George R. StewartRezensionen

Published in 1941, [Storm] follows the life of a winter storm from its birth over the North Pacific until its dissipation twelve days later. The storm, privately named "Maria" by a junior meteorologist at the San Francisco office of the US Weather Bureau, is a significant enough presence in the story to qualify as a character . . . except that Stewart, even as he lovingly chronicles its growth and changing nature, is careful never to humanize it. It sweeps across the Pacific, then across Northern California, utterly indifferent to its effect on the human characters in the story.

Those human characters are, by traditional literary standards, given only slightly more development. They have character traits and motivations, both limited in number and very sparely drawn, but not personalities. Over the course of the story, we see them almost exclusively in the context of doing their jobs, and learn virtually nothing about their larger lives or inner thoughts and emotions.

All of this serves the central theme of Stewart's novel, which is the collision of natural systems (the storm) and the human systems that it touches: the weather bureau, the airlines and railroads, the power and telephone companies, the flood-control works that regulate the flow of the rivers, and the highway department charged with keeping the mountain roads over the Sierra Nevada open and passable. The drama in the story lies in the humans who operate these systems straining their minds, bodies, and spirits to the breaking point to keep them operating in spite of the storm . . . or at least to keep its disruption of them, and thus its effect on people's lives, to an absolute minimum.

Stewart's writing about atmospheric phenomena, though it occasionally tips into the self-consciously grandiose, remains surprisingly gripping, and his juggling of multiple plot lines and sets of characters is masterful. It's a thoughtful reflection on the way that fragility and resilience coexist in the technological systems that make modern life possible. It's also a look into the minds of the workers whose unseen labor (both physical and mental) keeps those systems operating.

[Storm] not an easy sell to someone you don't know well, but if anything I wrote above intrigues you, it's well worth tracking down.

A somber portrait of a man who survives a cataclysmic plague and struggles to rebuild some semblance of civilization. Deeply affecting. Published in 1949, this is a classic work of science fiction that remains relevant today, perhaps more now than ever. A compelling read.

Brian Aldiss coined the term "cozy catastrophe" about John Wyndham's work. It being an end of the world event where the character doesn't suffer enough or there's not always impending doom right at the door. In Earth Abides, the main character, Ish, is bedridden throughout the entire apocalypse. Then we follow him when he is clear-headed. No zombies. No aliens. No evil government stooges.

Ish isn't a scientist or a doctor, or a superhuman soldier; he's just a slightly more intelligent person who understands the present and the importance the future holds. Along the way he picks up a few group of survivors. The dynamic of the group is something that is interesting as we see a small society form. Within this, Ish becomes a defacto leader and the idealist - but an idealist who has reality smack into him several times, especially when it concerns other people. While you do get a semblance of others actions and reasons, we are constantly following Ish and his internal dialogue. Society is gone and all that remains are the remains.

But now children come into the mix. Society is still in struggle within their group. Ish wants to build the children to take over and remember the times before and achieve order once again. But what does order and society look like when you only have less than a dozen people who existed in the "before times".

There are some amazing juxopositions in this book as well. Ish takes a wife, Emma, names that have origin towards "Adam" and "Eve". We see the story starts out with Ish (Adam) being bitten by a snake and then he's thrust out into a world of disorder but also the Earth continues. Within this, there is small discussions of religion as in Ish is not religious and views it as a distraction from the unity needed among the group and focus on survival tasks. Then to double back, mythology springs up on things that for Ish are common place but for the children who only know the world after the Great Disaster become totems and exalted titles.

There's no big shootouts in this book. There's no stopping the mad bomber or brigand. It is a calm book but the tension and drama are beautifully done. The dealing with an outside stranger to the group and the impact of actions taken is such a high point. But there are little movements that are big deals and then there are big deals where you think the story will focus on but it settles into a more somber and carefree tone. It's amazing.

I almost come to think of apocalypse stories truly bringing questions of the purpose of life and humanity front and center and this one has done it the most by not focusing on the disaster but on the life and humanity. This would be an amazing book for a group discussion or reading group. I was tempted not to finish it as I saw the end coming and didn't want it to end - a sure sign of a good book. A definite recommendendation. Don't let it sit on your shelf. But if you do, the Earth Abides. Final Grade - A+

Cuando Isherwood Williams, un graduado en geografía, vuelve de unas vacaciones descubre que todo el mundo esta muerto, victima de un virus. Va a la deriva, observa la degradación del paisaje, plagas de insectos y roedores, y al regresar a San Francisco, encuentra a una sobreviviente y forman una pareja y tienen hijos que vuelven a la manera de vivir de los nativos americanos, completando un círculo. Ish queda como único testigo al pasado y recuerda que «los hombres van y vienen, pero la Tierra permanece». Esta hermosa meditación sobre la ecología, el pasado y la inexorabilidad del cambio, es una de las obras maestras de la ficción especulativa de todos los tiempos.

The people are examples, generic, but each one shows how this great weather event affected many others like them. I read this many times over many years, and still felt it was new each reading.

My usernamesake!

Earth Abides is a gentle glide from the stagnation of civilisation to it's feeble, but comfortable, reignition.

I often found myself disagreeing with Ish, the narrator and protagonist, and wondering how I would react in a situation like this. It provoked some interesting thoughts and scenarios, and honestly immersed me in the world more deeply than if I had agreed with him at every turn.

I found that this novel could be put down at any time and returned to any time later without much loss of clarity, espescially during Part II: The Year 22. Some may see this as a negative, but I honestly found it to be a significant positive as I have a habit of putting books down and not picking them up again for months, only to have completely forgotten everything.

This is an intriguing, realistic, and frankly desirable look into a potential post-apocalypse humanity that is, to me at least, leagues above every piece of post-apocalyptic media that catastrophizes about humanity's 'evil nature' and the 'devolution' we might face in such a scenario.

Well written and compelling story. Though it was written in 1949, there is little to give that fact away.

Earth Abides has long been one of my all-time favourites. Until I listened to the audiobook this week. And, oh dear, am I conflicted about this book now.

I've always been aware of (and annoyed by) the sexism and the racism and the capital punishment. But somehow for me, the strength of the story outweighed the (ahem) uneducated aspects. Alas, not so this time around.

This book is told in two threads. The primary thread follows Ish, an academic and intellectual, who finds himself amongst the last survivors of a great pandemic. The secondary thread follows the earth itself and the changes that play out following the loss of humanity (to a significant extent).

The secondary thread is, in my opinion, the most interesting one. The environmental, geographic, and biological changes are fascinating. The insight into what we would now call PTSD and survivor's guilt makes for compelling reading.

The primary thread is underpinned by a white supremacist, heteronormative, misogynistic thread. The storytelling is masterful and the (white male) characters are well fleshed out and interesting. The female lead, Em, is a black woman. She's also quite a good character and, while Ish and Em's relationship would have been seen as shocking and progressive at the time of publication, it's sort of implied that she's some sort of exception to blackness rather than simply because she's a good person.

Also, the descent into hunter-gatherer society over the course of the book just seems so avoidable and unnecessary. Why don't they try harder to retain knowledge and instil it in the next generations?

There's a lot to love about this book – and unfortunately, a lot to hate too.

Maybe revisiting old favourites isn't always a brilliant plan.

Fascinating book about Donner party emigrants caught in early winter in Sierra Nevadas on the way to California. Found out later this account has some myths that are not quite right.

This wasn't at all what I expected. A post virus world where nearly everyone is wiped out. Not enough people to form an army (looking at you Swan Song!) but barely enough for humanity to survive at all. It's quite a cosy catastrophe really - I kept expecting the ravening motorcycle gangs etc but nothing like that ever happens. Because there are just not enough survivors.
It's also an environmental book before that was a thing. Lots of sections about world changing, animals breeding and dying as the effect of man wanes. (the section about the rats gave me the habdabs!). Ish is an introverted academic and often thinks deeply about things and what the future holds. I liked it a lot but it is a slow contemplative book - don't expect the motorbike gangs - they aren't here.

Gosh this book's fun. I'm not sure what I expected when I purchased this book, as it sat on a shelf for a decade before I picked it up. But what I found was an extremely readable and obviously-researched collection of stories--about how places got named in (mostly) the continental United States. The stories are tied together with useful and compelling analysis. I read the book cover-to-cover and nearly everything was interesting; moreover, I expect I'll follow some of its leads into more reading. What more can you expect from what seems to be a reference book?

I also expect that some of the research and analysis is dated, or otherwise faulty; these things happen in such comprehensive studies, so I don't exactly take everything at face value. Nonetheless, for those places I'm familiar with Stewart's stories are reasonably accurate.

==========

Irrelevant, mostly, but pertinent to me: When I started to read it I finally looked at the book's cover, which turns out to be a portion of Frank Galbraith's Michigan railroad map, published in 1897. As cropped, the map ends a few hundred yards north of where I live. 'Twas a bit of a thrill.½

Outstanding. A description of the birth of a storm and then its progress over 12 days. A wide variety of situations and people are involved. Each are introduced early in the book, but in many cases their significance does not become clear until later. Stewart is a master of describing a chain of events - two boys who shoot an electrical box on a pole which later lets the rain in and shorts the circuitry, disabling pumps and flooding an underpass. Or a tree that fell many years before and eventually slides off a rocky edge and brings down a phone line, disrupting a call. Or an owl that gets electrocuted on a power line, causing a weakness in the cable that later fails under the weight of ice from the storm.
As others have noted, descriptions of life in California in 1941 are fascinating, including the human skill that was involved in interpreting weather charts and producing a forecast.

True life horror story of the Donner Party emigrants that end up stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1846. Originally written in 1936 and revised in 1961, it pulls no punches while still maintaining an objectivity that avoids lurid sensationalism. A bit dated in style and ethnic sensitivity. It's a little like a Tolstoy novel because of the number of characters involved and the back and forth of the various parties and rescue missions.

You will never forget the vision of the rescuers finding some of the enfeebled, dead, and starving survivors at the bottom of a 25 foot snow and ice crater surrounded by the half eaten corpses of their neighbors and family, their entrails still in the stew pot over the fire.

At once a testament to both the heroism and desperation that humanity is capable of. Murder, greed, and selfishness are just the beginning.

It's a classic of survival literature that never fails to fascinate and hold us in suspense even as our stomachs churn.

Contains the Reed and Breen diaries as appendices as well as the 12 year old Virginia Reed's account of the harrowing journey.

What actually happens at a practical level when the majority of the human race is suddenly removed? How long do buildings stand, or the lights stay on, or water continue to flow? Some of these questions are addressed in this story, which grounds it, and stops it becoming just fantasy. Although the book was written in 1949, it has not aged that much, particularly in the light of COVID, and lockdowns. The passage of time accelerates somewhat in two bridge-like chapters, but this seems to work. There are times when the opposite happens, and there is a long period of philosophical reflection, which drags a little. The concern of the main character that the new community should be more creative rather than relying on stores of food and other necessities still available in shops, and the lack of response to the challenge of this idea is interesting. As is the rise of a new generation that has known nothing about how the world used to be pre-disaster. Recommended.

History was an artist, maintaining the idea but changing the details, like a composer keeping the same theme but dulling it to a minor or lifting by an octave, now crooning it with violins, now blaring it on trumpets.

I chose to reread this Science Fiction classic because of the Coronavirus Pandemic and my fond recall of this story I had read as a teenager.

With age comes much more appreciation for subtler things such as the interplay of history with 'reality' and the author's use of metaphor highlighting social and religious change.

Isherwood Williams starts out as the seemingly sole survivor of a great infectious disaster wiping the Earth of most of it's inhabitants.

Despite Ish's every attempt to raise the children as thinkers and to lead them away from superstition, his journey, as an intellectual overthinking philosopher, metamorphases into the leader of The Tribe, then ultimately, into a Deity.

Earth Abides is a love story to Humankind, a sonnet to the power of resiliency and one of the most well written Science Fiction books I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Pandemic novels may be all the rage right now, do yourself a favor and take the time to read Earth Abides. You'll be uplifted and cheerful at the end, rather than scared and anxious.

Follows a Pacific storm from it's inception off the coast of Japan to a several day wallop of California. Set in the present day of 1941, we follow the impact of the storm from the Weather Service to the railroad, air service, US 40 over Donner Pass, and Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento office. There is a wayward owl and lineman, blown down tree, and lineman as well.

Really happy to stumble across.½

Ex-Westminster School Library

George R. Stewart’s classic study of place-naming in the United States was written during World War II as a tribute to the varied heritage of the nation’s peoples. More than half a century later, Names on the Land remains the authoritative source on its subject, while Stewart’s intimate knowledge of America and love of anecdote make his book a unique and delightful window on American history and social life.

Names on the Land is a fascinating and fantastically detailed panorama of language in action. Stewart opens with the first European names in what would later be the United States—Ponce de León’s flowery Florída, Cortés’s semi-mythical isle of California, and the red Rio Colorado—before going on to explore New England, New Amsterdam, and New Sweden, the French and the Russian legacies, and the unlikely contributions of everybody from border ruffians to Boston Brahmins. These lively pages examine where and why Indian names were likely to be retained; nineteenth-century fads that gave rise to dozens of Troys and Athens and to suburban Parksides, Brookmonts, and Woodcrest Manors; and deep and enduring mysteries such as why “Arkansas” is Arkansaw, except of course when it isn’t.

Names on the Land will engage anyone who has ever wondered at the curious names scattered across the American map. Stewart’s answer is always a story—one of the countless stories that lie behind the rich and strange diversity of the USA.
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What’s in a Name?
Everything, according to an amazing book about America.
By Matt Weiland
June 30, 2008

On frozen winter nights in Minneapolis, I used to lie in the dark and listen to the high-school hockey scores. They were read out on the radio—hockey is always news in Minnesota—but I didn’t much care who won. I was 10 or 11 years old, a little bit lonely and a little bit bored, and for some reason I found comfort and distraction listening to the names of towns and cities around the state. Hibbing, Cloquet, Eveleth: the pinch and chap of the Iron Range, with traces of the Finns and French who settled there. Crookston, Warroad, Thief River Falls: the dark romance of the forested northwest. Moorhead, Brainerd, Saint Cloud: the dull thud of the flat and unlovely middle and its Norwegian bachelor farmers. Pipestone, Owatonna, Blue Earth: the dreamy vowels of the riverine south. Did I want to go to these places? No more than I wanted to go to Narnia or Middle-Earth. But I found in their names a kind of secular liturgy, beautiful and full of promise. Only later, reading George Rippey Stewart’s Names on the Land, did I discover that I wasn’t alone. “Some are born great and some with a gift for laughter,” Stewart wrote, trying to account for the origins of his own passion. “Others are born with a love of names.”

Even those lucky in laughter or destined for greatness will recognize Names on the Land as a masterpiece of American writing and American history. First published in 1945 and about to be reissued in the NYRB Classics series, it is an epic account of how just about everything in America—creeks and valleys, rivers and mountains, streets and schools, towns and cities, counties and states, the country and continent itself—came to be named. Like other broad-minded and big-hearted works of American culture from the first half of the 20th century—H.L. Mencken’s American Language, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A.trilogy of novels, the Federal Writers’ Project American Guide series, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music—Names on the Land reflects a glorious union of two primal forces in the American mind. On one hand, Americanism: the inclination toward the large-scale and industrial, toward manifest destiny and the farthest shore, toward what a French critic a century ago called the American “worship of size, mass, quantity and numbers.” On the other, Americana: the craving for the local and the lo-fi, for the inward heart of things, for the handcrafted and the homemade.

Stewart was born the same year as Lewis Mumford, 1895, and he shared Mumford’s restless curiosity and the ease with which he wrote across different disciplines and genres. A scholar, novelist, travel writer, journalist, biographer, popular sociologist and ecologist, he may be best known for three other books: Ordeal by Hunger (1936), an account of the doomed Donner Party; Storm (1941), a novel about a horrific Pacific Ocean storm and its effects on man and environment, which is also the source of the lasting tradition of giving female names to major storms; and Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel in which nearly the entire human race is destroyed by a virus. It is said to be the inspiration for Stephen King’s The Stand.

But Stewart’s grandest achievement is Names on the Land, a disguised wartime plea for the triumph of cardinal American virtues: buoyancy and tolerance, curiosity and confidence, love of the land and faith in the future. It is organized chronologically, from the land’s earliest settlement by what we clumsily call Native Americans to the coming of European explorers, the creation of the United States, the closing of the frontier and finally World War II, the time of the book’s composition.

This is no dry encyclopedia: Stewart writes with great narrative force. Take his account of the beginning of the Revolutionary War, when British soldiers fired on British colonialist militiamen—Americans!—at Lexington:

Then the firing came, and men lay dead upon the grass. The line wavered and broke, and perhaps some British officer thought: “Well, that’s over!” Yet all day that news and that name spread outward from the village where women sat with their dead. Reuben Brown took the alarm west to Concord. It went east to meet the men of Salem and Marblehead, marching already. “They fired—our men are dead—Lexington! A new name in the land!” … Still farther it went, the name of that little village. What riders carried it, no one knows. By the waters of Clinch and Holston men listened. It took the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap. There at last in that western land, a thousand miles from the village green, it came in June to a camp of hunters. They heard the name and said, “Let us call this place Lexington.” And so they did. … That was only the first of many. For now there was a new name in the land, and children learned it with their first words. At last the people had a symbol—not a stupid king across the ocean, but a name red with their own blood.

Throughout, Stewart is a great evangelist for the poetry that comes from keeping close to the land, that inscribes into it some of the experience of those who passed by: Cape Fear, Golden Gate, Deadman Creek. “The deepest poetry of a name and its first glory lie, not in liquid sounds, but in all that shines through that name—the hope or terror, or passion or wit, of those who named it. The second glory of a name, as with Marathon or Valley Forge, springs later from the deeds done there.”

The image of the melting pot has come to seem hackneyed as it’s become clear how stubborn segregation remains and how complicated patterns of assimilation can be. But Names on the Land is a convincing reminder that the metaphor holds much truth, revealing how early the process of Americanization began, how swiftly it advanced, and how resilient it proved to be. Time and again newcomers adopted and adapted local names, and names survived the end of empires. The French ebbed away, but Detroit remained; the Spaniards sailed from the Western shores, but San Diego endured; the Dutch sold up, and though New Amsterdam naturally became New York, the Dutch name for the village of Breukelyn lived on.

Like all great epics, Names on the Land has moments of comedy and of pathos. Chicago may first have meant “onion-place” or “skunk-town.” The word podunk, now routinely used to indicate any place comically unworthy of note, originates with poodic, an Indian word for a point of land; settlers along the Maine coast used to say “Go to Poodic!” the way we might say “Get out of here!” Texas originates with the word that a Spanish expedition in 1689 heard from the Indians they encountered there: “Techas! Techas!” or “Friends! Friends!” The original name proposed for the state that became New Jersey was Albania.

Always a great and plain democrat, Stewart evinces a strong sympathy for the persecution of Native Americans, and he decries the presence on the land of so many names belonging to “periwigged lords of London. … What most of them ever did for the colonies to deserve so much as the naming of an out-house would be difficult to discover.” But he is no cheap patriot: He derides our national name itself, the United States of America, as too long, too vague, too ugly on the page, too clumsy to say. It is, he says, “the worst misfortune in our whole naming-history,” explaining that the abbreviation USA only became popular once it was branded into the stocks of American muskets during the Revolutionary War.

Stewart cites some enticing alternatives: In 1775, newspaperman Philip Freneau banged the drum for Columbia; a generation later, some freedom-loving citizen proposed Fredonia; novelist Washington Irving suggested Alleghania. But as pretty as it may be to imagine a bright and shiny new name, there is something fitting about leaving our cacophonous, patchwork nation saddled with one so graceless and unmusical. And there is something perfectly American about sticking with it despite its imperfections. Stewart, after all, notes that of the four American places named Tokio at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing, none changed its name. “The state of mind seems to be more strongly than ever that the names now belong to us—to alter them would be repudiation of our own history, weakness rather than strength.”
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George R. Stewart, mid-century novelist and co-founder of the American Name Society, gave onomastics a good name with his classic Names on the Land (1945), a learned and rollicking act of patriotic toponymy. Its republication, with a graceful introduction by Matt Weiland, is a welcome reminder that the polyglot medley on our maps is, as Mr. Stewart says, “a chief glory of our heritage”...few authors or books are more American—in every good sense of that word—than George R. Stewart and Names on the Land.— Wall Street Journal

Important, useful, interesting....Names on the Land is a wonderful work of original research and a fine book to dip into.— The New York Times

An enchanting book, written with wisdom and wit and an almost austere poetry....Like all really good books, regardless of subject, it has a light to cast.— Journal of American Folklore

Unusual and excellent...put together in a fascinating manner...The style is also enchanting and leaves an impression that is not quickly forgotten ...Here is a book, in short, that may be read frontwards or backwards or from the middle in either direction and be fully enjoyed.— American Speech

Names on the Land was first published in 1945 and has remained a classic in the field of onomastics—the study of proper names and their meanings.
— Los Angeles Times

[A] masterwork.— Minneapolis Star—Tribune

A book so interestingly and delightfully written is certain to have wide appeal...Like all really good books, regardless of subject, it has light to cast: something of which there seems to be never enough to go around.
— Journal of American Folkore

12 days. A storm arises, crosses the Pacific, hits California ending a drought. The people who watch it and are responsible for dealing with its consequences in the Weather Bureau, highways, power, telephone, railroad, water management and air control are followed as well, but while the storm is named, Maria, only a few of the people are, and those whose inner workings are described as well as most others are referred to by job title often just initials.½

I was familiar with the basics of the story of the Donner Party, but didn't appreciate the depth and breadth of the ordeal. The book was well researched, and really gives you a feeling of what the people went through. For a similar story, see Nando Parrado's "Miracle in the Andes". Both are telling stories of survival, and make you wonder about the limits of our own endurance.

I read a kindle edition that could have used some editing, but it was a decent story. Strange writing style, but the point came across. Nice to read a post-apocalyptic story that didn't devolve into war, war, war.

so i finaly came through and read this book, i had to read to know what was it about and why people seemed to like it or hate it so much, i loved it, and can see the fantasy through it and also the 50's on it, yes the way Ishwood express himself is a bit outdated, but people need to start thinking he wasnt writting this book for us now, he was writting it for people on his time, where women and even mixed marriages were not well looked upon, actually this book made me think of my grandfather, and how poeple his age thought about the world, when this book was released and won a prize in his genre my grandfather was a boy less than 10 years old, just imagine him reading this, post apocalyptical fiction always makes us feel someting, or fear or that tingling that if things go this way i want to do this or that, well Ish fears made sense, would he be able to help his "wife" bring safely children to this world without a real doctor? uhmm his look at the world if he was an anthropologist makes sense of his scientific mind, sometimes he is also a bit pedant with this superiority, but i can forgive that... people in this kind of books, they lose many things, or they continue losing things its life with all its sadeness.½

this is a version of a post apocalyptic USA that is done without an Atomic War. That radiation problem is a real trial for the Science Fiction writers of the 1950's. Deep in the American psyche is the pioneer frame of mind, and Stewart creates a reasonable setting for the meme. It was readable. I like Sterling's new medievalism better.

I stopped reading at the halfway mark. The plot was too familiar and the story felt soulless. Meh.

If this was a movie - it would be a slow burn burn. Its more about the characters than the events. A solid classic that tells the tale of why knowledge should be passed down and also that the worthy don't always survive- however, the earth will adjust. Should be read by anyone who enjoys the dystopian or post-apocalyptical.