'Cross the Great Divide, side by side we'll ride,' a line from the Oregon Trail song, articulates this book's theme: Bridging differences in culture and place, particularly that of city and country.

The autobiography of a young phenom of the 60's and 70's who attended Horace Mann, Harvard, where he rowed on the crew and joined the Porcellian Club, then Cambridge, Stanford, and several divinity schools. It is book of hubris and wild youth, of drugs, sex, and the occult, and finally, Jesus.

This is the epic story of the fastest boat ride in history (at the time) through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river. With a gigantic release of water from the Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River was closed. So Kenton Grua evaded park rangers and launched his wooden dory, the Emerald Mile and barely completed his historical run. The story is very well told, and includes a solid history of the formation of the Grand Canyon, and the first efforts to navigate the river by John Wesley Powell.

This book summarizes Einstein's special and general theory of relativity using cartoon drawings to illustrate every concept. It does not shy away from physical formulae, neither does it provide in depth discussion of same.

Inhabited, Charlie Quimby's follow-up novel to his excellent Monument Road, focuses on life as a homeless person in a small city in western Colorado. This story is both edifying and compelling because he draws sympathetic and realistic characters, not just of those who migrate uncertainly from one temporary abode to another, but of those inhabitants who try to help the homeless and those who oppose such help, which can even be the same person under differing circumstances.

Joan Didion's set of personal essays from the mid-60's, an exercise in the emerging New Journalism and most in the first person, are episodically brilliant, but just as often facile and self-indulgent.

This is a good but not great biography of two lesser-known 20th century scientists, George Gamow and Max Delbrück, both of whom show up in many historical accounts of the history of molecular biology, hence my interest. I was particularly interested in the author's depiction of Delbrück, a Nobel Prize winner late in his life for work done thirty years prior. Delbrück, who is routinely depicted as a great thought leader and a fiercely intelligent scientist, is elusive in other historical accounts, begging the question: What did he contribute, and why was his input so prized?

Tolstoy remains one of my favorite writers. His War and Peace and Anna Karenina were reading investments that still pay dividends. These four short stories, in particular What Men Live By, represent some aspects of Tolstoy's later turn to a simpler and more universal religious outlook, when he eschewed organized religion, and embraced a code based on Christ's teaching alone, centering on the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.

The Department of Public Works in the coastal village of Neawanaka on the Mink River, besides performing the ordinary public works of cleaning streets and repairing sidewalks, slowly expands over time to 'preserve history, collect stories, repair marriages, prevent crime, augment economic status, promote chess, manage insect populations, run sports leagues, isn't that a bit much? We even give haircuts.' ^{( page 15)} Worried Man and Cedar are its two aging employees, idealists who doggedly work to carry out their mission statement: 'Brains against Pains.' ^{( page 45)}

Salter, a former fighter pilot, writes directly from experience in this novel of U.S. fighter pilots in the Korean War. He draws an internal picture of the psychology of the single combat warrior, and it feels genuine. His portrayal of heroism in the cloistered world of aerial combat does not always translate into obvious laudable accomplishment.

My initial interest in this book was to read a good summary of the history of the English Civil War, from James I to William and Mary. I found Tombs' account to be brisk, clear and reasonably complete, which propelled me to continue reading. I particularly enjoyed his judicious mix of historiographical review while attempting to pick that elusive clean line in historical narrative. The book proved to be an reasonably short yet comprehensive account of England's history.

It was a pleasure to soak in the deep water that is this novel. Charlie Quimby brought back alive a world I have had only episodic contact with in my life: small towns in the far country, where as a teenager, I spent successive summers, first in a small ranching and farming town in central Oregon, second in an oil and fishing town on the Kenai peninsula in Alaska. It was not as much the characters in this novel, but their sensibility, their rhythms of speech and actions that were recognizable from my past forays beyond the city. After the pleasure of remembrance past is the pleasure of a deceptively simple love story.