In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews R_eader-to-Reader: Capsule Reviews Mimi Schwartz Favorite books often come to us word of mouth—from a friend over lunch or in the health club saying, "Read this!" with enthusiasm.We do, because the other books they've recommended were good reads; we find ourselves recommending them also. The aim ofthis section is to expand the world of word-of-mouth recommendations by inviting good readers to share their favorite nonfiction books. Memoirs, travel writing, nature writing , essay collections, biography—whatever is true, insightful, and inspiring —are welcome in this section ofmini-reviews ofnew books and favorite oldies still in print. Our hope is to keep the best of nonfiction alive—after their initial newspaper splash—in a quiet, reader-to-reader kind ofway. Nothing to Declare, by Mary Morris. St. Martin's (paperback re-issue), 1999. 250 pages, $13.00. Travel memoirs are great antidotes for feeling closed in when the pressures build. Nothing to Declare is one I count on towards the end ofthe semester of my autobiography course. My students and I take off with Morris to the mountain town of San Miguel, Mexico, for a year ofsolitude, self-discovery, and re-invention of self in a strange land. And whether we are homebodies or adventurers, there's comfort in this story ofa woman on her own in a rich new culture that teaches her something about herself. We begin looking for cheap airfares to somewhere equally as good, even if-—or maybe because— "thejourney is never what we plan for; it's what happens between the lines" ofmaps that Morris says she is always studying for the next trip. I also recommend its sequel, Wall to Wall, in which Morris rides the Trans-Siberian Railroad from the Great Wall to the Berlin Wall. Again, there's that wonderful mix of vivid foreign cultures and her own personal 169 170Fourth Genre story so seamlessly joined that deciding whether to have a baby and learning about Chernobyl, or imagining the world ofher Russian grandmother and the worlds of the Russians, Siberians, and Chinese, she meets all seem to fit naturally on one train ride. Spillville, by Patricia Hampl. Milkweed Editions (paperback), 1987. 107 pages, $14.95. Saying a place is flat is another way of pretending it's simpler than it is. Nebraska is flat, we say. And Kansas is flat. North and South Dakota, and Iowa—flat, flat, flat. The whole Midwest is supposed to be flat. Yet here we are, Iowa, on our way to check out the World s Smallest Church (as the sign on the road promised), outside ofSpillville, and it's all up and down, dips and And then we'll go home and say, Iowa? Oh yeah, flat. Lots ofcorn. Really flat. In 1985 Hampl, together with engraver Steven Sorman and a few friends, make a pilgrimage to Spillville, a tiny Iowan village founded by Czechs from Bohemia. It is where, in 1893, Dvorak spent a summer composing —"I studied with the birds, flowers, trees, God and myself"—among his former countrymen. It is also Hampl's landscape, for she was born of Czech ancestors who settled the American Midwest. In a wonderful 102 pages that weave memoir and history, lyricism and meditation, humor and romanticism, we come to understand the surprising dips and curves of this land, and how they inspire art (wonderful engravings by Sorman), music, and words—past and present, crisscrossing time and space. Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose. Touchstone (paperback), 1997. 484 pages, $17.00. Ambrose also retraces famous footsteps—in this case the three-year expedition, starting in 1803, of Lewis and Clark across the American Northwest to the Pacific Ocean. Aside from the author telling us in the introduction that he has spent twenty years hiking on sections of the trail, reading excerpts aloud around family campfires at night, Ambrose is not in this book. He is third person storyteller only, but a wonderful one who makes pages turn quickly and creates vivid characters from Thomas Jefferson (Lewis's neighbor and sponsor) to Camehawait, Chief of the Book Reviews171 Shoshones. We hear them in dialogue and through the "I" ofauthentic letters , diaries, and journals...

pdf