Houseboat Chronicles - Notes from a Life in Shield County, Jake MacDonald. Extremely well written and clever. This book is so wide-ranging, maybe the best way to describe it is to give two example of passages that I thought particularly good:
Talking about the wilderness code of keeping one's cool no matter what, MacDonald tells of one night on the Great Slave Lake when he heard the camp Norseman plane crash in the lake, and the comments of the crew as they were rescued from the frigid lake. "Maybe people felt obliged to keep their cool under these circumstances because they knew their performance was being observed and would be recounted in bars for years afterward." Pg. 196.
"But the building of the drum was a ritual the Catholics call 'transubstantiation,' that is, a process by which a material object (such as bread) is transformed into the body of Christ. To the Ojibway, the sound of the drum drifting across the lake on a quiet summer night was the thumping of the Creator's heart." Pg. 205
I found this book while browsing the nature/science section at 2nd and Charles used bookstore (36 locations in the U.S.). I like browsing large selections of used books because I find books like this one that I would probably never otherwise hear about, and I like to be able to inspect the size of the type, and quality of the printing (info which is not available online AFAIK). I am especially dismayed when a used hard cover book arrives in the mail and it has small-type, is poorly printed, or is ex-library.
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