Hunting for Frogs on Elston by Jerry Sullivan, edited by Victor M. Cassidy, University of Chicago Press, £17.50/$25, ISBN 0226779939 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
IN SPITE of the book’s title, not much of it is about frogs and the Chicago thoroughfare Elston Avenue. The title comes from one of 70 weekly columns in the Chicago Reader written by the naturalist Jerry Sullivan, who died in 2000.
These short tales are delightful and crammed with interest. It is like being addressed by one of those idiosyncratic, knowledgeable and quirkily attractive elderly men who occasionally appear in American films, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch and reminiscing. There’s plenty of humour here, and a rueful nostalgia for the prairie that Chicago has sprawled across during Sullivan’s lifetime. His consuming interest in the area’s urban ecology makes the essays, which are grouped according to subject, a pleasure for readers around the world.
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Hunting for Frogs on Elston is a book to keep in the car and pick up while waiting at a station or in a traffic jam. Prepare, though, for a throng of Midwestern terms such as trout lilies, gnatcatchers, skunk cabbage and grackles. They might mystify, but they add to the easy charm.