Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness

Rating:
Summary: An environmentalist everyman
Review: Brooke's wife is Terry Tempest Williams, a local hero of the Utah environmental movement. When she gives a pro-wilderness talk or a reading, the seats are packed and she's the star. You sometimes see Brooke standing in the background, the spouse of the Famous Person like Alice B. Tolkas to Terry's Gertrude Stein. In this book he doesn't talk much about his famous wife, but it's obvious how strongly his life path has been influenced by his marriage. His association with her circle of high-powered environmental activists draws Brooke to feel like he should be doing more to better the world himself. He feels like a stolid and practical business man without the flamboyant ideological passion or natural eloquence of many leaders in the environmental movement, and to tell the truth, he's more interested in outdoors sports than in the spiritual aspects of wilderness. From this standpoint, his voice for wildlands conservation seems all the more powerful. He's not an ideologue, a media star or a nature mystic -- he's an ordinary person who loves wild places and has seen the need to do what he can to protect them.

Rating:
Summary: Vintage Whine
Review: For all the baby boomers who love the outdoors, this is the book for you. From worrying about the draft in the Vietnam years to fishing for halibut in Alaska, this book covers the experiences so many of us have gone through, with some special Utah twists to the story. We have all delt with trying to find meaningful, productive work. We all cope with balancing the demands and wishes of work, spouces, family, and our own personal needs for space and recreation. Brooke shares it all in a manner that is both serious and light-hearted. Great camping stories and personal revelations on coping with life in the 90's and beyond. Makes me equally eager to go skiing or desert canyon camping again soon.

Rating:
Summary: Baby Boomers, Work and Wilderness
Review: For all the baby boomers who love the outdoors, this is the book for you. From worrying about the draft in the Vietnam years to fishing for halibut in Alaska, this book covers the experiences so many of us have gone through, with some special Utah twists to the story. We have all delt with trying to find meaningful, productive work. We all cope with balancing the demands and wishes of work, spouces, family, and our own personal needs for space and recreation. Brooke shares it all in a manner that is both serious and light-hearted. Great camping stories and personal revelations on coping with life in the 90's and beyond. Makes me equally eager to go skiing or desert canyon camping again soon.

Rating:
Summary: Like sitting down for stories around a fire
Review: Having known and been fortunate enough to have worked with Brooke recently his book does justice with presenting his look at how life can be fulfilled without cable, fashion or surround-sound entertainment. He shows his readers a quieter and less stressful way to try and live life outside the realms of what marketers want us to believe our lives should be. Imagine yourself sitting on the front porch, sipping ice tea slowly, enjoying every drop.

Rating:
Summary: Vintage Whine
Review: Like so many memoirs, this one is at it's best when the author is self deprecating and humorous. Going to an action movie to fight off a plumbing business funk, he is hilariously able to cite the names and model numbers of the plumbing fixtures that the hero rips off the wall or uses in other creative ways to bonk, conk and stomp the bad guys. The scene was jammed with wonderful ironies and plenty of fun. However, the author has a revolving tendency toward self-pity and overly dramatizes having been born into the ownership (as opposed to a clerkship) of a cushy business and having to work in an office, while longing to protect the terrain, as if the two were incompatible. In those sections, the book gets maudlin and soggy and resembles another fixture--the power flusher. (Hello? Has anyone visited the hospital or getto lately, but then perspective is always on the endangered species list in this type of memoir.) Cut or replace just twenty-five percent of the book, all of the cry-baby-culture stuff, and this would amount to a solid reflection, a hardy effort, something to carry in the backpack over all that resilient and unforgiving terrain we in Utah love so much.