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Title: Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination by Barbara Hurd ISBN: 0-618-21512-3 Publisher: Mariner Books Pub. Date: August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Sophomoric and not Useful
Comment: I bought this book based on a review that suggested it was natural history and would give me information on swamps and bogs.
What it turned out to be was a sophomoric series of essays loosely focused around the author's experiences in wetlands. There was little science, instead just a series of unrelated ramblings.
It appears to be the work of student trying to impress their professor with their vast knowledge of various cultural icons.
If you want to learn about wetlands, find another book. If you want to read good writing, find another book.
Rating: 4
Summary: Swamp Hybrid
Comment: Each essay in STIRRING THE MUD is a hybrid of poetry and prose well suited to its swampy, mysterious content, which often varies widely from paragraph to paragraph. In fact, Hurd sometimes weaves together several topics within a paragraph, traveling with the speed of poetry rather than prose. It is no accident that poets have written blurbs of praise for the back of this book's jacket.
This is a book in which the gorgeous paragraphs reign. Don't miss them! The one downfall is that the book does not read well as the united whole its numbered chapters would suggest it is. We consistently and disruptively at the beginning of each chapter enter the swamp, again. And again. It would have been a welcome change of pace to stay in the swamp for two consecutive chapters once or twice. Without also having edited to further diminish repetition, better to have let them stand obviously as individual essays.
I suspect that Hurd must have been torn, the naturalist in her dared not leaver her beloved swamps only to the essayist but had to summon the poet also. No wonder this multiple talent struggled with form. She created a sort of hybrid that resists categorization. I hope her next work will emerge with a form even more unique.
Rating: 5
Summary: Barbara Hurd's Brilliant Book
Comment: This is a marvelous book, the best of its kind since Barry Lopez's ARCTIC DREAMS. In it, she traverses swamps and bogs with an expert's eye, and with concerns that keep resonating into the lives we live or might live, and those we repress. No one has written more lovingly (or is it fearlessly?) about sinking into the muck or enduring, even seeking out uncertainties. With language as lyrical as it is precise, Hurd speculates about "how it's possible to be on the ridge and in the thicket at the exact same time." I can't remember when I've felt so aesthetically satisfied while learning so much.
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Title: Entering the Stone : On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark by Barbara Hurd ISBN: 0618191380 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 05 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Louis Galison ISBN: 0393020010 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt ISBN: 1400041775 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 20 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: For Love of Insects : by Thomas Eisner ISBN: 0674011813 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Changing Planes: Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Eric Beddows ISBN: 0151009716 Publisher: Harcourt Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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