A Radical Mention: Robert Leonard Reid

Robert Leonard Reid

from John Barrette at NewsReview:

There are third party candidates, but my favorite for that role is too busy with his own writing and musical career to jumble his life by stumbling into the political maelstrom. I speak of the aforementioned friend, Carson City’s Robert Leonard Reid (no relation to Harry that I can discern).

Bob Reid is a bleeding heart booster of an ecological approach to existence, something captured with aplomb in his latest book: Arctic Circle: Birth and Rebirth in the Land of the Caribou. In it he recounts an Arctic trip to watch caribou migrate.

And he quotes the great naturalist Wendell Berry. For me, it made a pertinent point regarding current politics both nationally and in Nevada.

“In his poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things,’” writes Reid, “Wendell Berry offers as an antidote to the dissonance of daily life the ‘still water’ of the natural world:

‘When despair for the world grows in me/ and I wake in the night at the least sound/ in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,/ I go and lie down where the wood drake/ rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds./ I come into the peace of wild things … ’

“Nature has the capacity to heal the frazzled soul, Berry reminds us, bringing with it freedom and ‘the grace of the world,’” Bob Reid concluded.

Bob Reid also wrote the musical revue “I Say Nevada!” that was presented in Carson City in 2008. An updated “bailout version” is scheduled for this autumn. In it, songs make sardonic humor romp. In one, Harry Reid is satirized for the heartthrob he is (NOT).