Sunday Morning! “The Summer He Didn’t Die” by Jim Harrison

Rufus F.

Rufus is a likeable curmudgeon. He has a PhD in History, sang for a decade in a punk band, and recently moved to NYC after nearly two decades in Canada. He wrote the book "The Paris Bureau" from Dio Press (2021).

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5 Responses

  1. Aaron David says:

    Harrison was also a master essayist. Which is how I first came across him, in the pages of Playboy (and yes, I did read the articles, after the usual pre-teen boy fascination with the rest.) He wrote a great book on food which is how I introduced him to my wife, and his essay on vengence (the Playboy piece) has stuck with me for generations. He is missed.

    I seem to be reading a bit of Travel lately, the essays I mean. Peter Fleming wrote some wonderful pieces about going through Soviet Russia and into China back before the war (which include going through a plague area) and he was definately the better writer of the two brothers. A Forgotten Journey, News from Tartary, and One’s Company.Report

    • Mark Twain did a lot of travel writing too,. The famous one is The Innocents Abroad, but Roughing It and A Tramp Abroad are even better.Report

      • Aaron David in reply to Mike Schilling says:

        I have Innocents sitting on the shelf, waiting for the right moment to be picked up (the wife hates this, as I have far too many like this) but did he not also right some things like Life on the Mississippi, which could also be looked at as a travel book?Report

        • Good point. Life on the Mississippi started as a short piece called Old Times on the Mississippi, which is a memoir of Twain’s time as a riverboat pilot, and it’s every bit as good as you’d expect. To fill out the book, he added a description of a steamship trip down the river he took later in life, and that part is travel writing, but not neatly as much fun to read.Report

  2. Ozzzy! says:

    I bought it – this seems like my jam.Report