Clear Pond: The Reconstruction of a Life
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Book Overview
This is the story of poet Roger Mitchell's unique and intriguing search through more than a century of historical threads, looking for "a simple, singular man." The ostensible subject of his inquiry, one Israel Johnson, was a nineteenth-century pioneer settler who lived deep in the Adirondack wilderness. Despite having developed patents for a type of sawmill that remained in use well into the twentieth century, which could have made him rich, Johnson was "no one in particular," an everyman who died penniless, very nearly lost in the mists of time.
Roger Mitchell's painstaking search to reconstruct Johnson's life led into people's homes and family memories, into countless libraries, courthouses, and graveyards, into the National Archives, and far more. The story here is ofthe finding, as much as it is of the found. And the acts by which it was accomplished have the reassuring and preserving quality of memory, both individual and collective. The story of Clear Pond puts a small island in the scream of time; and while it certainly does not stop time, it makes time go around it.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:081560257X
ISBN13:9780815602576
Release Date:June 1991
Publisher:Syracuse University Press
Length:240 Pages
Weight:1.05 lbs.
Dimensions:1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
Window to the past
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 24 years ago
For anyone already bitten by the genealogy bug, this book will chart a familiar path. For anyone who is contemplating undertaking research on their family's history, read this first: it captures perfectly the passion and the curiosity that propels the researcher in what is often a confusing and frustrating quest, with many dead ends. More important, Mitchell manages both to give personality and character to his long-dead subjects, and to make the time and place in which they lived come alive for us. It is "human" history on a personal scale.
A Historical Detective Story
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 27 years ago
Roger Mitchell is a poet, not a professional historian. He became intrigued, even obsessed, by a random historical question. This is a book, not only about a place and its people. It is an account of an author's passionate search for an answer. In a quest for an old-time Adirondacker, Mitchell investigated the history of one, rather ordinary, Yankee family in the Adirondacks. His poetic narrative provides a profile in microcosm of authentic Adirondack culture. This book is already a classic of Adirondack literature.
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