With its humor and its fancy and its wistfulness, [Desert Islands]
is such a fountain of youth as no Ponce de Leon ever discovered. --New
York Times
A vast treasure chest...to dazzle and fascinate everyone who lifts the
lid.--Geoffrey Grigson
One of those cabinets of curiosities, Michael McKeon writes in his new
foreword, Desert Islands is filled with randomly juxtaposed artifacts
and devices rare and wonderful and far-flung, which long ago graced the
homes of the Renaissance patriciate and then, in the hands of natural
historians, became the model for the modern museum. Join Walter de la
Mare as he surveys the world of islands (symbols of man's love of
adventure and longing), both fictional and real, romantic and not--along
with shipwrecks, castaways, and solitude; pirates, explorers, and
treasure; Shakespeare, Swift, Columbus, Darwin, Utopia, England; and
particularly (of course), Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe.
One begins to fall under the spell, by way of Mr. De la Mare's fine
sinuous prose and fanciful comments, of those distant places, those
buccaneers' islands and remote wave-washed ocean rocks, by which he
himself is so strongly fascinated. --Spectator
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) wrote numerous novels, short stories,
essays, and poems. His Memoirs of a Midget, which won the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize, is also available from Paul Dry Books.
