Tropical Life  

ESSAYS | LAST DANCE

LESSONS FOR LIVING

A NEW COLLECTION OF OBSERVATIONS FROM A FAN OF THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

BY MARGARIA FICHTNER - mfichtner@MiamiHerald.com

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. Anne Fadiman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 220 pages. $22.

Years ago, impelled by the sort of meddlesome righteousness that manifests as gall, Anne Fadiman sent Vladimir Nabokov a list of 15 misprints -- ''thundercould'' for ''thundercloud,'' etc. -- she had spotted in her paperback copy of his autobiographical masterpiece, Speak, Memory. Surely, the zealous 23-year-old had reasoned, Nabokov would want the errors corrected for the next edition. She must help! Weeks later, a letter arrived from the author's wife, Vera, thanking the young proofreader for her unsolicited ``thoughtfulness.''

This terrific anecdote, which Fadiman relates in a previous collection of essays, pretty much nails her as a lifelong compulsive enthusiast, someone who still remembers the color (green) and composition (wood) of her childhood butterfly net, who once gasped ''Just what I always wanted!'' when presented with a pickled human tapeworm for her birthday and who, after a mathematical dabble in calorie counts and body-fat ratios, has determined that if she had stopped eating ice cream at the age of 18, she would now weigh minus-416 pounds.

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Margaria Fichtner is a Miami Herald editor.