• Book Reviews,  Creative Non-Fiction,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  NON FICTION

    What the Chicken Knows by Sy Montgomery *** (of 4)

    January 16, 2025

    The more I learn about animal cognition, the more I realize how ignorant I have been. (I recently read an article, for example, strongly suggesting that insects feel pain.) So not surprisingly, Sy Montgomery’s exquisite story telling reveals that chickens have personalities. Chickens can be brave, inquisitive, funny, clever, caring, ruthless, foolhardy, sneaky, and thankful. An attentive human can quickly learn to understand chicken and with a little practice talk back.

    Montgomery weaves together anecdotes from flocks she has known and avian science with such ease that you cannot even see her making the transition. She will make you love chickens as companions and yet not shed a tear when she stops keeping chickens after 20 years. Bears, weasels, raccoons, coyotes, and hawks all took advantage of her birds, but as she points out, the return of nearly extirpated predators to the woods of New England is actually cause for celebration.

    Read More
  • America,  Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION

    A Childhood by Harry Crews **** (of 4)

    December 15, 2024

    Published in 1978 and reissued in 2022, Harry Crews, an American novelist recounts the first five years of his life. He grew up in south Georgia, the son of dirt-poor sharecroppers in the 1930s. Stories flow from the pages (listen to the audiobook to get the full impact) like a stream meandering in the gulley at the edge of a sparse cotton field. One room shacks become theaters for orators and minstrels, itinerant salesmen and magical healers. Upstanding Black neighbors care for Harry while his family disintegrates, and a formerly enslaved Grandmother imparts the wisdom of a century (or however old she might be, she doesn’t know.) Pigs are slaughtered, hams are stolen from smokehouses by hungry neighbors, and broken down mules pull plows through exhausted soil. All before Harry turns five.

    Without electricity, and therefore without a television, radio, or addicting cellphone, Harry grew up with an extraordinarily creative imagination for play. His acumen as a storyteller is so confoundingly good, it is impossible to find the seams between the end of one tale and the beginning of the next.

    Read More
  • Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  Mystery,  Philosophy

    Creation Lake ** (of 4) by Rachel Kushner

    December 13, 2024

    A left-wing philosopher advocates that it is time for humanity to return to nature, but sends his diatribes via e-mail. Acolytes reading his emails in France form a commune and strive to live pure lives. They exclude people who are not sufficiently indoctrinated with the existential crisis that Homo sapiens has brought upon themselves. The superior humanity of Neanderthals (now sadly extinct) fill lengthy electronic missives.

    The commune is suspected of sabotaging a big geo-engineering project that will destroy the water table in the Central Massif. It will also ruin the lives of very-pure peasants (who the commune has excused for taking on modern agricultural techniques even though they might be advancing neo-liberalist agendas and the success of Capitalism with a capital C!)

    Sadie has been hired by some agency (we aren’t exactly sure which) to infiltrate the commune and entrap them into doing something illegal, thereby proving the commune-ists were responsible for the initial sabotage. Sadie (in a book written by a woman) seems quite preoccupied with the size of her breasts, and has no compunctions about deceiving people into doing illegal acts they might not otherwise have undertaken.

    This book made so many critic’s must-read lists. Seriously? Feh. Read it if you want to meet characters with no moral centers and read a lot about a nihilistic crackpot of a cult leader.

    Read More
  • Asia,  Audio Book,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  FOUR STARS ****,  India/Pakistan/Afghanistan,  Uncategorized

    The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese **** (of 4)

    October 1, 2024

    In the fictional riverside town of Parambil, in Kerala, India, 12-year-old Big Ammachi is taken from her home at the beginning of the 20th century to marry a widower. The marriage goes well and Big Ammachi is a protagonist around whom many of the village’s 31 additional characters revolve. Big Ammachi lives into her 70s and through her we observe the integration of rural villagers into the development of modern Indian life.

    Additional stories include a century-long investigation into a mysterious genetic ailment that makes many male descendants of Big Ammachi’s clan fear water and suffer vertigo when their heads are submerged. There is a nearby leper colony whose inhabitants and doctors are fully lovable. A young female artist, Elsie, must fight sexism to practice her artistic gifts. A Scottish physician sent to work in Britain’s colony on the subcontinent serves as an intermediary between British exPats and Indians. The regional environment of canals, forests, tea plantations, rivers, and individual trees are also important characters.

    At times the 775-page book feels like it has no beginning, middle, or end. Though never tedious, it can be as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Still, Verghese, as he says in his afterword, has culled and retold the stories of his ancestors. He has done so in exquisite fashion.

    Read More
  • America,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FOUR STARS ****,  History,  NON FICTION,  Prize Winner,  Science

    Fire Weather by John Vaillant **** (of 4)

    January 26, 2024

    Just as every year is now the hottest on record, so too the number and intensity of wildfires across the planet break annual records for temperature, acreage burned, and never-before-seen fire behavior. A warming climate, low atmospheric humidity, pre-dried forests, and human habitations in previously uninhabited ecosystems are all tinder waiting for an inevitable spark.

    What makes this book so insightful is its focus on fires in 2016 that demolished the city of Fort McMurry in Alberta, Canada. Fort McMurry is the home to Canada’s bitumen deposits of tar sands, the worlds least efficient and, after coal, most carbon intensive fuel. In essence, the oil extraction industry warmed the planet enough that it set itself afire.

    Further, human habitations, now interspersed in forested and tree-lined communities everywhere, are constructed with fuel for fires. House fires can be contained if a single home goes up, but are uncontrollable when a wall of intense heat flows toward a neighborhood. Homes are fabricated with kiln-dried wood and filled with wooden furniture and cabinetry. The number of household items made of oil-based synthetic products is surprising: vinyl siding, carpets, sofas, pillows, clothing, electronics. To a raging fire, it is all just fuel. Then add the propane tank for the outdoor grill, the gas tank for the SUV, and cans of sprays and paints in the basement and homes tend to explode before a fire even reaches them.

    Interspersed with the minute by minute account of the explosive growth of the Fort McMurry fire is a detailed, and unequivocal litany of warning about human induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The evidence and scientific proof has been around for more than 100 years, albeit in some marginal locations. Still, by the 1950s and definitely by the 1980s, there was widespread agreement that burning fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. I was explaining this in lectures already in 1987.

    What kind of evil is embodied in corporations and individuals whose internal memos acknowledge the repercussions continued fossil fuel extraction would have on the livability of our planet? Favoring profit or people, Vaillant leaves no doubt that they paid obfuscators to confuse the public and protect their profits.

    This book, a National Book Award finalist, should be required reading, but it should also be read only on the first floor. At the end when the reader jumps out the window she can live to recommend the book to someone else.

    Read More
  • Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  Psychology,  Suspense

    Birnham Wood by Eleanor Catton *** (of 4)

    November 23, 2023

    The premise is simple enough. A guerilla environmental group in New Zealand, calling itself Birnham Wood, illegally plants gardens on vacant properties. As you would expect, the group is anti-Capitalist, barely operating on a shoestring budget, shares its produce with low income families, and is mostly run by women: visionary, competent, egalitarian, and occasionally, passively catty. Their ethics are challenged when an American billionaire looking to construct a doomsday bunker for himself in New Zealand offers to bankroll Birnham Wood on property he has just purchased on the edge of a National Park.

    Should Birnham Wood take the money and after four years of insolvency finally enjoy stability and national recognition for their good efforts? Are they just being used as a publicity screen for a screwball capitalist bully? Are the billionaire’s intentions reliable or is greenwashing the sale of New Zealand real estate to foreigners a fair tradeoff? Can a non-profit with no hierarchical structure and some strong personalities hold itself together?

    It’s a little weird that the author tells us many things that characters are thinking that they do not even know about themselves, but page after page, intentions, whether overt or handed to us by the writer turn darker and what begins as enviros versus the rich spins into something much deeper.

    Read More
  • America,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  FICTION,  Food,  History,  Judaism/Jewish Culture,  World War II

    Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins *** (of 4)

    September 19, 2023

    An ambitious book that centers the Owen’s Valley in California, the valley’s desertification following rerouting all of the valley’s water to Los Angeles, and the placement of the Japanese internment camp, Manzanar, in the midst of the dusty, isolated desert. A lone holdout rancher, Rocky Rhodes, refuses to cooperate with the water boys from LA. He is joined by his twin sister, Casswell, his wife (who is already dead by the time the book opens), and his two children: Sunny and Stryker. (Get it: Rocky Roads, Sunny Roads?). The Rhodes’s come from old waspy money back east.

    Schiff, a nebish of a Jew, with a big conscience, from Chicago is charged with building a camp — really a ghetto — for 10,000 American citizens forced to abandon their jobs and homes with nothing more than what they are wearing and could carry in their hands. Sunny and Schiff have eyes for one another, Sunny is an indomitable chef in the middle of nowhere, Nature (with a capital N) in the desert and in the nearby Sierras is a character in its own right, and Japanese prisoners of war stagger through the indignities of living behind barbed wire.

    Wiggins is a master story teller and a wizard with words, but may have taken on too many themes to do sufficient justice to all of them in one book.

    Read More
  • America,  Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  History,  Memoir/Biography,  NON FICTION

    Grandma Gatewood’s Walk *** (of 4)

    August 2, 2023

    In 1955, when the Appalachian Trail (AT) was still in its infancy, Emma Gatewood walked its full length, 2050 miles from Mount Oglethorpe, Georgia to Mount Kathadin, Maine. She was 67 years old, a great grandmother, and did it solo. Her 11 adult children only found out after she was gone for several weeks and had already walked 800 miles.

    What is most striking about her walk is not her age nor intrepidity, though her courage and fortitude were boundless, but rather how simple she made it all seem. She sewed her own knapsack and filled it with less than 20 pounds of stuff. She hiked in sneakers and dungarees and slept on the ground on piles of leaves when she couldn’t find a lean-to. Almost without exception, whenever she appeared on someone’s doorstep, strangers welcomed her and fed her. Everything about her hike seemed matter-of-fact, because that was Gatewood’s attitude: put one foot in front of the other, a useful philosophy for living.

    It is hard to believe there was a time in America when hikers did not bear high-tech equipment or post selfies from every peak. It is just as hard to remember a time when a bedraggled stranger could arrive at someone’s door and expect to be offered a meal, a shower, and a bed.

    Read More
  • Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  NON FICTION,  Science

    An Immense World by Ed Yong *** (of 4)

    July 3, 2023

    Philosophically, a wonderfully provocative account of what other organisms can sense that we humans cannot. Ed Yong introduces us to umwelt the idea that our perception of the world is confined to what our senses can perceive. We cannot really conceive of what it might feel like to interpret our surroundings using the earth’s magnetic field, as birds can. What would it be like to sense chemicals through our feet (is sensing chemicals a sense of smell, taste, or something else, if it comes through your feet), as mosquitoes can?

    Other organisms can hear vibrations that only our most sensitive instruments can perceive – elephants – or use radar: bats, some sea creatures. Bees can see wavelengths that we will never see and the world’s flowers and plants look different to them.

    Yong goes through the five sense we humans possess – sight being our strongest – and then senses, like radar, that we do not. He compares human umwelts to umwelts that simultaneously constrain and expand the world of organisms whose capacities make ours seem insignificant. He does a marvelous job of explaining the science of how we can tell that an animal can do things that we cannot even imagine.

    Unfortunately, as he ticks through each sense, he seemingly recounts every organism about which a scientific experiment has been completed, until from shear exhaustion, you consider using your sense to skim ahead like a gnat detecting insect repellent.

    Read More
  • Book Reviews,  Environment/Nature/Ag,  Food,  NON FICTION,  Science

    The Devil’s Element by Dan Egan *** (of 4)

    April 21, 2023

    Kudos to Egan for calling out the devil’s bargain humanity has made with a single element: phosphorus. On one side of the equation, phosphorus is the plant nutrient most people haven’t thought enough about, but without which there would be no plant life. Phosphorus, along with nitrogen (worthy of a book of its own) and potassium, are the big three for plant fertilizers. Fail to fertilize plants and there isn’t enough food to support a growing population.

    But on the other side of the equation, so much phosphorus has been mined and spread about the planet that it now exists in overabundance in most of the world’s waterways and coastal environments. In the wrong places, phosphorus nurtures the growth of algae in such abundance that thick mats of often toxic sludge have displaced fish, oxygen, and recreation from way too many rivers, lakes, and bays.

    Maybe there isn’t another easy way to do this, but Egan’s book falls in line with most environmental treatises, foretelling doom and disaster in global proportions. By the end I was fully ready to toss myself into a toxic lagoon. To make matters worse, Egan extends speculations to the extreme, suggesting, for example, that phosphorus reserves are about to run out and by implication, global famine is imminent. Most evidence predicts that current reserves will last 400 or more years by which time our ability to extract phosphorus from less well-endowed reserves will surely have improved. Nonetheless, Egan highlights the one researcher with a projection of 30 years until we’ve exhausted out supplies, in part, it feels like because it makes for better, more alarmist, reading.

    Or, saying that ISIS might take over the Moroccan government (Morocco sits on the world’s largest reserves of Phosphorus) makes for exciting reading, but it’s a little like saying that if Mexican drug cartels get their hands on America’s oil wells, the world would be facing a global energy catastrophe. You hope someone in the bowels of the U.S. State Department is writing reports about potential scenarios that might require American attention, but maybe a whole book to scare the public isn’t necessary. Egan does briefly address solutions a final chapter, but by the time he gets to answers, much of his enthusiasm has waned.

    Read More