Product Description

When her thirty-year marriage broke up, Sue Hubbell found herself alone and broke on a small Ozarks farm. Keeping bees, she found solace in the natural world. She began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and the things that she cared about. The result is one of the best-loved books ever written about life on the land, about a woman finding her way in middle age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185984 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780395967010
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
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From Publishers Weekly
An invasion of spring peepers, a young indigo bunting at song practice, a parade of caterpillarsthese are integral parts of Hubbell's environment. She lives alone on a 100-acre farm in the Ozarks, where she tends 200 beehives and produces honey on a commercial scale. In a series of exquisite vignettes she takes us into her world, and a life attuned to nature. Hubbell's busiest season is late summer, when she harvests the honey. Then she needs help for the backbreaking labor ("a strong young man who is not afraid of being stung"). She tells how she desensitizes her helper to bee stings; there is a vivid description of a day in the beeyard at harvest time. We meet her dogs and cats, her neighbors; travel with her when she sells the honey; share the pleasures of observing wildlife. Some of these delightful pieces have appeared in the "Hers" column of the New York Times and in Country Journal. Illustrations. First serial to Harper's.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA Hubbell, a former librarian and now a commercial beekeeper, lives on a peninsula between two rivers in the Ozark Mountains. Her quiet reflections are arranged by seasons, beginning and ending with the spring. Most of the short chapters include an attractive pen-and-ink sketch of the insect, plant, or little animal, etc., that is the major subject of the essay. Through a map of her farm and the lovely prose descriptions of the natural settings that she has had around her for the past 12 years, readers gain a pleasant picture of the countryside. This is a book for those who enjoy natural history and the questions that arise from it. Rain, snow, and mud; countless harbingers of each season; and Hubbell's bees and how they fare all make fascinating reading for anyone who appreciates the beauties and intricacies of the natural world.Mary Wadsworth Sucher, Baltimore County Reading Services
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Hubbell is a slight woman, fiftyish, a former librarian, and now a beekeeper, living alone on a 100-acre farm in the Missouri Ozarks. With an unsatisfactory marriage behind her, she is determined to be independent, even to the extent of keeping her old trucks in running order and felling trees in her woodlot. In a series of perceptive essays, she describes the world around her with a fresh and discerning eye, reveling in the natural beauty of her mountain home and its wildlife. With her active and inquiring mind she is constantly asking questions: Why do the sawfly caterpillers follow the leader? How do opposums learn to play possum? Her delightful, witty book will appeal to all those who are intrigued by the natural world. Evelyn G. Callaway, California Native Plant Soc., Ridgecrest
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A quiet, thoughtful, and often very funny book
When Sue Hubbell's long-term marriage fell apart, and she found herself in mid-life living alone as a beekeeper on a farm in the Ozarks. Her book is ostensibly set within a single year, but that's only the framework for the series of essays that form a beautiful chronicle of the seasons of one's life, the seasons of nature, the seasons of tame and wild animals, and the seasons of living on a farm.
Her inquiring mind constantly asks "Why?" questions, and the essays are her attempts to answer them. She's a former librarian, so she's articulate, academic, intellectual - but also quietly hilarious, such as her description of trying to think like a chicken in order to coax her hens to sleep inside the coop instead of perched on the trees.
Buy a copy for yourself, and buy one for your best woman friend who is heading into her middle years and may also be Living the Questions.

A lyrically written memoir about country life and its charms
Sue Hubble is an excellent writer; you can feel the hot Ozark sun and hear the hypnotic murmur of her bees, the bright slash of a bunting's song and share her wonder at the joys and challenges in country life.

If you aspire to memoir writing, this is a fine example of the craft. If you want walk in someone else's footsteps for a few hundred pages, learn how they live and how they think and feel about everyday things and about nature, this is for you.

I love this book.

Bee-keeper tells all, and tells it well.
I almost didn't buy the audiocassette of this book because of the reviewer who said Sue Hubbell's reading was monotonous. I bought it anyway, and am thrilled to say both the content and the reading were outstanding. To my mind, the author's voice, in any tone, beats an inauthentic performance. This is one of the best works on contemporary nonfiction by women - and one of the best books on tape - I have come across in a long while. I recommend it highly, for anyone interested in how the human mind makes connections between her immediate surroundings and the larger questions of living in the world. The "bee" theme, like Thoreau's ants and Annie Dillard's creek creatures, is simply a fascinating and concrete set of phenomena through which Hubbell examines the mystical world around her, and around us all. (One last note of interest: the audiocassette - comprised of only one tape - includes a second tape on which Gary Snyder reads from his work on nature and the problem of logging in the northwest of the U.S.).