Mostly good essays. Liked the one about vacations at the Lake, the best. ( )

New England writers have a mode - fascinated with nature, and the everyday workmanlike process of filtering the natural experience through the small routines of daily life. Frost did it with "Mending Wall", Updike with his petty domestic dramas, Thoreau with his canoe and tourist cabin. I'll throw Lowell and Dickinson's confessional poetry in with the lot, if only to support my claim that these are all fish out of water stories - what it means to be inside when you really want to be outside, to bridge the divide between the house and the forest. White famously did this with his animal stories for children, but in this collection, his neatest rhetorical trick is "Coon Tree" - a meditation on a nocturnal scavenger that segues into a discussion of Cold War politics and nuclear annihilation.
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Recommended for birders, animal lovers, nature lovers, small-farmers, writers and anyone who loves good writing. (This is the White of Strunk and White's "Elements of Style".)

Otherwise, rather outdated. ( )

This is a widely diverse collection of essays. The sections include The Farm, The Planet, The City, Florida, Memories, Diversions and Obsessions, and Books, Men, and Writing. Some are funny, some are nostalgic, and some are just downright boring. While a few of the essays would have gotten five stars on their own, a few others would have gotten one or two stars, and most would have been somewhere in between, so I averaged it out to three stars for the collection as a whole.

Some of my favorites include “Farewell, My Lovely!” about the first Model-T and it’s idiosyncrasies; “The Years of Wonder,” about White’s month and a half aboard a cruise ship in Alaska; and “The St. Nicholas League,” about a magazine that published art and writing by children. One of my least favorites is “Mr. Forbush’s Friends,” a random collection of bird facts from Forbush’s book.

When I read my first collection of White’s essays (entitled One Man’s Meat), I was totally enchanted. I haven’t felt the same about the other two of his collections that I’ve read. There were definitely moments of enchantment, but I was expecting more. For anyone who is interested, I’d recommend One Man’s Meat as his best collection. ( )

E.B. White's essays are enduring classics, part of a rather small number of books that are enjoyable to re-read years later. His famous style does begin to seem stodgy and even a bit smug in our world, but his love of nature and ability to find humor in small details is still endearing. What struck me this time around, reading for a January 2016 book group, is his gentle approach to raging political problems of his time, the 1950s. On racism, he describes in leisurely style a vacation in Jim Crow Florida, and the astonishment of his Finnish cook that she shouldn't sit in the back of the bus. His deep identification with nature and animals implies a criticism of nuclear energy policies that threaten the environment. His appreciation of good writing brings along an implied criticism of the McCarthy era attacks on Hollywood screen writers he admires like Ring Lardner. After seeing the Trumbo film, this suddenly became much more obvious to me. Such a calm observational style could definitely improve our current political discourse if the public had the patience to think things through with care. These political implications are anything but stodgy and smug. Even his famous essay on racoons seemed to me this time like a very indirect commentary on motherhood in general. It's just easier to think about when transposed onto cute critters rather than real people. Here's a book that's definitely worth a another look. ( )