"Each chapter of Jack Kohl's Circle of Fifths fable From The Windows of Diligence is a complex journey through the twelve major keys of the musical language. Mr. Kohl, who is an inveterate runner, composes a meditation; as thinker, runner, and musician, he revels in the hand position of each tonality. Mr. Kohl's prose is as dense as the forest he trods. It is nothing less than a tour de force. The prose is sparse, erudite, nostalgic, lyric; one smells the earth, feels the crackle of leaves. There is the singular faith of the solitary wanderer; ears, eyes, and body wide open with wonder. The Windows of Diligence is life-affirming, and I believe it will become a classic as is Walden."
-DAVID DUBAL, Author of The Essential Canon of Classical Music "Is this a book about running seen through the lens of music, or about music seen through the lens of running? Jack Kohl's engaging propensity for taking life as a metaphor for music (rather than the more intuitive other way around) stands things on their heads, and makes you look at your environment differently. His as-outdoors-so-indoors mysticism turns hills into black piano keys, untuned pianos into forests, and practice-room denizens into deer in their habitat. It's a reminder that our perceptions can be richer and livelier than our habits let them be."
-Kyle Gann, author of Charles Ives's Concord: Essays after a Sonata
"Thoreau took us on a leisurely boat ride and gave us A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, replete with philosophical musings as well as detailed natural history. Here we accompany Jack Kohl on a series of jogs through Long Island's Makamah Preserve as he organizes his observations around the "Circle of Fifths," the twelve tones of the chromatic scale. The result is witty, wry, and replete with the wisdom gained from his close attention to nature and a life-long devotion to music, to which two other, complementary, essays typify."
-PHILIP F. GURA, Author of American Transcendentalism: A History