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The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces
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The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces Hardback - 2010

by Stephen Spotte

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Reader reviews for The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces

From the publisher

With an ear for life's fractured melodies, marine biologist Stephen Spotte recounts his lifelong study of literature and the sea and his search for the mythical place where reason and revelation intersect.

In The Smoking Horse, marine biologist Stephen Spotte recounts his youth from the mid-1950s through the turbulent 1960s. After growing up in a coal camp in southern West Virginia, he was expelled from a Maryland boarding school and over four summers lived a bohemian life in Beach Haven, New Jersey, working variously as a lifeguard, clamdigger, dishwasher, laborer, and milkman. Beach Haven in the early sixties was a riotous community of artists, musicians, drunks, junkies, and those who had simply fallen through life's cracks. It was, someone said, a seaside Greenwich Village, and in fact it became a weekend destination of New York City bohemians abandoning the hot summer sidewalks to mill with itinerant beach bums, boat jockeys, New Jersey pineys, and Philadelphia hipsters. It was here that Spotte began a lifelong study of literature and the sea, always with an ear to life's fractured melodies. Torn between art and empiricism, he moved to New York, haunting Village coffee shops, listening to beat poets, and following New York's jazz scene, where ragged sages claimed enlightenment in Coltrane's sax. Following stints as a deckhand in the West Indies he returned to college and trained to become a marine biologist. His professional life began in Niagara Falls, New York, where the Great Lakes were dying after years of pollution, the citizens struggling to breathe air reminiscent of the coal camps. The end of the memoir finds him separated from his wife and wandering alone in the Mexican desert astride a skeletal, marijuana-dependent horse and trailed by a stray dog, still seeking the mythical place where reason and revelation intersect.

Details

  • Title The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces
  • Author Stephen Spotte
  • Binding Hardback
  • Pages 195
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Excelsior Editions/State University of New Yo
  • Publication date 2010-03
  • Features Dust Cover
  • ISBN 9781438431390 / 1438431392
  • Weight 0.8 lbs (0.36 kg)
  • Dimensions 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.7 in (21.84 x 14.73 x 1.78 cm)
  • Category Biography / Autobiography
  • Library of Congress subjects Marine biologists - United States, Spotte, Stephen
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2009026795
  • Dewey Decimal Code B

Media reviews

Citations

  • Reference and Research Bk News, 08/01/2010, Page 276

About the author

Stephen Spotte is Adjunct Scientist at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida. He is the author of Bluegills: Biology and Behavior; Zoos in Postmodernism: Signs and Simulation; Candiru: Life and Legend of the Bloodsucking Catfishes; and Home is the Sailor, Under the Sea: Mermaid Stories. He lives in Longboat Key, Florida.

More Copies for Sale

The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces [Inscribed by Spotte to Chuck Kinder!]
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The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces [Inscribed by Spotte to Chuck Kinder!]

by Spotte, Stephen

  • Used
  • Near Fine
  • Hardback
  • Signed
  • first
Condition
Near Fine
Edition
First printing
Binding
Hardcover
ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9781438431390 / 1438431392
Quantity available
1
Seller
Item price
A$44.02
A$10.27 Delivery to USA

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Description:
Albany, NY: Excelsior Editions, 2010. First printing. Hardcover. Near fine/Very good+. Inscribed by Spotte to writer Chuck Kinder! Gray cloth boards in dust jacket, octavo, 187pp., not illustrated. Book has handsome boards and tight binding, text clean and unmarked. DJ has faint sun to spine, mild shelfwear.
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Item price
A$44.02
A$10.27 Delivery to USA
The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces (Excelsior Editions)
Stock photo: cover may vary

The Smoking Horse: A Memoir in Pieces (Excelsior Editions)

by Spotte, Stephen

  • Used
  • Good
  • Hardback
Condition
Good
Binding
Hardcover
ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9781438431390 / 1438431392
Quantity available
1
Seller
Item price
A$62.33
Free Delivery to USA

Show details

Description:
hardcover. Good. Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book.
Add to wish list
Item price
A$62.33
Free Delivery to USA