Bound

by Sally Gunning

Bound is a quiet novel, or at least it seemed so to me because there's not a lot of action. Most of the conflict takes place in a young girl's head, as Alice Cole worries herself over who to trust, how to keep her secrets, where to turn.... The story is set in Colonial times. Alice travels across the ocean with her family to the New World, but her mother and brothers take sick on the journey and when she arrives in New England her father is forced to sell his daughter into servitude to pay off his debts. She has to work for eleven years as an indentured servant. At first things go well; Alice is treated almost as one of the family, raised and taught alongside the family's daughter Nabby. But when the girls are grown, the remaining years of her service are transferred to Nabby, and the new household is not as kind to Alice. She is for the first time treated as a lowly slave, is abused by Nabby's new husband. Eventually things get so miserable that Alice runs away to Satucket, where she takes up with a widow who earns her keep by taking in boarders. Alice tries hard to prove her usefulness to this new household, while struggling to keep her secret: as a runaway servant she could be in serious trouble with the law if found out. But soon she has another secret to hide that's even harder to conceal than an obscured past.

For a book with such a quiet start; told most often in Alice's simple observations and wandering thoughts, Bound turns out to have quite a few heavy topics. I wasn't expecting it to deal with rape, or murder accusations. I wasn't expecting to end up reading about a trial- which was quite interesting, unlike most trial scenes that bore me. Although the story is about a quiet girl's life, trying to just evade trouble and live in peace, it's set against the bustling events of a small New England town. There's quite a bit of politics and local strife as the colonists struggle against English taxes; Alice becomes involved in spinning when they decide to boycott English goods and make their own cloth. Another thing I really liked about the story was seeing how Alice's character grew and her perceptions changed throughout the course of the year. She had a hard time at first learning to trust and understand other people's motives; I was quite surprised at how many times the man living with the widow forgave her indiscretions and mistaken judgements. I was glad she came to like a boy her own age and realize not all men were the beasts she had grown to fear. And I liked that the ending was kind of unexpected. All in all it was a good read.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 307 pages, 2008

more opinions at:
A Work in Progress

The Bucolic Plague

How Two Manhattanites Became Gentleman Farmers

by Josh Kilmer-Purcell

Again, a good read but not what I expected. Actually, I had fair warning from all the other bloggers: this book has too much Martha Stewart in it. I guess I was somehow hoping everyone else was wrong! It's about two well-to-do New Yorkers who buy a mansion on a piece of farmland just because it strikes them as so beautiful. Then throw their sweat into making it a working farm again, putting in most of their hours on the weekend, with the help of a caretaker during the week. And the caretaker happens to raise goats. So in addition to having a huge vegetable garden from which they eat fresh, can and preserve, they also hit on the idea of making specialty soap out of goat milk, and selling it for enough profit to quit their city jobs and live full-time on the farm. It all sounds rather wonderful. Except that's not what the book is mostly about. One of the guys happens to work for Stewart, so it goes on and on about how they try and fail (or sometimes succeed) to live up to "Martha" standards, and how much being seen on TV would boost their soap-making venture. And all that got rather tiresome. I would have liked to read more about the garden, or the goats. There's not even a good description of how they make the goat-milk soap, for example! I don't even know why milk goes into soap... There's also quite a bit about how their relationship struggled due to the strain of keeping up with city life and the demands of the farm, and of new people they meet in the farm community. It was all entertaining and kept me turning pages, sometimes laughing aloud, but I did wish for more stuff on goats...

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 304 pages, 2010

more opinons at:
Sophisticated Dorkiness
Caroline Bookbinder
Ready When You Are, CB
BermudaOnion's Weblog

Coop

A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting
by Michael Perry

It's been two weeks since I actually read this book (and the next one), so I don't recall exactly my first impressions, nor do I feel there's much I can say about it that hasn't already been said by other bloggers. See reviews linked to below. This one will be short.

Coop isn't really quite what the subtitle suggests. Yes, it's about a family man on a small farm, struggling to patch things together so he can raise chickens and pigs, alongside welcoming a new baby into his life. But the chickens really don't get much notice, and even the pigs feel like a sidestory. Mostly, the book is about family life. What it was like for him to grow up in a large family full of foster siblings, and in a small, obscure fundamentalist Christian church. To learn farmwork from an early age. The first half of the book feels almost entirely a memoir, the second part focuses more on his current life, putting together his own family and organizing things -in a haphazard way that reminds me of how I put together my own sorry cold frame- to make his farm somewhat functional. Even though it wasn't quite what I expected, I enjoyed reading it very much. Perry is a good writer, thoughtful and entertaining. A good book.

Borrowed from the public library. Got on my TBR list thanks to Raging Bibliomania and the Capricious Reader.

Rating: 3/5            352 pages, 2009

more opinions at:
Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
It's All About Books
the Quiet Man

welcome Sonja!

I suppose most of you have guessed, from my absence here, that our new baby girl has arrived!

Sonja Mae Nevarez was born on May 9th, at 3:11 pm. She weighed 8 lbs, 10 oz. Quite a big girl! She's a content and healthy baby. The only minor complication was that she fractured her right clavicle at birth, so had to wear a sling on her arm for a week, to hold the collarbone still. It's already healed over enough that we took the sling off a few days ago. She's much happier now, able to stretch her arm around.

Our older daughter is thrilled to be a big sister.

She's already planning to turn Sonja into a reader: big sister has brought her rocking chair into my room so she can read to the baby while she's nursing.

She pulled all the old baby books we saved off her shelf, says she's going to give them to the baby, and is reading aloud through the pile.

Myself, I've hardly read anything since Sonja was born. In two weeks I've barely made it through several chapters of Bound. I have a few reviews to write of books I read just before the delivery; they'll probably be kept short and sweet. And posting here will be spotty for quite some time, at least until the baby starts sleeping through the night and I can get some decent sleep again! Until then, it's catnaps all day and hardly any pages turned. But I don't mind. Here's a few more pictures.

Sonja and Daddy:

with Mommy:

Sisters:

See you later!

Farm City

The Education of an Urban Farmer

by Novella Carpenter

Living in a run-down neighborhood in the city of Oakland, Carpenter eyed the vacant lot next door to her apartment with dreams of growing tomatoes and raising chickens. And then she went ahead and did it. Started building raised beds and growing vegetables. The operation expanded into chickens, turkeys, ducks, a beehive. Then rabbits, and eventually even a pair of pigs. Some of her neighbors enjoyed in sharing the bounty of the garden, others complained about the noise and smell of the animals. She scavenged the city streets for weeds and discarded produce to feed her birds and rabbits, and ended up dumpster-diving behind high-end restaurants to acquire enough food for the pigs. I admired her thriftiness and determination- at one point she tries to go for an entire month living just on what grows in her garden, the meat from her animals, and what she can forage elsewhere in the neighborhood (fruit trees overhanging sidewalks, for example). I've often dreamed of keeping chickens for eggs and bees for the honey, but don't think I could go quite so far as Carpenter and slaughter bunnies for the table. I'm just too squeamish! Anyhow, Farm City was a quick, enjoyable read. The author also keeps a blog about her food-raising exploits.

I found out about this book on Amy Reads. Borrowed it from the public library.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 276 pages, 2009

Kingdom Under Glass

by Jay Kirk

I've recognized the name of Carl Akeley before, but until reading this book wasn't quite sure why he was famous. He was a taxidermist in the late 1800's, a man passionate about his work. He wanted to be known as an artist, not just someone who butchered animals to stuff their skins for display. He discovered new methods of preparing specimens so they were incredibly lifelike and showed the actual form of muscles, veins, etc. The entire time I was reading the book I kept thinking of all the animals I've marveled at when I visit the Museum of Natural History (particularly for drawing practice). But Akeley didn't just work in a studio to create lifelike animal displays. He also went into the field to collect specimens himself. I was just getting to that part of the book when I started to loose interest and put it down. It's not the book's fault. Just that the further I read the harder it is to hold my attention. The narrative often takes long asides into describing scenery and localities particular to the times; which is interesting but sometimes feels like it just wanders too far. And right now I'm simply more interested in gardening stuff. So when two gardening-related books came for me on the hold shelf, I set this one aside to read Coop and Farm City instead.

I picked this book up at the library, just browsing the shelves. The title intrigued me, and then the subject even more from reading the flyleaf. I feel pretty sure I do want to come back to Kingdom Under Glass someday; it just isn't the one for me right now.

Abandoned ........ 387 pages, 2010

more opinions at:
Fyrefly's Book Blog
anyone else?

The Moral Lives of Animals

by Dale Peterson

Not so long ago, people thought that animals were merely some kind of animated "machine", merely responding to external stimuli in predictable patterns. Nowadays most people have accepted the fact that animals can indeed think and reason to some degree, and that they have feelings too. Haven't you ever seen your dog look guilty when you catch him in the middle of a chewed-up mess, or the blissful expression on a sleeping cat's face? In The Moral Lives of Animals Dale Peterson takes this idea even further, positing that animals not only have feelings, but a sense of morals as well. Ones that we can not only recognize, but also learn from.

You might think that the animals featured in this book are all of species known to be highly intelligent- chimpanzees that deliberately deceive each other, elephants that grieve for dead family members, blue jays that hide their food a second time when they think another bird might steal it. But there are also a lot of other "lesser" creatures mentioned, such as a bat who was observed to assist another in giving birth, or mere insects that play tricks on each other. And I'm just barely scratching the surface here. The Moral Lives of Animals is rather heavy reading, thick with insights into animal and human behavior. A lot of it is looking into the question of why we have certain social rules, why humans (and animals) have evolved to feel certain emotions. It's very interesting. Often the author takes his time with a detailed introduction to a concept, but it's worth getting through the parts you might think aren't related, to see what his point is. And woven through the entire book is the motif of Moby Dick, as he contrasts two main characters' viewpoints on the mind of the great whale: Ahab who feels nearly guilty for pursuing it and views the creature as holding malicious intent, and Starbuck, who sees it merely as an animal to be captured for profit. These different attitudes say more about us as a species than about the whale (but whales get their own spotlight here, too). I appreciated the fact that Peterson pointed out more than once that the minds of animals should not necessarily be considered less complex or advanced as ours, but merely as other, as alien. Animals have their own different ways of thinking and perceiving the world, which is also reflected in their versions of morality...

I'm not quite sure what else to say about this book, as quite a lot of it I'm still mulling over in my mind to understand better. It's quite the read, one you want to go through at a leisurely pace, and I enjoyed it much.

I received a review copy of this book from Blue Dot Literary. It has not affected my opinion. Thanks, Tony, for giving me the chance to read this book!

Rating: 4/5 ........ 342 pages, 2011

More opinions at:
Dad of Divas' Reviews

Seedfolks

by Paul Fleischman

This is a lovely little book I read in nearly one sitting, prompted to find it by a review at Stuff as Dreams are Made On. Told in a series of vignettes, the voices of about a dozen different characters describe how a community garden spontaeously arises from a junk-filled vacant lot in an inner-city neighborhood. It starts when a Vietnamese girl plants a handful of lima beans in memory of her father. A few neighbors overlooking the lot are at first suspicious of her activities, but when they see what she's trying to do they feel differently. One lady even comes to water her plants when the girl doesn't show up for a few days. Gradually other people are inspired to grow something as well, scratching out a bare spot in the dirt. A young man who's always seen himself as tough plants tomatoes to woo his girlfriend. A woman plants goldenrod, remembering how her grandmother used it as medicine. A taxi-driver plants lettuce intending to sell it to nearby restaurants. They all have different motives for growing stuff: nostalgia, beauty, food for the table; but end up helping each other out and building a community connected by the garden. I loved how a little girl solved the problem of providing easily-accessible water for the garden. One guy even beats on doors of public officials until he gets the city to come clear the lot of trash and rubble. People start looking out for each other in more ways that just giving advice on growing vegetables, and overcoming their racial differences and language barriers in the act of sharing their produce and flowers. Seedfolks is a wonderful story that I enjoyed very much.

Rating: 3/5          69 pages, 1997

quite a list

All these books look so interesting, I just had to add them to the TBR!

Making the Rounds with Oscar by Dr. David Dosa-The Black Sheep Dances
The Great Starvation Experiment by Todd Tucker- Shelf Love
Little Princes by Conor Grennan- At Home with Books
The Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton from Life is Short, Read Fast
Wasp Farm by Howard Ensign Evans- Bookwyrm's Lair
The Mountain People by Colin Turnbull- Farm Lane Books Blog
Pink Boots and a Machete by Mireya Mayor- The Book Lady's Blog
The Secret Lives of Babi Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin- Savidge Reads
Pox by Michael Willrich- Sophisticated Dorkiness
Rose in a Storm by Jon Katz- Caribousmom
This Life is in Your Hands by Melissa Coleman- Sophisticated Dorkiness

The Help

by Kathryn Stockett

Set in the early 1960's, The Help is a story of several well-to-do white ladies and their black maids. It's narrated in turn by Skeeter- a young lady recently returned from college and constantly pestered by her mother to find a husband, Aibileen- a black maid devoted to the white children she raises, and her sassy friend Minny who just lost her job for talking back to her boss and now works for a reclusive woman on the edge of town. Skeeter is not quite like her friends; she wants more out of life than just spending her days shopping or attending bridge club. She wants to be a writer. Coming home to find that the maid Constantine who raised her is gone (and no one will tell her what happened), she starts asking questions of her friends' maids and starts to see the injustice in the relationships between the black and white women. She gets the idea to interview the maids and write their stories into a book. At first no one will talk openly to her; all the maids are terrified of the repercussions if they actually admit to what goes on behind closed doors. But one by one they start to come forward and share their stories...

This was a really good read. I've seen tons of reviews about it all over the place (don't feel like I really have much to add) but it wasn't until a friend put a copy into my hand that I thought to read it myself. I was a bit speculative (as I often am of wildly-popular books) but once I got through the first chapter I couldn't stop reading. The depiction of how these women's lives intertwined is riveting. Some are kind, some shallow, some downright mean. I admit I didn't really feel attached to too many of the characters; none of them felt very well-rounded, but I was more intrigued by the storyline and seeing what was going to happen. From the very beginning several large secrets started looming through the story and I was waiting for their revelations, ticking them off mentally when they appeared: so that's what happened to her, now what about this other bit? and then after all the secrets came out I was curious for the outcome. The ending was pretty satisfying. I was glad of how things worked out. And the one I felt most sorry for was the little girl Mae Mobley, poor child, whose mother hardly noticed at all what she was doing.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 451 pages, 2009

more opinions at:
Savidge Reads
The Last Book I Read 
Bookstack
Ardent Reader
Hooser's Blook

Living 2 Read

Ferns to Know and Grow

by F. Gordon Foster

I've always thought ferns were so pretty, and wanted to have some as houseplants. Now I'm thinking I could even use them as landscaping in my yard. For the past few years I've been looking a lot at what grows in other yards in my neighborhood, seeing which plants are the most vigorous or nice-looking. I don't see anyone growing ferns, though. My guess is it's hard to get them through our hot summers with constant moisture. But this book taught me there are some even native to my area, so it might be possible...

Ferns to Know and Grow is a pretty comprehensive plant book. It describes the structure and life-cycle of ferns, how they grow and how to care for them indoors or out. They are very curious plants! I always had assumed that the spores under the leaves were like seeds, and new ferns grew wherever they landed in a favorable spot. But that's not so at all. Ferns actually go through three stages. The spores grow into microscopic plants called prothallia which develop male and female reproductive organs. They make sperm which have to swim through a drop of moisture to an egg cell. Only after the egg is fertilized does a mature fern plant grow, the leaves with which we are more familiar. Isn't that crazy? I didn't know there were any plants that used sperm and eggs to reproduce! Some ferns can also grow a new plant from where the end of a frond touches the ground, others (called "mother ferns") grow new baby plants on top of their leaves. But they all use spores and prothallia as well. When I read this part of the book to my husband he said "maybe those are the plants that animals evolved from." It's quite a thought- ferns are older than the dinosaurs!

Anyway, the bulk of the book is actually about identifying ferns. There's a section on ferns that grow well in landscaping, with brief instructions on their horticulture. Another section is all about "tender" ferns that do well as houseplants, and the last part is about rare and wild ferns, that don't survive outside their natural climate and so are presented here to enable the reader to identify them in the wild.

A most interesting book, if you like plants! My only criticism is on the illustrations. There are very few color photographs, most of the images black-and-white. While the drawings  and descriptions are quite thorough enough I feel I could identify any fern I came across, it would still be nice to have some updated photos. Especially to see how they look in the garden.

Rating: 4/5 ........ 258 pages, 1971

In Praise of Slowness

How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

by Carl Honore

Journalist Carl Honore believes that the modern world moves at much too rapid a pace. People spend too many hours on the job, eat their meals too quickly, cram their schedules, drive too fast, etc. etc. In Praise of Slowness looks at how our lives have come to be so hectic, and what many people in countries all over the world are doing to counteract that. It's not just about freeing up your schedule a bit and finding time to relax. It's about rejuvenating your mental capacities, finding creativity, making time for your family, eating healthier and so much more. I've heard about the Slow Food movement before, but I didn't know there was also a Slow Cities movement- where small towns are being designed to encourage people to walk more, for example. I expected to read about people finding ways to get away from the rat race, but was surprised by a chapter about slower ways of doing exercise- promoting tai chi, yoga and SuperSlow (weightlifting) over fast aerobics or jogging, for example. There's also a section on taking your time with intimacy, on doctors spending more time with patients (which looks at both the traditional medical establishment and alternative medicine) and even one about music. I was totally unaware there's a movement centered on the idea that most classical music is played twice as fast (or more) than it was originally intended to be. Concerts now perform well-known classical pieces at a much slower pace, and people get an entirely different impression of them. Full of curiosity, I visited the sight for Longplayer, a piece of music played on Tibetan 234 singing bowls- the performance began on Dec 31st 1999 and is supposed to take until the year 2999 to complete. I've been listening to an audiostream of the performance while writing this. It's quite hauntingly beautiful.

So, a bit more about the book- I also appreciated the chapter on allowing kids to have more free time, not jamming their lives full of lessons and schedules to keep up with everyone else (reminded me of a lot of things in Confessions of a Slacker Mom). Overall the broad impression I came away with was the idea that by taking things at a more reasonable pace (even slowing down your very thought process) and doing less, we can achieve more, and have a better quality of life. It's about having more focus, and less drive to just get things done done done. I like that message.

I don't remember how this book first got on my TBR. I borrowed a copy from the public library.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 310 pages, 2004

Vegetable Gardening

by Southern Living Books

Another old, outdated gardening book. I think I picked this one up at a garage sale once. I thought at first when flipping through it that it wouldn't be much use to me, but I was wrong. In spite of the recommendation of lots of (again, unfamiliar) chemicals, and some very dated-looking photos, this book actually has a lot going for it. In the first place, it specifically focuses on my locale. I don't usually think of myself as living in the South, but Virginia is a Southern state, and this book is all about how to grow vegetables successfully in that region. In the back it even has a chart for each state showing when to plant all the different veggies and what varieties do best in which areas (quite a few of the names I even recognized- I grow Detroit beets and Fordhook Giant chard, so those strains are still around!)

Other useful sections include a chart showing how much to plant if you just want to eat stuff in season, and how much extra if you want to store food for the winter (canning, freezing, etc) for an average-size family. There are instructions on how to most efficiently layout the garden, how to garden in small spaces (including building your own strawberry barrel), how to start plants early or grow them through the winter in a hotbed, coldframe or greenhouse (with some instructions on building those things yourself) and even how to grow plants without soil! (although the hydroponic method sounds terribly tedious).

One chapter of the book describes each vegetable with specific growing instructions, another is dedicated to berries and vines, and a third to herbs. I found the black-and-white line drawings here quite charming. I especially appreciated the herb section, although it made me laugh that the book says of coriander "Although the dried seed have a pleasant flavor, the fresh foliage and seed of this plant have a disagreeable odor." It even recommends planting coriander in an out-of-the-way place in your garden so you don't have to smell it! Nothing is mentioned of using the leaves. I know this plant by the name cilantro, and we grow it mainly to use the leaves in salsas. I do dry some seed to use as coriander in pho soup, but not much. And I happen to like the scent of it in the garden.

Another very useful section is where the book identifies beneficial insects, and also has a photo gallery to help you identify pests and diseases. For the first time I now know what the bug that ate my broccoli is! So, even though the book feels dated in some parts, it's certainly already been useful to me and I'm keeping it around.

Rating: 2/5 ........ 172 pages, 1971

Tales of an African Vet

 by Dr. Rey Aronson

Aronson is a wildlife vet, and in Tales of an African Vet he shares various stories of memorable experiences he's had working with wild animals. These aren't animals held in zoos, but ones roaming free out in the bush. So in order to treat the animals he often had to spend hours searching for them, successfully get them darted so they could be safely handled while asleep, and then monitor them until they woke up again (so they wouldn't get attacked by another predator). Quite an undertaking. Some might say why bother treating a wild lion with an injured eye, or rescuing a baby elephant stuck in the mud? isn't it better to let nature take its course, and allow the hyenas to eat the injured baby rhino (no mother in sight)? But Aronson felt that since the lives of these animals had been altered by humans (they all resided in game parks, their habitat restricted by fences, and often infected by disease or afflicted by stress due to human presence as well) it was only right that he help them out when possible. In some cases it was pretty obvious that humans were to blame for the animals' suffering, as when he tried to treat a lioness with a wire snare around her neck, or a gemsbok ill from the shock of improper handling during transportation from one game farm to another.

I must make a correction. Not all the stories are of creatures roaming wild and free. There are also various animals brought into his vet practice: a pet squirrel monkey, a snake injured by a dog, a hedgehog likewise suffering from a dog bite. He also tells of visiting a crocodile farm, and a fish farm with valued koi suffering from the bends! The stories in Tales of an African Vet are all good reads, engaging and very intriguing, especially when they get into issues of animal conservation. Some of them are sobering- it was dismaying to read about how close cheetahs are coming to extinction for example, and (inevitably) there are a few cases where the animals don't survive treatment. But a lot of them have good outcomes, and positive outlook for the future (he says that wild areas in South African are actually increasing as more and more people who own land privately turn it into game parks or reserves with habitat suitable for wild animals). It's easy to tell which animals are the author's favorites; he gives a lot more description about the elephants and crocodiles than the lions, for example. I enjoyed reading about them all.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
 
Rating: 3/5 ........ 227 pages, 2011

more opinions at:
Page 247
A Library is a Hospital for the Mind

a few more

books for the want-to-read list:

My Abandonment by Peter Rock- thanks to Opinions of a Wolf
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks- You've GOTTA Read This!
Free Range Learning by Laura Weldon- Books and Movies
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson- Sophisticated Dorkiness
The House of Thirty Cats by Mary Calhoun- Literary Wombat
What I Don't Know About Animals by Jenny Diski- Things Mean a Lot
A High Wind in Jamacia by Richard Hughes from Ready When You Are, C.B.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maartin Troost- Reading Through Life
Bones Would Rain from the Sky by Suzanne Clothier- A Striped Armchair
The Hedgehog's Dilemma by Hugh Warwick- from Eva again
The Invisible Sex by J.M. Adovasio- ditto

Thanks all you wonderful bloggers, for adding yet again to my pile!

winner

It was no contest, really. Literary Wombat was the only reader who entered for my last giveaway, and thus is the unquestionable winner! Wombat, if you'd just let me know where to send your book set (jeanenevarez [at] gmail[dot] com) I'll happily mail it out to you!

Spiritual Midwifery

by Ina May Gaskin

This is truly the hippie book of childbirth. It was mentioned in quite a few of the other pregnancy books I've read recently. Written by a midwife who lives and works in a commune in Tennessee known as The Farm. Ina May learned the practice of midwifery by assisting at births, reading medical textbooks and being instructed by a supportive physician who was their back-up. In the time span of the book, about 2,000 babies were born at The Farm and Spiritual Midwifery shares many of their stories.

They're quite unlike any other birthing stories I've read. Not only do the women all give birth naturally- without drugs or medical interventions (except in a few cases where they had to go to the hospital) without (apparently) feeling any pain, but most of them say they find the experience exhilarating. They put a lot of emphasis on approaching birth with a totally relaxed, fearless attitude, and being surrounded by people who love and support the mother. It kind of makes sense to me that it would be easier to give birth if you're relaxed, that you feel more pain if your muscles are tense, that being stressed or worried could prolong your labor. But it was quite something else to read about mothers who reported having out-of-body experiences while in labor, or communicating telepathically with the baby's father or the infant itself. The language can take a bit getting used to; the women frequently refer to their birthing experience as being "psychedelic" or making them "feel high." They almost always refer to contractions as "rushes." To them, childbirth is not something to endure but a momentous, even enjoyable experience.

It all seems rather touchy-feely when you're reading the stories. A few of their practices had me wondering, though. I don't know how many times the midwife in these stories recommended a women drink liquor to slow down her labor. It also seemed like they frequently had the mother labor flat on her back in bed- when I was expecting to read about more different positions, like squatting. But the later part of the book reminds you how serious the midwives (Ina May is only one of several who have a presence in the book) are about providing their mothers with good medical care, both before, during and after the birth. The last half is a handbook for midwives. It's pretty detailed. I didn't read all of that part, just the bits that were interesting (like all the different ways a baby can present). Other areas just had too much information for me- I didn't want to look at diagrams of how to stitch up tears, or read about all the possible infectious diseases and birth defects.

At the end there are some instructions for new-baby care and the kind of support mothers need when they first go home. There are also statistics about the births on The Farm.  It's a pretty well-rounded text, although the black-and-white photos and drawings feel kinda dated and the hippie attitude is certainly unconventional.

The author has her own web page here where you can read a lot about her philosophy on childbirth.

I note the range of publication dates below because this book was originally written in the seventies, but the fourth edition I read has a lot of added material from 2002.

This ends my spate of reading books about pregnancy and childbirth, unless anyone has some really good ones to recommend that I might have missed?

Rating: 3/5 ........ 479 pages, 1975-2002

The Impatient Gardener

by Jerry Baker

This is one of those books I picked up from a swap site when I had a green thumb itch. The Impatient Gardener is full of concise, simple gardening advice, about nearly anything you'd want to grow or keep green- your lawn, shrubs, flower boarder, trees, rose bed, vegetables, even houseplants. There is information on how to establish perennials, recommendations for plant species that are relatively easy to care for and do well in different mini-climates of your yard, timelines on when to do certain work in the yard, info on how to layout your flower bed and veggie garden, what to feed your roses, how to keep your trees happy and much more.

But I had a few doubts about the book. First of all, it's rather dated. Secondly, even though the guy recommends some organic methods like feeding with compost, treating plants with homemade tonics (including things like mouthwash and baking soda!) and companion planting in the veggie garden to deter pests and promote plant health (the chart here seems really invaluable) he also constantly recommends the use of chemical pesticides, some of which I discovered by looking them up (not being familiar with their names) are no longer sold, they are so dangerous (like Diazinon). Another thing that kind of threw me was that in the section where he talks about keeping pests out of your yard and garden- deer, moles, squirrels, etc. He starts off by saying you should never kill an animal but find other ways to get rid of it; yet most of his recommendations move quickly from deterrent measures or trap-and-release to using gas, poison and other methods to kill the critters you want to get off your property. Hm.

So... I think I might keep this book around for some reference, it has lots of easy-to-find and understand guidelines for when to plant things, how to prune etc. and I'm curious to try a few of his homemade plant tonics. I looked for other reviews of this book online but all I could find was a handful of Amazon reviews- all of which raved about the results of following his advice, by the way. I didn't think much of this until the other day I saw a guy in our neighborhood mowing his lawn- when the grass has barely turned green, it's not even over an inch high in my yard! Personally I've never given my lawn much care beyond mowing when it starts looking scraggly, so I was wondering about starting up some regular lawn care. And then I looked at this neighbor's lawn compared to the others around it- his was fuller and greener. And one of the first things this Jerry Baker recommends doing with your lawn is cutting it as low as you can in the spring when it first begins to turn green. So maybe he has something there. I just might try following some of his advice, but I sure am going to steer clear of the chemicals and pesticides. They make me nervous.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 228 pages, 1983

Immaculate Deception II

Myth, Magic and Birth
by Suzanne Arms

 This book (engaging and very easy to read) looks at childbirth practices in modern Western culture, particularly how hospital doctors treat women and what historically led them to use so many interventions routinely. In some ways a lot of the historical information repeated what I recently read in Get Me Out, but there were quite a few new angles here, too. Arms focuses a lot on why men have overpowered women in the field of childbirth care, not only looking at how physicians shouldered out midwives in the recent past but also the role the Catholic Church played in discouraging the practice of midwifery. That chapter got a bit dull to read (it often felt like she was veering off the subject of childbirth and more into religious stuff), I was glad to move on from it. There are a few chapters that each give a fictional scenario illustrating how women typically gave birth in different periods of history. One shows a woman in a tribal culture, another a woman in Victorian times. They felt rather conjectural to me; I wondered exactly how she could know of the attitudes and practices surrounding childbirth in prehistory?

The latter part of the book is all about how childbirth is approached in our times-  how drugs are used, the rise of cesarean sections, use of ultrasounds (she considers them unnecessary), babies being put into intensive-care units more than ought to, the presence of midwives and doulas in hospitals, why our culture causes so many women to fear childbirth, how babies should be treated immediately after birth, etc. etc. In pretty much every case she is pointing out how intrusive hospital policies are and advocating midwife-assisted homebirths or in birthing centers. Birth is a natural process that need not be treated like a disease and almost any woman can get through it without drugs or interventions, seems to be her overwhelming message. Needless to say, I found Immaculate Deception II to be very one-sided, mostly anti-hospital in nature, yet at the same time it was very encouraging. I was able to set aside her negativity about hospital settings and instead focus on the empowerment of women, the assertion of their strength and ability to trust their bodies and birth their children without fear or tension.

At the very end of the book is a collection of interviews and stories about birth, showing many different opinions and circumstances. I liked the fact that it included not only stories of mothers giving birth, but also the viewpoints of various midwives, obstetricians, physicians,  fathers, even an interview with an eight-year-old girl who was present at the homebirth of her baby sister.

My original intent was to read the first version, Immaculate Deception, but I couldn't find a copy available. Probably for the best, as I've since read that it has quite an angry (possible more negative?) tone towards the medical establishment. I borrowed this one from the public library.

Rating: 4/5 ........ 290 pages, 1994

Night

by Elie Wiesel
translated by Marion Wiesel

Years and years ago in high school I went through a period of reading lots of books about the Holocaust- mostly personal accounts. I can hardly remember what any of them were now, but they held a kind of horrified fascination for me. After some time, though, the subject just got too depressing. I couldn't take it anymore and quit approaching those books. This one has been sitting on my shelf for ages and I'm not quite sure what made me pick it up now. It says something that it took me quite a few days to get through such slender text, though.

Night recounts how the author lived through and survived being shuffled between ghettos and several different concentration camps during WWII. Luckily he was able to stay with his father almost the entire time, but it seemed a heartwrenching thing, too, that they had to watch each other suffer. He tells about all the awful things: brutal treatment, starvation, forced marches, seeing infants and young children killed, people hanged for no good reason, etc. etc. Near the end his father becomes very weak and ill, and their roles are reversed as he must protect and care for his father, often with resentment. He also talks a lot about how his faith in God was shaken, about deep despair and hoplessness. It's all told in a very sparse, poetic style that really doesn't give a lot of detail. On the one hand, I was glad of that. Sometimes the details can just be too harrowing, especially in this case. On the other hand, I often felt detached from what I was reading, as if I was viewing it all through a telescope turned the wrong way. What most saddened me was reading about how some of the people turned on each other- a son fighting his father over a scrap of bread, men in a transport car beating up a woman among them who kept screaming about seeing flames, to silence her... I can easily see why Night is among the classics. It's a very personal, direct account of the horrific things that happened during the Holocaust. It just makes your heart ache.

Wiesel has written many many other books; he was a favorite author of one of my friends in high school. Has anyone read some of his other works? I'm curious about them...

Rating: 3/5 ........ 120 pages, 1958

more opinions at:
Ardent Reader
Diary of an Eccentric
Ready When You Are, CB
You've GOTTA Read This! 
Book Addiction
Things Mean a Lot
Hooser's Blook