Word: ponding
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...Bryant Pond is one of those tiny Maine towns that come upon the traveler as suddenly as a streak of summer lightning. There you are, tooling north on Route 26, dazzled by an occasional stand of white birch, sniffing the pinelike incense, just about convinced that this is God's country the way the glaciers carved it out 12,000 years ago. Then the road descends and a white Baptist church materializes on the left, as if designed for Our Town. At the bottom...
hill, as the wayfarer battles a curve and then a second, sharper right turn, two other obligatory props of a New England town blur past: the village store and the post office. Bryant Pond would be a dot on the map, located by reference to nearby towns with such names as Norway, Paris and Mexico, if it were not for one curious fact: this little way station happens to be the home of the last crank-telephone system in the U.S. Here is how it works. Somewhere in the modest stillness of Bryant Pond, someone rotates a crank, jangling...
Could anything be more of a family operation? And like every family, the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. had given everybody the illusion that it would live more or less happily ever after. Then Elden Hathaway turned 65, thought some, and quietly sold for $50,000 the stock in the business he had bought for $2,500 in 1951. Elden: who had strung Army field wire at $14 a mile to add to the 100 or so subscribers he began with. Elden: who had tinkered with one secondhand switchboard after another-Western Electric, Stromberg-Carlson, Northern Electric. Elden: who had pulled...
...comes to believe that a giant frog, an "undertoad," menaces him. It becomes a symbol for all the hidden dangers of modern life. The film never locates its undertoad and thus never confronts the true subject of the book. It is all just body surfing on a placid pond. -By Richard Schickel
...Port of New York became my Walden Pond," Lewis Mumford recalls in this luminous autobiography. It still is. With unflagging energy and unfailing memory, Mumford, 86, assumes the tone of an urban Thoreau, ransacking the familiar for overlooked truths. His principal turf is the city; his main object of study, himself. Born in 1895 in Flushing, Queens, raised in the precincts of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, educated at City College and the New York Public Library, Mumford was ideally prepared to become one of the great critics of the modern metropolis. He is also one of the most prolific...