A review by jonbrammer
Essays of E.B. White by E.B. White

4.0

New England writers have a mode - fascinated with nature, and the everyday workmanlike process of filtering the natural experience through the small routines of daily life. Frost did it with "Mending Wall", Updike with his petty domestic dramas, Thoreau with his canoe and tourist cabin. I'll throw Lowell and Dickinson's confessional poetry in with the lot, if only to support my claim that these are all fish out of water stories - what it means to be inside when you really want to be outside, to bridge the divide between the house and the forest. White famously did this with his animal stories for children, but in this collection, his neatest rhetorical trick is "Coon Tree" - a meditation on a nocturnal scavenger that segues into a discussion of Cold War politics and nuclear annihilation.