Living To Prowl: Essays By the Professor Who Inspired Dead Poets Society

Essays by the New England professor who inspired Dead Poets Society<P>"Reading Pickering is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend", said Smithsonian magazine. Living to Prowl, Sam Pickering's ninth collection of essays, finds the acclaimed author walking familiar paths, taking time to enjoy family, friends, nature, and other simple pleasures.<P>Like Pickering's earlier books, this collection records in highly personal and idiosyncratic terms a year in the life of a man with a tenacious commitment to pausing and wondering. Moving easily between humor and seriousness, the mundane and the philosophical, stark truth and evocative fictions, his essays saunter through life and rummage through lives. As Pickering himself puts it, Living to Prowl is meant to make people "turn away from the 'razzleum-dazzleum' of dream and abstraction to see the rich greens and blues at their doorsteps".<P>"The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble". — The New York Times Book Review<P>"Pickering takes up the stance of the congenial amateur, familiar with a great many things but expert in none, frank about the world's convictions, enemy to pomposity, a representative man who enjoys without apology the pleasures of household and flesh". — Scott Russell Sanders<P>"Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of self-mockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects". — Jay Parini<P>"Pickering can usually get a laugh out of even the most cynical reader". — Publishers Weekly