Web Letters: Stewartsville

By Christine Smallwood

This article appeared in the December 8, 2008 edition of The Nation.

November 19, 2008

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  • My compliments to Christine Smallwood on the engaging review of the writings of George Stewart. I have Earth Abides on my wish list as one of the early apocalyptic environmental disaster books that may well be prophetic if we don't get our act together during the Obama administration. I was pleased to see the mention of several place names local to me that inform the geology courses I teach--Allegheny (or whichever one of the many possible spellings you choose), Susquehanna, Blue Ridge and even the etymology of Clearfield Creek, part of my exercise on the flooding caused by Hurricane Agnes in 1972. Names on the Land sounds like it would make a wonderful companion book on the sounds, pleasures, meanings, and power of place to Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. In that book, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, forty-five poets and writers generate new definitions for hundreds of our mundane and colorful geographic/geomorphological/geological terms that can befuddle my students, words like "flatiron," "yazoo," "swale" and "paternoster lakes."

    Rob Sternberg

    Lancaster, PA

    12/21/2008 @ 08:15am


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