Vena Angier

Remember reading something by Bradford Angier about fifty years ago, so this mostly cherry, if musty-smelling, first edition of WILDERNESS WIFE (1976) caught my eye in a thrift store. Plenty here about wilderness living on the Peace River in remote British Columbia, where the Angiers built a cabin and set up housekeeping with their Irish wolfhound, Bushman, and a couple horses. Detailed descriptions of foraging for food and hunting moose and encounters with wolf packs and grizzly bears, not to mention arctic temps of 60-70 degrees below zero. Angier wrote many books like this back in the 60s and 70s, some of them enormously popular, mostly with hunters and outdoorsy types. This one is somewhat marred, I thought, by interspersed attempts at poetic flights of fancy about the magical beauty of nature, probably his wife's contribution to an otherwise solid narrative. It's a good enough book, I suppose, and even seems rather relevant again, in light of the global warming crisis and man's continuing destruction of the wilderness. But after fifty pages or so, I grew bored with the book, skimmed as many more pages and finally put it aside. An actual outdoorsman would probably enjoy this a lot more than I did. Musty attic smell to these pages - pee-yew. Better go wash my hands.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mehr)