2005年NPR美国国家公共电台七月-A 'Field Guide' to Losing and Finding You

This is Day to Day, I am Alex Chadwick.It's time for our weekly book report.We all know you can not judge a book by its cover,but can you judge it by the lack of a subtitle¹? Book critic David Kipen thinks: Yes, maybe you can.

Almost no publisher takes a non-fiction book to market nowadays without a subtitle any more than a hiker would tackle a Matterhorn without an alpine² stock."A field Guide to Getting lost" is Rebecca Solnit's first book to enter the world subtitle free.Perhaps acknowledgement that after 8 volumes of thrillingly venturesome art and nature writing,her name is finally becoming more of a draw than any unwieldy subtitle could ever be.

A field Guide to Getting Lost finds Solnit in a more elliptical mode than we used to from her previous books.Her last book save one was " River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological³ Wild West ", an impressionist biography of a photographer who first proved that all four hooves of a galloping⁴ horse really do leave the ground at the same time.Well,unlike that volume , the new book is a quick silver thing,changeable as the western desert that Solnit attends to so closely.It all adds up to this indispensible writer's most personal book yet, alive as ever, to settle new answers of a natural world but newly responsive to the promptings of her own heart and histroy.Yet this is a book about the experience of getting lost in a wild,in emotion in revery,and Solnit would be short changing her subject if she didn't sometimes seem a little lost herself.In its nine related essays,she alternates discursive⁵ pieces on childhood,family,friendship and love with a series of recurring⁶ meditations⁷ keyed to the color of blue.These inter⁸ chapters called " The Blue of Distance" offer a kind of base camp,where dazzled but weary travelers can return to prepare for the next descent and Solnit's switchbacks can be astonishing.Here she is pulling off a breath-taking extented metaphor⁹ about lost love---"A relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story , a sheltering as a house.You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines.It's a shock to find yourself outdoors and alone again, hard to imagine you could ever live in another house,big where this one was small,small where it was big,hard to imagine building it again but you lit the fire that burned it down yourself".

Solnit is a writer to get lost in, even if sometimes she herself goes too long between looks at a map. The new book, with the subject so slippery, as occasionally it seemed no subject at all, makes greater demands on her readers than her Muybridge buyer. That was Solnit on the rocks with a twist. The new book is Solnit 's stray, no chaser. Some who love the earlier volume may find her new whiskey's kick too strong, too unrelieved.But for those readers who admire the play of solnit's intelligence across any landscape, just the fumes¹⁰ from A Field Guide to getting Lost can disorient you for days.

The book is A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit,David Kipen is book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and for Day to Day.And NPR's summer reading series helps you find the best novels and kids' books and cook books and more and you can find our critics' recommendations as well as some excerpts¹¹ at NPR.org

1 subtitle   

n.副题（书本中的），说明对白的字幕

参考例句：

• His new book has a subtitle.他的新书有一个副标题。
• Ah!I don't know why they don't subtitle these movies.唉！我不知道这些电影为什么不打字幕。

2 alpine   

adj.高山的；n.高山植物

参考例句：

• Alpine flowers are abundant there.那里有很多高山地带的花。
• Its main attractions are alpine lakes and waterfalls .它以高山湖泊和瀑布群为主要特色。

3 technological   

adj.技术的；工艺的

参考例句：

• A successful company must keep up with the pace of technological change.一家成功的公司必须得跟上技术变革的步伐。
• Today,the pace of life is increasing with technological advancements.当今， 随着科技进步，生活节奏不断增快。

4 galloping   

adj. 飞驰的, 急性的 动词gallop的现在分词形式

参考例句：

• The horse started galloping the moment I gave it a good dig. 我猛戳了马一下，它就奔驰起来了。
• Japan is galloping ahead in the race to develop new technology. 日本在发展新技术的竞争中进展迅速，日新月异。

5 discursive   

adj.离题的，无层次的

参考例句：

• His own toast was discursive and overlong,though rather touching.他自己的祝酒词虽然也颇为动人，但是比较松散而冗长。
• They complained that my writing was becoming too discursive.他们抱怨我的文章变得太散漫。

6 recurring   

adj.往复的，再次发生的

参考例句：

• This kind of problem is recurring often. 这类问题经常发生。
• For our own country, it has been a time for recurring trial. 就我们国家而言，它经过了一个反复考验的时期。

7 meditations   

默想( meditation的名词复数 )； 默念； 沉思； 冥想

参考例句：

• Each sentence seems a quarry of rich meditations. 每一句话似乎都给人以许多冥思默想。
• I'm sorry to interrupt your meditations. 我很抱歉，打断你思考问题了。

8 inter   

v.埋葬

参考例句：

• They interred their dear comrade in the arms.他们埋葬了他们亲爱的战友。
• The man who died in that accident has been interred.在那次事故中死的那个人已经被埋葬了。

9 metaphor   

n.隐喻，暗喻

参考例句：

• Using metaphor,we say that computers have senses and a memory.打个比方，我们可以说计算机有感觉和记忆力。
• In poetry the rose is often a metaphor for love.玫瑰在诗中通常作为爱的象征。

10 fumes   

n.(强烈而刺激的)气味，气体

参考例句：

• The health of our children is being endangered by exhaust fumes. 我们孩子们的健康正受到排放出的废气的损害。
• Exhaust fumes are bad for your health. 废气对健康有害。

11 excerpts   

n.摘录，摘要( excerpt的名词复数 )；节选（音乐，电影）片段

参考例句：

• Some excerpts from a Renaissance mass are spatchcocked into Gluck's pallid Don Juan music. 一些文艺复光时期的弥撒的选节被不适当地加入到了格鲁克平淡无味的唐璜音乐中。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• He is editing together excerpts of some of his films. 他正在将自己制作的一些电影的片断进行剪辑合成。 来自辞典例句