The Very Rich Hours: Travels in Orkney, Belize, the Everglades, and Greece

The Very Rich Hours does not merely tell; it transports. And if this is not enough, it also entertains. Hiestand has an eye for the humor innate in most situations involving human beings, a sense communicated delicately and wryly rather than broadly. The tableau which features Hiestand and her travelling companion learning how to navigate a houseboat in the Everglades is as funny as choice parts of Douglas Adams' Last Chance to See. Like Adams, Hiestand does not allow her own discomfiture to eclipse the enjoyment her audience might obtain from her experience. Hiestand also knows that the real adventure in travelling lies in discoveries like the Stromness Natural History Museum, with its "hundred frozen-in-flight, frozen-on-a-branch, or frozen-in-defense-of-their-young stuffed birds," or the sudden appearance of an herbalist shop, populated by "crones," on a busy Athens street. She finds many marvelous surprises, and she invests the time and att! ention required to appreciate and understand them. The Very Rich Hours deserves the same attention.

What fun, what vision, what a great shipwreck story. I've read plenty of sea adventures, but never one that merged grit, adrenaline, and fear with a lyrical excursion worthy of Calvino or Marquez. And that's one part of one essay. Like a travelogue shot by a feature filmmaker, this beautifully wrought book offers sharp, compelling storytelling images set in luminous portraits of the natural world.

"If one must travel, one should do it with the eyes of a child, the mind of an ecologist, the heart of a pagan, and the words of a poet. Astonishingly, Emily Hiestand has all of that." --Kirkpatrick Sale, author,The Conquest of Paradise "The prose quivers with grace and wit as it charges the large questions with luminous details." --Bonnie Costello, author, Marianne Moore:Imaginary Possessions "In these fresh accounts of far-flung locations, Hiestand keeps returning us to the profound questions not of exploration, but of home. That is the book's great discovery: we're in this together, wherever we are." --Patricia Hampl, author,A Romantic Education "The most exciting travel writing I have read in years.... These pieces are, in the best sense, world-views... The poetic eye is their greatest strength; or rather, a poetic sensibility and intuitive perceptiveness combined with a remarkably cultivated and civilized intellect... The style seems to be an expression of good manners, good intellectual manners. She confronts head on some of the basic issues of writing and thinking about nature." --Robert Finch, ed.,The Norton Book of Nature Writing "Her range of references is wide and unexpected, and she is a wonderful observer... [W]hat holds the book together is a wry and elegant dexterity of intelligence, a sense of humor that engages both the solemn revelations and the undignified exasperations of travel with precision and elan." --Franklin Burroughs, author, Billy Watson's Croker Sack

"Hiestand journeys in this altogether terrific book to the far reaches of the human heart as well as to places for which there are maps. Her language is special. It is also, in the best sense of the word, 'poetic': precise, intense, compacted, and full of surprises." --Geoffrey Stokes, The Boston Globe "Categorizing The Very Rich Hours as a travel book seems at first an underestimation of its scope, but this tour de force of personal narrative is indeed an odyssey of sorts, a rich and rewarding literary journey told with the voice of a poet and the heart of a consummate observor...Hiestand has crafted a complex, yet elegant, naturalist approach to travel...This is a rare book, one that is astonishing fluid and keenly observant." --Fiona Luis, The Boson Globe "Here is a dazzlingly different kind of travel book. And it's just in time too, for a genre that was in danger of running to ground in the old ruts.... Deftly, Hiestand moves from specific physical observations to her big philosophical question: 'What is right habitation?' As she travels, she looks closely at our world and thinks hard about why and how we are to live in it. It is a rare experience." --Luree Miller, The Washington Post "Hiestand won the 1990 Whiting Writers Award and received a National Poetry Series award. Her book is more than a collection of travel essays...She brings a keen intellect and intuitive insight into human nature, and her prose is both evocative and lyrical...With its natural synthesis of poetry and prose with nature and culture, this volume provides a literary treat for the mind." --Jane Gilliland, Library Journal

Traveling through the eyes and heart of Hiestand is engaging and thoroughly fulfilling. As Bonnie Costello said, "The prose quivers with grace and wit as it charges the large questions with luminous details." Or, as Robert Finch said, "The most exciting travel writing I've read in years."