Root (Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place), Central Michigan University emeritus English professor and creative writing teacher, offers up a baker’s dozen of his own creative nonfiction essays, each focusing on a particular place, and the author’s personal experiences and associations. Some, like his description of an afternoon’s sylvan escape from the grounds of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in the mountains of Vermont, are purely personal. Others are connected to Root’s literary interests. A visit to Belgrade Lakes in Maine prompts recollections of E.B. White’s essay describing his summer holidays there, and his reflections on time and mortality. Walden Pond, in its modern state as environmentalist icon, literary shrine, and vacationer’s playground, offers an ironic contrast to the rather unremarkable, rural body of water it was when Henry David Thoreau settled near its banks to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Malabar Farm, now an Ohio state park, epitomizes the idealized agrarianism of owner/author Louis Bromfield, and brings to mind White’s witty review-in-verse of the 1948 book that bore its name. Root’s thoughtful, leisurely essays provide an intriguing glimpse into the interior life of a scholar and writer deeply engaged not only with the physical world, but with the historical, literary, and emotional worlds that lie alongside it like ghostly photographic double exposures. (Sept.)
