From Library Journal Mitchell, editor of the National Audubon Society's Sanctuary magazine, writes prosaically of a year spent in a cabin in semi-wild Massachusetts. During the course of the year, he reads the journals of Thoreau, whom he calls "Henry," and he draws many obvious parallels between...
A long-after the fact memoir of the author's youthful summer in Ile Rousse, Corsica, spent washing dishes and observing the regulars at the Rose Cafe. This is an pleasant but insubstantial sketch of an early-1960's Corsica, where every local man has some post-WW II snakes in his head. The author...
John Hanson Mitchell tells of his 1500 mile ride on a trusty old Peugeot bicycle from the port of Cadiz to just below the Arctic Circle. He follows the European spring up through southern Spain, the wine and oyster country near Bordeaux, to Versailles (the palace of the Sun King), Wordsworth's La...
The night ferry to Southampton was a case in point. Probably because of the strike the ferry was surprisingly crowded and there were no empty settees to stretch out upon. But poking around through the bowels of the vessel, I spotted a bulkhead lined with shelves of luggage racks and climbed to th...
In winter, the chilling mistral comes scything down the Rhône valley and the Massif central, lifting tiles from the roofs and screaming across the Gulf of Genoa to Corsica, where it is sometimes joined, or followed, by an easterly companion called the tramontana, which blasts in off the plains of...