Edward Hoagland

Edward Hoagland was legally blind for three years until surgery miraculously changed his life. In this, his first original book published in more than six years, Hoagland serves up a literary banquet celebrating his renewed vision. With the penetrating and entrancing prose that has made him one of the most celebrated nature writers working today, he guides us along the full spectrum of a fascinating life -- the painful stuttering of prep-school days to the vagabond existence of his circus months when he trained tigers, from enthralling travels to Antarctica to settling into the luscious surroundings of his home in Vermont. Indeed, "Tigers and Ice" serves full notice of this one-of-a-kind writer at his powerful best, exploring his own life and the natural world with trademark honesty and grace.

Part memoir, part travel guide, these essays take the reader into the rain forest in Belize, the mountains of Yemen, the Okenfenokee Swamp, "Up the Black to Chalkyitsik," and through the treacherous terrain in the literary world.

In the late 1870's, a small band -- including Cecil, who hopes to capture a grizzly bear cub and train it for the vaudeville circuit, Charley; a trapper in search of gold; Sutton; and two Indian women --make their way westward into the American wilderness.

"Exuberant writings on carnivals, baseball, literary backbiting, city walks, Texas, and newts"--Cover subtitle.

"Journalism, especially personal or polemical journalism, is a popular vehicle these days. Yet not many real essays are being written--pieces which have no occasion except the author's desire to speak at his convenience as he wishes, linking together memories and observations--perhaps because the form depends as much upon discipline as upon passion. Edward Hoagland's essays are sometimes autobiographical, and usually quite personal, but several are also about events and places; in any case, none is limited to the subject that it begins with. Here he writes about tigers, girl friends, show business, his father, and becoming a father, and the problem of how we treat each other in a world growing steadily more overcrowded. Although he writes painfully and eloquently about matters like stuttering, divorce and death, he tends to seize on subjects he rejoices in--the Vermont woods, county fairs, cowboys, street life, and harbor happenings. He offers even a kind of plan for survival, among other things, for he is a man seeking roots and foundation rocks. Mr. Hoagland is a stylist, a writer of low-keyed sagacity and versatility, and it is a delight to spend time inside his mind. Drawn from magazines as different as The Village Voice, Harper's, and Commentary, The Courage of Turtles contains some of the best English prose being written today."--Jacket.

This book describes certain areas as explored by the writer, in north america in the 1960s.

Includes essays by Joseph Brodsky, William H. Gass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Edward Hoagland, Edna O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff, among others.

Meet the death-defying motorcycle trick riders in the carnival's Devil's Tub, a man who keeps an alligator in his bathtub, a Chinese launder in Coney Island in search of love, a frontiersman who saves himself from a mauling grizzly bear by hiding in a beaver dam, three men from a circus looking for trouble at a rodeo, a washed out boxer trying to to hang onto his career, and dozens of others rich characters. From the cramped and gritty streets of New York City to the wide open spaces of the Old West, Hoagland's characters pine, ache, create, observe, love, learn, and live in such precisely rendered stories that we are transported into each of their peculiar worlds.