Started slowly, but I enjoyed this book immensely. Full of interesting quotations and set a century ago, it examined one man's search to find peace with death.

I disagreed with so many of Henry Stuart’s choices that ultimately I just couldn’t connect with his character. What a stubborn, irritating person. For me this is a slightly self-indulgent book about a highly self-indulgent man.

I listened to this in my car. The character of Henry Stuart was intriguing but repugnant to me. Much of the time, I found him pretentious, irritating, and self-absorbed. He did change for the better in the later parts of the book, once he was miraculously healed of his tuberculosis, but by then my heart was not willing to rehabilitate him. The narration, by Rick Bragg, was slow and soporific. All that being said, I am probably going to Google Henry James Stuart, the real person, and find out more about him!

The Poet of Tolstoy Park was a beautifully written historical fiction novel about the life of Henry James Stuart by author Sonny Brewer. This is a beautiful spiritual journey with a widowed professor in Nampa, Idaho in the early twentieth century who had been diagnosed with the non-contagious form of tuberculosis that is thought to take his life within the year. Henry, leaving the doctor's office and devastated with the news, leaves his boots on the porch as he makes his way home barefooted in touch with the earth and struggling with the reality of his lot. Books had always been a very important part of his life and while he knew that he would miss his beautiful library, he knew it was time to move forward. And so he dispensed all of his possessions among his sons, Harvey and Thomas, as well as his best friend Will.

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"It was plain to Henry that he would miss his books a great deal, that he had not yet fully incorporated Black Elk's teaching for he felt no real infusion of power of giving away his belongings. Henry did feel something akin to growing relief last night as this and that of his things were disposed of right down the list. Still the distribution of his books at this moment felt only like a loss.

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Researching the many places to spend the remainder of his life, Henry chose Fairhope, Alabama primarily because of the beautiful location and its connection to Leo Tolstoy, one of his favorite authors. Finding a perfect plot of ten acres above Mobile Bay, he departs from Nampa with two satchels, one with his most precious books as he boards a train for Mobile, Alabama. His first night there he weathers a hurricane in a cistern and during that harrowing night, he realizes that he must build a structure to house him that is in that pattern, and thus we have The Poet of Tolstoy Park.

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You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle. And that is because the Power of the World always works in a circle, and everything tries to be round. . .

The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball. And so are all the stars. The wind in its greatest power whirls.

Birds make their nests in a circle, for theirs is the same religion as ours. . . . The life of man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. . . .

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--- BLACK ELK, HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX, FROM Black Elk Speaks
by JOHN G. NIEHARDT

This was a beautiful book that I will refer to again and again. Oh, and now Fairhope, Alabama is on my bucket list!