Jerry Engels

DIVDIVThe raucously sweet sequel to At the Shores/divDIV Jerry Engels is in his junior year at Penn State. He lives with his fraternity brothers, flunks his classes, lifts weights, and thinks about women—constantly. Insatiable, Jerry devours the Kinsey Report in full, and sets out to test its findings wherever possible, grilling his brothers on their homosexual experiences, getting crabs from a prostitute, posing in the nude for art classes, and romancing a good friend’s little sister. Yet Jerry is not a rake but a carnal saint, delighting in life in a careless, grateful manner. When Jerry does find love, this remarkable comic novel of lust becomes a romance./div/div

DIVDIVA classic novel of a young man in love with women, the world, and love itself/divDIV The dunes of Jerry Engels’s childhood are those of Indiana Shores, a small slice of paradise resting between Gary and the industrial furnaces of Chicago. Jerry loves Lake Michigan and swimming its waters; he loves the beach and the live dune where he plays. But mostly, Jerry loves women./divDIV /divDIVThis isn’t the awkward lust of an adolescent; Jerry is a boy who loves women and everything about them: a flower tucked into the hair, or the length of a leg. Teenage Jerry is a charmer, a flirt, “an erotic pantheist or a pantheistic eroticist.” Always, in his honesty and quirkiness, he is an irresistible and lovable character, himself. When he falls for Rosalind, his love takes on new, humorous, and wondrous dimensions./divDIV /divDIVAt the Shores celebrates love in all of its forms; it is a coming-of-age novel for all generations./div/div

In this memoir of the Hudson River and of her family, Susan Fox Rogers writes from a fresh perspective: the seat of her kayak. Low in the water, she explores the bays and the larger estuary, riding the tides, marveling over sturgeons and eels, eagles and herons, and spotting the remains of the ice and cement industries. After years of dipping her paddle into the waters off the village of Tivoli, she came to know the rocks and tree limbs, currents and eddies, mansions and islands so well that she claimed that section of the river as her own: her reach. Woven into Rogers's intimate exploration of the river is the story of her life as a woman in the outdoors—rock climbing and hiking as well as kayaking. Rogers writes of the Hudson River with skill and vivacity. Her strong sense of place informs her engagement with a waterway that lured the early Dutch settlers, entranced nineteenth-century painters, and has been marked by decades of pollution. The river and the communities along its banks become partners in Rogers's life and vivid characters in her memoir. Her travels on the river range from short excursions to the Saugerties Lighthouse to a days-long journey from Tivoli to Tarrytown and a circumnavigation of Manhattan Island, while in memory she ventures as far as the Indiana Dunes and the French Pyrenees. In a fluid, engaging voice, My Reach mixes the genres of memoir, outdoor adventure, natural and unnatural history. Rogers's interest in the flora and fauna of the river is as keen as her insight into the people who live and travel along the waterway. She integrates moments of description and environmental context with her own process of grieving the recent deaths of both parents. The result is a book that not only moves the reader but also informs and entertains.