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Read in the Blue Line

McKibben explores big questions in memoir

In 2005, environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote “Wandering Home,” a chronicle of his journey from Vermont to his Adirondack residence in Johnsburg. The optimistic subtitle of the book is “A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape.” That hope is mostly gone in ...

A work worth rereading

New books keep piling up. Consequently I don’t go back and re-savor favorite novels as often as I probably should. That deficiency in my behavior became eminently clear as I reread Russell Banks’ “The Sweet Hereafter” for this review. Banks’ death just over a year ago, in January ...

The dark side of the Olympics

Those who’ve been around the Tri-Lakes long enough can remember the gilded moments of the 1980 Winter Olympics: The elegant opening ceremonies, more suited to their setting than today’s made-for-TV extravaganzas; speed skater Eric Heiden’s seemingly daily accumulation of gold medals; and ...

If mountains could speak …

“May the Mountain Speak to You: A Collection of Snapshots and Quotations” by Ken Marcinowski, Sr., is almost 50 pages of photographs of beautiful scenes throughout the Adirondack Mountains. The author, who lives in Ballston Spa, provides lots of quotations by various writers, poets, ...

A meditation on the Adirondack conundrum

Lorraine Duvall writes well about time and place. In her 2020 “Finding a Woman’s Place: The Story of a 1970s Feminist Commune,” she returned to an Adirondack effort by women who rejected America’s traditional patriarchal structure and created their own self-designed identity. The book ...

A fitting tribute to Saranac Lake

A new book by Skip Murray and Caperton Tissot serves as a very nice paean to the village of Saranac Lake, New York. “Saranac Lake: An Adirondack Portrait,” with its combination of poetry and photography, is clearly a labor of love. Promoted as a record of the community from 2017 through ...