Summer: A Spiritual Biography of the Season

by Gary Schmidt (Editor), Susan M. Felch (Editor), Barry Moser (Illustrator)

Overview

Explore the rich vibrancy of summer and reflect on how nature teaches us to value time—in this collection of reflections by our greatest writers.

A season of both growth and of stillness, of hard work in the garden and of relaxing in the cool of the mountains, summer is a celebratory time. Every day matters, says summer. Look around you. Life is starting up again after a long winter and spring, and we find ourselves in a world filled with creatures and plants and shimmers of heat on the subway, with backyard cookouts and ice cream trucks jingling through the neighborhood.

This collection of powerful, stirring pieces from a wealth of sources—ranging from poems composed in eighth-century China to letters from a pioneer woman in the American West, from the Declaration of Independence to Ray Bradbury’s musings on childhood summers—invites us all to fully experience the rich and bountiful spirituality of summer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781683365778
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	06/01/2005
Series:	Spiritual Biography of the Season
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gary Schmidt teaches literature at Calvin College. He is coeditor of Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season; Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season and Spring: A Spiritual Biography of the Season (all SkyLight Paths). He is also author of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, a Newbery Honor book; Mara's Stories: Glimmers in the Darkness, a Fanfare 2002 Horn Book honor list book; Straw into Gold; and, with Lawrence Kushner, In God's Hands.

Susan M. Felch teaches literature at Calvin College and is coeditor of Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season; Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season and Spring: A Spiritual Biography of the Season. She also edited The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock and Bakhtin and Religion.

Barry Mosher, one of the foremost illustrators working today, has illustrated many books for adults and children, including The Pennyroyal Caxton edition of the King James Bible and Lewis Carroll's Alice: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

Editorial Reviews

If at their most basic level anthologies are simply a matter of taste, editors Schmidt and Felch fashion a sumptuous banquet with this, their third spiritual biography of a season (Autumn and Winter). These pieces are not about summer so much as they embody summer, a season of heat and reach that expands the heart. These (mostly prose) selections lift up an exquisite wholeness found within an everyday sophistication. As Mary Oliver wrote of a summer morning in the excerpted Long Life: "As I say, it was the most casual of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world." Oliver resides in equal company alongside the other "ordinary" accounts of Anne Lamott building a sand castle with her son, N. Scott Momaday visiting his deceased grandmother's house and G.K. Chesterton doodling away an afternoon. The volume synergizes such considerable talents, structuring them within five themes: play and leisure, tillage and cultivation, family and community, nature and grace, retreat and return. Each section includes introductory material as well as a recipe, a prayer and, quite fittingly, a psalm. For fans of nature and literature, this thinking person's anthology is a must have. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly