North Country : A Personal Journey

by Howard Frank Mosher

Release Date: 08 June, 1998

Edition: Paperback

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Exploring the borderlands

In honor of his 50th birthday, Howard Mosher decided to take a solo journey exploring his home ground. His chosen turf is the "north country," the borderlands between the United States and Canada. Mosher traveled from Maine to Washington, meandering a few miles one either side of the border.

In this account of his odyssey, Mosher intersperses short anecdotes from his life as a resident and traveler in these areas, combined with mini-sketches of the people and places he encounters. Nobody and no place merits more than three pages of Mosher's spare prose. Mosher voices himself in the taciturn manner of the hardy border people. He strives for a rough-and-ready effect, implying that his itinerary was haphazard, and that his encounters were primarily ones of chance. I suspect that a lot more planning went into the trip than Mosher suggests.

My favorite chapter was the one on "fresh starts," in which Mosher profiled people who had left one life for another. For Mosher, traveling through places both familiar and completely new was its own form of fresh start.

An example of literary art that engages the imagination!

Howard Frank Mosher is a gifted writer. His descriptions provoke the imagination into painting landscapes and portraits that the human eye ordinarily can't see. I found it literally impossible to put this book down, and I will definitely be reading the rest of Mosher's stories!