Dancing on the Stones

If you've read any of John Nichols's novels or books of nonfiction, you've met a lively, funny, and very impassioned man. This new collection of essays gives you the opportunity to know him even more intimately. Taoseño, fisherman, father, author, spokesman for all underdogs, Nichols has gathered writings that span more than thirty years and range from idyllic reflections on nature to unmerciful satires on impending Armageddon. We see the author as a young man on the trip to Central America that gave him a social conscience that wouldn't quit; as a hunter, hiker, and naturalist on rivers and in mountains increasingly threatened by development; and as a novelist watching in embarrassed disbelief as his book The Milagro Beanfield War is made into a movie that succeeds in spite of Hollywood's best efforts to garble the outcome. The vitality that made Nichols a standout prep-school mischief maker and college hockey player lends irresistible high spirits even to essays about departed friends and mortal illness--subjects that are treated with compassion, bawdy irreverence, thoughtful philosophizing, and the author's intense love of life. Nichols can find a miraculous universe in a tiny stock pond, turn a rafting trip into a Keystone Kops misadventure, advocate revolution at a moment's notice, and laugh with beguiling aplomb at his own awkward pomposity. Almost everything this long-time New Mexican has to say is at once deadly serious and bright with untrammeled joy and curiosity.