A magnificent book tells what home is like

 I think Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders is a magnificent book.

Jim Harrison, who was a friend of Kooser’s, did too. “The quietest magnificent book I’ve ever read,” Harrison said.

I like a certain kind of book, and this is it. It will never make a best-seller list. It will always be on the verge of being forgotten. But it will always have a few readers who are advocates, who will mention it, argue for it, urge its merits on their friends.

I think Local Wonders is better than anything on the best-seller list. And I think it’s an excellent model for writers. I think almost everyone should write a book like this.

The book’s subtitle is Seasons in the Bohemian Alps. Kooser, a former poet laureate, wrote about his home in southeast Nebraska. The “alps” are foothills, hardly 100 feet high. They area was settled by Czechs, then known as Bohemians, in the 1850s.

The Czechs of Nebraska, like the Czechs of Texas, left an oversize footprint on the culture. Many immigrants were professional or skilled workers who were fleeing the revolutions (and failed revolutions) of the day. Many were well educated. Some were freethinkers. They had to learn to farm.

Kooser wrote a book telling us what his home is like, how the Bohemian Alps came to be settled and what it’s like to live there today.

The book is made up of 121 short essays. The length of each varies considerably. The shortest is a short paragraph. The longest probably tops 2,000 words. The average, to my eye, is a bit over 500 words.

Topics include the ritual of cleaning sheds, putting up Christmas decorations and plowing snow. He writes of the landmarks, including the grave of a young man who died on the prairie, headed west, before the Civil War, and of a single building in a tiny town that is home to a beauty parlor and a taxidermy shop.

As the subtitle suggests, these essays are divided by the seasons. You’ll read about plum blossoms in the section on spring and about deer season in the section on autumn.

The short essay on solitude, a key feature of the alps, points out that Nebraska has only three real cities. “The rest of the state is a vast grassy preserve set aside for those of us who like to be left alone.”

That’s Kooser’s voice, and he’s talking about the place he knows best: home.

If you can awaken

inside the familiar

and discover it now

you need never

leave home.

I wish everyone would write this book, if only for their friends and children.

• Source: Ted Kooser, Local Wonders; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.