My First Green Book

by Angela Wilkes
A life-size guide to caring for our environment

Just finished reading this book last night with my six-year old. It's all about environmental issues and things kids can do to help. It goes beyond just recycling and conserving electricity (although those things are mentioned). There are sections about air pollution, acid rain, how nature recycles waste, composting, choosing products wisely, healthy soils, plants that encourage wildlife, how trees improve our air, what's happening to the rainforests (and how much we depend on them), etc. At the end one page explains how to keep a simple diary where kids can record things they observe about the environment, and how to campaign to improve things up in your own neighborhood. There are lots of simple experiments to try illustrating different things about the environment. For example, one you take a piece of fresh celery, and several cut white flowers and put them in a glass of water with red food coloring or dye in it. The plants absorb the dye along with the water and turn pink. This shows kids how pollutants in water get absorbed by and can adversely affect the plant.

The formatting of My First Green Book is large, easy to read and understand. The book is a full 13 inches tall, so the large photographs have plenty of detail. All the experiments and information are explained simply enough for children to understand. We've already done a few of the experiments, one to see how plants respond to polluted water, another to see evidence of contaminants in our air. Right after reading the section on air pollution and seeing pictures of what types of lichens grow on trees, my kid inspected bark on trees in the local park and then ran to me shouting: "we have clean air! we have clean air!" because the lichens were a healthy leafy type. All in all a most excellent book. I recommend it to anyone who wants to encourage their children to care for the environment and learn simple things that actually make a difference.

Rating: 5/5 ........ 48 pages, 1991

The Hive Detectives

Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe 
by Loree Griffin Burns

I've been reading quite a bit about bees lately.This book has been on my list since I saw it on A Patchwork of Books, so I looked for it at the library.

The Hive Detectives is about honeybees, their importance to our food industry, and concerns about their rapid decline. It is illustrated with beautiful photographs, which I spent a long time poring over. After reading so much on bees and beekeeping in past novels and books, it was nice to finally see photos of what a honey extractor looks like, for example. The book tells a bit about the work of beekeeping focusing on a hobbyist or backyard beekeeping Mary Duane. It also shows how a large-scale beekeeping operation works, with several chapters about Hackenburg Apiaries who keep three thousand beehives. I always knew that crops need bees but assumed that the farmers simply kept some bees on site to help pollinate. What I didn't know was that large-scale bee operations will truck their beehives around the country and rent them out to farmers during the weeks that they urgently need pollination for their crops. At the end of the various growing seasons, the beehives are brought home and honey collected.

The crux of this book though, is about an alarming phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder which was first noted by the men at Hackenburg. They found hundreds of hives suddenly nearly empty of bees, in spite of having plenty of food stores and offspring. They promptly started an investigation to find out what was happening. All across the country bees have been disappearing at an alarming rate. Scientists have looked into diseases, pesticides and other factors trying to figure out what the cause is and stop the decline. There is a lot more information about CCD on the Wikipedia site; so far research is still trying to figure out what causes it.

Mostly I loved reading this book because of how much it taught me about bees and beekeeping. I was actually disappointed when it ended. The Hive Detectives is a juvenile non-fiction book but well-written and not overly simplified; I found it quite intriguing and educational.

Rating: 4/5 ........ 66 pages, 2010

Angela's Ashes

by Frank McCourt

Memoir of a boy growing up in Ireland. Frank McCourt was born in America but his family moved back to Ireland when he was very small. They were extremely poor and most of the time lived on public assistance. Situation not made any better by the fact that their father was an alcoholic; he could rarely keep a job, spent any money he earned in the pubs and when his mother got money from charities or the dole, he first chastised her for begging and then promptly spent that money on drink, too. Altogether a miserable character. So the family was usually hungry, living in awful conditions, the kids frequently sick. The author himself scraped through some frightening illnesses, and he lost several siblings to illness, some as infants. The entire time I was reading I kept thinking of his mother, how her heart must have ached to loose her children. She would have sought out a job herself but the neighbors saw that as shameful, that a woman would have to work when she had an able-bodied husband.

Throughout the story Frank talks about how the Catholic church infused his life; at first it was all mysterious as most priests or his parents refused to explain things to him. Later he figured a few things out, but by then had grow calloused as well. He tells of schools where kids are made fun or of beaten by their teachers, of desperately trying to find a job, of a growing fascination with girls and their mysteries when he hit puberty, and of finally saving up enough money to emigrate to America himself, in search of a better life. The ending kind of fizzled for me, though. I watched him through the pages struggle and struggle and finally get to the place of his dreams simply to carouse at a party right off the boat and declare America a great place. I was kind of expecting more, at that point...

It wasn't until I finished Angela's Ashes that I realized I've actually read it before. I don't know if that speaks well or poor of it, that I had completely forgotten most of the details. I knew I had opened it once a year or so ago, but thought I'd quit a little ways in, as I recalled quite a bit of the beginning, but all the middle felt new to me. Unless I skipped to the end? but I usually don't do that. Either way, I'm glad to say that I enjoyed it much more this time around.

Rating: 3/5 ........ 426 pages, 1996

more opinions at:
Ardent Reader

The Speckled People

a memoir of a half-Irish childhood

by Hugo Hamilton

One I picked up at a book sale, just because the title intrigued me. The Speckled People is the memoir of a boy growing up in Ireland with mixed heritage. His mother escaped Germany which was falling under Hitler's power, but in spite of the fact that she is adamantly against "the fist people" her neighbors are suspicious of her and her children get called names and executed in games by the other kids for being Nazis. His father is an extremist, full of nationalistic pride for the Irish people and trying to resurrect their native language by teaching it to his children and forbidding them to speak English in the house. This again alienates the children from others around them. For instance, at one point the father insists they only play with children who also speak Irish (Gaelic) so they have to bus to and fro with kids found miles away and none of the imposed friendships last. The story is full of sorrow and resentment; the boy ends up hating his father for all the rules forced upon him, and feeling pain for his mother when he finally learns the full extent of her story and why she fled Germany. In fact, more of the book feels like telling the story of his parents than of his own experience. His mother writes a journal to tell her children what happened to her, and several significant family stories are told again and again, woven into the narrative each time in a slightly different way. All is told from the unclear perspective of the child, with his impressions of moments that float in and out of focus: sitting on the bottom of the pool blowing bubbles at each other, watching a dog at the beach that barks at the ocean, trying to avoid bullies, welcoming new babies into the family, struggling through recurrent illness, riding on the bus... The tone of it all reminded me quite a bit of Call It Sleep, and also the feel of Chaim Potok's novels (though I couldn't really tell you why). At the same time, it all felt a bit too distant to me. I felt like I was getting more a relating of family history, patched together by childhood memories, and never got close to the narrator himself. O well. It was a nice enough read.

Funny, how some books that are otherwise entirely unrelated yet have a connecting theme. Another book I recently read, The Tapestry of Love, had a bit about beekeeping in it, which I found interesting because not too long ago I'd read a few books where beekeeping was the focus. It was intriguing that even in the few pages that discussed bees in Tapestry I learned something new about bees. Here too, in The Speckled People the father takes up beekeeping and again, I learned a few new details. The bees caused tragedy here, though...

Rating: 3/5 ........ 298 pages, 2003

More opinions at:
It's All About Me
16 Book for 16 Days
Still Point

Ordinary Love and Goodwill

by Jane Smiley

I almost didn't read the part of this book that turned out to be my favorite. I didn't know what I was getting into, with this one. I thought the title was all one piece, and it wasn't until I started reading that I found it's actually two novellas, the first called Ordinary Love and the second, Good Will. I still can't help thinking of the title as one line, though....

Ordinary Love just failed to catch my interest. It's written from the viewpoint of a mother of five grown children; two of her sons are twins. One is returning home from a recent trip to Korea. The others gather and lots of talk happens. Apparently there's quite a bit of discussion between them all about the parents' divorce. I really didn't get far enough to feel that out. I quit after about thirty pages. I just wasn't following what was going on or even which character was talking at one point. Not working for me.

That was going to be the end. But then I glanced at someone's review of the book on Library Thing and noticed it mentioned that Good Will was about a small family trying to run a self-sufficient homestead outside an ordinary suburban town. That sounded interesting to me. So I picked up the book again and read the second half, totally captivated. It's about a couple and their young son, who live on a farm. They grow or gather almost everything they eat, and barter for most belongings, make their own clothing and such. Hardly have twenty bucks between them all at any one time. The husband is good at carpentry and figuring things out, he makes all the furniture, builds the house, creates a fantastic compost system, etc. It's so impressive a writer comes out to interview them to be included in a book she's writing. This writer's presence eclipses the story; she's there at the beginning first learning about them, and at the end they receive the manuscript and shortly after the book to read what she's said about them- at the point when things are no longer the same. And it's not because their efforts failed, the couple were perfectly happy and content with their way of life, even though others viewed it as poverty. But the son, who went to public school and compared his life to other kids', was not as happy. Father and mother both viewed their son's actions from a divergent angle, and they each failed to realized what was going on until it was too late and they had to abandon their farm, because of the son's actions... I can't say more without saying too much. Read the story! It's good! There's a part that reminded me strongly of Steinbeck's The Red Pony, so if you have angst with animals dying in a book, you might not want to...

And if anyone's read Ordinary Love and liked it, tell me why. I might just go back to it if I'm properly convinced...

Rating: 3/5 ........ 218 pages, 1989

Up From the Blue

by Susan Henderson

Tillie's house holds secrets. From the outside, it appears orderly- just as her precise, meticulous military father wants it- unless you count the door her mother sealed shut with blue paint. Inside things are troubled; her mother struggles with a mental illness which her father refuses to acknowledge. I'm not sure if he was just stubborn about admitting anything was wrong with his family, or just ignorant (story is set in the seventies) about depression in general. But he treats her like crap, berating and yelling and demanding more, when she crumples up and can't function. Of course the kids don't understand what's happening to their mother either; the older boy distances himself and tries to act properly according to his father's rules; Tillie tries to help and protect her mom and lashes out occasionally at school. I felt for the little girl. It was hard to tell how much of her erratic behavior was due to her living situation, how much to her free-thinking independence, and how much to what she suffered unknowingly from her own mother's hands... Up from the Blue is quite a story. Eager page-turning. I nearly cried at the end, but then any scene with a new infant and mother tugs my heart these days.

I really love the title, although I never really figured out what it referred to!

Rating: 3/5 ........ 317 pages, 2010

other (and more thorough) opinions at:
The Zen Leaf
Musings of a Bookish Kitty
Bermudaonion's Weblog

The Tapestry of Love

by Rosy Thornton

Some time ago I put this book on a TBR list; after seeing it on several blogs (quite a few of which are mentioned below) it looked interesting. And someone let the author know I was interested in reading her book, because she emailed me and offered a copy! That doesn't happen to me too often (more frequently I'm solicited for review copies of books that fit in genres I rarely ever approach- why is that?) so I happily accepted. The Tapestry of Love has been my constant nursing companion this past week as I tend to the baby, and it was quite a delightful read.

It's the story of an older woman whose children are grown and is now on her own, having gone through a rather amicable divorce years past. Catherine is ready to live her dreams so she moves to southern France where she purchases a small farmhouse in a mountainside village. The story is all about how she learns to love her new home. (Although there is a romance later in the story, it's more about her falling in love with a place and a community, I felt). There are quite a few things to get used to- the house doesn't have all modern conveniences, and her phone and electricity lines regularly fail. The neighbors are rather reserved and formal, but turn out to be staunch friends and quite interesting characters themselves. Village life is quiet, the mountain trails offer nature-viewing galore (including glimpses of wild boar) and it is all rather peaceful. Except, of course, life is never that peaceful. Catherine struggles to set up a business doing upholstery and needlework- she finds plenty of customers but has difficulty with the French bureaucracy getting permits and stuff to make her business legit. One of her neighbors is an attractive man who it seems might become a good friend, but when her sister comes to visit things get complicated.... Not only is Catherine navigating the ups and downs of her new life, but her ties to England and the past are constantly there too- her children on the phone discussing their own struggles with careers and relationships, her mother in a home going through the final stages of Alzheimer's. As she becomes closer to her neighbors she gets involved in their small griefs and joys as well, so when in the end she has to make a choice about returning to live in England or staying in France she finds it harder than she first imagined, having started to set down roots in her new place... oh dear am I saying too much now? I'd better just let you read the book!

What I really liked about this novel was that it felt very much like real life- no huge drama but a lot of little choices, tough decisions, growing relationships... It was such a charming, touching book. I haven't read one like it in quite some time. I think I'd like to read more by this author. Any suggestions what I should try next?

Rating: 3/5 ........ 406 pages, 2010

more opinions at:
Read Warbler
Jenny's Books
Shelf Love
Ardent Reader
So Many Books
The Zen Leaf

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

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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
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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