The island,

By Robert W. Russell and Russell Robert

An account of life on an island in the Thousand Island part of the St. Lawrence River. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814907210
• ISBN13: 9780814907214
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Vanguard Press
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Treasured Memories of the St. Lawrence River

This book is also important to me, since I spent my summers growing up on Lake Ontario near the mouth of the River. Like the reviewer above, my father built things - a boat, docks, a house. Russell in his simple love of the region and dedication to his vacation home, recounting his misadventures with the resident experts and seasonal visitors has captured very special imagery in this work. His memoir begins with his first experience on the river as a boy, and follows through until his children are grown. The stories are enriched with the knowledge that the author is blind. I recommend this book to anyone who loves Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.

An important book to me

I first read The Island when I was 16. That was 27 years ago now, when my father and I were building a family cottage on Lake Ontario, very near to the mouth of the St Lawrence river where this story is set. That cottage had been my father's lifelong dream, and mine as well. The story that Russell tells resonated with me then. It was an idyllic story of bucolic pleasures involving self reliance, nature, and simple accomplishments - things that I valued. The story itself is as beautiful as the area it is set in, and although the author himself is blind, the descriptions are as evocative as anything that could be written based on vision. For me, it captured the feeling of that area of the world that I was in love with. I have since moved too far away to visit the area with any regularity, the cottage has been sold after my father's death, and I am finding that I am pulling the book off my shelf with some frequency lately, although it had not been touched for the previous 20 years. I only read chapters here and there, as there is now pain involved with the memories. But I think that the book may be there for me to help me regain a direction that may have been lost, and to decide again what is important. It is a story that can do that for you. Mike