WINTER: A Spiritual Biography of the Season

This outstanding anthology features top-flight nature and spirituality writers on the fierce, inexorable season of winter. This is not the place to seek warm fuzzy odes to sleigh rides and hot cider, though those images appear occasionally. Rather, these authors speak to the brutal barrenness of winter, its frozen tundra a witness to the manner in which spirituality requires dormant, seemingly infertile periods before bursting into life. Included are excerpts from Kathleen Norris's Dakota, in which she ruminates on the apparent impossibility of the Dakota cold, and three selections from noted spirituality writer Annie Dillard. New England resident Jamaica Kincaid reflects upon the struggles of a "winter garden," while E. B. White recalls "the winter of the great snows." White rather sheepishly confesses to liking the cold, the dark and the housebound nature of winter. Excellent essays by Ron Hansen, Will Campbell, Jane Kenyon and Henry David Thoreau are remarkably lively and warm, despite the icy subject. (Dec.)