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Book Reviewed by:A moving and irresistible book based on the true story of Henry Stuart who, given less than a year to live, moved to Alabama, discarded his boots and built a round hut that he lived in for the next twenty years.
"The more you transform your life from the material to the spiritual domain, the less you become afraid of death." Leo Tolstoy spoke these words, and they became Henry Stuart's raison d'etre. The Poet of Tolstoy Park is the unforgettable novel based on the true story of Henry Stuart's life, which was reclaimed from his doctor's belief that he would not live another year.
Henry responds to the news by slogging home barefoot in the rain. It's 1925. The place: Canyon County, Idaho. Henry is sixty-seven, a retired professor and a widower who has been told a warmer climate would make the end more tolerable. San Diego would be a good choice.
Instead, Henry chose Fairhope, Alabama, a town with utopian ideals and a haven for strong-minded individualists. Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, and Clarence Darrow were among its inhabitants. Henry bought his own ten acres of piney woods outside Fairhope. Before dying, underscored by the writings of his beloved Tolstoy, Henry could begin to "perfect the soul awarded him" and rest in the faith that he, and all people, would succeed, "even if it took eons." Human existence, Henry believed, continues in a perfect circle unmarred by flaws of personality, irrespective of blood and possessions and rank, and separate from organized religion. In Alabama, until his final breath, he would chase these high ideas.
But first, Henry had to answer up for leaving Idaho. Henry's dearest friend and intellectual sparring partner, Pastor Will Webb, and Henry's two adult sons, Thomas and Harvey, were baffled and angry that he would abandon them and move to the Deep South, living in a barn there while he built a round house of handmade concrete blocks. His new neighbors were perplexed by his eccentric behavior as well. On the coldest day of winter he was barefoot, a philosopher and poet with ideas and words to share with anyone who would listen. And, mysteriously, his "last few months" became years. He had gone looking for a place to learn lessons in dying, and, studiously advanced to claim a vigorous new life.
The Poet of Tolstoy Park is a moving and irresistible story, a guidebook of the mind and spirit that lays hold of the heart. Henry Stuart points the way through life's puzzles for all of us, becoming in this timeless tale a character of such dimension that he seems more alive now than ever.
This is a gentle, thoughtful tale, told simply and well, but not one to choose if you're looking for pulse-pounding action!..continued
Full Review
(135 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
If you live in or around
Fairhope,
Alabama ('a dozen miles as the laughing gull would fly across the bay from the
port city of Mobile') you might be lucky enough to know Sonny Brewer, the owner
of the Over The Transom Bookstore in
Fairhope.
The Poet of Tolstoy Park is his first novel, A Sound Like Thunder
will be published in August and he's currently working on the third volume of
his Fairhope Trilogy: The Tumble Inn and Sit Down Café.
If you liked The Poet of Tolstoy Park, try these:
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by Elif Batuman
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The true but unlikely stories of lives devoted — Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully! — to the Russian classics.
Bev Marshall, author of Walking Through Shadows and Right as Rain
An intoxicating and loving tribute to an extraordinary man, Henry James Stuart, whose life story is one of the most fascinating adventures I have ever read. . . . Written in language both lush and luminous, Sonny Brewer's debut novel is sustenance for both the mind and the soul. I believe that this novel is destined to become a literary treasure, and Brewer is destined to become a major voice in American literature.
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