North of Now: A Celebration of Country and the Soon to Be Gone

Without being too sentimental or woefully reactionary, Wetherell (Wherever That Great Heart May Be: Stories) laments in this book (portions of which have appeared in the New York Times, Vermont Life, Yankee and elsewhere) the disappearance of the simple, meaningful way of life of the early 20th century. He sees himself to be anachronistic as the millennium approaches, ""a walker in a sedentary age; a lover of quiet in a century that has the volume turned up full blast; a reader in a visual age; a writer in one that is increasingly aliterate."" Each essay/chapter offers an explanation of how, in Wetherell's life, the changing times have jarred his sense of the comfortable and the good. Within each piece, he provides a journal entry, a recollection of the kernel of thought that provoked the evocation. In ""Old Timers,"" Wetherell remembers the stories his grandfather told, and how through those stories the listener, creeping to the edge of his seat, became more intimate with the family and its past. Wetherell blames the TV--in much the same way that Faulkner condemned the radio--for ""throttling every good storyteller in sight"" and leaving our world with ""chatterers, not listeners."" In ""Genteel Poverty,"" he praises the sadly diminishing class of people who abhor materialism, and argues that ""living modestly, with a certain leanness, brings joy unknown to those for whom money is no object."" This book reads like a comfortable, peaceful hum that drifts away from the din of the noisy, restless world. (Mar.)