Word: hoaglands
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Among many other things. Edward Hoagland '54 knows juneberries. Moreover, he writes about them and about others of the curios of creation, whether of the natural world or of the more inorganic human one in that hard to define genre of the personal essay. His field of vision is broad. Most adept at chronicling the my read delicate changes and processes of the wilderness. Hoagland is also prescient in his observations of the doings of his own species. With equal amounts of aplomb, he explores topics as varied as the mating habits of the porcupine and the divorce customs...
...Hoagland's latest collection of essays. The Tugman's Passage, provides a handful of these observations which testify strongly to the author's boundless curiosity. From the title essay about the life and work of tugboat sailors to the last of the short editorials on nature that Hoagland pens of the New York Times, the work are highly crafted. In stylistic terms, Hoagland's reputation as one of the foremost essayists working is well deserved, he has a terrifically readable idiom of his own fashioning at once colloquial, rhythmic and incredibly even. His writing gives a sense of quiet passion...
Idioms and details, though are hardly enough of a foundation on which to construct a personal essay. Rather, as Hoagland points out in a short piece in the book specifically on the form of the essay, the critical ingredient is the quality of mind the essayist impresses on the work. Of course, this is no different from any form of literary expression Yet, the personal essay differs from the short story in the way it communicates its truth a difference which roughly mirrors that between plain speech and storytelling. Even the most inept can usually keep from bludgeoning beyond recognition...
...DOES HOAGLAND have that elusive bent of mind. The answer which rises out of The Tugman's Passage is a very qualified yes. Hoagland has a small measure of that extraordinarily rare common sense... the kind which seems so utterly obvious once we have encountered it and cannot image the ignorance we bore earlier--which one senses in Thoreau, Orwell, and occasionally, E B White Hence. Hoagland's best stuff in The Tugman's Passage, the two essays "The Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife Thrower" and "Women and Men," sparkle...
...handsome, white-haired woman who does not suffer tourists lightly: "Alf is too kind. I send them packing." And there have been lampoons of the now familiar Herriot style. Monty Python kidded the title verse: "All things gross and angrenous. All creatures gross and squat." Nature Writer Edward Hoagland parodied the books in the New York Times: " 'It's time t'awd bitch was up,' I said. I put my arm up her lug end to untwist her uterus ... 'If tha'll just wipe off the fly that's on my snout, Colonel...