3 comments about Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide (Ethnographic Alternatives Book Series, V. 16).

1. I recommend this book enthusiastically, for several reasons: First, amid the helter skelter of my own life, I treasure books I can enjoy in segments. Second, I enjoy books which I consider well written, and third, I relish non fiction books that read like imaginative prose but are actually non fiction works. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST meets each of these criteria. Savoring, dipping into this book, is a joy. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST enabled me, a compulsive stay-at-home, to see distant places. For example, as I write it's deep winter in Ohio, 2006, and I'm writing about Laurel and Ernest's ninth soujourn at St. Petersburg Beach, Florida in March 2002. Laurel, an accomplished poet, writes first, revealing her sharp yet lyrical talent for descriptive prose. It's her first trip since 9/11 and she breathes deeply "imagining millions of zaps of the happiness potions that live in the sea, some call them 'negative ions.'" She describes the GulfGate Condos as "color coordinated, swirls of turquoise, shrimp, and shells on the Wall Tex, chair covers, upholstery, pictures, dishes, towels, sheets. I sink into the comfort of the cliche." We're allowed to relish a visit to Evander Preston's jewelry store where Ernest buys Laurel "a pair of gold earrings, flat and smooth with wrinkled edges like the sea." In Ernest's account they revisit the Don Cesar Hotel which used to be a haunt of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Coincicentally, they want to see President George W. Bush and his motorcade drive up to the Don Cesar for a $25,000 a plate fundraiser. As two retired profesors they exchange hilarious wisecracks about the price! They also intend to have lunch in an ice cream parlor which was once named Zelda's, but they have to settle for the new Uncle Andy's. Ernest, who is an aficianado of--indeed, an expert on--F.Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY, describes the scene with accuracy and literary elan. As Laurel puts it, "Ernest can riff." He describes the Don Cesar as "our goal the flamingo pink mirage shimmering up ahead in the Florida heat, gigantic yet fragile looking, a Hansel and Gretel castle that might at any moment dissolve like sherbet into the Gulf of Mexico." Laurel asks Ernest whether he remembers George W. Bush at Yale. This sets Ernest off on a riotous yet highly informative ramble on those Yale days, 1963-71, when Ernest was assistant professor of English there. He recalls "classrooms full of good looking kids who'd rather discuss yachts than Yeats, most of them looking like, oh, clones of the Kingston Trio." Ernest writes skillfully, fearlessly about the then-new New Criticism and explains how and why N.C. eventually contaminated--yes, nearly murdered--the craft of literature, yea, education. Here is a marvelous expose, a must, for a throng of serious writers who have been suffering in silence and wondering for some time what really went wrong. In TRAVELS WITH ERNEST the authors break down societal barriers of alienation by sharing their conversations, thoughts, experiences. It's the actual story of two people who love each other and share their work and their lives. I treasure this book. It's kind of like reality TV, but the ideas are more exciting, and the language is platinum. REVIEWER: Elizabeth Ann James



2. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST could be called Travels with Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats, for its unique travel narratives are informed by a wide range of literary works. At one point Ernest Lockridge muses on his tendency to follow the footsteps of famous authors: "Myth and literature help order and direct your life, so you're not just traveling fecklessly about. They're like a map. We're able to map ourselves onto literature and onto myth." Lockridge and his wife, Laurel Richardson, travel with and without maps in TRAVELS WITH ERNEST, a hybrid volume combining travel narratives from two distinct perspectives. Lockridge and Richardson are both authors and emeritus professors at Ohio State University, Lockridge in English and creative writing and Richardson in sociology and cultural studies. For this book, they traveled to places as different as Death Valley, Beirut, and Ireland, each writing about the trip from his or her individual perspective; the book also includes transcripts of their conversations about the trips and the writing process. Ernest's essays, Laurel's essays, and the couple's conversations work together to triangulate in on exotic places and the process by which people come to know the world. Richardson describes their method: "Experiencing, writing, conversing, rewriting, conversing, writing. Although we agree on what we see, we have a different edge, a different take on experience." Most interesting are those forays that take the writers off the map entirely. Over and over again the map has been lost or left behind, but our intrepid explorers stumble on stubbornly, ending up lost or imperiled. Even while exploring familiar terrain, they discover hidden hazards. Lockridge, for instance, is haunted by memories of his father, novelist Ross Lockridge, who wrote RAINTREE COUNTY, a classic of mid-century Midwestern literature, and then committed suicide at the peak of his success. The terrain they travel is both exotic and familiar: a high-rise apartment building in Russia where they encounter cherished family members; a tiny apartment in Copenhagen that evokes memories of their student days; an ancient castle in Ireland that bears a family name. Wherever they travel--Beirut, Copenhagen, Shenandoah--they find their people, their history, themselves. And they also find Ohio. Lockridge describes Ireland's Midlands as "a dead ringer for Ohio on our best day of the year." Even while looking over Yeats's acclaimed Lake Isle of Innisfree, Lockridge finds an island paradise that looks familiar: "Thick with trees and shrubs it's the size of my back yard in Worthington, Ohio." Whatever maps its authors may follow, TRAVELS WITH ERNEST leads right back home.



3. I loved this book! Lockridge's humor pulled me in and Richardson's lyrical writing kept me reading. This is a book that cuts a broad swath through an academic couple's life. It took me to places I had never seen, made me think about my marriage in new ways and examine my career history with fresh eyes. Travels with Ernest is unique, compelling, and provocative. I highly recommend it.

No comments about The Mind of Oliver C. Cox (African American Intellectual Heritage Series).

No comments about Franz Boas among the Inuit of Baffin Island, 1883-1884: Journals and Letters.

No comments about Confronting the Drug Control Establishment: Alfred Lindesmith As a Public Intellectual (S U N Y Series in Deviance and Social Control).

1 comments about Moved by Love: The Memoirs of Vinoba Bhave.

1. Vinoba Bhave (1940-1982) lived a simple life devoted to non-violence, engaged spirituality, and to the power of love. In his Introduction to Bhave's engaging memoirs, Satish Kumar observes that, as one of modern India's great spiritual leaders and social reformers, "Bhave was a man of great purity" (p. 13). Visionary that he was, Bhave recognized that he was a man who belonged "to another world than this, one that may seem very strange. For I claim that I am moved by love, that I feel it all the time" (p. 17).

   Bhave's fascinating life may be organized as follows. Broadly speaking, during his first twenty years, Bhave accumulated knowledge. During the next twenty years he accumulated the power to observe his religious vows. He then devoted the final period of his life to "accumulating love" (p. 88). In its 272 pages, MOVED BY LOVE first paints a touching picture of Bhave's parents, and then follows Bhave on his long walks through India, supporting Gandhi by offering non-violent resitance to the British Raj in 1940, and later persuading landlords to give more than four million acres of their land with India's poor. Bhave believed that "land is for everyone, like air, water, and sunlight" (p. 157). "What am I doing in all this?" Bhave asks midway through the book. "What do I want? I want change. First, change of heart, then change in personal life habits, followed by change in the structure of society" (pp. 134-5).

   These are the memoirs of a social activist who lived with one foot in his inner world, and the other foot constantly engaged in the outer world. "I have had very sacred experiences," Bhave tells us, "for I have become aware of the great purity of heart to be found among ordinary people, and have realized what a strength this is to our country. It is the foundation upon which, if we will, we may build a strong nation" (p. 121).

   G. Merritt

2 comments about Innocents in Africa: An American Family's Story.

1. Brilliantly, achingly rendered, a wonderful read. Spend some time with the Pifer family in South Africa in the 1930's and '40s. You'll come away with a love of these people and a deep affectionate knowledge of this vast and challenging country.



2. Inside all of us there is a compelling need to read something of our own history, something that is quaint and undiscovered. And it is here that the attraction of Innocents in Africa lies. It is a beautifully written book, about Drury Pifer's childhood growing up in Africa - the unique insight of an American family, unfettered by the conventions of British, German and Afrikaner society, trying to make their way in the world. The reader is easily transported back to Southern Africa of the 1930s and 40s, to Nigel, a dreary mining town near Johannesburg, and to the windswept desert beaches of South West Africa. It is a story of childhood memories, charmingly told, lyric sentences bringing alive a place whose history needs to be delved. But more than that, it also manages to pose the important questions of the day, in a delightfully apolitical but nevertheless pertinent manner. Most of all however, I will treasure this book because of what it records - an account of unchanging small-town life somewhere in Africa, where previously I only had my parents' oral anecdotes of their own childhood to rely on. When Pifer describes `Time in Oranjemund' as bearing `no relationship to whatever time has since become. A day then lasted a year, or a lifetime'...even I can relate. It is nostalgic. It is the poignant tale of a family's quest for a living in the mining towns of Southern Africa, based on their blind American optimism that ability will bring promotion. In Africa, the Pifer family would ultimately only find disappointment, and yet the author notes, `these would be our family's happiest few years, but how could we know that?'

   I discovered the book accidentally, read it, and was delighted. I am now recommending it to everyone.

No comments about Women Who Touched My Life: "A Memoir".

No comments about Talcott Parsons (Key Sociologists).

No comments about Pioneer in Space and Time: John Mann Goggin and the Development of Florida Archaeology (Florida Museum of Natural History Ripley P. Bullen Series).

No comments about Vilfredo Paretos Sociology (Rethinking Classical Sociology).