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    Sex and the River Styx
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    Sex and the River Styx
    Unavailable
    Sex and the River Styx
    Ebook316 pages5 hours

    Sex and the River Styx

    By Edward Hoagland

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Called the best essayist of his time by luminaries like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Edward Abbey, Edward Hoagland brings readers his ultimate collection. In Sex and the River Styx, the author's sharp eye and intense curiosity shine through in essays that span his childhood exploring the woods in his rural Connecticut, his days as a circus worker, and his travels the world over in his later years.

    Here, we meet Hoagland at his best: traveling to Kampala, Uganda, to meet a family he'd been helping support only to find a divide far greater than he could have ever imagined; reflecting on aging, love, and sex in a deeply personal, often surprising way; and bringing us the wonder of wild places, alongside the disparity of losing them, and always with a twist that brings the genre of nature writing to vastly new heights. His keen dissection of social realities and the human spirit will both startle and lure readers as they meet African matriarchs, Tibetan yak herders, circus aerialists, and the strippers who entertained college boys in 1950s Boston. Says Howard Frank Mosher in his foreword, the self-described rhapsodist "could fairly be considered our last, great transcendentalist."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChelsea Green Publishing
    Release dateFeb 18, 2011
    ISBN9781603583381
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Sex and the River Styx

    3.5/5

    9 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Hoagland's an old man reflecting on life and society. He's quite analytical and intellectual, but there are more than a few times that he slips into what seems to me to be knee-jerk old geezer territory. He routinely bemoans the fact that the Internet is keeping us from communicating authentically, and that cyberspace insulates us from understanding real Nature. I tend to disagree with these conclusions, but he does reason his way into them with conviction.

      His paeans to his early days, roaming the face of the earth and being seduced by the glories of Nature, are sheer delight. His trips to third world countries are wrenching and interesting. His meditations on age and the Divine, on dying and humus, on global extinctions and personal ones, approach the transcendent. Since it's a collection of essays written over time but herein gathered, there's a fair bit of repetition that maybe could have been edited out. I only needed to read the bit about George Orwell saying that every man has the face he deserves by 50 once or maybe twice. Not every other essay. His essays reflecting on his wives and his travels are less wonderful to my eyes than the others. And the one about circus people is just... weird.

      Quibbles aside, it's well worth reading.
    • 3/5
      Edward Hoagland has been hailed by the "Washington Post" as "the Thoreau of our Times." This collection of essays lives up to that name as a naturalist now looks on his life as an old man. Mr. Hoagland uses his personal relationship with nature and memories of his history to force us to see the tragedy that will happen if we keep destroying the very land we walk on. In "Small Silences", he chronicles his life as youngster and then adult noting that human beings and animals are connected. An example, people lock their doors and barely know their neighbors: the same for the animals who no longer trust man but fear him. Since we are all here and connected and, according to Mr. Hoagland, this is heaven on earth we are in dire straits indeed. In "A Country for Old Men" the author comments if you are in middle age you are what you will end up being and since people aim too low there can be no improvement in us. Each essay gives the same message using different aspects of his life and, though I agree with him, this is too repititious. The reader doesn't see a life dedicated to keeping nature on an even keel but rather, in the author's words, "a grumpy old man" on a harangue.