Blue Rooms: Ripples, Rivers, Pools, and Other Waters

The Earth is Beautiful because of water, says John Jerome, who sets out to explore the most ravishing examples of it he can find. The result is a travel book about water: a search that takes him from Oklahoma swimming holes to Adirondack lakes, from Canada to the Caribbean -- and from his earliest water memories to his mature reflections on what it is that so many of us find so compelling about water in its natural state. In Jerome's hands water becomes not commodity or resource but setting -- and a medium for escape, for pleasure, and, most rewardingly, for understanding the way the natural world works.<P>Blue Rooms considers everything from the physics of streams to the effects of clear-cutting on rivers, from the dynamics of a canoe stroke to the psychic joys of swimming. Once again Jerome takes his readers into a meditative space and a landscape that informs the soul, and, as he was praised for Stone Work, "changes the way you look at a sequence of small things and thus enhances your life more deeply in the long run" (Chicago Tribune).