Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau is a memoir told in vignettes. Early on, Millman found in Thoreau a kindred spirit, far outside of the mainstream social, sporting, and educational interests he was expected to be cultivating. And like Thoreau, he would rather be out-of-doors — where he could socialize with mushrooms, insects, or earthworms — than stuck in any indoor locale.
Unlike most books of poems nowadays, Goodbye, Ice has a strong ecological bias. The book offers a window on the natural world of the Arctic and its tradition-bound indigenous people. Climate change, inevitably, raises its ugly head in many of the poems, but the book itself is a lament not just for the loss of ice, but for the loss of the Arctic itself.
About the Author
Writer, ethnographer, mycologist Lawrence Millman has made over forty trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic. His twenty-seven books include such titles as Last Places, Northern Latitudes, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Hiking to Siberia, Lost in the Arctic, At the End of the World, The Book of Origins, Fungipedia, The Last Speaker of Bear, Foraging with Jeeves, and the Coyote Arts titles Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poemsand Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau. He has written for Smithsonian, National Geographic, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, and The Sunday Times (London). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
