Bios / Memoirs Archives

Little White Duck

a Childhood in China

by Na Liu and Andrés Vera Martínez

A beautifully illustrated book where the author reminisces growing up in China just after the Cultural Revolution. She depicts stories from her parent’s youth, and her bafflement at the death of Chairman Mao (adults weeping all around her at the loss). Traditional celebrations, New Year’s events, her youthful enthusiasm for school and doing her part to help rid the town of pests- in this case rats, because sparrows had all been nearly exterminated. This was a deliberate (and encouraged) killing of animals, but there’s another incident where the narrator and her sister have well-meaning intentions to give someone’s baby chicks water in the heat, but accidentally do them harm. My favorite part was in the final pages, the titular story where she goes with her father to visit his mother’s family in a poor rural village. She wants to wear her best coat and is advised not to, but insists. She’s shocked to see how different things are in the village, where people have very little and struggle day to day. The grandmother appears sullen and mean. The children outside- where Na is sent to play- are muddy and rough. Their idea of fun is to casually torture live insects. Na is appalled, and upset at how dirty her nice coat gets (especially when the curious children want to touch it, enthralled by the lovely texture it initially has). Realization of how much she has at home sinks in. Earlier lessons on avoiding food waste, and helping to plant the rice, seem to mean more now, too.

This is a slender graphic novel, and while it’s about a child, I don’t know if I’d read it to children- a lot of the nuances might go over their heads, and the part with the insects is rather upsetting- it made me feel distinctly taken aback. (It also for some reason brought vividly to mind the book A Child of the Northeast). Sensitive kids would probably have a similar reaction. But I don’t think this was necessarily written for children. And the pictures really are lovely.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 4/5

108 pages, 2012

More opinions:
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Book Aunt
Lindy Reads and Reviews
366 Books
A Book and a Hug

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Bios / Memoirs, Current Reads, Graphic Novels

Layers

a memoir

by Pénélope Bagieu

Stories from the author’s life, based on her actual journals. Not in chronological order. Loving and loosing a cat (poignant to us since we recently lost our nineteen-year-old cat). Awkward interactions with boys. Obsessing over some of them, never speaking to friends again over others, and then some awful moments- being groped on public transit by a stranger, assaulted after a party at someone’s house- that she never tells anyone about (until now I suppose). One strange single-page snippet about a girl she sits next to in band who has a strange patch of skin on her hand- and an obviously made-up story to explain it. Was it a burn from an accident? eczema? there’s no resolution to that one. How she tries to learn skiing, always finding it difficult, but everyone else seems to pick up the skill so easily. Her anxiety to develop breasts but then chagrin at the sometimes-unwanted attention they bring. Always feeling cold and this weird coin-pay heating system that sound totally archaic and aggravating, in places where she lived in London, as a university student. There’s a lot more, but not much else stuck out in my memory after completing the book.

Translated from French by Montana Kane. Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 3/5

144 pages, 2023

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Twirling Book Princess
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Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Bios / Memoirs, Current Reads, Graphic Novels

Hit by a Farm

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn

by Catherine Friend

I really liked this book. It’s about the author’s forays into farming, with her female partner. A big concern they had starting their farm, was how people in the small town would react to a lesbian couple as neighbors. Nobody batted an eye. Much harder was learning the skills- they’d had grandparents that farmed, but didn’t have any direct experience themselves. The author was a writer, her partner wanted to start a farm and she was supportive, so they dived in together. One of them a bit reluctant to get her hands dirty, prone to anxiety and a tendency to be controlling. The other enthusiastic and brave (lots of dangerous equipment and situations!) about all things farming, but easily angry- at immediate problems, at her partner, at the world in general. The story is just as much about the difficulties their relationship suffers through, and how they work through that, as it is about farming. First they raise chickens, then try their hands at sheep and wine grapes. Trying to do it all with the least negative impact to the land, few pesticides and chemicals, etc (but not strictly organic). With lots of pitfalls and a steep learning curve. And the author’s personal struggles realizing how much the farm work takes away from her writing, and figuring out how to balance that without leaving her partner all the heavy work. I loved how brisk and down-to-earth this book was. Grimacing and laughing at the mishaps, delighting in the new lambs and other joys, the satisfaction of good work done. Very honest about how hard it all is. I could relate far better to this book than Dirty Chick– they have a lot in common, but the mindset and personality varies widely.

And then there’s all the animals! In addition to chickens and sheep, they had goats, llamas, ducks and geese. I was a bit baffled and disappointed not to hear more about the dogs. Several dogs from the start that were just pets, but then they got a young border collie. Reported feeling encouraged when he showed “eye” towards the sheep- but then no mention of the dog being used to move sheep, or getting trained- however lots of pages about the difficulties in herding sheep or catching them. I suppose they never found time to train the dog? or it didn’t work out? but there’s no explanation of that at all. I just found that a tad frustrating as a reader, because every time I read about how hard it was to catch an individual sheep or move them, I’d think: where’s that border collie? why isn’t he helping with this job. Would have liked to know.

Other similar books: The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell, The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball, Shepherds of Coyote Rocks by Cat Urbigkit, Thoughts While Tending Sheep by W. G. Ilefeldt. I know I’ve read others about keeping sheep, and being new to farming, but these are the ones that came immediately to mind.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 4/5

240 pages, 2006

Tags: Animals Nonfiction, Bios / Memoirs, Current Reads

A Thousand Trails Home

Living with Caribou

by Seth Kantner

The author grew up in Alaska, where his family (white folks) lived as the Natives did, in a sod igloo on the tundra, hunting and gathering food each year. Very close to the land. As he got older, his brother decided to leave for college, and when Katner had his own children, his daughter likewise left for the Lower 48. But he stayed in his father’s footsteps, only wanting to be an expert hunter, to know the animals and landscape more closely, to be there. The book varies widely in its focus: some chapters are about his family history, why and how they lived the way they did, the difficulties and sense of fulfillment in it. Other chapters are about the land, the history of people in Alaska, how arrival of Outsiders changed things, how wildlife management and land ownership has changed things, and most of all how climate shifts have changed and affected everything. But mostly it’s about the caribou. How much they depend on this one animal. Why it is so valuable to people living a subsistence lifestyle. Possible causes between a population crash in the past (which sounded like fable to Katner when older people told him about it in his youth), the abundance and growth he knew most of his life, and the troublesome reduction in numbers more recently. As much as this man loves the wildlife and hunting, he is honest about the choices he’s had to make to maintain it. Why they stopped using dog teams for the most part, and switched to machines. How thrilled he was as a teenager to finally own a modern (semi-automatic) rifle that had far more accuracy and ease of use than any weapon he’d had in the past. This was so effective in “harvesting” animals that most people overdid it. Or got careless. Leaving wounded caribou, or spoiling the meat with bad shots. How shameful that was, and yet he found himself struggling to resist the urge to continue, to just get another and another. The passage describing this impulse to keep killing and how he fought it off, was very sobering. It reminds me of reading accounts when a predator got into a pen of sheep, or a fox into a henhouse, how rampantly they slaughter- because the prey can’t flee, and suddenly it is so easy . . .

There are stories in here of people he knew growing up, and the wisdom they shared. Interesting characters. Stories of how villages changed and grew with influx of new technologies and connections to Outside. Accounts of government and politics likewise getting involved, affecting the lives of people and animals too. The historical parts interested me more than I first expected them to. I didn’t know, for example, that reindeer were introduced from other parts of the world, when caribou scarcity threatened the lives of Natives decades ago. Or how different they are now, in spite of actually being the same species. Since this is a book about a hunter, there is a lot on how the animals are butchered and their bodies used, in plenty of detail- which might put off some readers.

I recall now having read Caribou and the Barren-Lands, but the details now unclear. I wish I’d read these books alongside each other.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 4/5

320 pages, 2021

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

The Speckled Beauty

A Dog and His People

by Rick Bragg

By the same author as All Over But the Shoutin’. Which I had forgotten about, but reminded myself of via my own review, and now I feel this one rounds the other out nicely. It’s kind of a memoir, mostly focused on the dog. The author lived with his mother and brother on a small farm, in his older age. Struggling with some health issues, just getting through each day and keeping the place more or less running. They took in a stray dog that had lots of problems. Half blind, loved to chase everything, always getting into all kinds of trouble. Author would tell everyone what a bad dog he was, worst dog he’d ever have. Never minded unless he had his own reasons too, that dog. At the beginning you get a sense they wondered why they bothered to keep him around. Then they started to tolerate his ways, quit expecting him to change (though he did mellow some after finally being neutered). And at the end, you get a sense that this phrase “he’s a bad dog” was said with pride, and even fondness. The dog really behaved awfully, but he needed a home after living rough for who-knows how long, and when he saw it was good here, he stuck by his people. Just sitting companionably on the porch when someone was too unwell to do much more than sit and gaze down the driveway. He spent hours in the house (though usually preferred being outside) being near his elderly mother, an ear to all her stories when she lost family during Covid. When folks needed him, the dog was there. I didn’t realize how recent this book was, how current to times, until I read about their fears of Covid, struggles with lockdown, grief that went unattenuated- no funerals or family gatherings to honor someone’s passing. That made it very much more real to me, but also kind of eerie, as I don’t often read books that echo so soon something I’ve gone through. (I didn’t loose any family members during Covid, but other aspects of that story, I could relate to).

It’s not all sad though, not by a long shot. There’s wry commentary and quiet moments and lots of humor, especially at the dog’s misbehavior. I think my favorite part was when the dog tried to herd kittens in the barn- the episode included a large paper sack- and I was laughing so hard. This author is a really good storyteller. I ought to read more of his work.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 3/5

238 pages, 2021

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

Mud Season

by Ellen Stimson

I thought this book would be something like Dirty Chick– but it wasn’t. Similarity: it’s about a family that decided to move to their favorite vacation spot, putting down new roots in northern Vermont. From city to rural area, with all the adjustments that takes. Everything else is different. This book isn’t nearly as funny as it wants to be, and a lot of it just rubbed me the wrong way. It doesn’t help that the author’s personality is the complete opposite of mine- though I can often like reading varied points of view. But the focus was all wrong here. Or at least, what the author thought readers would find interesting, funny and endearing, just had me shaking my head or cringing. Rather like my reaction to A Dog Called Perth. Let’s keep this painful thing short: I was expecting to read about the author’s attempt to embrace a rural lifestyle: raising chickens, chasing wayward goats, dealing with the weather, etc. And it is, but only in small bits. The best parts are mentioned in the blurbs, front jacket flap and intro- so there’s not much else to get to inside the pages. There’s an encounter with a bear, a fight with a skunk, the adopting of two bottle-fed lambs which ends awkwardly (they had no plans what to do when it grew up). There’s effusive descriptions of the scenery and the changing seasons- and that’s about it.

Most of the book is about their misguided attempts to run a local general store, their poor business decisions, their excitable plans that never quite turn out, and exactly how they made such a poor impression on all the locals. It’s the kind of book where the author obviously wants you to laugh along with her, at her (with plenty of oddly-placed footnotes tongue-in-cheek explaining that), but I didn’t. I got tired of reading about mismanaged money and ditching this attempt to start another before she’d even got the store off their hands. In the end I was skimming pages. There’s recipes in the back- they all sound delicious but also very dense and rich (I probably won’t try any). It is very readable, though. A light, breezy conversational style that you can get through quickly. Just not at all my cup of tea.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Bios / Memoirs, Current Reads

The Last Garden

by Liza Ketchum

A nice, quiet, reflective little book. I thought momentarily from the title that the focus would be the garden the author planted in what she felt were her final years- but really, it glances back to many different gardens she had throughout her life. From ones she barely participated in as a child, to those of family members and neighbors she visited, but mostly the gardens she planted and tended in various homes she lived in through her adult years. Each chapter has a loose focus on a certain plant or flower, telling what it meant to her, what family member or friend it reminds her of, how cuttings or shoots of it were handed down through the family or among gardening friends. I expected to glean little bits of gardening advice and lore, but what more I picked up on was the closeness of family among many moves and restarts, new beginnings all over again. The comfort that came in growing things from the soil, that familiar work with hands in the dirt. Simply joys in seeing birds and butterflies visit her plants, reassurance in knowing she’d done some good to support the natural world, when all else around might seem to be falling apart with misuse, pollution and global warming. I felt a bit distracted throughout, not always following closely who the various people she spoke of were, and missing more depth and detail about the actual gardens (I could well have read this book were it twice as long)- but for what it was, very nice. The finely drawn, black-and-white illustrations by Bobbi Angell are lovely.

I received my copy from LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 3/5

179 pages, 2020

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

Illusions of Camelot

by Peter Boal

Memoir from a dancer with the New York City Ballet. From an affluent family that lived in a mansion, sent their kids to private school, owned horses, belong to an exclusive Club, etc. Insider story about what it was like to grow up in those circumstances. A lot of it sounded pretty posh to me, but yes there were struggles and kids teasing each other and an argumentative, dysfuncational family and a father with alcoholism that only got more severe as the years went on. The author describes how his family was always a fan of the ballet, and took him to see performances at a young age, and he was so enthralled, turned to his parents and said: that’s what I want to do. And he did it. Starting at twelve. Taking the train into the city for ballet lessons after classes all through middle school, traveling with the company half of his high school years! Sounds like he had a natural talent, strength and flexibility- almost immediately singled out by instructors and mentors. I don’t know a lot about ballet (having only read a few fictional accounts of children in classes) so I was hoping for more, but feel like I just got the bare bones. All the ballet stuff was sketched over, or breezed through with technical terms I couldn’t follow, frequently mentioning big names, how he met certain people, how much he admired them- but not a lot of the details that get a reader to really sink into a story. Really more of the narrative was about his family life, travels, incidents and politics in his hometown. I did admire his family’s stance on certain things, and liked the stories from his childhood, but going into this book thinking it was mostly about the ballet, it came across as a disappointment.

Also a tad disjointed- it skips around quite a bit. More or less chronological, but then events fall out of order again. You’ve read all through his childhood and teen years into adult, and then suddenly the last few chapters tell about the pony he had as a kid, and how his sister got into competitive riding. I realized why when I read the acknowledgements at the end- seems like much of this book was originally written as short stories, which he then pieced together. So that makes sense to me now, but when I was reading it before knowing that, it kept throwing me off. Another thing that baffled me, was reading about how as a young man he first realized he was gay, about his first lover who became very ill, and another man he was with after that- and then suddenly at the end of the book it mentions his wife and children. What? I was very confused- there’s not even a brief sentence of explanation. Probably it’s too personal to be included, but I admit I was taken aback and can’t help wondering what changed. It’s the one thing that keeps turning over in my mind on finishing the book, and it wasn’t the most interesting part of his story.

I received my copy from the Early Reviewers program on LibraryThing, in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: 2/5

318 pages, 2022

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Bios / Memoirs, Current Reads

A Walk Across America

by Peter Jenkins

The title is a bit of a misnomer, because he doesn’t go all the way across the country, just from his home in Connecticut to New Orleans. Which is plenty far enough! But I thought the map look awfully truncated, and when getting close to the end of the book I realized this was just the first half of his trip. (There’s a second book that details the rest of his journey). Young man in the seventies, disillusioned with life and especially his own country, decided he better get out and see a good part of it, before giving up and leaving (to become an expat I think). Accompanied only by his beloved dog, he walked all that way, stopping at various small towns to find jobs when he needed funds to keep going. He worked in a sawmill in North Carolina, did farm labor in a Tennessee commune, shoveled out horse stalls on a Alabama farm, among other things. He camped where he could in a tent (which the dog usually torn down the next morning in his exuberance, ha), but often just stayed with people who warmly invited him in- sometimes for weeks on end. He lived with an old mountain man in a remote cabin in Virginia, walked part of the Appalachian trail, and got run out of more than one small town because the locals were suspicious of a long-haired looking stranger who looked like a disreputable hippie. (I know this isn’t in order). It was interesting. Especially the section where he lived with a poor black family for so long, he almost forgot he was the only fair-skinned person among them. Or the time he ended up at a seminary in a dorm room with space to write, feeling completely out of place but then falling in love with a girl the first time he saw her (end of the book). I liked reading about the characters he met, the small incidents of travel, the stories that honest hardworking people shared with him, how they lived their lives. But a big part of the book was also about his search for spirtuality (although he didn’t seem to realize he was seeking it)- attending Methodist church in small communities, going to a huge revival in Alabama, listening to the rambling commune leader preach. All that a bit tiresome to me, personally- I would have rather read more about the people he met, the wildlife he must have seen, even the weather. His personal take on a personal journey.

Note: don’t be like me, and look through all the photos in the book before reading it. You’ll give yourself a very BIG and SAD SPOILER.

Rating: 3/5

292 pages, 1979

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

Dirty Chick

Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer

by Antonia Murphy

About a young couple who love to sail, end up in New Zealand, and decide to stay. They had a few acres of land- at first a rented place, then later manage to buy their own. Start out by taking care of other peoples’ animals- an elderly dog, a few cats and chickens. Things do not go well from the start, from diseases attacking the hens, and a duck assaulting them repeatedly until one dies. Not at all for the faint of heart, full of disgusting descriptions of all kinds of things that can go wrong with livestock keeping- from terribly cute alpacas that spit deadly green goo at anyone they dislike, to sheep that need their butts shaved to prevent maggots from burrowing in, to midwifing a goat that eats her own placenta (normal, but rather gross the way it’s described). And just more from then on. I cringed at parts, was astonished and laughed out loud at others. Oh, and the descriptions of cheese-making attempts in this book, have made me not want to eat that product for a very long time. And there were some details about their neighbors, learning about the local culture- I did wish for a bit more of that, whereas usually I’m more keen on reading about the animals. This one was mostly focused on their children, and how they kept accumulating animals, learning to care for them, dealing with all the messiness and trials that includes. Goats, chickens, alpacas, cows, sheep. They drew the line at pigs after the husband helped someone else castrate a bunch of piglets. No go. Too much poop flinging for my taste.

Exacerbated by two little kids, one who talks easily about death and gross things, the other who suffers from seizures no doctors can find the cause. It’s sad to read about how they struggled to find treatment for their son, while accepting him for who he was and finding him a place in the coummnity. A bit alarming how much they let their kids just roam around- reminded me of the Slacker Mom, ha. Other books this brought to mind: the Bucolic Plague and Once Upon a Flock and The Dirty Life. I know there’s others, about raising chickens and taking up farming late in life, but can’t think of them now.

Had a recent knock to my health, doing some reading as I recuperate but not very keen on the writing right now- screens give me awful nausea and headache at the moment. So when I do manage to get on here a post something (so as not to forget what I’ve been reading) it will be short and to the point, for a while . . .

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 3/5

256 pages, 2015

More opinions: Book Chase
anyone else?

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

Tag: Bios / Memoirs

a Childhood in China

a memoir

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn

Living with Caribou

A Dog and His People

Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer

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