Cabin Fever

April 11, 2011
Seeking the solace of "a deliberate life," Fate, a professor of English at the College of DuPage, writes of his measured take on Thoreau's iconic words, turning his back on a hectic world in his new book. With a cabin in the wilderness of southwest Michigan, he explains his core beliefs after reading Thoreau's Walden in his introduction: "a deliberate life is a search for balance in mind and body and spirit amid our daily lives." If the reader can get past such feel-good, cozy chapter titles as "Picking Blackberries" or "A Box of Wind," there are real gems of insight and wit on the diverse topics of appreciating nature, love and sex, technology, parenthood, the solitary life, art, self-reliance, reason and aging. Never snide or condescending, Fate blends the significant milestones of marriage and family in a high-tech BlackBerry society with the joys and shortcomings of being mindful in both cultures, allowing the reader to sample how others live away from the hectic rat race in a pseudo-spiritual environment.

April 1, 2011

A suburban father marches to the beat of Henry David Thoreau.

After rereading Walden in middle age, Fate (English/Coll. of DuPage; Steady & Trembling: Art, Faith, & Family in an Uncertain World, 2005, etc.) emulated his literary hero by building a cabin in the wilds of southwest Michigan. He then began the search for balance and a closer connection to nature, which he recounts in these delightful personal essays. A father of three in suburban Chicago, Fate could not isolate himself in his cabin like the hermetic Thoreau. So he conducted his quest while fully engaged with the daily rounds of life in a high-tech, material culture. Inspired by awareness of the most ordinary things—a backyard bird feeder, a bowl of lake glass, the death of the family cat—each essay explores some aspect of human experience, following Thoreau's "invitation to a new kind of vision, to the joy of enough in a culture of more, to a deliberate life." The author watches children lost in play and wonders when he lost his own faith in the present moment. Taking a cue from "Mr. Self-Reliance," he attempts to trim the elm trees on his property, fails miserably, and realizes that Thoreau's barebones way of living clearly "isn't nearly enough for me." With each foray into the workaday world, Fate comes closer to understanding how he might achieve balance in his hectic modern life.

Quiet, beautifully written reflections on nature and the mindful life, laced with the thoughts and writings of Thoreau.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from May 1, 2011
Fate, the author of four previous books and an essayist whose work appears on National Public Radio and in diverse newspapers and magazines, debates his mentor, Henry David Thoreau, in a sequence of inquiring, superbly constructed essays. As Thoreau does in Walden, Fate encapsulates a years worth of experiences and reflections, but his musings are anchored to not only the cabin he builds in southwest Michigan but also the suburban Chicago home he shares with his wife and three children. An English professor and a writer, a family man seeking solitude, and a book lover reading by candlelight as his computer slumbers, Fate seeks a middle way. The son of a pastor and a seminary graduate, Fate discerns invaluable lessons in living from watching birds and ants at work and his son at play, walking in the woods, sitting with a dying friend, listening to the roar of interstate traffic, and contemplating the lives of suburban coyotes. His frank, poignant, and funny essays grapple with the quandaries inherent in the effort to live a balanced life. Fates clarion musings on place, time, family, social responsibility, the wild, and the civilized are thoughtful and affecting in their revelations of how complex and precious life is.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)