Looking for the Klondike Stone: A Memoir
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Book Overview
A CLASSIC AMERICAN MEMOIR THAT CAPTURES A TIME, A PLACE, A LIFE IN WHICH WE ALL CAN FIND OURSELVES
A luminous memoir of five summers at a Vermont camp that became a child's whole world.
"Prose of unfailing dazzle and profound specificity...enchanted...electrifying as touch, warming as sun, and refining as poetry" Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Stunningly good... If you prefer to read a novel] that novel had better be by someone such as...Jane Austen if it's to give you more pleasure than Looking for the Klondike Stone. Arthur has] a memory easily equal to Proust's or Wordsworth's..." Noel Perrin, The Boston Globe
"Enchanting" The New Yorker
"Camp Wynakee lay in a hollow of the hills." So begins Elizabeth Arthur's incandescent memoir of five perfect summers in the Green Mountains of southern Vermont - a paean to youth, to summer, and to enchanted places.
Elizabeth is in her fourth year as a camper when we first meet her, arriving at Wynakee in the back of her stepfather's Jeep, "dressed in new shorts, a new shirt, new sneakers and a new cap, like any pilgrim ready to be reborn." Possessed of a child's remarkable ability to endow the events of her days with symbolic significance, she is poised to make the most of every moment.
With Elizabeth, we enter a world where the comforting daily routine begins with "the chimes of a great brass bell ringing and ringing in waves of deep sound across the meadows and the woods." On Klondike Day, gold-painted rocks, hundreds of them, are scattered through the hills for the campers to seek and find; one stone - and only one - is the Klondike Stone, the true treasure, whose finder, chosen by fate itself, is "cleansed, remade, newly wrought."
To Elizabeth, it is the emblem of the miracle of Wynakee, where a child who has known since her parents' divorce that "things you love can vanish" might experience during a few brief seasons a measure of happiness that will nourish her for a lifetime.
Hailed upon its original publication as an American classic, Looking for the Klondike Stone was universally praised. Light of touch, written in a style of great lyric generosity, this is a book to remind us of the joyful seriousness and awe-filled intensity of childhood. In Looking for the Klondike Stone it will be forever summer in Vermont, where the pervasive magic of a place called Wynakee is elevated to the status of myth by an extraordinary child on a quest to discover the meaning of the world. It is destined for the small shelf of classic American memoirs that capture a time, a place, a life in which we all can find ourselves.
With a Foreword by Elizabeth Arthur's husband, Steven Bauer.
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