Appalachian Summer

by Marcia Bonta

Overview

In Appalachian Summer, Marcia Bonta offers a day-by-day account of summer’s budding, blossoming, and fading on her 650-acre property in south-central Pennsylvania. During this summer, the author’s first grandchild grows alongside the forest animals that populate the mountain. A local girl disappears, and while searchers comb the mountain for her, Bonta poses questions about women’s safety in the woods and why they might hesitate to hike or camp on their own. Undeterred, she continues her meandering daily walks around her forested home, making minute observations of this one place in this one season, ultimately laying bare the undeniable connections we retain to the natural world—which is, after all, our own. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822956938
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	05/06/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Marcia Bonta is a freelance nature writer and the author of, in addition to her Appalachian seasons books, Outbound Journeys in Pennsylvania, More Outbound Journeys in Pennsylvania, Women in the Field, and Escape to the Mountain, and the editor of American Women Afield. She has written more than three hundred magazine articles for publications such as Birder’s World, Bird Watcher’s Digest, Living Bird, and Hawk Mountain News. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, and she is a popular lecturer on nature and nature writing. 

Editorial Reviews

Naturalist Bonta combines scientific accuracy with a lyrical sense of wonder and excitement as she describes her daily explorations around her . . .  hillside home.”
—Publishers Weekly

“She is nothing if not a dedicated and sharp-eyed observer. . . . a lover of natural detail, to whom minutes and hours of silent examination bring the greatest rewards.” —Outdoor Traveler 

From the Publisher

This is the third book of naturalist Bonta's series, offering a day- by-day account of the natural life of her property in south central Pennsylvania. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

"Bonta describes the plants and animals of the forest in exquisite detail while accurately depicting their activities. The reader can't help but learn something about the ecology of these woods and the behavior of its denizens."—

Audobon Naturalist News

"She is nothing if not a dedicated and sharp-eyed observer. . . . a lover of natural detail, to whom minutes and hours of silent examination bring the greatest rewards."—

Outdoor Traveler

A middle-of-the-road nature diary, set in the Pennsylvania mountains. Following her Appalachian Spring (1991), Bonta records, in the form of a diary polished into little essays, the summertime natural history of her small corner of central Pennsylvania, a mountainside place that is neither remote nor hard to get to; yet, she notes wryly, "to most easterners, raised on roads paved to everywhere and used to convenience at all costs, our home is daunting to reach by vehicle and impossible on foot." Thus effectively isolated, even though interstate highways and new housing developments ever encroach, she reflects on the ways of woodchucks, foxes, woodpeckers, pewees, phoebes, wood buffaloes, squirrels, gray shrews, and mushrooms. Along the way she discusses the hows and whys of nature observation, noting the pleasures and occasional frustrations of fieldwork. But, regrettably, Bonta far too easily falls into nature-good, humans-bad sentimentalizing, as when she coyly writes of discovering a nest full of newborn brown and yellow grouse chicks who crawl all over her, peeping in the confusion of a mother-bond imprinting gone awry: "I will tell the story over and over, like a mantra, to myself and others. The experience will remain as a shining talisman to illuminate the inevitable dark days of life. To have been mistaken for a ruffed grouse mother is a privilege few humans have experienced." And her prose lacks the poetic grandeur necessary to sing a place into imaginative being, as Annie Dillard has done for rural Virginia and Ann Zwinger for rural Colorado—a shame, inasmuch as the place about which Bonta writes seems so inviting.

Kirkus Reviews