The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
By breviews
May 1, 2008
Bill McKibben, fresh out of Harvard, where he was editor of the Harvard Crimson newspaper, landed a job as a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1982. Early in his career, while grinding out pieces for “The Talk of the Town” section of the magazine, he began to emphasize the “physicalness of the world,”…
By breviews
March 1, 2008
On my mother’s side I trace my Adirondack ancestry back seven generations. That’s hardly a big deal. American toads, red-backed salamanders, garter snakes and their cousin reptiles and amphibians have been breeding, feeding and dying here, with interruptions for ice ages, for untold thousands of generations. They’re the real Adirondack natives. By comparison, bears, moose,…
By breviews
January 1, 2008
The Adirondack landscape of Lueza Thirkield Gelb’s memoir, Schroon Lake, is not the stuff of High Peaks travelogues and dark Romantic vistas. It’s well-groomed and meticulous, a place where homes have names—like Almanole, or The Big Place—and long, curling driveways. Where deviled eggs are cooled on lake ice and sofas swing on the porch. Boathouses,…
By breviews
January 1, 2008
People in Lake Placid knew that their longtime village and town historian, Mary MacKenzie, had written on local history for many years. But hardly anyone knew how prolifically, or how diversely, or what a dogged and accomplished researcher she was. “I don’t think most people had any sense of the real magnitude of the work…
By breviews
January 1, 2008
In her new book of essays, At the End of the Road, Ruth Mary Lamb reflects on her experiences living in a remote valley west of Lake George. In 1990 she and her husband, Sandy, left their busy life in Boston to live in a ramshackle farmhouse they dubbed Journey’s End. Ours was a reverse…
By breviews
January 1, 2008
This past fall, Adirondack lakes and ponds got some much-needed good news. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, eight states and a host of environmental organizations reached a settlement in a suit filed in 1999 against American Electric Power (AEP), an Ohio-based power company with coal-burning plants in five states. To cut back the sulfur and…
By breviews
November 1, 2007
Larry Weill has been many things in his life: financial planner, technical writer, trainer, Naval officer. He’s also been a wilderness ranger in the Adirondacks, and that led to another item on his resume—storyteller. Weill shares his experiences from his three years as a ranger in the West Canada Lakes Wilderness Area, in the late…
By breviews
November 1, 2007
Larry Weill has been many things in his life: financial planner, technical writer, trainer, Naval officer. He’s also been a wilderness ranger in the Adirondacks, and that led to another item on his resume—storyteller. Weill shares his experiences from his three years as a ranger in the West Canada Lakes Wilderness Area, in the late…
By breviews
July 1, 2007
What do Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek have in common? They all spent time around Raquette Lake for one reason or another. Who knew such a seemingly unprepossessing spot on the Adirondack map could have played host to such luminaries?…
By breviews
July 1, 2007
Anyone who thinks the world’s going to hell in a hand basket can take heart. Nancy G. Slack and Allison W. Bell’s Adirondack Alpine Summits: An Ecological Field Guide, recently published by the Adirondack Mountain Club, demonstrates that some things are getting better, and even excellence can be improved upon. This handy and remarkably thorough…