One of the workers told me, “People don’t realize the beauty of the Park that’s right under their noses and that takes them away from noise, traffic, and the problems of The City.” Evidence that workers with chainsaws had been at work and had cleaned up much, but not all the aftermath of the storms. We saw sliced and diced tree trunks, rounds way too big for a fireplace and sawdust scattered on the ground. Together we walked and saw fallen trees and the stumps of once mighty trees that had been uprooted, decapitated, split down the middle and shattered like toothpicks. She’ll photograph most anything and anybody and she rarely goes anywhere without a camera. Alternative Voices is the title of her book. Hansen made a name for herself documenting the lives of the punks in San Francisco in the 1980s. Photographer Jeanne Hansen and I drove around the Park to get the lay of the land and refresh our memories of a place we had visited many times. Hurray! With hundreds of downed trees, the City, it seemed, had taken yet another hit it didn’t need and couldn’t afford.Īs a tree hugger and a citizen of the city I had to see as many fallen trees as possible. In a city haunted by the homeless, druggies, unleased office space and criminals, citizens tend to forget about the trees and the woods at the heart of Golden Gate Park, an area that covers a thousand acres and that is the largest urban park in the US. No one seems to know precisely how many trees, but the figure 661 has been bandied about. Last winter, when winds up to 88-miles-per hour whipped San Francisco month-after-month, several hundred trees came down. Fortunately, too, I now live five-minutes on foot from the western edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park that boasts thousands of trees that are clustered so closely together in some place that they make me feel I’m in a wilderness. Fortunately, I enjoyed a second boyhood after I moved from Long Island to Northern California and fell in love with the redwood grove on the land where I planted fruit trees, harvested apples, peaches and plums. Homestead, a book of short stories written under the pseudonym Rosina Lippi Green, was published by Delphinium.I am an inveterate tree hugger, a hugger of oak, fir, pine, eucalyptus, hickory and cedar which I first hugged as a boy growing up on the edge of a hardwood forest long gone to make room for suburbia. (Aug.) FYI: This novel is Donati's debut under her own name. The many subplots are skillfully interwoven, and the author's sheer stamina commands respect but the novel is complicated, not complex, overstuffed with familiar, featherweight themes. Nathaniel is the only thoroughly admirable white male in the huge cast-upbringing having triumphed over blood-and no person of color has flaws. Worse, the characters are color-by-numbers cartoons. Then the charm falters as their adventures are padded with details that embroider without embellishing. At first they are an enchanting couple, shooting at bad guys and making athletic love in unlikely woodsy settings. Nathaniel wants Judge Middleton's land, too, for his adoptive people-but, unlike Todd, he also wants Lizzie for herself. One look at rugged Nathaniel Bonner, a Scotsman raised by Mohawks (they call him Between-Two-Lives), and Lizzie scuttles her feminist disdain for marriage and her father's calculations. Richard Todd and fulfill both men's ambitions for property. When Elizabeth Middleton, a proud spinster of 29, arrives in upstate Paradise, N.Y., after a sheltered life in England with her titled aunt, she means to live with her father, Alfred, a judge, and her wastrel brother, Julian, and teach school. Alas, Donati offers less wit and more cant than her celebrated precursor in a hefty volume that is politically correct to a fare-thee-well, suggesting that the author hoped single-handedly to reverse all race and gender bias. Claire Fraser, Gabaldon's time-traveling physician heroine, even makes a cameo appearance as a battlefield surgeon. Epic in ambition, heaving-bosomed and lavish with pioneer life, Donati's debut inevitably invites comparison to the Revolutionary War-era romances of Diana Gabaldon.
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