Waltzing the Magpies: A Year in Australia

by Sam Pickering

Overview

Praise for Sam Pickering:

"The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble."
—-The New York Times Book Review


"Reading Pickering . . . is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend."
—-Smithsonian

"What a joy it is to 'mess around' with Professor Sam Pickering!"
—-The Chattanooga Times

"Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from it more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived."
—-Kirkus Reviews


The movie Dead Poets Society is where most Americans first met Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor. Robin Williams plays the lead character (loosely based on Pickering), an idiosyncratic instructor who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.

Fewer know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters. Like the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson, you can spot Pickering's writing a mile away; there's no mistaking the Pickering pen. As an ample demonstration of the author's literary gifts, Waltzing the Magpies is his unabashedly lush and Technicolor travelogue from Down Under.

On the face of it, Waltzing is the chronicle of a sabbatical year spent with family in Australia. Yet beneath the surface Pickering's big themes-family, nature, seizing the moment-move in a powerful current that frequently bursts out in moments of ecstatic revelation and intense sensual flourish. Through it all Pickering weaves stories from his fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, especially when the goings of the outside world get rough.

Waltzing the Magpies is classic Pickering at the height of his literary powers, and places him in the company of such great American essayists as E. B. White and James Thurber, but with an irony and observational prowess that is pure Pickering.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472113774
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	03/02/2004
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Sam Pickering is Professor of English at University of Connecticut in Storrs. He's the author of more than a dozen books of essays, including Trespassing, The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays, and The Last Book. He is married and has three children.

Table of Contents

From Waltzing the Magpies:

"Of the three places we snorkeled, my favorite was Turquoise Bay…Here I drifted wantonly, beneath me groves and bowers, seraglios, caverns, evenings of rose red twilight, golden sunrises, and fish, looking like birds one moment, the next petals ticking through the air. Plate, cabbage, lichen, and brain coral slipped luscious beneath me, pink and blue, sometimes hard-shelled, other times downy. A green turtle paddled past. A moray eel wound through stone, its skin pale lattice…"

"…I spent much of the afternoon looking at birds. A barking owl swallowed a mouse head first. A grass owl stood motionless in a bower. Torres Strait pigeons cried 'you.' The call of a Macleary's fig parrot sounded like water spurting from a faucet. Peaceful doves bubbled, and the chatter of red-collared lorikeets smoothed into weeping. Noisy pits wore tails through brush, and bush thick-knees stood motionless in profile, single blue eyes staring. Apostle birds clustered in cup-shaped nests, feathers sticking out like slivers of decorative chocolate. Bills of long-tailed finches seemed the clearest orange I've ever seen, and the blue adorning fairy wrens were so bright the sky seemed white-washed. For a few moments I forgot cages, but then a Muir's corella stared at me, cocked his head, and said, 'Hello.'"

Editorial Reviews

Honorable Mention: Connecticut Center for the Book (CCB) 2005 Award for Lifetime Achievement in Service to the Library Community, biography or memoir category

CCB Award for Lifetime Achievement

Honorable Mention: 2005 Connecticut Center for the Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in Service to the Library Community in the biography or memoir category

Connecticut Center for the Book (CCB) Award for Lifetime Achievement

Pickering (English, Univ. of Connecticut), the acclaimed author of numerous books of essays, was the model for Robin Williams's memorable character in Dead Poets Society. These two collections of essays certainly display his erudition, but their appeal stretches far beyond the esoteric or academic. Highly autobiographical, The Best of Pickering offers more than two dozen essays that explore a wide range of his most-beloved themes (e.g., nature, student days, being a parent). His lively imagination pulls the reader from the vividly real to the imaginative as we are introduced to his make-believe world of Carthage. Although somewhat unexpected at first, this whimsical parallel to the everyday quickly becomes comforting and often very amusing. Waltzing the Magpies, which includes previously unpublished essays on a year he spent teaching in Western Australia, focuses on the familial and the natural, and of course, on the cultural differences between Australia and the United States. However, this collection is not so much a chronological travelog as a rambling account of a life broadly similar to Pickering's life as a professor in the United States. In this way, small, peculiar differences are made to stand out in colorful relief. The relaxing pace of life that Pickering enjoyed in Australia is so well conveyed that the reader is lulled into an enjoyable peace. It is evident from both collections that Pickering delights in documenting the minutiae of life. At first this may strike the reader as a little pedantic, but one soon becomes charmed by Pickering's gentle, sometimes gleeful, humor and then frequently moved by his wisdom and thoughtfulness. The writing, while carefully penned and showing great skill, is never pretentious and is entirely suited to the subject matter. Both collections should enjoy a wide interest in both public and academic libraries.-Rebecca Bollen, North Bergen, NJ Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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