Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1298997 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Raymo (An Intimate Look at the Night Sky), a physicist at Stonehill College, agrees with Walt Whitman that "there is a sense in which the least thing contains the all." The least things in Raymo's universe occur on a one-mile path he has walked every day for 37 years between his home and his office in North Easton, Mass. Along this path that he knows so well, he writes, "every pebble and wildflower has a story to tell"-geological stories, environmental stories, human stories. Raymo uses each ecologically distinct portion of his path as a starting point for one of those tales. He is at his best when he relates the tale of the path itself, how it was constructed by the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted as part of an estate for the great-grandson of shovel magnate Oliver Ames. The beginning of the path at the end of a suburban street provides the opportunity to discuss the origin of the village of North Easton at the close of the 18th century: the small Queset Brook supplying the power needed to run the factory that would dominate the village for a century and a half. As the path meanders from woods to open fields, from gardens to water meadow, Raymo discusses ecological relationships, the nature of DNA, basic geology and contemporary environmental concerns. Although always interesting , Raymo's stories are less compelling and more superficial the further afield he goes. But this slim, lovingly written volume helps readers become more observant of the natural portions of their world. 8 b&w illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Previously inveigling us with the heavens in An Intimate Look at the Night Sky (2001), Raymo here enchants us with the earth, in particular, a one-mile-long section of his hometown, North Easton, Massachusetts. He walks the route to his teaching job, beginning in town and passing woods, a creek, and fields, scenery partly landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted but now gone somewhat to seed. Olmsted and his employers, the Ames, who were heirs to a shovel-manufacturing fortune, had the foresight to buy local parcels a century ago, endowing the town with its undeveloped space. This provides the inspiration for Raymo's soliloquies on nature, in which he links the physical remnants of Olmsted's and the Ames' presence with the natural world. Raymo ruminates on water as erosive force and life source for the birds, plants, and insects seen on his walk, which in turn provokes tangents on entropy, the chemistry of DNA, and the area's geology. How wondering a commute can be--if one looks as thoughtfully as Raymo does in this beauty for nature readers. Gilbert Taylor
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