River Time: The Frontier on the Lower Neuse

by Janet Lembke

Book by Lembke, Janet

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Janet Lembke (2 March 1933 - 3 September 2013), née Janet Nutt, was an American author, essayist, naturalist, translator and scholar. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio during the Great Depression, graduated in 1953 from Middlebury College, Vermont, with a degree in Classics, and her knowledge of the classical Greek and Latin worldview, from Homer to Virgil, informed her life and work. A Certified Virginia Master Gardener, she lived in Virginia and North Carolina, drawing inspiration from both locales. She was recognized for her creative view of natural cycles, agriculture and of animals, both domestic and wild, with whom we share the natural environment. Referred to as an "acclaimed Southern naturalist," she was equally (as The Chicago Tribune described her) a "classicist, a noted Oxford University Press translator of the works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus". She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Virgil's Georgics, having already translated Euripides’ Electra and Hecuba, and Aeschylus’s Persians and Suppliants.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of Janet Lembke's natural history works are favorites of mine. I first read Dangerous Birds which led to to seek out more of her work. Fascinating woman who has lived an off the beaten path life.

[Frederick Bingham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for a book club.

This is a slow book, despite its short length. It describes a world, late 1980s rural coastal North Carolina, that no longer exists. The area where this community was is now $1M+ McMansions on the river. The descriptions are beautiful. For example, on pages 64-65 there is a great description of the impact of fire on people and nature. There are a number of evocative descriptions of how fish are caught on the Neuse River. This is an idealized view of rural life in the swamps and forests at the end of the road. The author glosses over the possible downsides of the life in terms of human nature, lack of privacy, in-group out-group exclusion, intolerance of outsiders, etc.

I tend to be more interested in books with narrative drive (for fiction) or some sense of organization and purpose (for non-fiction). This book is more of a stream-of-consciousness memoir that I found a little tough to wrap my head around.