle essays drag a bit, but the outdoor writing, ruminations on friendship and, as he ages, on life itself, are terrific. And then there is this, on the penultimate page, that almost knocked me out of my chair; written in March 1996, in an essay on the West as an inseparable part of the greater North America:
"Do I interpret the so-called West with dishonest eyes because I bring such varied influences into the game? Or if we are truly one nation, indivisible under Donald Trump, with liberty and injustice for all, am I perhaps, like all the rest of us, just another addition to a much more eclectic beast?"
"Do I interpret the so-called West with dishonest eyes because I bring such varied influences into the game? Or if we are truly one nation, indivisible under Donald Trump, with liberty and injustice for all, am I perhaps, like all the rest of us, just another addition to a much more eclectic beast?"
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