NORTHERN FARM: A Glorious Year on a...

NORTHERN FARM: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm by Henry Benson, illustrated by Thoreau MacDonald (Henry Holt: $13.95; 246 pp.). Benson exults in the pageant of the changing seasons in New England in this popular collection of essays and journal entries. He savors the details of the natural world he observes, sharing his delight in the tracks of a snowshoe hare in the snow, the call of an owl, the flavors of newly picked vegetables. Castigating urban existence, which he perceives as divorced from the reality of nature, Benson concludes, “The consequence is that life and time and history become unnaturally a part of some endless and unnatural present, and violence becomes for some the only remedy.”