A trail guide, an essay and poetry book, a tourism tract - this enticingly named book is all of the above.  Green Enchantments is a vigorous multi-tasker offering hiking information, sightseeing highlights, and a generous sampling of esoteric Catskill interpretation, as well.

Its disparate parts are well organized and cohesively blended.  Boyajian divides the Catskills into five main regions: Western, Eastern, Southern, Northern, and Central.  They are then broken into subchapters that focus on the Department of Conservation's designated "wild forest" areas.  There's location information and general description of the forest, then a step-by-step depiction of one recommended trail.  Nature haiku follow, and essays on the author's boyhood camping excursions and tubing the Esopus.

The huge amount of information this book contains is augmented by sidebars that provide educational commentary on Catskill geology, flora, and climate.  There's also an appendix with such facts as the heights of the Catskill peaks (Slide Mountain is tallest at 4,180 feet), the population of Catskill villages (Phoenicians number a scant 381), and helpful listings of outdoor activities, bookstores, recommended festivals, and campgrounds (try Guestward Ho in Deposit).

Unfortunately, at certain points the book falls just short of its incredibly ambitious intentions.  Many of the haiku are more declarative than surprising, some essays lack fluidity, and the hiking information omits important estimates of trail length and completion time.

The glossy, full-page photos could benefit from captions, and many have the color-washed quality of an old home movie.  They frame clearly gorgeous vistas, however, and amazingly, are the author's work as well.  Though Green Enchantments is uneven, one quality comes through consistently: Boyajian's drive to share his passion for everything Catskill.

Green Enchantments isn't technically exhaustive enough to be the book to guide you through the Catskill trails, and for pure nature reflection, you may be better served elsewhere - but it's still ideal as an introduction to this magical mountainous place.  It will be an excellent primer for a first-time Catskill adventure, a supportive companion for the journey, and a nostalgic reminder of days spent exploring these enchanted green landscapes.  Boyajian will read from Green Enchantments at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock on Saturday, September 25, at 5pm.

- Susan Krawitz

Few among us are willing to admit to reading self-help books without at least a little self-deprecating shrug or a wry comment.  Yet this area of non-fiction has become so ubiquitous that it can be difficult to sort out the practical textbooks that teach sound methods from the commercially geared confessionals.  I am happy to report that Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow belongs to the former category.

Omega Institute co-founder Elizabeth Lesser has more than 25 years of successful counseling and spiritual guidance experience to back up her words, but she has chosen a particularly personal take on the theme of transformation.  Much of the book documents her own struggles with her divorce, the death of her father, and illnesses of friends.  None of Lesser's battles are beyond an average reader's own easily imagined or experienced life dramas, and the empathy this generates make her words and lessons more powerful.  It is easy to relate to her struggles, and she is the first to admit her own weaknesses or less-than-glorious moments of truth.

Lesser sometimes uses phrases that may give the more jaded reader reason to blanch momentarily, but overall her language is direct, honest, and jargon-free.  She effectively illustrates her points with words of wisdom from a very diverse group of famous folk, including Rumi, Joseph Campbell, Woody Allen, Ram Dass, David Bowie, Mother Teresa, and Wavy Gravy.

Her thesis surrounds the notion of what she calls the "Phoenix Process," in which one undergoes a trial by fire, only to emerge potentially a stronger, wiser, and more positive person.  She does not offer a lot of pat answers as to why difficult moments are endured by so many, but makes a compelling case for using the tough times as tools for further personal growth.

Lesser's experiences are interspersed with stories and anecdotes from people who have come into her life.  Some of their stories are told by Lesser; in some cases, she wisely chooses to use the subject's own words.

The book is divided into categories, grouping experiences into common themes.  Organizing the chapters in a less defined way might have made for a more challenging and enlightening read.  Still, she is never pedantic, and with her warm and honest voice, Lesser has managed to put a little elegance and compassion into this easily dismissed genre.

- Annie Kane-Horrigan

John Milk is a senior at the University of Indiana in 1939 when he first encounters Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist on the faculty who's been recruited to teach a "marriage course" open only to engaged couples.  The whole campus is bothered and bewitched.  There are rumors of a slide presentation that would make even the most sexually experienced student blush.  So, like many other horny undergraduates at the U of I, Milk hooks up with a faux-fiance, attends the arousing lectures, and agrees to give up his sex history in a private interview with Kinsey.  Milk's life, previously as pallid as his name, is changed forever.

T.C. Boyle's latest novel, his ninth, manages the same tricky blend of fact and fiction as The Road to Wellville.  Like the earlier novel, The Inner Circle is a portrait of a man on a mission to make twentieth-century America a healthier place, except that Kinsey's prescription isn't cornflakes, it's sex.  "There are only three types of sexual abnormality," said the real Dr. Kinsey, "abstinence, celibacy, and delayed marriage."

Milk, a self-absorbed but hardly self-aware narrator, says he's not sure why Kinsey hires him to become the first of an inner circle of sex researchers.  Then again, maybe he does.  "I had a pretty fair physique in those days...and a thatch of wheat-colored hair with a natural curl."  It turns out that the private Kinsey, happily married father of three, has a sex drive almost as encyclopedic as the sexual practices inventoried in the best-selling "Kinsey Reports" of 1948 and 1953, for which he would collect nearly 20,000 sexual histories.  (His goal was 100,000.)

Boyle's Kinsey has a handful of redeeming qualities, but mostly he's a manipulative son-of-a-bitch whom you can't help suspecting that T.C. Boyle admires.  Kinsey's only counterweight is Milk's wife Iris, who runs screaming from Kinsey's house one particularly salacious night.  The Inner Circle is an uncomfortable book that may tempt some readers to run screaming, like Iris, for safety.  But Boyle's powerful capacity to repulse and titillate does serve a larger purpose: to force an evaluation of the interrelationships among love, sex, and marriage.  And the author's own implicit conclusion is surprising.

T.C. Boyle will read from The Inner Circle at Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz on Sunday, September 12, at 7pm.

- Jane Smith

Poetry should again assume responsibility for the description of history," declared Edward Sanders (echoing his mentor, Charles Olson) in his 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry.  By way of such assumption, what Olson did for Gloucester, MA, and what William Carlos Williams did for Paterson, NJ, David Appelbaum proposes to do for the Village of the Huguenots in this, the first installment of a projected epic poem.  Judging by "Book I: The Burial," he has succeeded in placing New Paltz on the map of the imagination.  Which is to say that the history he describes is not a conventional one, but something at once intensely personal and hauntingly archetypal - a dark, numinous, unstable terrain, lit from moment to moment by flashes of charged language.

As a poet who has studied Western esoteric traditions, Appelbaum understands that the truth of a place - the history of all its histories, not only human but animal, vegetable, and mineral - is multidimensional, unbound by laws of cause-and-effect.  Hence, his approach is necessarily achronological; his "narrative" is a palimpsest of narratives, in which the past is fully and palpably present in each moment.  A "diesel motor / shredding the highway's bed / as though to roll in it" is contemporaneous with the stagecoach from New Paltz to Poughkeepsie; the suicide of a young female student at the Normal School is coexistent with the slaughter of the Esopus Indians by the Dutch.  In such a mosaic, marginalia assumes an importance equal to the main flows of the text - the poem is a carefully wrought collage attesting to the deathlessness of memory and desire.

Threading its glimmering way through the poet's protean landscape is the strange story of Peter Novalis, a peripatetic circus performer who specializes in Houdini-like escapes.  Novalis - magician, huckster, mythological trickster - simultaneously titillates and terrifies the good citizens of New Paltz.  His "burial" in an oaken chest dropped into the "Devil's swim hole" and his subsequent resurrection, "haloed in deciduous light," is as good a metaphor as any for "... a town imagined / in words of / an imagined poet / who lives / and dies with / imagination -  / place imagined / words imagined / the voice only / nearing / that inflection..."

"The world of imagination," wrote William Blake, "is the world of eternity."  David Appelbaum's Nieuw Pfalz is a bright addition to that world.

- Mikhail Horowitz