Deprived Of Unhappiness - Hardcover

Pickering, Sam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0821412345 ISBN 13: 9780821412343

Publisher: Ohio University Press, 1998

In this, his tenth book of essays, renowned raconteur Sam Pickering wanders from Nova Scotia to Tennessee, from a middle school athletic field to an English department. He tells stories about people named Googoo and Loppie. He examines trees and flowers. He watches a daughter play soccer and a son row. He attends funerals and remembers the past and imagines the future. His is the ordinary world observed closely.

But reading Pickering makes life blossom. Suddenly the small and the neglected bloom and charm. He is opinionated, too. “Foolishness in low places,” as a reviewer put it, is also his subject. Critics have compared him to Twain and Montaigne and have said his sentences flow like silk, caught in a breeze of verbs and nouns.

Deprived of Unhappiness is a book that describes living—living within a family and with Everyman’s hopes and fears. As the narrator roams hill and field, he tries to make sense of life. Even better, he enjoys life, its big rooms and its small, dusty corners. Pickering breathes life into the weary letters of carpe diem.

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About the Author:

Sam Pickering, best known as the model for the teacher in the film Dead Poets Society, is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the author of numerous books of scholarship and creative nonfiction.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Caterpillar, 1997, etc.). Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it a more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived. ``The stories I tell are stationary. The narratives don't teach or inspire.'' Dozy and comfortable as they are, his essays also urge readers to preserve the clarity of the moment, to stop looking for meaning and significance under every rock, to get of their duff, take a walk. Here are a dozen of his pieces, all Brownian and witty and melding fiction with nonfiction (he insinuates a homespun cast of characters from Carthage, Tenn.a motley crew of the halt and the lameas counterpoints to drive opinions home, as with ``I prefer bright lies to drab truth.'' One essay finds him summering in Nova Scotia, spending brambled days with a restless wife and two dogs that never get the drift about porcupine quills. In another, it is autumn and Pickering is at the losing end of a collision with a swimming pool wall, shaking loose intimations of mortality. There is a tour of irritability, the result of falling and breaking a few ribs (his wife, inured to his bumbling, greets him at the door with ``My God! What have you done now, you asshole?''); and there is a celebration of crotchetiness prompted by the doldrums of February. These are all stories of the commonplace, but in Pickerings hands they rise like yeast, a chemistry of clever writing that teases oblique pleasure from the mundane. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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