Natural History - General & Miscellaneous, New England - Regional Biography, Regional Studies - Northeast & Middle Atlantic U.S., Natural Literature & History, New Hampshire - State & Local History, Northeastern & Middle Atlantic Region - History - Genera

Bones of the Earth

Name: Bones of the Earth
Author: Howard Mansfield
ISBN: 9781593761394

by Howard Mansfield

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Overview

In this graceful collection, Howard Mansfield looks anew at the New England region he's called home for over twenty years. He studies the beautiful stonework of granite bridges with a local expert; contemplates the deserted second and third stories of the old mercantile buildings that populate New England's towns and cities; and considers the cemeteries and roadside shrines that punctuate the landscape. Each exploratory adventure is written with Mansfield's typical wit and passion in prose so smooth that the deeper questions he raises appear with startling poignancy. How do our local landmarks narrate the past? What is history? Should we — can we — preserve its artifacts for the future? A kind of elegy for the built environment and dying customs of New England life, these essays will challenge anyone's notions of home, history, and the future that jeopardizes both.

Synopsis

The Bones of The Earth is a book about landmarks, but of the oldest kind—sticks and stones. For millennia this is all there was: sticks and stones, dirt and trees, animals and people, the sky by day and night. The Lord spoke through burning bushes, through lightning and oaks. Trees and rocks and water were holy. They are commodities today and that is part of our disquiet. Howard Mansfield explores the loss of cultural memory, asking: What is the past? How do we construct that past? Is it possible to preserve the past as a vital force for the future? He writes eloquently on the land and time, on how to be a tourist of the near-at-hand, and on the forces that try to topple us. From the author of In the Memory House and The Same Ax, Twice comes The Bones of The Earth, a stunning call for reinventing our view of the future.

Publishers Weekly

In these measured and moving laments for bygone forms of New England life, historical essayist Mansfield (Skylark; Cosmopolis) traces the loss of local landmarks and customs in an age of increased urbanization. He opens with an account of the ceremonial rite that originated as a marketing ploy of the Boston Post, which offered towns a cane made of African ebony with a gold-plated head for the town's oldest male citizen. He next takes a wry look at the mythology surrounding the "Washington Elm" that once stood in Cambridge, Mass., and goes on to explore, with a local expert, the beautiful stonework of New Hampshire's granite bridges. In perhaps his strongest and most anthropological essay, Mansfield delves into the rules that cemeteries insist on in order to constrain the excesses of mourners' grief, while taking time to reflect on the contemporary ritual of roadside shrines (the flowers and messages of mourning that mark the sites of fatal accidents). The most personal and sentimental essay in the collection celebrates the life of a late friend, a hunter-trapper turned naturalist named John Kulish, whose death represents for Mansfield the passing of a world of intimate knowledge of wildlife. Carefully researched and exuding unassuming integrity, this collection will have special appeal for New Englanders who share the author's mournful approach to modernity. Agent, Christina Ward. (Nov. 20) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

About the Author, Howard Mansfield

“Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing,” said the writer and critic Guy Davenport. “He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent. His deep subject is Time: how we deal with it and how it deals with us.”

Mansfield is the author of six books, including The Bones of the Earth, In the Memory House, and The Same Ax, Twice, which The New York Times said was “filled with insight and eloquence. A memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom.” Mansfield is also the editor of the Where the Mountain Stands Alone (UPNE 2006) and two forthcoming children’s books.

For The Bones of the Earth, Mansfield was a tourist of the near-at-hand, exploring the corner of New Hampshire that he has lived in for the last twenty years. Seeking out magnificent elms, he trespassed, and with the cover of a friend and photographer (who is a professional in conflict resolution) he loitered gathering the reactions of passersby. With an old trapper, he enjoyed long winter hikes, one of which ended in a tumble over a five-story icy bobcat ledge. And with an architect schooled in the workings of Las Vegas, he toured a commercial strip, trying to see it with fresh eyes. Other journeys took him back 10,000 years to the bottom of a glacial lake that is now a city, and to the deserted second and third floors of old mercantile buildings in towns and small cities.

Writing about preservation, architecture and American history, Mansfield has contributed to The New York Times, American Heritage, The Washington Post, Historic Preservation, Yankee and other publications. Mansfield has explored issues of preservation in five books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind Review said, "Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of American books about the idea of place…. But the best of them, the deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard Mansfield’s In the Memory House.”

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Beth Kephart

“A profound curiosity and a rare humanity underlie the elegant work of Howard Mansfield. He is a master sleuth, an invested listener, a credible and compassionate guide to our future and our past. He is a writer I read because there is real wisdom in his words, because there’s nobody else in this generation who writes so meaningfully about what really matters in the American landscape.”

Gilbert Taylor

“In the Same Ax, Twice (2000), Mansfield queried the multiple meanings of the popular practice of restoring historical objects, an impetus of concern with the past that carries into this volume. Instead of considering restoration, however, Mansfield plays his thoughts off objects of place as disparate as presentation walking canes, and regulations on impromptu cemetery memorials.... Connoisseurs of seeing the world in an oyster, or even a small state, will savor Mansfield’s style.

Harry Sheff

“In witty essays that recall both Thoreau’s Walden and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, Mansfield ruminates on American history by unpacking our connection to the landscape.”

Keith Demanche

“Reading Bones of the Earth is a little like archaeology. Each essay is a rare find: an exciting bit of history, a revelation about how a forgotten culture operated, an interview with someone unexpected… There are plenty of interesting tidbits and curious facts throughout the book to keep the pages turning. But it is the bigger picture, the epiphany, that makes this book great. Time and again, people fail to recognize the miraculous natural world around them.”

William Craig

“The Bones of the Earth is a book of joyful wonder and discovery, of perceptions expanded by knowledge… Mansfield shows us how much we’re not seeing in what we see around us nowadays. The Bones of the Earth challenges us to cherish our natural and cultural heritage, while delighting us with insights inspired by Mansfield’s research, his gift for vigorous, empathetic observation, and his love of the lasting world.”