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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 508.778 Hubbell, S. 1986 | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 508 Hubbell | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A country year is something like a baker's dozen--it contains an extra season. Hubbell lends the reader her eyes and ears to explore her peninsula between two rivers in the Ozark Mountains from one springtime to the next. Through Hubbell's eyes readers come to see their own surroundings in a very different way. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author Notes
Sue Hubbell was born Suzanne Gilbert in Kalamazoo, Michigan on January 28, 1935. She received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Southern California in 1956 and a master's degree in library science from Drexel University in 1965. She worked as a librarian at Trenton State College and as a periodicals librarian at Brown University.
In 1972, she and her first husband moved to a farm in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and took up beekeeping. To supplement the income from honey sales, she wrote freelance articles for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. After they divorced, she continued to run the large beekeeping operation. She also wrote several books including A Country Year: Living the Questions, A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them, Far-Flung Hubbell: Essays from the American Road, and Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys Into the Time Before Bones. She suffered from dementia and decided to stop eating and drinking on September 9, 2018 because she did not want to eventually be placed under indefinite institutional care. She died on October 13, 2018 at the age of 83.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (April 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Sparkling description of a year of beekeeping on a 100-acre farm in the Missouri Ozarks, an operation run by one woman alone. After 30 years together, Sue and her husband Paul Hubbell divorced. He left her their farm, equipment and varied wildlife, including 200 beehives that (during the year described) produced 30,000 pounds of top-grade honey. For the first three years after Paul left, Sue was ""out to lunch,"" unable to read anything but the lightest froth. And then one day she jelled again: "". . .I set about doing all the things that one does when one returns from lunch. I cleared the desk and tended the messages that others had left. I had been gone a long time, so there was quite a pile to clear away before I could settle down to the work of the afternoon of my life, the work of building a new kind of order, a structure on which a 50-year-old woman can live her life alone, at peace with herself and the world around her."" Peace came not only from beekeeping for 10-to-12 hours daily for three of the four seasons. It came also from closely watched creeper frogs, spiders, coyotes, copperheads, owls, chickens, opossums, caterpillars, mites, termites, bobcats, bats, deer, flowers and trees, among other growing things. Her book more or less alternates chapters between beekeeping and wild things. And none of it is academic, though Hubbell has a trained eye. Bees are, ""when all is said and done, simply a bunch of bugs. But spending my days in close and intimate contact with creatures who are structured so differently from humans, and who get on with life in such a different way, is like being a visitor in an alien but ineffably engaging world. In town I am known as the Bee Lady. Whatever could I do to equal that?"" This is a book one wants to quote from beginning to end, not only its cinnamon-flavored pages about bees and honey-making, but also those about a woman chain-sawing a winter's firewood by herself in the woods, about weathering the winter while snowbound, and helping out when there's a suicide on the nearby picnic grounds. Stirring--and more richly alive than any PBS nature film. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.