Pennsylvania - Travel, Nature Travel - Tourism, Narratives & Description, Eastern United States - Travel Essays & Descriptions
Available on Bookshop
Write a review
Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
In Appalachian Summer, Bonta watches the "waltzing" of a southern red-backed vole, the mating of eastern box turtles, and the stalking of a nest of house wrens by a black rat snake. She chronicles the life histories of fishers, woodchucks, jumping mice, and star-nosed moles, and she has frequent close encounters with black bears, eastern coyotes, red and gray foxes, raccoons, porcupines, white-tailed deer, and fox squirrels. Another important event in this Appalachian summer is the disappearance of a local girl, and Bonta poses questions about the safety of women in the woods. Do women stay out of the woods because they fear attack by men, or wild creatures and the unknown? Should they have such fears? Bonta's examination of these fears brings to mind the relationship between humans and nature - how, as we continue to encroach upon the wilderness around us, we are faced with increasingly more difficult decisions about our interactions with the natural world.Editorials
Booknews
This is the third book of naturalist Bonta's series, offering a day- by-day account of the natural life of her property in south central Pennsylvania. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Audobon Naturalist News
"Bonta describes the plants and animals of the forest in exquisite detail while accurately depicting their activities. The reader can't help but learn something about the ecology of these woods and the behavior of its denizens."—Outdoor Traveler
"She is nothing if not a dedicated and sharp-eyed observer. . . . a lover of natural detail, to whom minutes and hours of silent examination bring the greatest rewards."—Kirkus Reviews
A middle-of-the-road nature diary, set in the Pennsylvania mountains. Following her Appalachian Spring (1991), Bonta records, in the form of a diary polished into little essays, the summertime natural history of her small corner of central Pennsylvania, a mountainside place that is neither remote nor hard to get to; yet, she notes wryly, "to most easterners, raised on roads paved to everywhere and used to convenience at all costs, our home is daunting to reach by vehicle and impossible on foot." Thus effectively isolated, even though interstate highways and new housing developments ever encroach, she reflects on the ways of woodchucks, foxes, woodpeckers, pewees, phoebes, wood buffaloes, squirrels, gray shrews, and mushrooms. Along the way she discusses the hows and whys of nature observation, noting the pleasures and occasional frustrations of fieldwork. But, regrettably, Bonta far too easily falls into nature-good, humans-bad sentimentalizing, as when she coyly writes of discovering a nest full of newborn brown and yellow grouse chicks who crawl all over her, peeping in the confusion of a mother-bond imprinting gone awry: "I will tell the story over and over, like a mantra, to myself and others. The experience will remain as a shining talisman to illuminate the inevitable dark days of life. To have been mistaken for a ruffed grouse mother is a privilege few humans have experienced." And her prose lacks the poetic grandeur necessary to sing a place into imaginative being, as Annie Dillard has done for rural Virginia and Ann Zwinger for rural Colorado—a shame, inasmuch as the place about which Bonta writes seems so inviting.Book Details
Published
June 30, 1999
Publisher
Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, c1999.
Pages
232
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780822956938