February 2009 - Page 2 of 3

The Myth of Wild Africa

Conservation without Illusion
by Jonathan Adams and Thomas McShane

This book criticizes wildlife conservation and management in Africa. The first few chapters are built to show that the western ideal of Africa- a place where animals roam free in a last wilderness untouched by humans- is unrealistic, as African wildlife lived side by side with humans for hundreds of years before Europeans discovered the continent. The Myth of Wild Africa points out that conservation efforts which try to separate native Africans from sharing the land with wildlife often cause more problems than they solve. All the white men who have tried to exploit, use, study or save African wildlife- sport hunters, rich men on safari, behavioral scientists, conservationists, park rangers and tourists alike- have their own different agendas, but if they would work together, methods of conserving wildlife and at the same time allowing African nations room to grow and develop, could be found. But the very fact that this book is about how complicated and sticky the issues surrounding wildlife conservation are made it too tedious for me. The constant parade of facts, names, organizations, statistics, data, reports, etc (and details about how flawed they are) just wore my eyes out. It\’s not the type of book I can read right now. I do feel it has important information, and I\’m curious to know how wildlife conservation has progressed since this book was written, but I\’ll have to come back to it later. I skipped ahead a bit and read a passage about the work of Mark and Delia Owens, whose book Cry of the Kalahari I\’ve read, but in reality I quit reading this book on page 94.

Abandoned 266 pages, 1992

Has anyone else read this book? Let me know and I\’ll add a link to your blog review.

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Nature, Nonfiction (general)

reading goals

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I have a headache today so instead of posting about a book I\’m just going to share some photos. Of (what else?) books in my house! There\’s too many. My heaps of yet-unread books are getting overwhelming, so I\’ve decided to make a focused effort at reading those first- neglecting for even longer the TBR list I add to daily from all the wonderful book blogs, and resisting the urge to browse shelves at the library when I\’m picking up books for my daughter.

These shelves are my permanent collection. They\’re not all books: the top of the bookcases has some stuff left over from when my husband built our last computer, and the bottom right-hand and middle shelves have games and some oversized picture books. I don\’t have many reader friends, so the most frequent comment I get when people visit our house is: have you actually read all these books? The answer is yes, except for the coffee-table ones (about a dozen) which I treasure for their gorgeous photos but haven\’t gotten around to reading yet.

Okay, just for fun I made a kind of map of the shelves. Hopefully if you click on it you can get a bigger image and read it!

These are the books in my bedroom, waiting to be read. The first pile is on top of my dresser:
The second pile is on the floor near my bed:
And then there\’s two shelves that serve as my bedside table:
Enough books for years! So I\’ve made a goal to seriously diminish these piles, starting with the dresser heap, then the floor ones, and hopefully getting it down to a TBR load that my bedside shelf can contain, before I start picking books from my lists again. Maybe I ought to join a challenge to help me stay motivated with this- are there any going on currently about reading your own books, or tackling your TBR? I don\’t know how far I can get with this before I break down and pick up a book that doesn\’t already have physical presence in my house. Any guesses how long it will take me to work through those piles? (Keep in mind that I probably will taste just twenty pages or so and then set aside quite a few of these).

Tags: bookshelves

Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

Richards already had three Morgan horses when she adopted Lay Me Down, an abused and injured racehorse, from a rescue operation. When all the other horses in the SPCA corral ran away in terror, this one calmly walked into her trailer on its own initiative. As she relates what it was like to bring her new horse home- integrating Lay Me Down gradually into the rest of the herd, tending to her injuries and illness, getting to know her personality- Richards also tells about how the horse helped her take a new step in her life. Slowly she unfolds her story of pain- her mother\’s death when she was only five years old, her unhappy childhood among abusive relatives, her lifelong struggle with alcoholism, the bitter ending of her marriage, her subsequent withdrawl from social circles, alone on her farm where she found peace with her horses. The calm, gentle spirit of Lay Me Down touched Richards\’ heart deeply, giving her the courage to reach out again and try dating, awkward as it was for her in middle-age. When she discovered that Lay Me Down had a debilitating illness, facing the possibility of loosing the horse she loved enabled her to finally come to terms with her mother\’s death, and heal from a grief she had carried for many, many years.

Chosen by a Horse is a touching memoir, a tender look at the relationship between a woman and her four horses. There were moments that almost brought me to tears (not many books make me cry!), and the ending is very emotional. In addition to a deep affection for horses, the author also loves books and writing. Book-love was only mentioned briefly here and there, not being the focal point of her story, but it was enough to make me feel like she was a kindred spirit. Susan Richards has an easy, conversational writing style that makes you feel like she\’s sitting right at your kitchen table, telling you her story. And it\’s definitely one worth hearing. Reading, I mean.

Rating: 3/5 248 pages, 2006

More opinions at:
Beautiful Mustang

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Nonfiction, Bios / Memoirs, Current Reads

To Everything There is a Season

The Gardening Year
by Thalassa Cruso

The weather has warmed up here a bit last week, with mild sunny days that encouraged my bulbs to start growing, but cold frosty nights that I fear will harm them. My hands are itching to plant the garden, but I know it\’s still too early so the next best thing is reading gardening books!

To Everything There is a Season is one I found at a library sale. This is the first time I\’ve \”met\” its author, Thalassa Cruso, an avid gardener who hosted a TV show about plant care in the sixties. At first I had doubts about how good a book based on a TV program could be, but first I read the introduction where Cruso discussed the differences between presenting her ideas to a television audience, through a magazine column, and writing them in a book. By the end of the first chapter I was hooked. She writes in a friendly, conversational style that drew me in immediately. This fat little volume spans an entire year of seasons in her country garden, drawing from more than twenty years of experience to share her knowledge (much of it self-taught) about plants. Cruso was never afraid try new things when traditional methods didn\’t work, and she carried out many experiments growing numbers of the same plant in different soil mixes and locations to see which worked best. She also sometimes tried exactly the opposite of recommended care, with surprising results. Her love of plants and nature shines through the pages, and it was really enjoyable to read. I kept a list of pages to turn back to for my own reference: how to grow healthy parsley, how to start tomatoes from seed (in eggshells!), how to mix your own insecticide from non-toxic things in your kitchen, how to plant \”the three sisters\” together- corn, beans and squash. I appreciated her chapter about how some sunflowers left to regenerate themselves grew in a few short seasons into crazy, wild, undesirable plants (a warning to know what you\’re doing when you try saving seed!). Most of the chapters are about horticulture, but two of my favorites were one where she described the gardening library she inherited with the house, and how she learned from its books about the previous generation\’s love of plants. The other described how she keeps an eye on the yards and gardens in her neighborhood, describing them with admiration or consternation, and offering gentle criticism of their owners\’ gardening methods!

This was a delightful book, and I can\’t wait to read more by the same author. The only thing I felt it lacked was illustrations of the plants she discussed, as I was unfamiliar with some and would have liked to see their faces. But that\’s a very small flaw, in my mind.

Rating: 4/5 300 pages, 1971

Have you written a blog review of this book? Let me know and I\’ll add your link here.

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Current Reads, Gardening / Food

Book Giveaway!

Win a Free Book!

This week I\’m giving away a copy of The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl. If you\’d like a chance to win, just leave a comment here. Leave your email address too, if I can\’t easily find it, so I can contact you if you win. A name will be drawn from the hat on tuesday 2/24. You can mention this on your blog and link back to this post for a second entry.

I haven\’t read this book myself, so here\’s what it says on the back cover:

Boston, 1865. A series of murders, all of them inspired by scenes in Dante\’s Inferno. Only an elite group of America\’s first Dante scholars- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and J.T. Fields- can solve the mystery. With the police baffled, more lives endangered, and Dante\’s literary future at state, the Dante Club must shed its sheltered literary existence and find the killer.

Sound interesting? Leave a comment for a chance to win!

Tags: giveaways

Gay-Neck

the Story of Pigeon
by Dhan Gopal Mukerji

As you can gather from the title, this is about a pigeon. Gay-Neck (named for the iridescent feathers on his throat) was raised by a boy in India who kept pigeons as pets. The boy trained him until the pigeon was so skilled he was used in the army to carry messages. Gay-Neck has lots of adventures outflying predatory birds (a lot of other pigeons in the book get killed by owls, hawks, eagles, crows, etc), frequently gets lost, and the boy tramps all over trying to find him again. He passes through the hands of strangers a few times before being reunited with his owner. Some of his encounters with danger make the pigeon too fearful to fly again, so he and the boy seek healing from a holy man. Gay-Neck: the Story of a Pigeon has lots of descriptions of animals killing each other, and men killing each other in warfare. The author laments this brutal behavior, then exhorts the reader to find peace and courage in his own heart.

I wanted to really like this book, because it has so much lore about bird behavior, how pigeons are trained, and wildlife in India. But the prose is often awkward, the style feels very dated, and I found myself frequently bored, in spite of all the exciting events running through its pages. The narration frequently shifts from the boy\’s perspective to that of other minor characters, and sometimes the pigeon tell his own story as well. This was only midly confusing to me, but might make it more difficult for a child to follow (if the unfamiliar prose style and scenes of killing don\’t already put him off). But if you\’re interested in life in India during World War I, the role pigeons played in it, or aspects of their training (far beyond the life of a city-dwelling \”rat with wings\”) this book might interest you.

A lot of other readers had praise for this book, so don\’t take my word for it, but check out some of the links included below.

Rating: 2/5 …….. 192 pages, 1927

More opinions at:
Rebecca Reads
Children\’s Lit and Other Bits
The Newbery Project
Semicolon
Shelly\’s Book Blog
The Children\’s War

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Animals Fiction, Juvenile Fic, Past Reads

Word People

Being an Inquiry Into the Lives of Those Persons Who Have Lent Their Names to the English Language
by Nancy Caldwell Sorel

Word People contains snippets of stories about people whose names have become common nouns, and how that happened. Some of them I had always suspected came from a person\’s name, many more I had no idea they had such origins. It is fascinating, and written with plenty of humor as well. The text is accompanied by expressive pen and ink illustrations by Edward Sorel, which I found hilarious in and of themselves. The book got a little tedious in parts; it was one I had to read in small segments, over more than a weeks\’ time, but curiosity kept me continuing to the end. If you\’re interested in the history of language, or wonder about how people got their names worked into everyday usage (although quite a few have fallen out of use by now), I recommend this book. I\’m sorry that I can\’t recall any of the particular words themselves; I\’d love to share some examples! But this book doesn\’t reside at my public library, and it\’s been several years since I had it in hand. Still, I remember it fondly enough to want to mention it here.

Rating: 3/5 304 pages, 1970

Have you written a blog review of this book? Let me know, and I\’ll add your link here.

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Nonfiction (general), Past Reads

The Water Babies

by Charles Kinglsey

The protagonist of this book is Tom, a naughty young boy who works under a cruel master as a chimney sweep. One day he gets himself into trouble, runs away and falls into a river where he is transformed into a \”water-baby\”, able to live among the fishes. Tom is anxious to meet other water babies, but first he has to learn to be nice and well-behaved. He meets a lot of underwater animals- otters, lobster, different kinds of fishes- and fairies. Through his interactions in the underwater world, Tom slowly learns his moral lessons, eventually going off to save his old master from punishment for wrongdoings, and making his way back to land. My main enjoyment of the story is in the unfolding of Tom\’s character- he\’s quite a cheeky boy, curious and unafraid to ask questions of anyone (although the answers often puzzle him at first). His transformation out of ignorance and selfishness is nicely done. I also like reading about all the different creatures Tom encounters- their personification mostly reflects the natural behavior of said animals, and it\’s not many books you come across that feature talking salmon, lobsters and dragonflies. A delightful book, but one that I think should be read with the outlook of its time well in mind.

For The Water Babies is a didatic tale, heavily reflecting the Victorian ideas of its time. It is full of stiff moral lessons, crammed with Christian perceptions of guilt and redemption, and spouts off a lot of prejudiced criticisms of different groups of people- including Jews, Catholics, Americans and the Irish (these parts have mostly been edited out of later versions). I am not sure if I have ever read an unabridged version. And although it is usually classed as a children\’s book, I don\’t know if I\’d feel comfortable reading it to my daughter without verbally editing some of those heavily opinionated passages. It\’s very interesting to read the wiki article about this book, which tells me that among other things, Kingsley wrote The Water Babies as a piece of satire, much akin to Alice\’s Adventures in Wonderland, although the flavor of this story feels more like Peter Pan to me. Moralism and satire aside, it\’s a tender and curious story, full of interesting characters and lively adventures.

Rating: 4/5 316 pages, 1863

More opinions at:
BookNAround
cucullus non facit monachum

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Classics, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Juvenile Fic, Past Reads

Meme: Author Blogs

from Booking Through Thursday:

Do you read any author’s blogs? If so, are you looking for information on their next project? On the author personally? Something else?

Well, the answer is no. I don\’t read author blogs. It\’s hard enough to find time to keep up with my regular reading and the book blogs, I honestly can\’t squeeze another thing in. Occasionally I\’ll look up an author to answer a question I have about the background of their book, but this is more likely to be a wiki article or another blogger\’s interview with them. And I usually just visit once, not repeatedly. I did have Nick Hornby\’s blog on my reader for a while, but it got tiresome. I feel terrible saying that, because I love his bookish books, but the blog just wasn\’t doing it for me. And you can\’t leave comments there, so what\’s the fun in that? (Although if that option was open, I\’d probably feel too intimidated to do so!)

I know some of the book bloggers I read are also writers, but somehow that feels different to me. They feel like my blogging friends, not a stranger I\’m trying to scope out some information on. What about you? Do you read author\’s blogs?

Tags: memes

Inventing Motherhood

the Consequences of an Ideal
by Ann Dally

This book examines the history of motherhood and how ideas about it have changed and evolved through the decades, how have societal standards and attitudes towards women influenced our perception of motherhood and what creates our ideal image of a good mother. Popular and professional opinions have shifted about nearly everything from what is better, constant cuddling or letting your child cry? bottle or breast feeding? to how to disciple children, or even how close they should bond with their mother. It was interesting to see the change in trends- some strong advice from decades past has been refuted today as ignorant and even harmful. I found it particularly applicable to read about how society has gradually made it more and more difficult to be a full-time mom while at the same time advocating that only a mother can provide the best childcare. Most of the book focuses on the idea that while society holds in mind an ideal image of motherhood, few of us are allowed, or capable of, fulfilling it. Some parts of Inventing Motherhood get really technical and dry, especially when it goes into more detail about sociological and psychological issues. I admit I didn\’t follow all of it well. And I don\’t agree with all of the author\’s conclusions, but it was a very educational read and made me think about what has shaped my own ideas about how to be the best mom.

Rating: 3/5 360 pages, 1982

Have you written a blog review about this book? Let me know and I\’ll add your link here.

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Parenting / Pregnancy, Past Reads

Month: February 2009

RATINGS / SUBJECTS: