Book Reviews

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Old pictures are sure to please. And so Historic Images of the Adirondacks is a quick, enjoyable tour of life from 1870 to 1960, the period linking the oldest and youngest of the two hundred photographs reproduced in these pages. The photos are from the Adirondack Museum’s collection of eighty thousand pictures, and many of…

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Adirondack Life loyalists are acquainted with Betsy Folwell’s writing. Often neatly packaged in the magazine’s regular column “Short Carries,” for twenty years it has limned the Adirondack scene as no other writing has, presenting the region’s people, places, issues, spirit, spunk, and landscape with uncommon insight, humor, grace, and wisdom. Folwell’s essays now come in…

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Cracking The Adirondack Reader is like getting dropped deep in the backcountry. It’s dense, with little open space between the essays and excerpts, and it’s large, encompassing 495 pages, including 31 pages of biographical notes on the 117 writers, many renowned, all deeply familiar with the mountains at various times over the past four centuries.…

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Carl Heilman II has just come out with Lake George, his third book of Adirondack photographs. Like his last one, The Adirondacks, this is a small-format book (7 by 5 inches) that sells for under $20. As the title indicates, he turned his lens on just part of the Adirondack Park, but it’s an especially…

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For years, I lamented the fact that the great and celebrated corpus of Adirondack literature included so little about flora and fauna. The second (1982) edition of Paul Jamieson’s Adirondack Reader pretty much exemplified the state of affairs. Browse the index and you’ll see for yourself the scant attention Adirondack Mountain wildlife tended to receive…

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It all began when one person decided to introduce an acquaintance to high technology so he could record his low-tech life. “I didn’t really start out to write a biography,” says Marylee Armour of her book Heartwood: The Adirondack Homestead Life of W. Donald Burnap. The book, first published in 1988 (so when we say…

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On July 12, 1609, Samuel de Champlain, along with about sixty Canadian Indians, canoed into the lake that he quickly named after himself. On the twenty-ninth, the party spotted a band of Mohawks, enemies of his Algonquin allies. Abrief battle ensued the following morning, during which Champlain, pretty much without provocation, shot and killed two…

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In spring, birds flood the Adirondacks with music, and those who tune in report that the chorus thrills the soul. Yet listen closely in May and June, and you’ll detect a far older symphony. This one is of such ancient vintage that it, or something like it, shook the Jurassic air when swamps and marshes…

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In the summer of 1894, in the midst of a frightening drought, New York State convened a constitutional convention. Along with such issues as judicial and civilservice reform, education, and home rule for cities and villages, the delegates considered the future of the Adirondacks. They were meeting in Albany, near the banks of the Hudson…

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Tim Rowland’s High Peaks: A History of Hiking the Adirondacks from Noah to Neoprene is an impressionistic review of those aspects of Adirondack history that helped form the landscape that modern-day hikers traverse. Rowland, a humor columnist for the Herald-Mail in Hagerstown, Md., began visiting the Adirondacks in the 1960s, staying at his grandfather’s camp…