Bøger af Tom Montgomery Fate

In a travel memoir that ventures from his smalltown upbringing to vastly different cultures around the globe, Tom Montgomery Fate comes to define "home" not as a physical location, but as a way of belonging. "Migrating birds have an internal compass that allows them to home their way back to their nesting place each spring," he writes. "For birds, home is both verb and noun--both journey and destination." The same is true for Fate. Whether he is bobbing in a canoe in the freezing rain with his son on a Canadian lake, praying with Lakota elders in a sweat lodge in South Dakota, or teaching English in a remote Filipino village, these are not stories of arrival. They are detours of discovery, a spiritual wayfinding through the wilderness of time and memory.

Cabin Fevermight be described as a modernWalden, if you can imagine Thoreau married, with a job, three kids, and a minivan. A seasonal memoir written alternately from a little cabin in the Michigan woods and a house in suburban Chicago, the book engages readers in a serious yet irreverent conversation about Thoreau's relevance in the modern age.The author turns Thoreau's immortal statement "e;I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately"e; on its head with the phrase "e;I got married and had children because I wished to live deliberately."e; Though Fate spends half his time at the cabin, this is no world-renouncing, back-to-nature paean. Unlike Thoreau during his Walden years, he balances his solitude with full engagement in family and civic life.Fate's writing reflects this balancing of nature and family in stories such as "e;The Confused Cardinal,"e; in which a male cardinal feeds chicks of another species and leads to a reflection on parenting; "e;In the Time of Cicadas,"e; which juxtaposes his wife's hysterectomy with the burgeoning fecundity of the seventeen-year cicadas coming out to mate; and in a beautiful essay reminiscent of E. B. White's "e;Once More to the Lake,"e; in which Fate takes his son to the same cabin his father took him as a child.In his exploration of how we are to live "e;a more deliberate life"e; amid a high-tech, materialist culture, Fate invites readers into an interrogation of their own lives, and into a new kind of vision: the possibility of enough in a culture of more.