November 2009 - Page 2 of 3

The Boy of the Painted Cave

by Justin Denzel

Set in the stone age, The Boy of the Painted Cave is about a young orphan boy named Tao who was born with a club foot. His greatest desire is to become an artist, and paint in the Sacred Cave. But the tribe will never choose him for this honor because of his unknown parentage and crippled foot. Finding himself more or less an outcast, Tao starts roaming the wilds around his home and through observation discovers that some things his tribe has taught the people to fear are falsehoods. He also befriends a wild dog, a creature the tribe fears and loathes. Eventually Tao convinces a shaman to teach him the painter\’s skill in secret, and then tries to find a way back into his tribe; not just as an accepted member, but as one who can bring them advantages (the dog) and honor (his art). Not too in-depth (written for ages 8-12) but a well-written imaginative story that kept me curious to see what would happen next.

Rating: 3/5 160 pages, 1988

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Historical Fiction, Juvenile Fic, Past Reads

Pigeons

The Fascinating Saga of the World\’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird
by Andrew D. Blechman

A book about people who are passionate about pigeons. Love them, hate them. Breeders, sportsmen, activists, rescuers, chefs. Pigeons have a long history with man including doves that were sent from ships to find land, birds raised or hunted to be eaten in pies, and pigeons that delivered crucial messages during war. Then there are hobbyists: men who breed fancy pigeons for their colors, shapes and fantastic feathers, others involved in the dying sport of pigeon racing, or the clandestine pigeon shoots. Pushing a bit further beyond these obvious interests, the author also sought out famous people who loved pigeons (Queen Elizabeth, Mike Tyson), men whose livelihoods are built on deterring pigeons from hanging around buildings, and others who work in processing plants that sell pigeon meat to fine restaurants. Then there\’s the city ladies obsessed with feeding pigeons, those that furtively net pigeons to sell to the shoots, and animal-rights people who try to thwart them. Blechman finds out about them all, in the meantime sharing a wealth of pigeon lore. He claims that pigeons really don\’t spread disease, in spite of the mess they leave around, and that their current status as reviled \”rats with wings\” is relatively new; for a much longer time period pigeons have been appreciated as one of man\’s first domesticated animals. They can be birds of great stamina, natural athletes, and complete homebodies- racing pigeons, after all, are just speeding their way back home to their comforts and city pigeons like to hang around people because the pickings are easy. I learned a lot of interesting stuff from Pigeons, but sometimes wished it stuck a little closer to topic (more on the pigeons and less about the people) particularly the chapter about the famous boxer. It was all about how the author kept getting the runaround when trying for an interview, with a smattering of info he picked up on Tyson\’s pigeons. That part could have used some editing.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 239 pages, 2006

More opinions at:
Diary of a Suburban Gardener
PhiloBiblos

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

The Dolphin Doctor

by Sam Ridgway

Another older book I found at a library sale one time. The author of this one was a veterinarian for the Navy, and became involved in early studies of dolphin sonar and diving abilities, and training programs that used dolphins to assist scientists at sea (retrieving objects, delivering messages between divers, etc). The Dolphin Doctor is mostly about one particular dolphin named Tuffy, but also about the extent of dolphin work in the sixties and seventies, when the field was very new. Not much was known about dolphins; much of the work Ridgway did was just as much to learn about their physiology as it was to keep them in good health. He was the first vet to come up with a way to safely anesthetize a dolphin. It was really interesting to read about his work with the dolphins- and to see Tuffy\’s transformation. He was a wild-caught dolphin, at first truculent, resistant and fought off any human contact. Won over by patience on the part of biology assistant Debbie (and many fish), Tuffy became cooperative and proved to be intelligent and highly trainable. Remarkably, he was even trained to work at sea- swimming freely, following the boat, diving to great depths for tests. Eventually Debbie had to leave for graduate school, and when she came back to visit after three months their reunion was very touching. Dolphins are really incredible animals, and when this book was written scientists were just beginning to learn more about their abilities. It\’s a bit awkward in the beginning- jumping from one time period to another, and including a section about Ridgway\’s youth on a farm that felt a bit out of place- but overall an interesting book.

Rating: 3/5 159 pages, 1987

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

blog award

I have hedged and hesitated over acknowledging this award received from Sherrie at A View of My Life, simply because it\’s getting hard for me to choose blogs to pass awards on to. I like them all so much! Maybe someday I\’ll just put all the blogs from my Google reader into random.org and award whoever comes up (just kidding)! Well, here\’s the rules for this award:

•Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.

•Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.

•Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.

•Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we\’ll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!

•Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

and here\’s some blogs I want to give it to:

A Work in Progress
The Book Tiger
Across the Page
Musings of a Bookish Kitty

go check them out!

Red Fox

by Charles G.D. Roberts

Reading Red Fox was nostalgic for me. I can\’t remember where I first picked this book up, at my elementary school library or the Burien public branch. I do know I must have read it half a dozen times when I was young. It\’s out of print now, but I was happy to find a copy via Book Mooch and read it one more time.

The book tells the lifestory of a fox in the Canadian woods. It is based on observations of wild foxes, many true-life incidents all complied into one adventurous story. The hero of Red Fox is the largest of his litter, stronger, braver and smarter than the rest. He learns survival lessons and hunting skills from his mother, also from his siblings\’ blunders and his own mistakes. He must outwit his prey, deal with changing weather conditions and confront or avoid other predators- mink, lynx, eagles, bears, rival foxes. By the time he is an adult he knows how to outwit dogs and farmers, but then a young boy who has been quietly watching him helps trap the fox and tries to tame him. That failing, he sells the fox, thinking the animal will be taken to a zoo. But Red Fox is let loose on the grounds of a foxhunting club, where he must use all his wits against the hounds if he wants to gain his freedom again. The story ends a little abruptly, but otherwise I enjoyed it. Some passages jumped out from my memory, others I had entirely forgotten and that made reading it anew a discovery all over again. The pen-and-ink illustrations by John Schoenherr are quite nice.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 187 pages, 1972

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Juvenile Fic, Re-reads

Next Panda, Please!

Further Adventures of a Wildlife Vet
by David Taylor

I was so glad to enjoy a David Taylor book again, after my last disappointment. This one describes Taylor\’s work with animals at Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester, as well as his travels abroad to treat sick falcons in Saudi Arabia and the first panda to live in a zoo in Madrid (the panda\’s story is a continual thread throughout the book). Among his animal patients are an armadillo who was kicked down a street by teenagers, a dolphin that needs a limb amputated, a deer with a dislocated eye, some killer whales with frostbite, cheetahs which have mysteriously been drugged, and young giraffes suffering from stress, on account of being included in a filmmaking project. This chapter delighted me the most, as here I \”met\” people known to me from other books. A few years ago I read two books on giraffes, one Raising Daisy Rothschild by Betty Leslie-Melville. Taylor knew Leslie-Melville, and went to Kenya to visit the ranch when they were making a film about how she had raised an orphan giraffe. The funniest chapter (although not its ending) was about a traveling circus where a chimpanzee took revenge on a parrot that constantly taunted him by sitting and crapping on his head while screaming dirty words at the crowd. The saddest chapter was reading about how the Belle Vue Zoo finally closed, and the difficulties finding places for all the animals to go. And of course, like always in Next Panda, Please! I was completely engaged with Taylor\’s easy writing style and learning the interesting facts about animals. Did you know, for example, that one of the very few animals to suffer from leprosy alongside humans are armadillos? Lucky for us (but unhappily for the armadillos) this means they were used in research on treatments for leprosy.

Rating: 4/5 …….. 196 pages, 1982

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads

The Three-Legged Stallion

and Other Tales from a Doctor\’s Notebook
by Siegfried Kra, M.D.

I read this book for the Random Reading Challenge. It was #14 on my list. The first story almost dampened my interest for the rest- but I continued reading and the puzzle of each little tale was intriguing enough to get me through the book. It\’s a collection of \”medical mysteries\”- people suffering from various unusual conditions and illnesses, and how the doctor finally figured out what it was. Most of them had good outcomes, for a few the solution came too late, or there was no known cure. Among the stories are a ladies\’ man who looses his potency, a man who is constantly blue in the face, a dentist who is slowly going crazy and a man being poisoned by the wine from his own vineyard. But interspersed are a few different kind of stories- the longest being one of the author\’s own childhood illness, a continuous fever of unknown cause- and a sad little chapter about time he spent as a medical student in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the early 50\’s, where he fell in love with one of the patients. There\’s also one about a trip he took on a night train to Paris, where a poor, Italian family (due to a language barrier) misconstrued his attempts to help their ill, elderly father as an attack on his life! In style it\’s kind of like an Oliver Sacks book, but not nearly as well-written, more casual in a light storytelling vein. I read through it pretty quickly.

Rating: 2/5 213 pages, 1989

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Current Reads, Nonfiction (general)

bookmarks giveaway

Win two free horse bookmarks!
Two bookmarks up for grabs this week; a pair of horses. Laminated, with a short ribbon tassel. I didn\’t show the back this time because it\’s pretty plain, blue color on the one, golden brown on the other with a dancing horse at one end. If you\’d like to win these horsey bookmarks, just leave a comment here before tuesday 11/17 . Name will be drawn at random. Open worldwide.

(click image for larger view)

Tags: giveaways

Hillbilly Gothic

A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood
by Adrienne Martini

New moms are supposed to be all smiles and delight over their tiny little bundles of joy, right? So what happens when they\’re not? In this heartachingly wry memoir, Martini takes us through her experience with postpartum depression. She knew going into motherhood that her family history was peppered with women who habitually \”went mad\” after giving birth, not to mention those who suffered from depression or bi-polar disorder, and a number of relatives who were suicidal. These things went unspoken in her family, but they began to make more sense to her when soon after the arrival of her first baby she felt her emotions sliding out of control, into an abyss of tears and helplessness. Insomnia, difficulties breastfeeding, frustrations at the baby\’s demands, at her own inability to live up to her concept of the ideal mom. When her infant was barely a month old, she finally admitted herself to a psychiatric ward and sought help. Martini takes the reader along as she plumbs the depths of her emotions and patches her life back together: what triggered her depression? can she recognize it if it happens again? can she face the birth of a second child? She also talks a lot about place, about living as the descendant of Appalachian mountaineers, but I didn\’t really get a sense of the \”hillbilly\” aspect of it. Most of all, I was intrigued by her discussion on the stigma of mental illness; even though we now know that mental health problems are caused by genetics and chemical imbalance – not weakness of character or sin- it is still a difficult and sometimes shameful thing to admit. At one point in the memoir, Martini mentions how she picked and chose which friends she would tell the truth of her condition to; at another point she\’s recently moved into a new neighborhood and introduces herself with this information, choosing which people to befriend by their reaction to it. More than anything, Hillbilly Gothic feels so painfully honest. Here\’s a normal, perfectly nice woman who just couldn\’t hold it together when the new baby came. I am sure there are hundreds of others like her with stories untold. People don\’t like to think about moms who fail to go ga-ga over little babies, but they exist, and they\’re not horrible people, and perhaps this book will help them be more understood.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 221 pages, 2006

More opinions at:
Rebecca Unpublished
Library Goddesses

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

Nov reviews- DogEar Challenge

Here\’s the place to put review links this month, for books read for the DogEar Reading Challenge. Only one month left!

I know two readers have finished already, but I\’m still searching for my last book to read, an adult fantasy. I tried all the ones left on my shelf, and for one reason or another none of them worked for me- Moon Called got boring, Tolkien\’s Silmarillion and Book of Lost Tales had such an archaic, dry writing style I could not understand it, much less enjoy- and The Summer Country was just bleh. I didn\’t even make it through the first chapter of that. The rest of the unread fantasy books in my house are YA, so I started going through my TBR list, but dismayed to find most aren\’t even in my public library system, and the few that are, reside in other branches. So I\’m going to have to request them and wait a bit…

Anyhow, if you\’re reading along for my little challenge, leave your links here for the month of Nov!

Month: November 2009

RATINGS / SUBJECTS: