Word: almanacers
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...NORTH AMERICAN ANIMAL ALMANAC by Darryl Stewart Stewart, Tabori &Chang; 351 pages; $14.95 May is the best month for observing the grizzly bear, from a proper distance, of course. March is the best time to study the turkey vulture, especially in the tiny hamlet of Hinckley, Ohio, to which, like the swallows that regularly come back to Capistrano, the scavenging birds return every year. February, however, is not the ideal time to look for groundhogs. The woodchuck does awaken from his winter torpor earlier than most other ground animals but rarely as early as Feb. 2-unless roused from...
...creatures who populate the planet have always fascinated the one identified by Shakespeare as "the paragon of animals." Naturalist Darryl Stewart's entertaining Almanac shows why. Scarcely a creature crawls or jumps by without a tale...
...right guard, Steinkuhler, is the quintessential Nebraska football player. Under the hometown column of the team roster, occasional entries from New Jersey and Texas, California, Colorado or even Connecticut are fairly obliterated in a hailstorm of small Nebraska towns. It reads like the appendix of an almanac: Plattsmouth, Scottsbluff, Bell wood, Fremont, Waterloo, Dix, Ponca, Shelby, Wahoo, Hildreth, Crete, Burr... Steinkuhler is from Burr...
Like Sancho and Shakespeare, those who praise proverbs favor nature over artifice and peasantry over peerage. Benjamin Franklin always preferred "a drop of reason to a flood of words" and filled Poor Richard's Almanac with colonial one-liners: "Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead"; "The used key is always bright." Emerson thought proverbs "the sanctuary of the intuitions." Tolstoy's knowledge of common tradition led him to an encyclopedia of wisdom. Eastern European sayings have always assumed the clarity and force of vodka: "Where the needle goes, the thread follows"; "The devil...
...often find the old ways better, but Strout is a liberal who remembers without nostalgia when the World Almanac published an annual table of lynchings. He has watched at close hand one-third of all American Presidents. Characteristically, he insists that he has never been "intimate with any of them." He recalls being scandalized at his first presidential press conference in 1922 by irreverent questions thrown at Warren G. Harding, who in plus fours pleaded, "Gentlemen, go easy. I want to get out and play some golf." And when Calvin Coolidge dictated a single sentence, had 25 copies...