When Lori Schiller was in highschool, she started hearing voices. Her moods became erratic, swinging from ecstatic highs to depression so severe she wouldn't leave her bed for days. Suspicion and fear of other people eroded her friendships. Eventually, driven by the voices in her head which screamed insults, curses and constant criticism, Lori started using cocaine, and then attempted suicide. Even then her parents denied that she was seriously ill, so it was some time before Lori got an actual diagnoses, and admitted to a hospital for the mentally ill. For years Lori was in and out of hospitals, institutions and halfway houses, while doctors struggled to find out what was wrong. They tried every combination of drugs on her. At first they thought she had bipolar disease, then schizophrenia. Most of the early places she was in saw her wild behavior as a deliberate lashing out, and tried using medication to control her mood swings, without really delving into why she behaved that way. It was a long time before she was able to confide in a psychiatrist what the voices were actually saying to her, to find a drug that would calm her emotions, to learn that the voices really were just inside her head and she could learn to cope with them instead of trying to escape by running away or hurting herself and others. In the end, she improves enough to live on her own and hold down a job. The book wraps up with Lori discussing what things remain difficult and the everday challenges she faces in living with schizo-affective disorder.
In 1914 Earnest Shackleton and a crew of 28 men left England on a discovery expedition, intending to cross the Antarctic continent with sled dogs. Their ship became trapped in pack ice, then slowly crushed and sunk by pressure of the moving ice. The men were left stranded, setting up camp on a thick ice floe and hoping for a chance to reach land. Their original plan was to use lifeboats to reach land where they could travel with the help of the dogs. But long before they escaped the ice they were forced to shoot the dogs, at first because of short supplies, and later simply to eat them. I'd heard of Shackleton's voyage before, but this is the first account I've read of it. I knew it was about an expedition that got stranded and made it back to civilization by trekking long miles and enduring extreme conditions, but for some reason I had in my head a picture of them trudging overland to their destination. In fact, they scrambled between ice floes in their small boats, seeking mostly shelter from the raging elements, often stuck on one floe for months at a time because pack ice gave them no escape. Some times they had plenty to eat when seals and penguins were nearby. Warm weather was a threat, not a boon, as it would melt the floe underneath them and half-melted floating pieces of ice made the water too dangerous to navigate. At other times they suffered terribly from starvation, fatigue, bitter cold, frostbite, etc. In the end (no spoiler as you know well some of them made it out alive; the book is based on and quotes from the crew members' diaries and the ship logs) they made it to a far-flung island which offered scant shelter, and Shackleton made a final desperate move to get by boat to the nearest whaling port, in South Georgia. Even when stretching the limits of exhaustion he made it there, they landed on the opposite side of the island from the whaling station, and had to climb over a glacier to finally reach help. This is without much food or proper gear of any kind.
This book, the second one included in The Chronicles of Chrestomanci Vol I, has some of the same characters from Charmed Life, but it takes place some twenty-five years earlier. Here we get the story of how the powerful enchanter Chrestomanci of Charmed Life, was once a young boy himself.
Charmed Life is about a boy named Eric whom everyone calls Cat, and his overbearing ambitious sister Gwendolen. They live in one of many worlds close to ours, and in this particular one magic is an everyday thing. Gwendolen has a natural aptitude for magic, but isn't well-taught and thinks too much of herself. She flounces around everywhere trying to get her own way and using magic to play mean tricks on people who thwart her. Rather like a great spoiled child, only one with an inordinate amount of power. Her brother Cat on the other hand, through whose eyes we see the story (although it's told in third-person, the reader only gets as much info as Cat himself is privy to) cannot seem to work magic at all, so he follows around in Gwendolen's shadow. He does, however, have extra lives, a thing which is so rare that its significance is not realized by many, it seems to be just considered another magical oddity in this world of wizards, enchanters and soothsayers. But his sister is making use of Cat's nine lives in a terrible way.
There's a lot more to this story than just his search, though. Kathleen is staying with her aunt and uncle because her father is in prison, and she suffers being bullied by her unfeeling aunt, as well as her cousins and boys at school. Sirius is her only consolation, and the relationship between them is quite tender. I love Kathleen's character. She's kind, smart and bookish! and puts up with a lot of crap before she finally stands up for herself. Some of my favorite parts are how Sirius develops a relationship with the household cats, his encounter with the fox, the revenge Kathleen gets on her cruel aunt, and the ending. I find it very sad, and fitting at the same time. 
I feel almost shamed to write this. Not only did I start out late joining in on Jenny's marvelous Diana Wynne Jones week, but apparently I picked the wrong book to begin with! I wanted to read The Homeward Bounders, and more particularly the Puss in Boots rewrite Jones did, but turns out my library had neither (one was checked out, the other non-existant). I was there in the middle of the week and scrabbled through the shelves: must get me some DWJ! I could only find three shelved: Fire and Hemlock, something about a griffin, and Castle in the Air.
Perhaps I should have gone with the griffin book. I liked this one well enough to start with. It begins set in a desert country, with our hero Abdullah being a daydreaming carpet-seller. He unexpectedly comes to own a magic flying carpet, and it whisks him away to a beautiful garden where he meets a lovely princess straight out of his dream. Abdullah falls madly in love, but his princess is stolen by a djinn (who has, it happens, been stealing princess from all over the world) so he sets off in pursuit. The quest has lots of unexpected bumps, as Abdullah takes up with an out-of-work soldier, a genie in a bottle with evil intentions (every wish it grants goes bad somehow) and a mysterious black cat (whom the soldier is besotted with). I was enjoying the adventure well enough until I ran into characters from the first book- for this is a sequel. I knew that when I started off, but I thought it would be able to stand alone and I'd figure out what was going on. But when Abdullah gets mixed up with wizards, more than one djinn and a score of scheming princess (who aren't going to just sit around meekly being held captive) it just all got mildly confusing and I found I suddenly didn't care much about these characters. Abdullah's constant flattery was starting to get old. I'd been a bit taken aback how suddenly he fell in love with his princess at the beginning, but now discovered I didn't really care why she was upset and acting coolly towards him. My favorite character was the cat- until she became something else...
This last of the dinosaur books I've been reading is my favorite. It's just so fascinating, and so well presented. The text, while of course being very factual, is also written in a reader-friendly fashion and there's even bits of humor here and there! The Natural History Museum Book of Dinosaurs tells you all sorts of things you don't get from the other books. Like how detailed, long and tedious the work of paleontologists actually is- one chapter takes the reader through the work of presenting a single specimen, from removing it from the dig site, cleaning, figuring out how the skeleton fits together, comparing it to other known species and finally presenting it to the public and the scientific community. There's a lot of work involved! I'm always wondering how scientists learned things like how well a certain dinosaur could smell, or at what age it died, and this book explains a lot about the detective work (so to speak) that gains that knowledge. I also really liked the parts that explained dinosaur physiology by comparing them to present-day animals, and the section on how dinosaurs have been depicted by media and artists, capturing the imagination of so many (but often misrepresenting things like which dinosaurs co-existed). Other really intriguing chapters cover things like how scientists have figured out some aspects of dinosaurs' social lives, the history of early dinosaur fossil discoveries, and a layout of evidence on how dinosaurs evolved into birds. All really amazing stuff. The pages are illustrated with photographs of dig sites and museum exhibits, diagrams, drawings, paintings and models (both computer-generated and sculptures). This is a really rich reference source and fascinating reading as well. A great book to wrap up my week of dinosaur reading!
Of all the j-nonfiction animal books I've been reading with my kid lately, this one stands above the rest. All the pictures are good quality, some stunningly beautiful. It's well-organized and really informative. And it's also very well-written. The prose is lyrical and descriptive, while still being easy enough for a child to understand. I very much enjoyed reading it. I think it's a good example of how a kid's book can still have lovely writing even when it's just mostly stating facts. Cheetahs describes where cheetahs live, compares them to other big cats, describes how their bodies are adapted to speed, and mentions something of their history with man. Most of the book is a description of a cheetah's daily life, how it hunts, raises a family, interacts with other predators, etc. The final pages (a common theme in these books, I am finding) discusses why cheetahs are endangered. It goes a bit beyond the usual habitat loss and poaching issues to also talk about genetics and captive breeding programs. A beautiful little book overall, one that impressed me so that next time kiddo is looking for "true books" about animals in the library, I just might type in this author or series name to see what else comes up.
This book is a sort of field guide to dinosaurs. If you're interested in prehistoric beasts, it's a great reference. The first part of the book has a family tree showing the classification of life forms and how dinosaur (and other ancient animal) groups are related to each other.There is an explanation of what classifies animals as dinosaurs, a geological timeline, details on how fossils are formed and then a description of each major time period with its characteristics and signature life forms. All of these things are presented in a lot more detail than the other books I've read. The bulk of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life is made up of animal profiles, highly pictorial, each pointing out key features of the animal and organized by both time frame and habitat. There are 200 dinosaurs, pterosaurs, early mammals and other creatures featured, and at the back is a list of 300 more that were not included in the main body. A lot of these bizarre and fantastical animals were ones I'd never seen or heard of before. Even my husband was exclaiming with amazement when I periodically interrupted what he was doing to show him one or the other. One thing I kept thinking as I looked at all the varied dinosaur forms, especially those with horns and spiky backs was, is this where the idea of dragons came from? Stick a pair of leathery wings on any of a number of these beasts and it would look like a really cool dragon. I wonder if early scientists put a few skeletons together wrong and thought they'd found evidence of dragons.
Fleeson leaves behind her dissatisfying life in Philadelphia as a news reporter and goes to the relatively remote Hawaiian island Kauai to work as a fundraiser for a large botanical garden. I thought the book was going to be all about her work with plants, and how native Hawaiian plants are threatened with extinction and fast disappearing. I was intrigued by stories of the history of the island's plants, of the work of dedicated botanists who brought some back from the brink (although my husband said when he heard what I was reading: who cares if a few plants disappear? animals always get the attention, don't they! but their lives are intricately tied together, I believe. Did you know- blunt aside- there is a tree -in Africa I think- with huge, heavy thick-skinned fruits no animal can break open; scientists assume it must have been eaten by ancient giant creatures now extinct- prehistoric mammals or dinosaurs. Sorry, I can't remember where I read this now or which tree it is). But Waking Up in Eden is a jumble of subjects. It's also about the author's personal life, her struggles to get accepted by the Gardens staff, her fascination with unconventional (for their times) people who came to live on the island: the wealthy gay couple who owned the Gardens land before and built themselves a paradise there; a solitary woman from the 1800's who traveled the globe including Kauai, writing extensive descriptions about the island. I liked the island history parts but found I wasn't interested in the constant snubs Fleeson suffered from her co-workers, or her fling with the local hottie, or her digging to find out all about the gay men: what intolerance they fled in 1920's Chicago, where their money came from, how they got accepted by the island community, etc; or even her travels across the island following the footsteps of Isabella Bird. It felt like there were chapters and chapters about this stuff and I just wanted to get back to the plants. If several of those subjects sound interesting, you might well like this book! but for me, I was expecting something a bit more focused.