One Man’s Maine: Essays on a Love Affair (Paperback)
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Description
Maine is a talisman of the American imagination, offering beauty and wildlife to tourists and natives. Over the last few years, Jim has published many essays about the wonders and challenges of Maine’s environment, and One Man’s Maine collects and edits them into sixteen pairs. The first essays of each pair employ the natural icons of Maine—lobster, moose, blueberries, lupine—to reach into matters of human significance. These are familiar essays that combine science and belief, observation and emotion. The second essays are broader and more discursive and take on a fuller range of experiences in this beloved state.
About the Author
Jim Krosschell has been supporting the Maine Turnpike for 30 years. After a career in science publishing in the Boston area, he began to spend more time in Maine and writing much more regularly. More than 50 journals and magazines have published his personal essays, most about Maine, and his book Owls Head Revisited was published in 2015 by North Country Press. He is also president of the Board of Directors, Coastal Mountains Land Trust, in Camden, Maine.
Praise For…
“Jim Krosschell’s essays are an inviting and thought-provoking revelation of how Maine has pulled in and transformed the life of a man from ‘away.’ His essay on Thoreau, for example, thrills the soul. His essays beautifully and caringly reveal this in depth and love.” — John Rensenbrink, Professor Emeritus Bowdoin College, co-founder US Green Party and the Maine Green Party
“A string of vignettes like perfect Maine pearls on a twist of sweet grass, Jim Krosschell’s One Man’s Maine brings us a perfect set of closely observed reflections on what it means to live in right relation with the natural world. Honest and drawn with a light touch, Jim gets us to relax and savor the sweetness of Maine’s true nature . . . and when we open our eyes, we see that he’s given us something real and true to think about.” — Tim Glidden, president of Maine Coast Heritage Trust
"'One Man's Maine: Essays on a Love Affair, a collection of essays by Jim Krosschell, nods to E.B. White in subject matter, title, and tone. Krosschell, who divides his time between Newton and Owls Head, Maine, examines 'a world in which change is speeding up and place is shrinking down, even in Maine.'
Krosschell is both grump (lamenting that his nephew is chatting on his cellphone about a bathroom renovation while at the top of picturesque Beech Hill) and sage, understanding that the world moves; times shift; and there’s a balance to be sought between society, with all its screens and buzzes, and nature. He celebrates the slow pleasures to be found scraping moss off the roof and asks the big questions about what kind of world is being left behind to younger generations.
Like Loren Eiseley, he is an open-hearted scientist, one wedded to facts and yet not afraid to use the word 'miracle' or 'mystery.' The 16 essays appear in pairs — the first in each couple looks at Maine’s natural icons, berries, lupine, loon, lobster, and the second grapples with wider concerns. It is a view that will help even those who feel they know the state to see it anew." — Boston Globe
“. . . by page three, I’m not just reading, I’m listening to sounds and rhythms, where the energies are. . . .This is down-Maine backyard naturalism. . . . In Krosschell’s world, joy is a form of truth. He is not saying so. It’s transpiring out of the words. . . . But what I really want to convey to you about this book is that, while all the things Jim Krosschell says here can be merely said, however skillfully, the writing in it channels powers and energies beyond the saying. . . . All backyard naturalists, and everybody in the vicinity of Thoreau, will want to read this book.” — Dana Wilde, “Off the Radar,” Kennebec Journal
