the imponderabilia of actual life

Boneyards: Detroit Under Ground: Book Review

2011-03-09T16:56:00.000-05:00

Boneyards: Detroit Under Ground, by Richard Bak, was a fortuitous grab off the new book shelf at the Ann Arbor District Library.

From a recent MetroParent article on libraries I learned the shocking news that the public library in Troy, Michigan will be closing at the end of the April. Troy is not a poor suburb, nor a particularly small one. But its voters turned down a couple of millage increases that would have kept the city library running, and then the city government didn't allocate the necessary funds. I hope that the Troy library doesn't end up like the Mark Twain branch of the Detroit Public Library.

Anyway, I never would have found this book without the AADL, which has such a fabulous library that I couldn't give it up when I moved out of the city to an exurb. I now pay for the privilege of being able to check books out of it. It's not that my local library isn't good - I'm often surprised by just how good the Saline District Library is (sometimes they even have books the AADL doesn't have!), and they're open to suggestions - but Ann Arbor is a much bigger city, and it has a library to match.* Then again, Troy isn't all that small, and look what happened there. I like the comment on dETROITfUNK under the pictures of the Twain branch noting that this abandoned library is a "mind cemetery".

Which brings us back to graveyards, the subject of Richard Bak's new book. I never would have found this browsing on my new nook, as much as I've found love the immediacy and portability of e-books. Boneyards is the kind of book that really doesn't work well on an e-reader, anyway - the beautiful black & white photographs are a huge part of this book, and the main reason I grabbed it off the new book shelf and stuck it in my bag with the romance, fantasy, mysteries, and memoirs that came up on my request list.

I was thrilled to find that the text - the historic snapshots of a major midwestern city that it provides, both in the introduction ("Here and Gone") and on the pages facing over one hundred of these amazing photographs - was as well-done as the photographs. Many of these photos are historic, and others are striking or evocative artistic works. Taken together, they provide one of the most unique perspectives Michigan history that I've seen.

In Boneyards, I learned about Hazen Pingree, the Detroit mayor during the depression at the end of the 19th century who created plans for unemployed workers to grow vegetables on vacant lots. "Potato Patch" Pingee became governor, died suddenly of peritonitis in England in 1901, and the Detroit City Hall was draped in elaborate mourning buntings with an enormous black-rimmed portrait. (Many of the historic photographs of funerals and cemeteries show mourning decorations that appear bizarre and extravagant to 21st century sensibilities).

Then there was Benedetto Evangelista, the creator of his own religion, who provided celestial services in his basement, found beheaded in the same basement in 1929. His family - a wife and four young children - were slain upstairs, and no one was ever convicted of the murders.

Native peoples and burial mounds, the deaths and graves of French and British soldiers, Greek, Polish, Italian, and Romanian immigrants, convicts buried in prison cemeteries, the Purple Gang, drug dealers in the 1980's, racial segregation in cemeteries, Henry Ford, Walter Reuther, the Dodge Brothers (Bak notes that the workers on the main Dodge line were permitted to drink beer while working), union protesters killed by the police and Ford security personnel in 1932, and unclaimed cremations are all the subjects of short but eloquent essays. The photographs alone would have made Boneyards a beautiful coffee table book, but Bak's research and insightful narrative make this something more.

*Too bad you can't check books out of the University of Michigan libraries without paying a small fortune. You think they'd have some kind of special deal for alumni or local residents or both, like many other state universities, but nooo. Instead, I get some of the books I need for writing jobs from inter-library loan from EMU or MSU - or in one strange instance, a city library in Bezonia, Michigan - even though the same material is sitting unused on a shelf in the Hatcher library just six miles away.

Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention: Book Review

2011-01-28T19:22:00.002-05:00

I read Katherine Ellison's article - Doing Battle with the ADHD-Industrial Complex - when it was published a few months ago. I thought it was an interesting and insightful piece, and promptly put her new book on my to-read list. I wasn't really looking forward to reading Buzz, though.

I've read a lot of books on ADHD, OCD, and Tourette's Syndrome and related disorders (including autism spectrum disorders) over the past ten years. You can see some of these books on the disability shelf in my goodreads account here, and some information on Tourette's and Tourette's Syndrome Plus (TS+) here and here.

The books I've read include memoirs, parenting and teacher advice, therapeutic manuals, and fiction aimed at all ages. Some of these books were enlightening, some were depressing, and some should be required reading for anyone dealing with these issues. I wish I had enough money to buy copies of Ross W. Greene's The Explosive Child for every parent who would benefit from it, and enough copies of Lost at School and Challenging Kids, Challenged Teachers for every administrator, teacher, and paraprofessional (i.e., teacher's aide) who needs to read these books.

Anyway, I thought Katherine Ellison would be preaching to the choir in Buzz, and that it was unlikely she would tell me anything new, or describe any personal experiences I hadn't already lived myself. Then the book became available on my library request list. Even though the cover gave me a headache with its vibrating-look title (and the library's fluorescent ID sticker went right through the middle of the legs in the center, making them look like some weird butterfly wearing Converse high tops), I gave it a try.

I was hooked by the first chapter. Ellison describes her "bad mom moments" in unflinching detail, along with graphic descriptions of her son's defiance, anger, and confusion. After one particularly memorable incident, Ellison resolves to turn her attention and considerable skills at investigative journalism to ADHD in general, and to her son (who goes by the nickname "Buzz") in particular, for the next year.

Her account of her year of research, experimentation, expense, family life, and community is fascinating. She examines medication, therapy, support groups, neurofeedback, meditation, and several other approaches to dealing with ADHD. There's a bit about the history of most of these ideas, interviews with mental health professionals and other practitioners, and interesting accounts of her experiences and her son's. I'd heard of many of these approaches - but reading about the details of the practices was cool in a whole different way. It reminded me of Mary Roach's popular science books (like Stiff), actually. And I really appreciated the detailed end notes (complete with references), and a useful index.

When I read about the meditation technique of mindfulness that Nirbhay Singh recommends for defusing anger, for instance, I was able to turn to the research in the endnotes, and then look Singh's articles up online. My son and I both read Singh et al.'s Meditation on the Soles of the Feet Training, and though he didn't particularly like thinking about his feet, he was able to focus his concentration on something else in a similar manner to help calm himself the other day. This is an approach I hadn't ever seriously considered.

Ellison's descriptions of her family's ordeals and triumphs during this year is equally engaging, and adds a certain (sometimes dark) humor to the narrative that kept me reading. I did wish that there was more about schools and educational advocacy in Buzz, and Ellison mentions that she became aware of this lack when it was too late for her to use the information effectively (in the epilogue).

One work that complements Buzz particularly well is Judith Warner's recent book on children and mental health: We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.

In short - it's definitely worth turning your attention to Buzz, whether you have to deal with attention deficits and/or hyperactivity or not.

Every Bone Tells a Story: Book Review

2011-01-08T16:21:00.009-05:00

Every Bone Tells a Story: Hominin Discoveries, Deductions, and Debates, by Jill Rubalcaba and Peter Robertshaw

In general, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists don't do a great job of telling the public about their work. Their studies are so technologically and theoretically specialized today that it's difficult to convey all the relevant information to even a fairly well-read person, unless these people are willing to sit through several introductory lectures or classes in anthropology. And even then it can still be hard to describe the subtleties of current anthropological debates and translate the latest jargon (like hominin!*) to students....er, the general reader. It doesn't help that anthropologists aren't generally rewarded for making their passions clear to the public. It doesn't get them tenure, advance their research, or bring in grants, and writing for non-specialists is very, very different from the type of writing that anthropologists are trained to do in graduate school. Sadly, grad students and most anthropologists aren't awarded any points for creative writing, compelling dialogue, or evocative descriptions - or any of the other things that keep readers (especially children) turning the pages of a book.

Explaining anthropological research to the public is crucial if the field is going to continue to exist in times of economic hardship, however. Which partially explains why I was so excited to learn about Rubalcaba and Robertshaw's latest book when it was mentioned in the comments at Heavy Medal, the School Library Journal's blog on the current contenders for the Newbery.

Sadly, I had to request Every Bone Tells a Story from inter-library loan to read it. Only ten or so libraries in Michigan currently have it in their catalogs (and Ann Arbor isn't one of them! I suggested that they buy it). Maybe if it wins some more awards it will find its way to more libraries and into the hands of more kids and adults.

It's written for older kids through young adults, but like some of the other nonfiction contenders for this year's Newbery prize (such as Sugar Changed the World, by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos, and They Called Themselves the KKK, by Susan Campbell Bartoletti), Every Bone is suitable for adults as well as kids. The writing style is simple and usually clear without being simplistic (with the exception of the section on the genetics of speech, and let's face it, mitochrondial DNA is difficult to explain clearly), and much of the information presented will be new and interesting to anyone interested in human evolution. Four sets of skeletal remains from different time periods are presented, with wonderful descriptions of their discovery, some good summaries of the deductions scientists have made that are based on these remains, and lively looks at the current debates swirling around them.

Because Every Bone Tells a Story is very well-written, I found myself wondering which author wrote which parts, but it was all very seamless, without any discernible differences in style. Perhaps Peter Robertshaw is one of those rare archaeologists with a gift for popular as well as academic prose, or maybe Jill Rubalcaba has the (also fairly rare) ability to imbue scientific discourse with human interest. At any rate, it was an enjoyable read, reminding me a lot of Mary Roach's nonfiction books (Stiff, Bonk, Spook, and Packing for Mars), which are funny, informative, compelling and memorable. It's a hard balance to find.

My only criticisms of this book are minor ones (i.e., not enough to warrant taking a star away from the 5 out of 5 I gave it on www.goodreads.com). I wish that one of the skeletons that they had featured was distinctively female, so prehistoric gender roles could have been addressed. Lapedo child could have been a girl, but we really can't tell. I think the Time Line at the back of the book should have been put in the front - it would help readers put the Turkana Boy, Lapedo Child, Kennewick Man, and the Iceman in an temporal/evolutionary context as the reader encountered each of them, instead of trying to fit them all together at the end.

Unfortunately, Every Bone was written and published right before Svanto Pååbo completed the latest reconstruction and analysis of the Neandertal genome, which reversed earlier conclusions about ancient humans and Neandertals gene-mixing. The latest genetic analysis suggests that Euro-Asian populations may have interbred with Neandertals between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago, probably in the Middle East (see Nicholas Wade's article in the NYT from May 2010). It must have been frustrating for the authors to see this research appear so soon after their book came out, with its debate section on Lapedo Child that cited Pååbo's earlier suggestion that "Neandertals went extinct without contributing to our gene pool" (p. 79), yet their conclusion notes that research continues, and the bones' stories have just begun.

* Hominin is the new, rather unwieldy term used to classify humans, their ancestors, and closely related species, including the genus Homo and the genus Australopithecus. The Tribe Hominini does not include chimpanzees or gorillas. Hominid, which anthropologists previously used to describe humans and their ancestors, now includes chimpanzees and gorillas as part of the family Hominidae. Got it?

New Start

2011-01-07T13:14:00.002-05:00

Well, it's time to pull this old blog out of the basement, take it out of its box (luckily a waterproof one, or it would be moldy from all the puddles spreading out from the wall-floor joint every time it rains more than a half inch or it gets above freezing in the winter here), and use it again.

It's been an eventful year and half since I've posted. I don't want to post anything personal about my family, though. I do have the urge to post some book reviews that are a little more detailed than the ones I've been doing on my goodreads account, so you can expect some of those soon.

I don't have a real writing job at the moment. I've enjoyed the last few opportunities, writing about cannibalism and mad cow disease and orthorexia and global warming and prehistoric tobacco, but since that's done I can think about blogging again. Even though it doesn't pay as well.

PS If you're a friend or family member, don't feel bad because you didn't get a holiday card. No one did this year, though I may send out Groundhog Day or Candlemas cards in early February.

Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground

2009-08-18T11:44:00.002-04:00

Here's the last book review that I've done in the last few years for a website that is no longer maintained (but that can still be accessed via the Wayback machine). The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) holds fascinating conferences and publishes an incredible diversity of books on motherhood (this year's on blogging).

"Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground”: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth, edited by D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, is an eye-opening and diverse collection of papers published by Demeter Press, the publishing division of York University's Association for Research on Mothering.

The book's title comes from a Cheyenne proverb:

“A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is done, no matter how brave its warriors nor how strong their weapons.”

Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground's diversity is both its strength and a minor drawback. The multiple voices, different indigenous peoples, varied histories, and the personal experiences of motherhood that Lavell-Harvard and Lavell (mother and daughter editors) bring together are amazing, but the diversity is sometimes overwhelming. It can be difficult to switch gears between the different topics and styles of writing in the contributions. Lavell-Harvard and Lavell acknowledge this in the first paper ("Thunder Spirits: Reclaiming the Power of Our Grandmothers"), noting that "There is such a range of Aboriginal women's experiences existing somewhere between "traditional" and "modernized" that perhaps the only thing we do share is what Mihesuah calls a 'commonality of difference'"(p. 2).

They go on to eloquently and convincingly explain how:

"the historical persistence of our cultural difference generation after generation (despite the best assimilative efforts of both Church and State) is a sign of our strength and our resistance. That we have historically, and continually, mothered in a way that is "different" from the dominant culture, is not only empowering for our women, but is potentially empowering for all women (p. 3)."

Lavell and Lavell-Harvard do a skillful job of organizing the diverse works into four sections: one on pregnancy and becoming a mother, the ideology and practice of motherhood, the state's influence on motherhood, and literary representations of motherhood.. And the references and the endnotes are remarkable - there are scads of wonderful, intriguing sounding articles, books, and papers from the most obscure places in each article's references.

A few of the papers are written in an academic style that can be off-putting for those not accustomed to it. If you persevere, however, the insights into different cultures and social groups, and the historical understandings gained, are definitely worth a few obtuse paragraphs of sociology, medical anthropology, ethnohistory, or literary analysis. I learned something, or was moved, or came to a new appreciation for the strength that the mothers portrayed have shown in the face of incredible hardship in every single one of the papers in this book.

The seventeen papers include reflections on motherhood amongst the Anishnaabe (Ojibway) of Canada, cultural and personal implications of the medicalization of birth (among Anishnaabe and Mi'kmaq communities), a fascinating look at historic Haudenosaunee (Iroqouis) mothering (especially interesting for those studying non-patriarchal societies and/or gender equality) , and one Metis mother's powerful account of how traditional parenting skills programs made a difference in her life.

“Back to Basics” describes mothering, and the impact that grandmothers and aunts - also prominent in several of the earlier papers on Canada - have on children’s survival (especially from kwashiorkor) in urban Ghana. On my first look at the book, I thought that Africa was a far cry from Canada, and wondered how this piece could possibly fit in with the other papers, but the authors do show how colonization and various forms of oppression have had a similar effect on motherhood in many areas of Africa, North America, and Australia. Similarly, three papers on Aboriginal mothers in literature, including works by authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Nugi Garimara (aka Doris Pilkington, the author of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence) fit well in this book.

"Aboriginal Mothering: An Australian Perspective" provides an important look at "the Stolen Generation" (which many North Americans first heard about in the movie The Rabbit-Proof Fence), focusing on how women and families are re-connecting after the long period of cultural genocide that happened when children were taken by the Australian government in the years between 1905-1970. This paper is fittingly followed by a couple of papers on Canadian state child protection policies and indigenous mothers, the history and lingering effects of Canada's residential schools, and a short but revealing look at the impact of Canada's Indian Act and its context in colonization and oppression, authored by the editors.

As described on page 188, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell (one of the editors and co-author of "Aboriginal Women vs. Canada" ) was the first woman to challenge the section of the Indian Act's Section 12(1)(b), which was finally amended by Bill C-31 in 1985. As an American, I had heard the Canadian term "status Indian", but I was unfamiliar with the implications of how the Canadian Indian Act worked (and continues to work with its 1985 modifications). As Lavell and Lavell-Harvard describe,

"For well over a hundred years, beginning in the 1870s and continuing until as recently as 1985, under the provisions of section 12(1)(b), upon their entrance into marriage with a man not possessing Indian Status, the Canadian government stripped tens of thousands of Aboriginal women (and any subsequent children) of their Indian Status, and all the rights such status entailed including access to health care, education, and perhaps most importantly the right to live in their own homes and communities. Conversely, under the Act, not only did Indian men not lose status upon marriage to a non-aboriginal, their spouses gained status as did their children...Furthermore, since the extinguishment of Indian Status was irrevocable, many Aboriginal women were left without recourse in the even of domestic violence, divorce, or widowhood (p. 187)."

As Lavell and Lavell-Harvard point out, Bill C-31 (which restored Indian status to over 100,000 people)

"has simply created several new categories of Indian and only postponed the extinguishment of Indian status a couple of generations. While Lavell, and many other women like her, were reinstated as 6(1) Indians, her three children were classified as 6(2) Indians, which means their children, her grandchildren, will only be considered Indians should her children marry status Indians. Should her children marry non-Indians, her grandchildren will automatically be considered non-Indian. In a sad twist of fate, or perhaps a particularly ingenious governmental trick, Lavell's struggle for the right to marry whomever she pleases and still remain an Indian is currently being relived by her children" (p. 191).

This papers in this part of the book - the section titled "'Big Mother': The Role of the State in the Performance of Mothering" - are the most disturbing to read, but also the most illuminating.

I believe that most readers will come away from Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground with a deeper understanding of how history (and current government policies) affect families through their actions on mothers and mothering, as well an enduring admiration for the women who showed such strength in the past, and who continue to fight for their rights today. Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground also demonstrates the richness and diversity of Aboriginal motherhood, and should lay the idea that there is "one right way to mother" permanently to rest.

Perfect Madness: Book Review

2009-07-15T13:18:00.012-04:00

Again, a couple of book reviews from 2005 that were lost in the ether, retrieved by the magic of the Wayback machine. I fixed a couple of spelling errors, love that Firefox add-on.

Perfect Madness or Localized Insanity?

Well, I finished reading Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner today.

I was very disappointed. The reviews were better than the book (and a lot more coherent). She totally disses Mothers & More and other similar groups, by the way, as:

“utterly corrupted by the competing religions of the American left and right”….(they) “purport to unite working and nonworking mothers alike in an ecumenical, pro-family social agenda. Their organizers, I found, were committed to this vision, and strove to make it a reality. But their membership, carried over from their pre-name-change days, was another story. Once you scratched the surface of their pro-unity slogans, all too often, something quite different emerged. Competition. Intolerance. And a big dose of sanctimony. Coming, most notably, from stay-at-home mothers seeking validation for the “sacrifices” they’d made in the name of motherly virtue” (p. 265-266).

It’s possible that other chapters are a lot different from mine. Do any of us seem sanctimonious here? I’m just not getting that vibe. But more on Warner’s book later, I have to go eat lunch with my daughter. She’s done drawing dinosaurs.

_____________________________________

Imperfect Madness

Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety is first and foremost an opinion piece on “the current culture of motherhood” - it should not be taken as sociological or cultural analysis of even the most rudimentary kind.

I liked Miriam Peskowitz’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars a lot more for its examination of the work/family/time issues facing American mothers, and Douglas and Michael’s The Mommy Myth for its historical analysis of the media and its influence on modern parenting. Strangely, and very obviously leaving a gaping hole, Warner makes absolutely no mention of Douglas & Michael’s book, even though she covers a lot of the same issues (Peskowitz’s was published close to the same time as Warner’s).

Warner’s book strikes me as sloppy in terms of research, logic and presentation. Her endnotes are not presented in the text of the book, but arranged by page number in the back, so when you want to check the basis for a given statement, you have to turn to the back to see if it is endnoted. Almost every time I did this, I found Warner’s statement was based on a secondary source - a newspaper article or a magazine article usually. Very rarely was any scientific data (even from soft sciences, like sociology, psychology, or anthropology!) cited. For instance, her statement that today’s children display more anxiety, throw more tantrums, behave more disrespectfully, and are just overprotected brats is based on an article from Better Homes & Gardens.

Warner makes some sweeping (and unfounded and just plain inaccurate) generalizations about kid’s food allergies and the use of medication for ADHD & other behavioral problems that are sure to piss off many parents who deal with children with real problems of this nature.

And “Attachment Parenting” - even a middle class watered down version gets given extremely short shrift as just an example of the bad side of over-parenting: “baby-wearing, co-sleeping, long-term breast-feeding and the rest of it — cruelly insensitive to mothers’ needs as adult women”. According to Warner, co-sleeping makes for unhinged, sleep deprived mothers. Funny, everyone I know that co-slept did it because it enabled them to get more sleep.

Some other things that bothered me were the chapters on how this socio-cultural phenomenon that she calls “The Mess” is a personal psychological failing, like bulimia or anorexia, caused by mothers:

1. trying to capture their own idyllic childhoods (repressed overworked mothers & all)

2. trying to compensate for horrible childhoods and neglectful mothers

3. trying above all to gain CONTROL

But then she implies it’s a cultural thing, a mass hysteria, or a cultural OCD where the compulsions include making cupcakes, arranging birthday parties, etc. , and the obsessions are “perfect” children.

My main problem, though, is just with Warner’s basic premise: that the majority of mothers today have this “widespread, choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret…poisoning motherhood for American women today”. Maybe it’s just her wacko friends and the women (about 150 of them, selected how?) that she interviewed in Washington, D.C.? Do I just live in a small bubble of sanity? Ann Arbor is a relatively wealthy (but too idealistic and activist oriented?) place, and I’m just not seeing this compulsive over-parenting and cult of hyper-motherhood she describes in sometimes hilarious detail.

The sad thing is that I agree with many of the (politically liberal) solutions that Warner proposes that would help American mothers. But this material is tacked onto the next to last chapter, “For a Politics of a Quality of Life”, and hardly given the emphasis or the detail invested in the preceding ten chapters. And Warner completely ignores all of the other people who’ve already called for these changes, making it sound like the solutions are something new and innovative she discovered after she returned from France and discovered a lack of affordable childcare and a bunch of DC area neurotic mothers (not unlike those portrayed in Danielle Crittendon’s Amanda Bright@Home, or perhaps in Desperate Housewives? I need to watch Desperate Housewives). Also, it is hard to see how these laudable structural changes would actually improve “The Mess”, which is supposedly self-imposed, all-encompassing, and inextricably intertwined with our American lifestyle and identities as mothers.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine

2009-07-15T12:59:00.010-04:00

I've retrieved a book review that I did for Mothers & More for their "Mothers at Work" blog campaign in 2005. Since you can't access it anymore through regular avenues, I didn't think they'd mind if I put it on my personal blog, so all of my book review links work.

It Really Is All About Time...

….according to Miriam Peskowitz in The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother?

What a great book. Here’s my review from my personal book log:

A really good, thoughtful, well-written book. I don’t know why it hasn’t been reviewed anywhere but a couple of blogs, when Judith Warner’s book (which I haven’t read yet, so no comparisons) is all over the place.

Peskowitz looks at SAH moms, moms who work PT, and WOH moms, and every permutation of work/childcare and “sequencing” you can imagine. She examines the stereotypes, politcal manipulation, media & marketing, and what women (and some men) really do, and how women’s “personal choices” (as in “opting out”) may actually be more being “squeezed” by culture, companies, and just the time crunch that being a parent entails. She looks at feminism’s role in this and in motherhood.

This book was a huge breath of common sense. Peskowitz doesn’t rant, she doesn’t tell gut-wrenching personal stories (or especially hilarious ones), and she doesn’t over-simplify the issues. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been a big hit? It’s too reasonable? I dunno.

One thing lacking: an index. There are good footnotes, and you can tell that her statements are backed up by fact (and you can check the facts yourself via the footnotes), but an index would help you when you think, hmm, what did she say about FMLA (the Family Medical Leave Act)? What chapter was that in again?

Here’s one of my favorite quotes: “With the kids interrupting and needing attention, who can finish a setence, let along organize a piece of a revolution?” (p. 173).

I don't even feel the need to change anything I wrote over four years ago! The book is still a breath of fresh air.

The Busy Tree: Book Review

2009-07-14T10:48:00.003-04:00

I got two review offers a couple weeks ago. I turned down the offer for Tucks Pads (I'm not sure what I would say about them....maybe I could have looked at the medicinal uses of witch hazel? Hemorrhoids in history?), but I happily accepted a free copy of The Busy Tree, written by Jennifer Ward and illustrated by Lisa Falkenstern.

My seven year old nature lover mostly picks chapter books for herself now, but luckily (for me, because I love them, too) she still enjoys picture books. She agreed to review The Busy Tree with me, to give everyone a kid's perspective.

Here's her comments:

"I like the cover.

It's really realistic! It shows underground! And it shows animals there."

Basically, she raved about the artwork and the progression of the story, and happily read the simple rhymes.

I enjoyed The Busy Tree a lot, too. It's nice to be able to give such a positive review to a book. The last free book I got I hated (but luckily only had to discuss in an online salon), and I was critical enough of Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports to enrage a few tween readers who couldn't stand seeing their favorite book series criticized. They were downright polite compared to Darla Shine's fans, though.

Anyway, The Busy Tree made me mourn the loss of the giant elm tree in our back yard, and long for a big old oak tree. The kind that takes about a hundred years to mature, unfortunately.

Like my daughter, I loved Falkenstern's illustrations, and all of the different aspects of the single tree that the authors brought forth for us.

When I first saw the cover, I was afraid the book was going to be too precious and and/or overly cute, but as my daughter pointed out, the cover is just a clever collection of many of the different creatures shown in the book. She noted that the moth there was probably the result of the bagworm cocoon pictured on one of her favorite pages. There's nothing terribly cute about bagworms, though they are definitely an interesting and common tree dweller. My son actually actually considered some of the bagworm caterpillars on our pin cherry tree as pets one year (then again, he also wanted to keep maggots as pets).

The graphics I found of the cover online were kind of dark, so I took the pictures here so you can get a better feel for the book. Which I happily recommend for kids and adults who like gorgeously illustrated picture books featuring realistic natural settings, or trees (especially oak trees), or who may be interested in the ecology of a single tree.

Libraries & State Parks - Hammocks Subject to Availability

2009-07-09T17:46:00.008-04:00

If you're in Michigan and you have a library card (and if you don't have a library card, what's wrong with you?), there's a great deal going from now to the end of September, combining two of my favorite things: books and nature. You can go to your local library and get a free pass for any state park (98 of them!), good for seven days (usually there's a $6 vehicle fee, unless you've got an annual pass). It's part of their new Park & Read program:

Many parks will also have a hammock available at no charge for Park & Read participants to borrow while on-site for the day so they can fully enjoy a great book in Michigan's great outdoors.

"The program was designed to give people a free trial visit to experience what a fantastic family and recreational resource their Michigan state parks and recreation areas can be," said Maia Stephens, recreational programmer for the DNR Parks and Recreation Division. "Besides, what's more relaxing than a day at the beach or under a shady tree with a good book?"

Here's a list of the Park & Read Parks with hammocks. Although the Saline District Library isn't on the list of participating libraries, since I found the link for the program on their website, I think they offer the passes, too. The Ann Arbor District Library is listed, along with Chelsea and Brighton libraries.

Catching Fire

2009-05-29T13:44:00.017-04:00

Strangely enough, I have two very different books with the same title on my "to read" list right now:

Weird coincidence, eh?

And for a short review of some fiction for kids about archaeology, combining the two interests above - anthropology (Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire) and Young Adult fiction (Catching Fire is the not yet released sequel to Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games) - check out my goodreads.com review of Reading the Bones, by Gina McMurchy-Barber. It's one of the only pieces of fiction that I've read (for adults or kids!) that deals with many of the issues that archaeologists face. Amateur collectors, the repatriation of Native remains and sacred objects, scientific goals, and homeowner's feelings about private property are mixed well with overly authoritarian adults, a rebellious pre-teen girl, and some suspense. I hope McMurchy-Barber writes another and that this book gets a little more press - it was hard to find!

Fun with Google Searches

2009-03-12T17:08:00.004-04:00

I hope the person who searched "babababababababababa babababababababababa babababa" enjoyed the book review of All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown. No, there is no sex in Maximum Ride (not the Extreme Sports one I reviewed, nor the others), and I'm sorry I don't know where you can find Tastykakes in Michigan.

If you're not finding what you want with "patriartical", may I suggest you try "patriarchal"?

Twitch and Shout: Book Review

2009-03-11T11:38:00.014-04:00

"Son, neurological disorder is the wave of the future."

This statement by the author's father is from the frontspiece to Twitch and Shout: A Touretter's Tale, by Lowell Handler. I've said something similar to my son, but reading Handler's memoir gave me more a bit more insight into what he deals with every single day. In middle school, no less.

On one level, Handler's book is an enjoyable coming-of-age, overcoming disability, finding your niche story. But it also has some startling (to me, anyway) insights into Tourette's Syndrome and OCD:

I know a woman with OCD who thinks continually of the word Ebola. Regardless of what is happening around her in conversations or on the television or radio, she is thinking Ebola. The fact that the word represents a horrible, deadly virus does not matter to her; more significant is the sound the world makes audibly and in her mind when it's repeated. She is fascinated by the "acoustic contours" of the word itself. Touretters often develop such an obsession with words, lost in an amusement park of the mind where thy can spend hours turning over the vocal and mental variations in form, inflection, pitch, and even the meaning of a world or phrase. A single word may become the roller-coaster ride for a Touretter on which he or she can be carried away for hours, unable to complete another task (p. 37).

Handler relates his interviews with several other people with TS (including those featured in the film he helped make, with the same title) and I thought this explanation by Adam Seligman was intriguing:

"My theory about all Tourette symptoms," Adam continued, "is that you have a buildup of pressure, which must be relieved by an action. The action is either a physical movement, a sound, a ritualistic compulsive act, or an obsessive thought. If you don't relieve this pressure it builds up, and you feel like you are going to explode (p. 92)."

Twitch and Shout is was clearly ahead of the game when it comes to explaining the need for health care reform and orphan drug support (it was published in 1998), and it also includes fun and interesting stories about eating nasturtiums with Oliver Sacks, Zulu ideas about Tourette's, self-medicating, humility, degrees of disability, and humor.

As an unexpected bonus, I love black and white photography, and Twitch and Shout is nicely illustrated with some of Handler's photographs. In fact, a little web browsing shows that Handler's photographic work is amazing. Check it out, along with his book.

No! Let Them Eat Thin Mints and Samoas!

2009-03-09T12:01:00.005-04:00

And you can buy them from my daughter's troop if you happen to be at Cabela's in se Michigan next Saturday morning. Forget about the new Dulce de Leche flavor - they sound much better than they are. The sugar-free chocolate chip isn't bad, though, and I think the lemon cremes are sadly unappreciated.

We already did our part selling at Busch's in Saline last Saturday. Thank goodness there was an overhang there that our table was under. Still, dismal weather.

Let Them Eat Kale

2009-03-03T10:04:00.003-05:00

I've been reading some interesting stuff on food and its economics and politics.

The Politics of Food by 11D is a wonderful post that includes the following quote that sums my feelings up nicely:

Food is not a priority to most people. Pressed for time and energy, most people are going through the drive-through window at Wendy's. Even if it was cheaper and more readily available, kale and okra are only important to the intellectual fringe. And people don't want to hear about it. They don't want the guilt. Vegetable-guilt drives people to Sarah Palin's rallies.

...as well as a link to Ezra Klein's Foodie Politics post at The American Prospect.

I'm seeing the same split between foodie ("pie in the sky"?) intellectuals and people who are struggling to pay for their food and don't have time to cook it in the comments on feministing.com's post titled Low-Income Children Shamed by Cheese Sandwich Policy, which spun off a Chicago Tribune story about the policy that the Albuquerque Public Schools recently instituted, where students whose parents are behind on paying for their lunch bills get a cheese sandwich, milk, and fruit for lunch.

It's too bad the Tribune didn't bother to do a local story on this, because I'm sure there are schools in Chicagoland that have similiar policies. Here in Michigan (hey, maybe we're an economic bellwether for the rest of the country!), both my first grader and my sixth grader's schools have done something like this for years - if your child's account is more than $5 in the hole, your kid gets offered a PBJ sandwich if they didn't bring their own lunch. They don't get to have one of those cheeseburgers that makes McDonald's look like gourmet food, or even a little pool of the fluorescent liquid cheese-food-product with a pile of tortilla chips (all served on a lovely styrofoam tray) that passes for nachos.

Also close to home, Mark Maynard has a post called The President Calls for Victory Gardens. Despite the fact that a commenter said my contribution (a link to Eat the View, and their cute historical video on the White House lawns & gardening) was the stupidest shit he'd seen in ages - and I have to confess, it does highlight the gulf between foodie intellectual and "what's for dinner tonight?"Americans - I'm still planning on planting a few tomatoes in the back yard when the ground thaws in....oh, three months or so. Maybe I'll even buy some kale at the Saline Farmers' Market when they open again. It probably doesn't taste too bad in ramen soup, and if I tell my 12 year old that's how they eat it in Japan, he may even try it. Maybe I'll go wild and use the entire flavor packet.

Newbery Winners and Where to Put Them

2009-02-10T09:55:00.010-05:00

I haven't mentioned all of the Newbery winners that I've read (and blogged about over at The Newbery Project) for a long time. So here are links to some of the best of the ones that I've read in the last year:

The Twenty-One Balloons, by by William Pène du Bois - won in 1948 and I think this is the most underrated of my favorites. It belongs on your shelf along with Jules Verne, and both my (then 11 year old) son and I loved it.

Miracles on Maple Hill, by Virginia Sorensen - set squarely in the 1950's, I think this is another winner a lot of people have never heard about. Great story about the healing power of nature (think The Secret Garden).

Gay-Neck: The Story of a Pigeon, by Dhan Gopal Mukerji - sadly, no boy (and few girls) over the age of 8 or 9 will ever check this out of the school library, and it was surprisingly modern and engaging for something that was published in 1927. Maybe you can find a copy published in the U.K., where it carries the title Chitra: The Story of a Pigeon. Seriously, this story of a pigeon was pretty darn cool. Who would have guessed?

Dear Mr. Henshaw, by Beverly Cleary - another book that sounded booooring but was fun. If you've ever written a letter to an author (or your child has to for a school project), you might enjoy this. And you don't have to be divorced or have divorced parents to like the book, either.

Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, by Rachel Field - yes, old-fashioned again (hey, it won in 1930), but surprisingly interesting, especially for a book about a doll. I don't even like dolls and I liked this a lot.

and finally, my favorite out of all of these: The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman - this year's winner. I didn't want to read it at first, because I'm not a huge fan of horror, but the reviews (even before it won the Newbery) convinced me that I should give it a try.

The first chapter is scary - not graphic and gory, but definitely scary. And if one of your kid's anxieties is that people are going to sneak into your house and kill you all while you sleep, you might want to steer them away from The Graveyard Book for a bit. Anyway, because of the nature of the story, librarians are having a hard time deciding whether to put it in the regular kid's section or in the YA or Teen section.

The Ann Arbor District Library gets mentioned in this article as having

"hit upon the most Solomon-like solution to the problem — it classifies Gaiman’s book under Y for youth fiction, which is in between J for juvenile and T for books in the teen room."

I see that my local library (the Saline District Library) put it in the youth section ("birth through age twelve"). I kind of hope that they buy another copy and put it in the Teen section, because some of the comments on the School Library Journal article note that older kids don't want to check stuff out of the "little kid" section, whereas readers that are 11-14 years old are usually eager to venture into the Teen room. My 12 year goes happily back and forth between the two sections, but he's oblivious to some of the social rules and status distinctions that rule his peers.

I liked Roger Sutton's perspective on this. Really, though, you should just buy your own copy of The Graveyard Book, read it yourself (because I predict you'll want to read it again and again), and decide if your kids can handle it.

Another Good Reason for Kids to Have Recess

2009-02-06T11:40:00.006-05:00

And for them to have trees and bushes and flowers and the like on a playground, not just flat grass, pea gravel, and plastic and wood play structures: there's good evidence that "interacting with nature" improves cognitive function, especially memory and attention. And if your kid has ADHD, the more nature the better.

I read an interesting newspaper article on this research last month: How the City Hurts Your Brain, by Jonah Lehrer (and kudos to the Ann Arbor Chronicle for it's blurb on UM research that lead me to this). Unfortunately, our recent weather (just how many mornings has the temperature been in the single digits or below zero?) has pretty much kept all of us indoors. We don't even have to go out to walk the dog anymore. And as much as I like WiiFit, I did suspect that it's just not quite the same as actually jogging, snowboarding, or taking a yoga class or walking to school.

Well, it's going to be above freezing this weekend, and I'm determined that we go on some of the "nature hikes" we had been doing that my kids complain about but seem to enjoy once we're actually out there. One of the authors of the study cited above notes that "People don't have to enjoy the walk to get the benefits. We found the same benefits when it was 80 degrees and sunny over the summer as when the temperatures dropped to 25 degrees in January. The only difference was that the participants enjoyed the walks more in the spring and the summer than in the dead of winter."

I wondered about the "urban walks in Ann Arbor" part of the study - I mean, Huron Street isn't exactly New York City, don't all those trees in Tree City help mitigate the stress of this urban setting? The study noted that participants walked in the Arb and at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens for the "nature" part of the study, which sounds good. I found myself wondering how a suburban neighborhood falls in this natural/urban continuum. And congratulating myself for buying a house on the edge of town, with its views of rolling farmland and a couple of barns and lunch trees.

I'm reading Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot right now, finding it much easier going than The Wordy Shipmates (yeah chapters! short chapters, even), if not as good historically. Her essay on "The Strenuous Life" touched on these indoor/outdoor themes, and as someone who would rather read than ski, ice skate, or even take the kids sledding, I found myself agreeing with her guilt about liking the indoors. Plus, this line made me snort:

What if I'm perfectly content that, on any given day, my only communion with the earth is watching the sun set over New Jersey or burning a "geranium jasmine oak moss" aromatherapy candle? (p. 194)

So I decided that I'm reading Bernd Heinrich's Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival next, and we'll contemplate hibernating animals while we slosh through the melting snow and mud sometime soon. Whether we like it or not.

Unblocking

2009-02-04T15:05:00.013-05:00

Perhaps I took Reblock Yourself the Polly Frost Way! a little too seriously. I haven't blogged here since before Christmas.

Yes, most of my family did explore viral gastroenteritis in January. That's another excuse. I knew it was sweeping through my daughter's grade school. I suspected that it came on quite suddenly when we were at her school's Winter Carnival, when a nine year old a few people in front of us in line lost his dinner. At least his dad hadn't paid for that second piece of pizza yet.

And I've been busy shoveling snow. And putting plastic over our leaky windows. I'm glad to see the last of January.

I have been reading. Here are a few notes on what I've been reading since the beginning of the new year:

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel L. Everett

This was a truly interesting book, if a little disjointed. The author combines an autobiographical account of his work as a missionary and a linguist among a group of Indians in Brazil (the Pirahã) with some classic ethnography and musings on linguistics theory, philosophy, and religion.

The Pirahã are really different, both culturally and when it comes to language. If you want to read about about some people that think about life in a fundamentally different way, this is a good introduction. Sleep, ambition, raising children, numbers - wow. It's hard to wrap your mind around their worldview, but even the little we can comprehend makes you think about your own life choices - this one of those things that is most seductive about reading good anthropology. And Everett writes better than most anthropologists.

Some might find the chapters on linguistics a little slow going (but if you've always wanted to read about Chomsky, Whorf, etc. this is a good introduction), but you can always just skim that and enjoy the parts about Everett's life and how the Pirahã change him. Whether their culture shaped their language or the language molds their lives is one of the points Everett discusses at some length.

The title comes from a Pirahã belief that sleep is dangerous, too much will make you weak and vulnerable to jungle threats. They get up a lot in the middle of the night, poke the fire, bake a potato, eat something, chat, etc. - an eight hour stretch of sleep is unheard of in their villages.

Right now I'm reading The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. How is it that I've never read anything by her before? It's wonderful. Puritans and the Brady bunch and shining cities on hills. But why oh why didn't she use some chapter breaks? And an index? I'm halfway through the book and wondering if she is going to mention The Witch of Blackbird Pond (isn't that how most older girls of my generation learned about Puritan life?), and I can't check the index. Hmpf.

Speaking of Newbery winners, I am still reading them for The Newbery Project. The most recent one (a re-read) was Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which was so good that until I started Sarah Vowell's book everything else suffered in comparison.

Snow Day

2008-12-19T17:49:00.004-05:00

Today was a snow day. My son missed a big math test and movie afternoon at school, and my daughter missed pajama-pizza-and holiday party day (but the first grade teachers sent a note home Thursday night reassuring their students that it would be rescheduled after school resumes in January).

Check out the drift on our garage roof. I'm glad we got that new roof in October (and if anyone's looking for a really reasonable recommendation for a roofer, I heartily recommend Tony's Roof Repair in Ann Arbor).

Currently Reading

2008-12-18T11:06:00.008-05:00

I should blog about something besides books. Like "actual life" even, imponderable or not.

But not today! There's a snow storm coming tonight and tomorrow morning (the media are beside themselves with excitement. Will it be a snow day? Do you have enough ice melt, bread, milk, beer, and egg nog?) and I have stuff to do before it hits.

I did want to mention one of the books I'm reading now, though.

I'm really enjoying The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West, by Sid Fleischman. It's on the short list of books that the "Mock Newbery Committee" is considering for the 2009 Newbery Awards (if you want to know more about that, check out this blurb I wrote on The Newbery Project). It's written for older kids, so its short chapters are the perfect length for reading in bits and pieces, but the vocabulary and syntax are not child-like in the least. I was thrilled to run across "farm sass" again (see the lengthy post I did on "garden sass" a few years ago), as in:

Meanwhile, the tightfisted wife of the publisher provided meals notable for their trifling portions. News of the great potato famine then raging in Ireland could not have escaped backwater Hannibal, and Sam must have felt himself to be a cosufferer. To sustain himself, Sam felt obliged to raid the cellar at night for potatoes and other farm sass taken in barter for subscriptions (p. 28).

I also learned that when he was in his 20's, the young Samuel Clemens planned to travel "to the headwaters of the Amazon and collect coca and trade in it and make a fortune" (p. 34), which is fun to know.

I don't think that Fleischman's biography is going to win the Newbery (only a couple of other biographies have won - one on Abraham Lincoln in 1988, and one of Louisa May Alcott in 1934) - but I'm happy to recommend it for older kids and adults alike. If you want a more critical review of the book, I recommend Wendy B.'s review on goodreads.com, because she said everything I was vaguely thinking but couldn't articulate.

If You Really Want a Snow Day...

2008-12-04T16:36:00.007-05:00

...you should wear your pajamas inside out and flush an ice cube down the toilet. This is what one of the neighborhood kids told my son last Sunday afternoon, anyway, when they were predicting 3-7 inches overnight, and everyone (except for a stay-at-home parent or two :-/) was really wishing for another day tacked on to the end of the Thanksgiving weekend.

I had never heard about this bit of childhood magic, so I went Googling and found an interesting link to an NPR story. An inquiry on the parenting board I frequent also turned up several instances of related rituals for getting a snow day, including licking a spoon and sleeping with it under your pillow, and putting a white crayon under your pillow (along with wearing your pajamas inside out or backwards). I wonder how far back these stories date? It's an interesting anthropological question, and if I had time I would check out something like this book on Rituals and Patterns in Children's Lives and see if it's in there, and what other childhood rituals (May baskets? dandelions under the chin? jump rope songs?) are in there.

My son who struggles with OCD expressed his disbelief in this particular ritual, and laughed about how funny it was, this "normative manifestation of compulsive behaviors found in typical development". Which is interesting - when it comes to real OCD, everyone else's rituals (including many group beliefs) are utterly bizarre. But your own idiosyncratic rituals, avoidances, etc. - no matter how illogical, those are different. You just never can tell with OCD, can you?*

Anyway, we got rain and then maybe an inch of snow, which quickly melted. The photo above is actually from last January.

*pun intended. I know very well it's the "doubting disease".

And Another "Year" Book!

2008-11-20T13:51:00.009-05:00

Strangely enough, I finally got a book I've had wish-listed on www.paperbackswap.com for about a year (which is great for all those books you'd like to have, not borrow from the library, but are too cheap to buy right now on half.com or addall.com) - it's like getting a surprise present when one of these books gets listed.

Anyway, the book is Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn, by Hannah Holmes. And it fits right in with all the "year in the non-fiction life" memoirs I posted about last week.

Suburban Safari is an excellent book, by the way, full of the best kind of nature writing, by someone who understands that you don't have to travel to some pristine wilderness (as if ever there was such a thing, except maybe in the New World more than twenty-thousand years ago) to observe nature.

The Year of Reading "Year of Something" Memoirs

2008-11-12T16:54:00.005-05:00

So I'm reading A.J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically right now. An entertaining book, full of weird bits of knowledge about mixing linen and wool, praying, coveting, and other things I don't think about very much.

And it occurred to me that I've read a number of "I did something for a year" memoirs. And most of them were pretty enjoyable. In the last few years (ok, I fudged the post title a bit), I've read Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea; Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, by Julie Powell; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver; Gary Paul Nabhan's Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods (note that Nabhan beat Kingsolver to the punch by a few years, and also refrained from the using the word year in his subtitle); and The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, by Steve Rinella (what, no subtitle at all?).

And also: A Country Year: Living the Questions, by Sue Hubbell, and The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, by Henry Beston (the oldest of this type of book I read, published in 1928). Whew, that's a lot of "year of something or other" books.

Rinella's book is the only one I've read that comes up in an entertaining article from the NYT Book magazine with the title "The Year I Stopped Shopping, Had Lots of Sex, Cooked Street Pigeon...", which I found by Googling "year of doing something memoirs".

Clearly, I need to do something....something different for a year and then write about it. But what?

From Abluvion to Zyxt (A Book Review of "Reading the OED")

2008-10-25T13:10:00.003-04:00

Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate.

—Mark Twain, in William Dean Howells, 1906

I love unusual words, especially words that are saturated with history, or words that describe something that I never realized had a word devoted to it (imponderabila, from Bronislaw Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific fits both criteria for me).

I regularly read Michael Quinion's World Wide Words and WordSpy (adorkable! fauxmosexual!), check wordy books out of the library, and spend far too long rambling through the Internets searching for the origins of phrases like "garden sass" or "fall vs. autumn"- as you can tell if you click on the words label in my righthand sidebar. And I was thrilled when both the Saline District library and the AADL offered access to the Oxford English Dictionary online.

So when I saw Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea, I knew it was a book that I should check out. And I wasn't disappointed.

The book is ordered alphabetically (duh), but it's not all words. Well, actually, it is all words, there are no pictures in it, but it isn't all definitions. The essays on dictionaries and reading them are wonderful in their own right:

But what about all the things that you cannot do with the electronic version?

You cannot drop the computer on the floor in a fit of pique, or slam it shut. You cannot leave a bookmark with a note on it in a computer and then come upon it after several years and feel happy you've found something you thought you had lost. You cannot get any sort of tactile pleasure from rubbing the pages of a computer. (Maybe some people do get a tactile pleasure from rubbing their computers, but they are not people I have any interest in knowing anything about.)

....I've never looked across the room at my computer and fondly remembered things that I once read in it. I can while away hours at a time just standing in front of my books and relive my favorite passages merely gazing at their spines. I have never walked into a room full of computers, far from home, and immediately felt a warm familiarity come over me, the way I have with every library I've ever set foot in (p. 56-57).

But on to Shea's favorite words! Here's the first entry in the A's:

Abluvion (n.) Substances or things that are washed away.

Chances are you have never stared at the dirty bathwater washing down the drain and wondered, Is there a word for that? but now you will forever be cursed with the knowledge that indeed there is (p. 5).

My favorite in the A's, though is:

Anonymuncule (n.) An anonymous, small-time writer.

This delightful word is the result of combining anonymous with the Latin word homunculus ("little man"), p. 9.

And constult! Why don't people use this word today? It's perfect:

Constult (v.) To act stupidly together

Taking part in an activity that is inordinately stupid just because one's friends are doing it is not the exclusive province of teenagers - it just seems that way.

Shea has a wry voice, and seeing his opinions come through in the commentary on the definitions and his musings about libraries (public and personal) and the people who use them is just fun. This is one of those books I want to keep on that special shelf devoted to books about books.

My only criticism is that it is too short. Shea mentions that he kept track of many more words than he used in his book. While Reading the OED feels like it is a good length (never a chance to get bored!), I wanted more. More weird words to go look up online, more of his gentle snark, more stories about lexographers past and present.

Besides, where else would I ever have learned that the word fizzle originally meant to fart silently? Unless I read the OED myself, anyway.

Oh, and zyxt is an archaic Kentish word meaning "to see", in case you were wondering about that.

Barack-O-Lantern

2008-10-10T09:04:00.006-04:00

I'm in Saline, on a fairly busy street. Do you think my pumpkin's more likely to get smashed if it has the "Yes We Can" or "No More Lies" design from the Yes We Carve site?

I like the fact that Obama's campaign people ask for a mere $5 contribution and encourage you to carve your pumpkin to show your support, though I'm not generally a fan of co-opting holidays for ideological purposes (see this post from Halloween three years ago, and this one). I'll probably stick with my bumper sticker and t-shirt for political purposes, and let the kids carve the traditional triangle eyed faces on their jack-o-lanterns.

Though I do think Obama's graphic artists' designs are way cooler than the McCain ones.

And if you'd like Tina Fey to come to Michigan (instead of Sarah Palin), check out this petition on the Michigan Democratic Party's website.

A Map of Home: Book Review

2008-09-29T09:53:00.017-04:00

Since I haven't bothered to blog since last summer (and did so very rarely before that in this last year!), you should realize that if I'm getting on here just to plug a book, it must be really, really good. And it is. It is so very,very, good you should buy it now and find a way to get your copy signed by the author soon.

A Map of Home, by Randa Jarrar, is the best book I've read in ages about being a rebellious teenager. Best book about it forever, maybe. And I've read a lot of books featuring teen angst, teen love, growing of age, the experience of being an immigrant, and dealing with dysfunctional families.

If you read and enjoyed Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow by Faiza Guene, or The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Walls, or Stealing Buddha's Dinner, by Bich Minh Nguyen (hey, she lived in Ann Arbor for a while just like Jarrar!) then I think you'll like A Map of Home. Jarrar's novel reminded me of the best of all of these books in its honesty and in the heroine's ability to find humor and insight in the most unlikely places.

It's funny, it's sweet, it's rude, it's geographically and historically interesting, and it's incredibly easy and just enjoyable to read. A Map of Home is the story of Nidali, who was born in Boston (to a pair of the most loud, stubborn, and memorable parents I think I've ever seen portrayed), who grew up in Kuwait before the first Gulf War, and who matured in Egypt and finally, finished high school in Texas. Check out Nidali's first reactions to Texas:

I looked out of the car's window, mesmerized by the highway. Cars stayed in their lanes. They stopped at the traffic lights: here, these red and yellow and green circles were not mere suggestions or street decorations. The roads were clean. The graffiti on the inside of tunnels was pretty, like a well-tended flower. the air didn't smell of trash. A woman was crossing the street and no one appeared to offer her his luscious love bone. In the distance I saw lights from the city; they hovered over us like the personal illuminations of a hundred tiny angels (p. 215).

I don't think the title A Map of Home was catchy enough, somehow (there seem to be a lot of rather highbrow books out there favor that the use of a map as a literary device, don't you think?), though I did enjoy how Jarrar used maps in the book. Not literally (although that's not a bad idea, maybe she could draw one herself for the paperback cover?), but literarily.

My only regret is that I didn't read this book a few months ago, so I could have gone to her book signing in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago. But since Jarrar lives here, I hope she does another local one sometime. And I hope she is working on another novel right now. I'd love to read her take on marriage and motherhood.

Stupid Things You Get Maudlin About After the Loss of a Dog

2008-07-08T17:05:00.014-04:00

We had to put our elderly dog down last Friday. She was born December 21, 1992, so Zoe had a very long (and I think pretty good) life for a golden retriever/black lab mix.

Besides being sad at her death, and missing her almost perfect dog-ness, I find myself getting all teary-eyed about the traces she left behind. These are the reminders of over fifteen years of dog-ownership: treats and plastic bags for picking up poop stuffed in coat pockets, someone that's always happy to see you when get home, the last full vacuum cannister of dog hair (although we'll probably be finding remnants of dog hair as long as we live in this house), thinking we hear a whine or that we see her sprawled gracefully across the living room floor. The whine was my daughter's nose whistling after she crawled in bed with us at 5 am; the glimpse in the living room was a brown towel that my son dumped legos on to expedite pick-up.

Even the bare spot by the refrigerator where her food and water bowl sat reminds me that she'll never again walk up to me at the computer, lay her head on my thigh, and mutely ask to be petted.

Long Overdue Update

2008-06-11T14:56:00.004-04:00

I don't really know why I haven't been blogging. There have been plenty of potential topics: the best way to deal with an outbreak of head lice on your children, the worst time to go the University of Michigan emergency room for possible appendicitis (Saturday night at 1 am - I got seen around 6:30 am, turned out to be a ruptured ovarian cyst), books I've read recently, my daughter's horseback riding lessons, and the excitement of replacing screen doors, dishwasher controllers, and sump pumps. A lot of actual life, but not anything I've been inspired to document. I think writing elsewhere has filled the need to write that blogging used to satisfy.

One place I have been able to blog is over at The Newbery Project. Writing about the most recent children's or YA book that I've read is pretty easy. Here's the ones I've done in the last few months:

The Door in the Wall, by Marguerite de Angeli (14th century English boy becomes crippled but still manages to save the castle; 1950 winner. Very old-fashioned story, the kind that Lois Lowry wrote about in the bibliography of The Willoughbys).

Crispin: The Cross of Lead, by Avi (14th century English boy becomes a wolf's head, encounters bad guys and good guys involved in the Peasants' Revolt; 2003 winer).

Kira-Kira, by Cynthia Kadohata (Japanese-American family in Iowa and Georgia in the 60's and 70's - good YA girls' story; 2005 winner).

Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson (1940's Chesapeake Bay, another YA girls' story full of angst; 1981 winner).

Up a Road Slowly, by Irene Hunt (first half of 1900's, another angsty YA book that will appeal largely to girls; 1967 winner).

Amos Fortune: Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates (late 1700's Africa, Massachusetts, and NH; 1951 winner and one of the most outdated I've read. But not as bad as Daniel Boone).

The Wheel on the School, by Meindert DeJong (turn of the 19th century Holland story about a group of schoolkids who try to get storks to nest on the schoolhouse).

Spring Snow and Historical Newbery Winners

2008-03-23T10:54:00.005-04:00

Ack, it's just wrong to have 8 inches of snow on the ground the day before Easter. Above you see the view from our back yard before we got dumped upon. Yes, it is dark. March really isn't the best month in Michigan.

I'm still reading a lot of children's historical fiction - it is surprisingly good. Here are links to Newbery Project reviews of The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman, The Midwife's Apprentice, by Karen Cushman, and Number the Stars, by Lois Lowry.

We're on a bit of a Lowry kick here - after reading The Giver with my 11-year-old, we went on to Gathering Blue and just started Messenger. I think Number the Stars is my favorite so far, though my son just ordered Gossamer from the latest Scholastic Books flier from school, so we'll have to see how that stacks up. She really is an amazing writer, and one that I missed by not reading much recent children's literature before this.

Spring and Books and Stuff

2008-03-14T18:01:00.007-04:00

You have to wonder what kind of a person Googles "What is actual life?". And when you use google as a verb, do you capitalize it? Are all the people Googling "imponderabilia" looking for me, or are they just stymied by the word?

My kids played outside for two hours after school today. They drew on the driveway with chalk. Amazingly, my son managed to cover most of his clothes in chalk dust. He had spots of it in the middle of his back. I could tell the splotches lower on his back were from putting his hands on his back, just above his waist, but I'm not quite sure how he managed to get the chalk between his shoulderblades. I don't think he was rolling on his back in the driveway.

And I finally saw a robin. Maybe - just maybe - spring really is coming.

I've been reading all kinds of fun stuff, but nothing that I love or hate enough to blog about. Except for two more Newbery winners: The Giver, the 1994 winner by Lois Lowry (and guess what? I even liked the cover), and Roller Skates, by Ruth Sawyer, which won the award in 1937.

Reviewing Bad Books

2008-02-26T22:19:00.005-05:00

Well, I wrote the most scathing review that I've ever given to a children's book today, on a biography of Daniel Boone, written by James Daugherty in 1939. You can read it here at the Newbery Project.

I hated the artwork, I hated the style of the story, I hated its content. I can't believe it was ever given an award, even in 1940.

If I thought that any child would actually voluntarily plod through Daniel Boone, by James Daugherty, I would be more worried about it being on library shelves. It's out-of-print, so kids are unlikely to find it elsewhere. And maybe if they do happen to pick it up (like if they're doing a biography paper, for instance, like my fifth grader just finished), they'll be so mind-dulled by Daugherty's prose that they won't realize what he really says.

Sometimes it feels good to pull out all of the stops when you really hate a piece of literature. I never thought I'd do it for a Newbery Award winner, but I think that James Daugherty belongs right up there with Darla Shine and Linda Hirshman as authors that deserve the all of opprobrium that their heavy-handed propaganda incurs.

Q Road: Book Review

2008-02-14T16:30:00.011-05:00

Q Road,* a novel by Bonnie Jo Campbell, was one of my luckier finds from the free paperback swap shelf at my local library. I read the back cover, stuffed it triumphantly into my bag (leaving a trashy mystery in its place), and promptly forgot about it for over a year. I finally got around to reading it this week, and discovered that it wasn't anything like the quirky story that the blurb on the back promised: it was much, much better.

Q Road is an occasionally dark, thoroughly gritty, and often poignant look at the lives of a handful of people of rural Greenland Township in southwestern Michigan. Much of the story takes place on October, 9, 1999 - and it should be noted that early October is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Midwest. Historical vignettes featuring some of the characters and their ancestors range back to the 1830's, when the Potawatomi were forced out of the Kalamazoo area; the 1860's, when the big barn that is central to the story was built; and the 1930's, when a tornado destroyed a farmhouse next to the barn.

For me, some of the appeal of Q Road was in Campbell's skillful portrayal of the woods and fields, the river, and the gardens and farmstands of her native Michigan. I grew up in a small town surrounded by farms in northern Illinois, and have lived in southeastern Michigan for over twenty years. My present house on the edge of town backs up onto one of the few remaining farms in the area (luckily it's in a farmland preservation program); in the twenty years I've been here the amount of open area that has become big box stores and subdivisions is staggering. And the conflict between suburbanites and farmers on Q Road could have been taken from our local paper. So her portrayal of similar situations on the western side of the state isn't too surprising. But the insightful way that Campbell describes both the people and the land (and even some plants and animals) itself did surprise me.

There was a lot of fascinating information on birds seamlessly woven into the story, and as a former archaeologist, I was tickled to see that the remains of Native garden beds (see some maps of these ridged fields below, and if you have journal access through an academic library, here's an article on them) played a role in the story. The Indian gardens weren't all hokey and mystical in the book, either, but were part of an unflinching look at the land and its changing uses.

Similarly, the people of Q Road were portrayed with their complications, ambiguities, and flaws, and a refreshing lack of stereotypes. Not every farmer's son was a wholesome son of the soil, and the philandering aluminum window salesman wasn't wholly unlikable. The old women were particularly realistic and entertaining - and when was the last time you read about a little old lady that was anything but sweet and boring? (Apart from Janet Evanovich's Grandma Mazur, anyway). The two retired women on Q Road couldn't be more different from each other, but both were fascinating in their own way.

What I really want right now is a sequel - like one set ten years later, in 2009. I don't see any signs that Campbell is doing this on her website, so I've had to content myself with buying her book of short stories, Women and Other Animals, and hoping it's as good as Q Road.

"Ancient Garden Beds" illustration from MSU's map library, from History of Kalamazoo County, Michigan, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers, by Samuel W. Durant. Philadelphia, Everets, 1880.

*Q Road refers to the name of the township road in southwestern Michigan where most of the story takes place. O Road and P Road are also mentioned, but Q Road and the Kalamazoo River and a handful of other memorable places - George Harland's 160 year old barn, a drafty farmhouse, a houseboat made out of an old trailer, a new manufactured house, and the Barn Grill - form the meaty backbone of this book. I'm not sure that the title helps sell it, though, and I thought the hardcover dust jacket was hideous (the much more attractive paperback cover is shown above).

Strangely enough, Powells.com put Q Road in its "horror and mystery" section. I guess there is a little horror (though not much of the supernatural kind) there, and there's a little mystery - but really, I think Q Road should go on the bookshelf next to Jane Smiley's books, or Steve Amick's The Lake, the River, and the Other Lake and Meghan Daum's The Quality of Life Report. Although they're non-fiction, Michael Perry's books (like Population: 485 and Truck) could go on the same shelf. If you have any other suggestions that capture the essence of the Midwest with sympathy and without saccharine, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

Yet More Historical Fiction for Kids

2008-02-09T17:49:00.001-05:00

In my reviews of The Witch of Blackbird Pond (17th century Connecticut) and Adam of the Road (13th c. England), over at The Newbery Project. The Newbery Committee likes those historicals, doesn't it.

All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: Book Review

2008-01-24T10:30:00.001-05:00

After my book club read The Glass Castle last month, I described it briefly in the book forum in an online community. A friend there (thanks, Naomi!) suggested I might also like Rachel Manija Brown's All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India. The synopsis sounded pretty interesting, and I almost always enjoy reading about different cultures (and this book features both an obscure religious/philosophical group and a very foreign country), so I picked it up from the library.*

I didn't expect this memoir to be so funny. I spent over an hour in the waiting and exam rooms at my local mammogram center this morning (routine yearly exam, all clear), stifling my laughter and snorting and wishing I had a bunch of post-its so I could flag specific passages to share. I looked around the web a bit tonight, and found a perfectly nice interview with Rachel Manija Brown on BookSlut - but little mention of the mind-boggling, eye-popping passages that made this story of a child stranded amongst weirdos in a remote part of India so enjoyable for me.

At the ashram, Baba's name was on everyone's lips at all times. It was used as punctuation, as a greeting, as an exclamation, as a goodbye, and as a prayer. Mom in particular used "Baba" much as some people use "fuck," as an all-purpose conjunction. "Oh, Baba, what a nice sunny day." "Baba, a cockroach in the dal!" "Oh, Baba, the train's late again." She even followed burps and sneezes with a trailing sigh of "Oh, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba, Baba."

When I saw The Brady Bunch episode in which Jan exclaims, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!" I knew exactly how she felt (p. 86).

From the end of one of my favorite chapters ("Without a Single Marathi Vowel"):

I wondered sometimes if the residents were strange because they lived in Ahmednagar, or if their choice to move to an ashram proved that they'd been oddballs before they left. As the only person in the ashram who wasn't there by choice, I would be the test case. If I turned out like the other residents - if I started writing love poems to Baba, if I volunteered information about my morning dump, if I turned eighteen and decided to stay on as a full-time Baba-lover - it would be because that forge everyone kept talking about had melted me down (p. 128).

Although Brown endured some horrific things, I never felt as outraged and saddened during All the Fishes as I did when reading The Glass Castle. Brown's parents were out-there different, self-absorbed, and sometimes oblivious, but they were never as violent nor as horribly negligent as Jeannette Walls' parents. In fact, much of Rachel's suffering in All the Fishes came from the nuns or the other students at the Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Savior Convent school. Her stories of this school beat all of the other "worst thing a teacher ever did to you" stories you've heard, hands down.

Rachel Manija Brown's website proved to be an unexpected pleasure. As a child who spent the equivalent of several years buried deep inside books, many of them obscure and antiquated, I especially liked the Author's Notes, which describe the many books that play a role in All the Fishes.

There's everything from Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword to Marguerite Henry's King of the Wind (link to my Newbery Project review) to (I kid you not) Biggles Takes It Rough, by W.E. Johns. Plus deleted scenes, just like your favorite dvd, and a FAQ with "Whatever happened to the people in your book?". This was a lot more fun than the advertising/reviews/book club discussion questions I've come to expect on authors' websites. And it's all so pretty. Kudos to Ms. Brown and whomever designed her website.

I can't figure out why this book isn't as well known as The Glass Castle. It's perfect for book clubs - there's absolutely beautiful prose, tons of interesting things to discuss about it, and it's not too tragic (maybe it needs a "not an Oprah pick" sticker on the cover?). I couldn't even find any other reviews searching blogs, which partially prompted me to write this. It deserves much wider recognition, dammit!

I'll leave you with final bit of wisdom from All the Fishes Come Home to Roost:

Parents, if you do not want your children to write tell-all memoirs when they grow up, do not name them KhrYstYll, Pebble, or Shaka Zulu (p. 18).

*If you can afford to buy new hardcovers, this one's worth it. You can also request that your library buy it for you.

Despite My Absence

2008-01-23T21:52:00.001-05:00

I haven't given up on blogging altogether. I've been dealing with a very sick, very old dog that needs a lot of help, many pages of fifth grade math homework (quick! What is the prime factorization of 60? Use exponents in your answer), house falling apart stuff, the usual.

I did read this year's Newbery Award winner - Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, by Laura Amy Schlitz - checked it out of the library hours after the award was announced, read it, blogged about it here, and returned it the next day.

And I'm working on a couple longer book reviews which are almost done.

I hope all of you that I never sent holiday cards to are having a good new year. Please don't feel slighted - no one got cards this year, even my parents. Though they did get presents.

I Read Two More Historical Fiction Newbery Winners

2007-12-21T13:08:00.001-05:00

One from 1941: The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds, set in 1757; and one from 1973: The Slave Dancer, by Paula Fox, set in 1840. Both are especially interesting when it comes to race - check out the title links for my reviews at The Newbery Project.

I'm also reading Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali, by Kris Holloway, and it is simply amazing. I wish I'd heard about this book a year or two ago, because then I could have seen the author when she came to Ann Arbor and talked about her book. It is an especially nice follow-up to The Birth House, which my book club read last month, and reminds me of two great books on Africa by anthropologists: Return to Laughter, by Eleanor Smith Bowen, and Dancing Skeletons, by Katharine A. Dettwyler.

How the 70's Ruined Another Good Newbery Book Cover

2007-12-10T13:42:00.001-05:00

I just reviewed Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry, here at the Newbery Project. It was the 1941 winner, and despite some minor quibbles (mostly due to the time period when it was written), I liked it a lot. And I loved the author's illustrations. One of them graced the cover of the 1968 reprint that I got from the library:

And then I saw what they did to it a generation later:

Why? Why do they do this to perfectly good covers?

Actually, I think I liked the original 1940 cover the best, which just shows a Polynesian tapa-cloth pattern that the author did in a woodcut:

Browsing the author's granddaughter's website, I also learned that Armstrong's brother Paul was the inventor of the Sperry Topsider boatshoe. Huh.

Unstrange Minds: Book Review

2007-12-08T17:14:00.001-05:00

Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism, by Roy Richard Grinker, was a fascinating read. I've read several absorbing, thoughtful books on autism in the past few years (Songs of the Gorilla Nation, by Dawn Prince-Hughes and George and Sam, by Charlotte Moore, most recently), and Grinker's book helped put the others in a larger context. It was kind of like Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire in that respect, which put all the novels and memoirs I've read about the Middle East into a bigger picture, with history and comparisons of the extremes and the differences of Islam (or autism, for Grinker) in different parts of the world.

Grinker has gotten the most publicity for his analysis of the autism "epidemic" (like this Time article), and his argument that improved and broader diagnosis accounts for the startling rise in numbers of people with autism spectrum disorders, but I found his historical and cross-cultural examinations of autism even more compelling. Who would have thought that the stories of Leo Kanner, Hans Asperger, the influence of psychoanalytic theory, and the origins of the DSM would make such interesting reading?

The story of Grinker's daughter and their family's experiences with a school district was both eye-opening and moving, and all too familiar to any parent who has dealt with an IEP for something that confuses and dismays many people.

Thanks to Naomi, who recommended this in her journal here. :-)

Early and Late Fall Pictures

2007-11-12T11:12:00.002-05:00

Shagbark hickory (Carya ovata, one of the few trees I can identify by the bark) in October.

View from the bedroom window at the end of the day. Yes, it's a blurry picture, it's through the window. If you click and enlarge it's still blurry, but you can see that the sky is absolutely filled with geese. Landing, grazing in the corn stubble, swooping over the house and honking, this has been a fall full of Canadian geese.

Sarah, Plain and Tall

2007-11-04T22:23:00.001-05:00

Well, I still have a couple articles on climate change in the Great Lakes and sustainable development to finish for my part time job, but I did manage to read a wonderful children's book. I steered myself away from Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan because I thought it was going to be like a made-for-tv movie. Wrong - it's the most deceptively simple and beautiful bit of writing I've read for a long time. Check out the review at The Newbery Project.

The White Stag

2007-10-24T16:01:00.001-04:00

I looked at this award winning book of 1938 here at The Newbery Project. I really don't get its appeal, even if you're a Hungarian patriot (which apparently author Kate Seredy was).

Was I was too hard on it? I think my disappointment regarding the difference between the Foreword and the story made me more critical than I might have been otherwise. Regardless, it was one of the least enjoyable Newbery winners I've read so far, out of 24 to date.

I did love the very elegant 1930s drawings, and I think the modern cover sucks in comparison. With all those beautiful black and white drawings - the best part of the book - they go and use this?

Mind you, the original 1938 cover wasn't all that pretty, either. I think they ruined it with the color:

Early to School

2007-10-23T11:24:00.000-04:00

For fifth grade, my son has to be at school at 7:55 instead of the more civilized 9:00 am of grades 1-4. As winter gets closer, it is darker and darker when we get up. I do like being able to see the sunrise sometimes, though.

Julie, Wolves, Vocabulary

2007-10-14T11:54:00.001-04:00

I have another writing deadline coming up, so my blogging is limited. I did manage to read Julie of the Wolves, the 1973 Newbery winner by Jean Craighead George, and write a review over at The Newbery Project. When you don't have much time to read for fun, YA or older children's literature is great.

My latest favorite internet time suck is the vocabulary game at the Free Rice charity site. It makes those Reader's Digest "Word Power" tests look like the pap they really are.

But I don't think anguine is a level 40 word. I mean, cruciform is in level 45 and it's much easier to figure out (and much more common). I got to 50 last night, but this morning I stalled at 43 on lustrate and ambagious.

Banned Book Week

2007-10-01T17:46:00.001-04:00

Ahoy! The ALA says "Treasure Your Freedom to Read and Get Hooked on a Banned Book" (click on the Banned Books Week logo above for their cool link).

And here's a link to a post I did two years ago for Banned Books Week. I still love Judy Blume.

And speaking of Judy Blume, the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books have an awesome bunch of posts up here in celebration of this week. Deenie gets a B, Go Ask Alice gets an F - fun reading. I'm on the library waiting list for The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler. Maybe I should check out And Tango Makes Three while I'm at it.

Inanity

2007-09-26T10:09:00.001-04:00

Hey, I'm so glad that this blog is the number two source for Google searches on "inane in sentence."

Sorry about the lack of pictures for the "housewife 1 on 1." And (presumably), on the other end of a gender continuum, who Googles "my husband is an asshole" and expects advice?

Apparently I'm also the go to blog for people that spell patriarchal as "patriartical". Good to know, thanks StatCounter.

A Wrinkle in Time

2007-09-24T15:24:00.001-04:00

I reviewed the classic children's book A Wrinkle in Time* over at the Newbery Project yesterday. Why did I wait over thirty years to re-read this book?

I like the cover on this edition better than the one we have at home. I'm going to buy a nice hardcover edition for my kids (ok, for me really), because we should have this on our shelves.

*edited 9/27/07 to add a link to And Another Thing about A Wrinkle in Time...

Learning to Drive: Book Review

2007-09-22T13:14:00.000-04:00

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, by Katha Pollitt.

In the last year, I've read all of Pollitt's essay collections (and blogged here about Virginity or Death! and Reasonable Creatures). I enjoy Pollitt's political perspectives and her humor a great deal, but it's her incredible gift for words that really keeps me reading, even when she's writing about a topic that doesn't particularly interest me. The pace, the particular words she picks, the way it all hangs together, often ending with a surprise punch to your gut - it is all very satisfying. And of course it helps that I agree with most of Pollitt's views - it's always nice to find your opinions vindicated by someone who articulates what you were thinking with such color and style.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I was really looking forward to Pollitt's new book, especially when I read that it was mostly material that was not previously published (many of her essays for The Nation can be read online here and since I got hooked, I've been reading the columns and her blog regularly). And not only is this book new stuff, it's more personal than political, which makes it quite different from her previous works.

Some reviewers apparently feel a bit betrayed by this. The most brutal review was by Susan Salter Reynolds in the LA Times, who called the collection "whingeing" and "self-indulgent at best". I don't agree (but do agree when Reynolds says "It must be my problem"); I think that Pollitt's honest and sometimes painful essays about her personal relationships, fears, and aging make for utterly compelling reading.Unlike her previous books, which I picked up and put down, reading an essay every couple of days, I read this one in a day and a half, stealing moments whenever I could find them to read the next piece. It was over all too soon.

Here's a few selections from my favorite parts. On the aftermath of her breakup with a long-term boyfriend, who lived with her for years and apparently slept with numerous other women:

...I would browse the Internet, searching for information about him. Except "browse" is much too placid and leisured a word - a cow browses in a meadow, a reader browses in a library for a novel to take home for the weekend. What I did fell between zeal and monomania. I was like Javert, hunting him through the sewers of cyberspace, moving from link to link in the dark, like Spider-Man flinging himself by a filament over the shadowy chasm between one roof and another. "Are you Webstalking him?" a friend in her twenties asked over coffee. I hadn't known there was a word for what I was doing. (p. 22)

On what people do vs. what they say, and the power and beauty of words:

You think what people say is what matters, an older friend told me long ago. You think it's all about words. Well, that's natural, isn't it? I'm a writer; I can float for hours on a word like "amethyst" or "broom" or the way so many words sound like what they are: "earth" so firm and basic, "air" so light, like a breath. You can't imagine them the other way around: She plunged her hands into the rich brown air. Sometimes I think I would like to be a word - not a big important word, like "love" or "truth," just a small ordinary word, like "orange" or "inkstain" or "so," a word that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away, like the roughness on a pebble in a creek bed, but that has a solid heft when you pick it up, and if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core. (p. 31)

As a midwesterner, I loved the insights into New York City and the east coast in general (no strollers in post offices? What are they, crazy?), especially when it came to motherhood and feminism:

And it was feminism that made it an expected, an ordinary, thing for a man and a woman to live together in their own way - they could clean the house together or just let it fall apart. Those were not ideas that you could easily derive from middle-class American family life in the 1950s and 1960s, even a family of Communists like mine. Who owned the means of production - that was nothing, that could change overnight. But who vacuumed, who brought coffee while the other person remained seated, who held forth and who made encouraging murmurs - that seemed set in stone. (p. 171-2)

I hope that people who don't read Pollitt's columns will pick up this memoir - which veers from funny, to touching, to nostalgic, and then back again to funny - and go on to read the rest of her work. As for me, I'll be returning my copy to the library, buying my own hardcover copy, and hoping that Pollitt comes on a book tour to Ann Arbor so I can get her to autograph my book.

Tags: Katha+Pollitt, books, book+review, Learning+to+Drive

Americans and Food

2007-09-17T14:28:00.000-04:00

The Americans are the grossest feeders of any civilized nation known. As a nation, their food is heavy, coarse, and indigestible, while it is taken in the least artificial forms that cookery will allow. The predominance of grease in the American kitchen, coupled with the habits of hearty eating, and of constant expectorations, are the causes of the diseases of the stomach which are so common in America. -- James Fenimore Cooper, in The American Democrat, 1825 (cited and disagreed with by Frederick Marryat in his A Diary in America, 1839, on p. 30 of the book below).

Just a tidbit from American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes, edited by Molly O'Neill. I don't think we can say that modern American cooking is not artificial in form any more (and isn't it interesting that "artifice" is considered a good thing in 1825?), and expectoration doesn't seem to be such a huge problem any more (are they talking about spitting chew? Just spitting?), but we've certainly still got the grease and heavy eating going.

This book is amazing. It's perfect for browsing - over 700 pages of wonderful excerpts from everyone from Thomas Jefferson, H.L. Mencken, Betty MacDonald, Peg Bracken, and David Sedaris to Michael Pollan, organized historically, a with wonderful section of sources and a meticulous index that starts at abalone and ends at Zuni breadstuff.

A lot of my favorite authors are in here. Frederick Douglass talks about ash cakes and hunger, Walt Whitman describes feeding ice cream to wounded soldiers in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C., and Emily Dickinson provides a recipe for her favorite cake. John Steinbeck talks about breakfast. Russell Baker describes franks and beans. Wendell Berry, Raymond Sokolov, Daniel Pinkwater- all here, as well as any famous food writer you can imagine.

The only problem with this book? It's so big that I'm not going to be able to finish it before it's due back at the library. Ah well, I really need a copy of my own to be able to consult whenever I need it. Did I mention that the recipes that interleave the excerpts are historically intriguing, often droolworthy, and that someone with a wonderful sense of graphics and balance arranged these recipes?

Fossil Park in Sylvania, Ohio

2007-09-09T20:27:00.001-04:00

Fossil Park, just south of the Ohio-Michigan border, is a great place to take your kids on a fall weekend. It's free, you get to keep all the fossils you find, and all you need are some buckets and old toothbrushes (and maybe sunscreen, drinking water, and mosquito spray). They supply the fossils (crinoids, tons of different species of brachiopods, horn corals, and some trilobites) from the Devonian seas, portajons, and a couple of friendly college students who are knowledgeable about local geology and ecology.

Even a five year old can break apart the chunks of shale and recognize the shells within, though they may not have the endurance needed to keep going long enough to find a trilobite. Every time we've been there, though, one of the regulars has shared some broken trilobite bits with my enthusiastic ten year old, who in turn shares his knowledge of paleontology with anyone who will listen.

-edited in Aug 2009 to fix the park system's link, and to add that Google Maps doesn't take you to the right location when you enter "Fossil Park, Sylvania, OH" in their search box. The park is located at 5705 Centennial Rd. (just south of where it says "Silica Quarry #1 on the Google Map), down a little gravel road on the right when you're heading south, just past the Mayberry Square stripmall (which is on your left). If you're coming from Michigan, exit US-23 at Sterns Rd. - the last exit before the Ohio border - and take Sterns Rd. to Clark Rd., which turns into Centennial Rd. in Sylvania.

Maximum Ride #3: Book Review

2007-09-05T08:01:00.000-04:00

Generally, I only post reviews of books that I either absolutely love and want to share with the whole world, or books that annoy me so much that I don't want a single other person to waste their time with them - even with used copies that are "free with shipping & handling" online. Reviews are surprisingly easy when you have such strong feelings about a book.

But then I sold out (see here), and starting taking remuneration - in this case, an amazon.com gift certificate, as well a free copy of the book, from the savvy women at MotherTalk. The first book that came my way was James Patterson's Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. I thought I was pretty well qualified to review this book.

I'm not a literary snob (I love good romance, chick lit., and mysteries), I read lots of current bestsellers, and one of my favorite genres is fantasy/sci-fi. In the last year I've been reading lots of children's and YA selections, reviewing lots of different kinds of kids' books for The Newbery Project. One of the most recent Newbery winners that I read - Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown - reminded me of just how much I like fantasy, and since Patterson's Maximum Ride series is aimed at about the same age group (12 & up), I was really looking forward to it.

Well, if I'd picked this up on my own - perhaps to see if it was appropriate for my ten year old (and it was, for the most part), I wouldn't have bothered with a review. It was just....well, totally (to the max?) mediocre.

I didn't hate this third installment in the Maximum Ride series. I was intrigued by the premise: a group of runaway gene-engineered kids with wings save the world from evil mega-corporation scientists. I actually sought out Patterson's almost-parallel adult book, which I somehow completely missed nine years ago. (Maximum Ride was spun off Patterson's When the Wind Blows).

I didn't finish When the Wind Blows, though. Even the addition of sex didn't make up for a way too-predictable story and clichéd characters. And after reading about half of When the Wind Blows, I definitely felt like Maximum Ride was the better book. During both books, I felt like I was reading one of those X-Files or Star Trek adaptations, with a couple hundred extraneous pages of padding - mostly witty banter and stereotyped descriptions of laboratories. In fact, I can imagine the (proposed) movie, with its cool CGI graphics and nearly non-stop action.

I did enjoy many of Patterson's descriptive passages, and I can see how his writing style would appeal to most teenagers:

Well. If sudden knowledge had a physical force, my head would have exploded right there, and chunks of my brain would have splattered some unsuspecting schmuck in a grocery store parking lot down below. (p. 94)

"Okay, the second they undo us, make sure all heck breaks loose," I said when everyone was awake the next morning - at least I figured it was morning, since someone had turned the lights on again." (p. 115)

But was it really necessary to substitute heck for hell here? I mean, he's talking about evil experiments on children. If you're old enough to read about that, surely h-e-double hockysticks is old hat. Teenagers are supposed to be reading this, not second graders (though I'm sure quite a few second graders know the world hell, too). It grated on me, like many other things in the book.

I couldn't help liking Max, the main character, who was snarky and plucky and strong. But really, she needed some depth. And what's with the two to four page chapters? It makes it easy to put the book down and pick it up again later, but it was the literary equivalent of commercial tv - a book of sound bites.

Furthermore, I'm a little sick of the evil scientist stereotype:

I won't describe the scariest things we saw that morning, 'cause it would depress the heck out of you. Let's just say that if these scientists had been using their brilliance for good instead of evil, cars would run off water vapor and leave fresh compost behind them; no one would be hungry; no one would be ill; all buildings would be earthquake-, bomb-, and flood-proof; and the world's entire economy would have collapsed and been replaced by one based on the value of chocolate. (p. 337)

Do you really think that our world would be perfect if scientists were better people? What about politicians and company wonks and half the people who voted in the last presidential election? Didn't Patterson see Who Killed the Electric Car? Don't go blaming the scientists, people.

Anyway. If I were giving this book a grade, it would get a solid C. I wouldn't discourage any teenagers from reading it - I'm solidly in the "almost any reading is good reading" camp, and there's nothing really offensive in this book, and plenty to redeem it - but there's nothing really great in it, either. Steer your kids to Jumper, by Steven Gould, or Sunshine, by Robin McKinley, either before or after (or instead of) reading Maximum Ride. That's the kind of YA fantasy that's worth keeping on your shelves and re-reading.

Mmmm, Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets

2007-08-13T20:01:00.000-04:00

If you're from southeastern PA, or you like baseball, Tastykake Krimpets, or magical realism, check out my review of Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli over at The Newbery Project. There are lots of other interesting new reviews over there, too.

On Vacation

2007-08-13T16:37:00.000-04:00

Living down here south of I-94, I forget how beautiful it is in the northern part of the mitten. Just a little above where the thumb is attached to Michigan's hand - and definitely above where the fingers separate - the pine trees, the birch trees, and the ferns appear, obvious even when you are speeding by on the interstate. It is cooler and drier and the farms are less frequent, except on Michigan's west coast, where there are beautiful rolling hay fields, patches of corn and pumpkins, and orchards of grapes and cherries.

Things we saw on the drive (not even trying): a flock of wild turkeys crossing the road, a mother deer trailed by a fawn, and two very large-bottomed teenagers on ATVs mooning the highway, who were just down the road from a straw-hatted farmer with three Clydesdales pulling a hay mower.

If you're ever near Charlevoix, I recommend driving south and getting a cherry pie from Royal Farms in Atwood. The pie we got there was as unlike a pie made with canned filling from your grocery store as that really cheap waxy chocolate you get at the dollar store is unlike the good stuff at Zingerman's. I didn't even think I liked cherry pie, and now I wish I'd bought a dozen.

Monarch Life Cycle

2007-08-04T12:30:00.000-04:00

All pictures taken this July, hands and arms provided by my kids (who also found the caterpillars). If you want more information, check out John Himmelman's A Monarch Butterfly's Life (check out these pictures!), and some of the links at the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project.

Is this the 50's?

2007-08-03T14:13:00.000-04:00

I called to arrange home delivery for milk today, then put up a clothesline and hung a load of laundry out back. My son caught a frog in the nearby river, and had pbj for lunch.

My daughter and I had hummus, though, which I don't think would have happened here in the 50's - even in a town with a cooperative farm like Saline Valley Farms. Check that link for some very cool old photographs from 1932-1953.

Newbery Winners: One Recommended, One Not

2007-07-31T10:18:00.000-04:00

I've done reviews for two more Newbery winners over at The Newbery Project: A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, by Nancy Willard (1982 award), and The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley (1985 award). I can hardly imagine two more dissimilar books - one is aimed at older kids, and I think the other is meant for parents to read to their younger kids. Both are fantasy, but they are still as different as chalk and cheese.

Another Literary Meme

2007-07-27T21:42:00.000-04:00

I was tagged by Bookworm Julie, who lives a few miles northeast of me. I think these answers are going to make me look very lowbrow, but I'll try to be honest anyway. I read a lot of non-fiction, and I'd love to meet a lot of the people in those books, or the authors, but noooo this is all about literary characters. Or is it possible to have a literary character in a non-fiction work?

1. If you could host a party with 7 literary characters, who would they be and why?

- Cutuk from Ordinary Wolves, because I want to hear about Alaska, and he'd be happy with pizza.

- Joshua from Lamb, because who wouldn't want to talk to the historical Jesus? Especially if he's anything like the character in Lamb.

- Abby Normal from You Suck (why yes, I do like Christopher Moore's books), because I want to read her descriptions of the party afterwards.

- Maye Roberts, from There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell, by Laurie Notaro, because she would be a lot like her creator, I think.

- Stephen Maturin (Julie can have Jack Aubrey and Awkward Davies and the rest), because I love natural history and medical trivia.

- Ranger, from Janet Evanovich's books, just because.

- Anthony Bourdain - I know his books are supposedly non-fiction, but honestly, he must at least exaggerate himself in those books, right? And I want him to cook.

2. Who is your literary role model?

Harriet Vane (from Dorothy Sayers' classic mysteries), though I don't want to be put in gaol (or jail).

3. Which literary house would you like most to live in?

Misselthwaite Manor, probably because I read about it at such an impressionable age (in A Secret Garden).

4. Which literary couple would you like most for parents?

Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan.

5. Pick 3 literary characters you would like to have as siblings.

Well, with Aral and Cordelia as parents, that would leave Miles as a brother, which would be entertaining. I would still need a sister or two, or another brother, though - and most of the good ones seem to be from children's literature. Hmm, is there even any adult fiction out there with happy sibling relationships?

I guess I'll take Sam Gribley from My Side of the Mountain, and Claudia from The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. I could get the best of both nature and culture then.

6. Who is your favorite literary villain?

Frankenstein's monster.

7. Name a character that most people dislike, but that you do not. Why do you like them?

Poor Frankenstein's monster. He tried so hard, reading to educate himself. It was hard to hate him.

8. Which minor character deserves a book all to themselves, in your opinion?

Becky Thatcher from Tom Sawyer. I want her to kick Tom's ass, and I want to hear things from her perspective.

9. Which character do you identify most with in literature?

Kate from Jennifer Weiner's Goodnight Nobody. Except in the midwest, with less money and a better husband.

10. If you could go into a novel, which one would it be and why?

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde. And this is really one of those cheating answers, like when you wish for a hundred wishes, because in The Eyre Affair characters get to go into any novel that they choose.

11. Name 3 — 7 books that you rarely see on people’s favorite book lists, that are high on your own.

George & Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism, by Charlotte Moore - this is non-fiction, but it is as well-written and funny and touching and gritty as any fiction I've read this year. Read it, do. Don't let the fact that it's about autism scare you away.

A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews

A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck (I'm on a crusade to convince more adults to read children's literature)

A Primate's Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky (yes, another non-fiction book)

The Lake, the River, and the Other Lake, by Steve Amick

12. Which is your least favorite book of those that are considered “classics”?

The Great Gatsby. I just wanted to smack all of the characters.

Tag you're it, reader with a blog!

Human Dalek Corn

2007-07-24T10:22:00.000-04:00

Did you ever notice how the roots of corn look a lot like the head of a Human Dalek? Weird.

Corn really is a freaky looking mutant tropical grass. I wish the local sweet corn was ready. This picture is from the field corn from the farm behind our house, which is probably going to become high fructose corn syrup and starch and cow and pig feed.

Dinner Suggestions

2007-07-16T17:10:00.000-04:00

...yesterday, from my 5-year-old daughter: a "really big" marshmallow, cookies, and cake. No, that's not what we had. I really wonder if she will ever voluntarily eat a vegetable.

In other news, my ten-year-old son and my husband spent Friday night sleeping in a tent in the backyard. This didn't help convince my husband that camping is fun, because it was the coldest night since early May. When they came in at 6:00 am, it was 46°F.

Reviews of Two More Newbery Winners and a New Mystery

2007-07-14T16:40:00.000-04:00

The reviews of the Newbery medalists are up over at The Newbery Project: The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin, and Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, by Paul Fleischman (winners in 1979 and 1989, respectively). Check them out - for you or your kids - if you like classic mysteries or cute read-aloud poetry about insects.

I've also read A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini; Lean Mean Thirteen, by Janet Evanovich; and Origin, by Diana Abu-Jaber; in the last couple of weeks. A Thousand Splendid Suns left me pretty much speechless (in a good way), from both the writing and the story, and there's not a whole lot to say about Evanovich's Thirteen - it's like the earlier ones, but with less sex and more humor - but since Diana Abu-Jaber's new book isn't as well known as the other two, I thought I'd describe it here.

I liked both Crescent and The Language of Baklava by Abu-Jaber (a novel about Iranian emigrants, and a memoir about the author's childood) a lot, so I was intrigued when I saw that Abu-Jaber's latest was a mystery. It's a very gritty mystery - full of difficult people and uncertain relationships, freezing winter nights on the streets of Syracuse, NY, loss, and office politics. The main character, Leda, reminded me a bit of Smilla from Smilla's Sense of Snow, and a bit of Mallory from Carol O'Connell's mystery series. The story was chilling (even apart from the sections on hypothermia), unpredictable, and entertaining. The ending was a little too pat for me, but after such a good read, I could hardly begrudge Abu-Jaber for tying up the loose ends so neatly. A warning, though - there is a lot about SIDs and infants getting murdered in this book - it's probably not something anyone wants to read in their postpartum period, or perhaps even with a baby in your house if you're a very sensitive person.

Dust and Books

2007-07-04T17:08:00.000-04:00

Rothstein, Arthur. Son of farmer in dust bowl area.
Cimarron County, Oklahoma. April 1935.
America from the Great Depression to World War II:
Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945,
Library of Congress.

I have another post up over at The Newbery Project: Dust, a review of Karen Hesse's poetic* 1998 winner, Out of the Dust.

rebel from www.sybermoms.com suggested I take a look at The Kids' Book Club Book: Reading Ideas, Recipes, Activities, and Smart Tips for Organizing Terrific Kids' Book Clubs, by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp, so I requested it from the library, and noticed happily that Out of the Dust is one of their titles for "grades 4-7". The six pages on Out of the Dust (with spoilers! yes, you can have spoilers in a book of poetry) include a recipe for apple pandowdy, some wonderful quotes from Karen Hesse, and Hesse's recommendation for Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads. My kids aren't in a book club, but I think we will listen to Woody's cd on the drive to my parents' this weekend.

*literally as well as metaphorically - the book is a collection of poems that tell a story

Canadian Mothers

2007-06-28T17:34:00.001-04:00

I have a longish book review of a new Canadian book out on The Whole Mom webzine, if you're interested in motherhood, Native peoples and politics. The book is Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth, edited by D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeannette Corbiere Lavell - "an eye-opening and diverse collection of papers published by Demeter Press, the publishing division of York University's Association for Research on Mothering in 2006."
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The Birchbark House: Book Review

2007-06-27T12:23:00.000-04:00

So I followed up my reading of Caddie Woodlawn (written in 1935 by Carol Ryrie Brink), which was set in 1864-1865 in western Wisconsin, with The Birchbark House, which was written by Louise Erdrich and published in 1999.

The Birchbark House is set in northern Wisconsin (on the shores of Lake Superior) in 1847, but like much of Caddie Woodlawn, a lot of the story is timeless. It is the story of a seven-year-old girl dealing with an annoying younger brother, a bossy older sister, and some quirky relatives. The character descriptions (along with the beautiful landscape descriptions and the fascinating portrayals of everyday life) really made the book something different and wonderful for me. And Old Tallow reminded me more than a little of Grandma Dowdel, one my favorite characters ever in a children's story.

I loved Erdrich's illustrations, too.

I would recommend this for kids of any age, except that there is a sudden, devastating death in the middle of the book. It is heartbreaking, and it isn't something that can just be skipped by not reading a couple of chapters, because much of the second half of the story deals with how Omakayas (the main character) comes to terms with her loss. This part is actually very beautiful and uplifting to read, and reminded me of one of my favorite books from college - Return to Laughter, by Elenore Smith Bowen, which also describes smallpox in a small community. But some younger or more sensitive kids may not be able to deal with this story as well as older children, so I'm going to say it is best for kids eleven and up.

Erdrich also has a beautiful children's book aimed at younger kids, and set in contemporary times, that older kids may like, too, called Grandmother's Pigeon. It is a nice follow-up to The Birchbark House, because it shows that Native Americans don't just exist in the misty past along the shores of Lake Superior.

Tags: book+reviews, Birchbark+House, Erdrich, children's+literature

Caddie Woodlawn

2007-06-25T15:58:00.000-04:00

The real Caroline Augusta Woodhouse,
from The Wisconsin Historical Society's site on Caddie Woodlawn

So I just posted a rather lengthy review on this 1936 Newbery winner here, over at The Newbery Project.

One of the parts that I didn't write about there (because you know, I've already gone on and on past many people's attention spans) was how Caddie and her brothers take this generic Indian item (a "scalp belt", which I have no idea if even existed among any Native peoples in Wisconsin) and re-name it and make a sideshow out it. It's a nice metaphor for the co-option of Indian culture by American society in general.

As an archaeologist working in the U.S., of course, I was accused of this and much worse. It's not so black and white (and red), though, and it's another point that could be discussed when kids read Caddie Woodlawn. How much have we progressed since its publication in 1935? Are media portrayals of Indians any better today, or are people just being politically correct and thinking the same old thing that their grandparents thought?

Tags: book+reviews, Caddie+Woodlawn, racism

A Dog Post

2007-06-18T14:35:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting post on AAIO on the dog park for Ann Arbor debate. With one cranky exception, even the people who don't particularly like dogs see the importance of having such a park. I don't think I've ever seen such agreement amongst the commentators there - on a positive issue, anyway, there have been plenty of snarky posts where everyone is happy to join in abuse. As far as I can tell from reading a recent newspaper article and the posts at ArborDog, the reasons that there aren't a public dog park in Ann Arbor already are:

- NIMBY issues (dog parks are ugly and/or dirty, increase traffic, people are just going to let their dogs run off-leash in parks anyway so why bother, and dog parks are dangerous, and won't someone think of the children?)

- painfully slow city bureaucracy - with funds available for fences at some parks but not others

The increased traffic and parking might be an issue if people actually do travel to use the dog park (negating the next objection). I don't really think that people who come to use a dog park are going to let their dogs run off-leash outside the park - they're already traveling a bit just to use an area where their dogs can be off-leash safely, so what's the point of letting them loose just outside the dog park? From what I've seen at other dog parks, the dog owners that use dog parks are generally more responsible than your average dog owner. They understand that dogs need exercise and socialization, and they often have taken their dogs to obedience classes. Bad dog owners can't let their dogs off the leash even in a dog park, because the dog doesn't understand "come", and their dogs won't drop the ball when they retrieve so why bother to throw anything, and they just don't have time to do more than let the dog out in the backyard a couple of times a day anyway.

I don't think that dog parks are any more unsightly than baseball fields, soccer fields, or playgrounds, and we certainly have plenty of those around. They need a lot less maintenance than any of those park facilities, too. Basically, all a dog park needs is fencing (and not really expensive fencing, either), parking (already available at many of the parks), and a garbage can. Shade is nice, but not necessary.

And I don't think dog parks are dangerous, either. You could certainly argue that happy, exhausted, and well-socialized dogs are safer to be around that neurotic, hyperactive dogs, and that dog owners are less likely to let their dogs off-leash in other parks if they have somewhere that they can do it legally. The dog park in Saline (see below) co-exists with both a children's playground and some natural areas, and during many hours spent with my kids on the playground, we've never had any problems with dogs. And the few times that I've been in the dog park, we didn't have any problems with children.

I don't understand the difficulty in putting a fence up at an existing park. The City of Ann Arbor Parks & Recreation department owns 147 parks, and they can't find one area with an acre to spare? I'm still mad at them for taking down a perfectly good chain-link fence at Scheffler Park, and replacing it with a rustic split-rail wooden fence. The chain-link fence made the park playground safe for little kids, which I assume is part of the point of having a playground. It must have cost a bit to pull out that fence and replace it with the new fence - which had the great advantage of being easy to mow under, even if it didn't keep toddlers from ducking under the rails and out onto Platt. I know that quite a few letters and e-mails to the Parks department were shrugged off, so maybe it shouldn't surprise me that dog owners are getting the shaft now.

Anyway, we're lucky to live near two dog parks now - one run by the city of Saline Parks & Recreation department, in Mill Pond park (in the back of the park, on the Saline river), and one at the corner of Textile and Pleasant Lake Rd. (kitty corner from the Washtenaw Farm Council grounds), part of the Copper Leaf Crossing vet's office/pet supply store.

Sadly, my dog is now too old to benefit from a dog park - at well over 14, she doesn't want to wrestle or chase rambunctious younger dogs any more, and she just doesn't need so much exercise. I remember spending hours throwing a tennis ball or a frisbee in Leslie Park when she was young, calling her quickly and putting the leash on her anytime a car entered the park or when a kid came wandering over from Arrowwood. We not only picked up our dog's poop, but offered bags to other dog owners who seemed like they were going to ignore their dog's waste, and often picked up other's people's dog poop and the occasional diaper thrown into the parking lot. My retriever mix also excelled in collecting plastic bottles, which we turned in for the deposit or recycled. We were responsible scofflaws who didn't hurt anyone.

Zoe still acts like a puppy when we put the sprinkler out, though, even in her old age. Here she is last Sunday, the hottest day of the year, when she was running through the water with my kids.

Selling Out

2007-06-16T14:34:00.000-04:00

As you may have noticed, I'm giving Google's AdSense a try. We'll see how it works out, but with paid employment not being plentiful here right now (hey! Michigan's first in the US in unemployment!), and since AdSense is based in Ann Arbor - well, we'll see. I'm only willing to sell out so much.

It may make me blog more, which would be a good thing, as I've been lazy now that summer's here. Now excuse me while I go pick strawberries from our yard and put them on ice cream, with a little whipped cream and dark chocolate, and sit out on the deck and watch the corn grow and my kids catch butterflies and baby grasshoppers.

Missing May and The Higher Power of Lucky

2007-06-16T14:28:00.000-04:00

Check out my review of Cynthia Rylant's novel about the loss of a parent over at The Newbery Project: Missing May. It's a beautiful book, but I think it is better suited for older kids - at least around age 12. The Higher Power of Lucky (this year's Newbery winner - Missing May won the award in 1993) is also about loss and a search for meaning, but it is much lighter in tone and the grief is a little more distant. It was fine for my ten year old, whom I now like to call "ma puce".

Fair Weather and The Devil in the White City: Book Review

2007-06-15T10:31:00.000-04:00

My book club read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Eric Larson this month - a re-read for me, although I confess I only skimmed most of the parts about Daniel Burnham the second time around. Since I grew up in Chicago's hinterland, I'm interested in history, and my grandmother had a little souvenir glass with the script "World's Fair 1893" on it, it was not hard to find at least some of this book fascinating. Other parts of Larson's book included a bit too much name dropping, heavy-handed foreshadowing, or were too gruesome for some of us.

Over a pitcher of sangria, my book club agreed that Larson really should have included some good maps in the book. Luckily, much of this information is available online, at sites like the University of Chicago's The Columbian Exposition, or the Chicago Historical Society's site. And this is a good place to also recommend one of my favorite books ever on Chicago: Nature's Metropolis, by William Cronon - though my brother says it has too many footnotes, I liked every one of them.

Anyway, I had recently read (and was blown away by) Richard Peck's A Year Down Yonder as part of a group blog about the Newbery award winners, so that when I saw that Peck had a children's book that took place during the World's Fair, I decided to check this one out, too.

Fair Weather was a wonderful book. In fact, I thought that it provided a more compelling description of the fair and its historical importance than The Devil in the White City, at least partially because Peck didn't try to include such a mass of facts in there. And it's not like I prefer easier (or children's) books more - Nature's Metropolis (see above), although one of the best-written works of environmental history that I've ever read, still isn't really an "easy read."

One of the things that surprised me when I re-read The Devil in the White City was how little I had retained after three years. On the other hand, I don't think that I will have any trouble remembering several of the scenes from Fair Weather for many years - partially because of the beauty of the writing.

I know that it's not really fair (no pun intended!) to compare a piece of historical fiction aimed at 8 to 12-year-olds to a New York Times non-fiction bestseller - but Larson's work is so well-known and (deservedly) widely appreciated, I can't help but put in a plug in for Peck's gentler work. Frankly, I've been surprised at how very much I have been enjoying all of the children's books that I've been reading for The Newbery Project.

Although there is no mention of H.H. Holmes (aka Herman Mudgett) in Fair Weather, the book does acknowledge the darker side of Chicago - in an age-appropriate manner:

We had us a good supper at the Old Vienna, though Granddad warned us not to order the bratwurst.

"Chicago's a meat-packin' town," he explained, "and once in a while a workin' man will fall into the grinder and come out as links of prime smoked sausage."

Lottie swallowed hard.

But we made a hearty meal out of sauerbraten, sour potato salad, and vinegared cucumbers. Over our heads the terrible wheel creaked. Across the Midway dancing girls writhed like serpents. (p. 68)

Peck's five page "Note from the Author", titled After the Fair, concludes the book with the most interesting and succinct summation of the fair that I've read (and that includes Devil in the White City and many scholarly and popular articles and essays). Even if you don't have the excuse of having kids that are the right age for Fair Weather, I definitely recommend it.

Here's an excerpt from the end that illustrates Peck's writing, and some of the enduring fascination that Larson and so many others see in the fair:

As we turned up into the sky, you didn't notice the straining and the clanking of that terrible wheel anymore. The great exposition began to fan out below us and all the pavilions were like frosted wedding cakes. It was the White City on blue lagoons against the endless lake. Golden statues caught the last of the setting sun. Then like sudden morning the electric lights came on. If I could show you anything, I would show you that. The searchlight turned, and everything was washed in light like there could never be darkness again. (p. 131-2)

Tags: book+review, Chicago, children's+literature,Richard+Peck, Eric+Larson, World's+Fair,1893, Fair+Weather, Devil+White+City

Nine Parts of Desire: Book Review

2007-06-11T19:44:00.000-04:00

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, by Geraldine Brooks, is a book that I wish I'd read a couple of years ago.

My book club (and I) read March - Brooks' 2006 Pulitzer prize-winning novel - this year, and I really enjoyed it (despite the fact that I never liked Little Women all that much), but I thought that Nine Parts of Desire was every bit as good as March. Though as non-fiction, it is obviously a completely different animal. If you ask me (and it's my blog, so in a way you are asking me), Brooks is pretty damn talented, doing both of these things so very well.

The title is from a famous quote by Muhammad's son-in-law (founder of Shiite sect):

Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.

Part of the reason that I liked Nine Parts of Desire so much is because of the way that it complements all of the other books I've read about the Middle East over the last few years. Books that it seems that every second person in the US is reading right now. Books like Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Bookseller of Kabul, Kabul Beauty School, The Kite Runner, and (as soon as I move to the top of the library reserve list) A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Brooks' book gave me a much broader perspective on women in the Middle East, and a lot of history that helped make women's roles in the other books more understandable. As much as I enjoyed the other works (except for several parts of Kabul Beauty School, where I repeatedly wanted to ask the author wtf she was thinking), each of those books presents a glimpse of women's lives, while Nine Parts of Desire provides the range and depth that put the other books in context - both in terms of time, and culturally and geographically.

Although it's non-fiction, Nine Parts is quick, easy read. Since all of the chapters are short pieces on the women that Brooks met in the different countries where she worked as a journalist - including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, and Jordan - it is easy to pick the book up and then set it down frequently, as may be needed if you are trying to read while dealing with children or a job or any other pesky book distractions.

Brooks examines how these women feel about a bunch of different topics (with some skillfully placed interviews and anecdotes), such as dress (especially different forms of veils), marriage, sexuality, children, revolution, sports, and education in the different chapters. For example:

Like most Saudi homes, theirs had two entrances - one for men, one for women. I arrived at the high-walled villa one night for a party. White-robed men moved to the front door. Their wives, black-veiled and clutching colorfully dressed toddlers, made their way to an entrance at the side.

Each door opened on a large, sofa-lined salon, the women's decorated in floral pink cottons and plush carpet; the men's a more austere and formal room. The two groups didn't mingle. But there was one male guest the hosts particularly wanted me to meet....When I returned to the women's salon, the man's wife winked at me. "You just did me a great favor," she said. "My husband loves to talk politics. And talking politics to a woman is sure to have made him aroused. Now I can't wait to get him home. I know I'll have great sex with him tonight." I blushed. The woman laughed. "You Westerners are so shy about sex," she said. "Here, we talk about it all the time." (p. 40)

There is a useful glossary and a comprehensive index, in case you want to know the difference between a burka, hijab, and chador, or find the spot about Queen Noor's courtship. Furthermore, reading Nine Parts of Desire should go a ways towards stopping its readers from making sweeping generalizations about Muslim women.

The only serious drawback that I found is that Nine Parts of Desire was published in 1994 and obviously written a year or so earlier. It is interesting and rather depressing to see how well Brooks predicted current fundamentalism and strife in the Middle East. But it is also more than a little frustrating, because at the end of the book, you really want an update that covers the last 13 years. So Ms. Brooks, if you read this - how about a new edition? I'd say the time is definitely right for it.

Tags: Geraldine+Brooks, women, Islamic, Muslim, Middle+East, history, Nine+Parts+Desire

Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Her Mixed-Up Covers

2007-05-26T20:20:00.000-04:00

I just blogged about the 1968 Newbery winner, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg, over at The Newbery Project. It's a book that I actually remember reading as a child, and it was still great some thirty-plus years later. My copy (a 1977 edition, recently picked up for a quarter at the Saline District Library's monthly used book sales), had this cover:

Not terrible. The image of the kids in their pajamas hiding in the museum gives you the gist of the story.

But when I looked around for cover images, I saw the cover that I remembered from my childhood:

This cover has original artwork by the author on it - which fits well with all the wonderful illustrations in the book (until my recent re-read, I didn't realize that E.L. Konigsburg did the illustrations as well as the story. Damn, she's talented). It also doesn't have that plasticky seventies look to it, which I first noticed with the creepy mannequin-like people in the cover for Tales from Silver Lands.

Now why did the publishers go and change a perfectly good, classic cover? Did they think that one on top was better because it was more colorful? I was happy to see that the most recent edition retains more of the flavor of the original. Although I like the title font and placement better, I'm not sure that the image is really a great improvement, though:

I'm going to have to buy this edition, though, because my 70's paperback is crappy acidic paper that probably won't last the few more years until my daughter's old enough to read it, and I have to see the 2002 afterword from Mrs. E.L. Konigsburg.
It really is a great story.

Tags: Konigsburg, Mixed+Up+Files, book+reviews, book+covers

On My Nightstand and the Floor and the Coffee Table

2007-05-15T20:21:00.000-04:00

...are all the books I'm currently reading. I haven't done an "On My Nightstand" post (modeled on these by Mental Multivitamin) for a long time. Today I'm just blogging about why I'm reading it (do you also find yourself using "blog" as a verb in your daily life? Scary, isn't it?), and then turning to a random page and taking a quote from the book.

___________

The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread, by Kate DiCamillo. This is part of a very enjoyable group read and blog about the Newbery medal winners from 1924 to today (see my review of The Tale here). It's been wonderful re-discovering children's literature with my kids, and The Tale of Despereaux is something that shouldn't be missed by adults who love fairy tales.

"Reader, do you recall the word "perfidy"? As our story progresses, "perfidy" becomes an ever more appropriate word, doesn't it?" (p. 69)

___________

The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones - I haven't started this one yet, but it's by the author of Lost in Translation, and it's about food. And it has an absolutely gorgeous cover. How bad could it be?

"This past year his topic had been a single phrase: xia guanzi, to eat out, to go down to a restaurant. In an elegant sixty-minute loop he conjured all of xia guanzi's meanings over the last eighty years. At first it meant something positive and exciting - pleasure and company, good food." (p. 85)

___________

The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? by Leslie Bennetts. This is a book that's been in the news a lot lately, and a topic of much discussion in my Mothers & More group, a national advocacy and support group for mothers.

"To many observers, the most heartbreaking thing is that they're choosing such vulnerability voluntarily. "Women's impoverishment is nothing new, but in the past, women didn't have other options," observes sociologist Kathleen Gerson. "Now they do." " (p. 103)

___________

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, by Craig Childs, is filled beautiful names (and places): Chaco Canyon, Hovenweep, Kinishba, Homol'ovi, Grasshopper Pueblo, Mesa Verde. It also has enough great feasts, rituals, "roads", awe-inspiring architecture, drought, migration, warfare, cannibalism, corn, prehistoric ecology and land management, and ground water to satisfy me (as well as a very good index). This would be a wonderful book to read before visiting late prehistoric sites in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico, which were familiar to me but I'm afraid not so well-known to most Americans. Childs does a very good job of explaining a lot of the things that southwestern archaeologists spend their time pondering with a minimum of jargon.

"The word roads is probably a misnomer. Although many are wide enough to handle multiple lanes of car traffic and they are outlined into the distance by curbs of rock and broken pottery, they seem too large for mere transportation. Instead they were likely formal processions, long public spaces akin to the National Mall in Washington, D.C." (p. 57)

___________

Quit It, by Marcia Byalick - another book about Tourette's Syndrome. Last month I reviewed I Can't Stop! by Holly L. Niner (aimed at younger kids) rather critically, and I was happy that Byalick's book avoided so many of the things that I found lacking in Niner's book. Some of this is undoubtedly because Quit It is aimed at older kids - the main character, Carrie, is starting 7th grade. Carrie's life is complicated, and TS is only one of her problems. Humorous, engaging, and not overly preachy, I think this is an excellent book for kids aged 11 and up.

"You could almost smell that the end of the school year was approaching. Maybe it was the brightness of the sunlight, or the fact there were no more awful multiple-choice tests, or simply that everyone except Clyde wore shorts to school." (p. 93)

___________

Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America, by Elliot Jaspin - a grab from the new release shelf, this is turning out to be a very compelling and heartbreaking collection of fine-grained histories of several different communities where African-Americans were driven out by vicious mobs. Most of the events covered took place in the early 1900's, but unlike the lynchings and race riots in this period, the (slightly) less deadly but very far-reaching "racial cleansing" that took place in many places (including Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and Kentucky) is not as commonly known.

"Within minutes the gunfire died away. The mob had used up all its ammunition. Uncertain of what to do next, the rioters fell back to Commercial Street. As the mob milled about, a few men trotted up Walnut Street to the state armory next door to the city jail and sized the rifles and ammunition - by one estimate a thousand rounds - that had been loaned to the posses the day before." (p. 75, on Pierce City, Missouri).

___________

Native Americans and Indians in Children's Literature

2007-05-11T19:48:00.001-04:00

First all, I've got a review of Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell's 1961 Newbery Medal winner up here over at The Newbery Project. It's historic fiction for older kids, based on the story of an Indian woman who lived alone on one of the Channel Islands (off the coast of California) from 1835-1853. I'm still not a big fan of the book, thirty years after I read it for the first time.

A couple of my fellow Newbery Project bloggers posted their reviews of Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink (1963 winner), and Debbie Reese commented there and linked to her posts about the book at her blog, American Indians in Children's Literature, in two posts: Reflections on Caddie Woodlawn: Teaching about Stereotypes using Literature (which is especially poignant because it involves Reese's third grade daughter's response to the book), and The 'Scalp Belt" in Caddie Woodlawn.

Reese's blog (which includes book reviews from several other authors) is a wonderful resource for reading about children's books on different Native American peoples, First Nation groups, or American Indians, along with Oyate (which I linked to when writing about Nature books for Kids).

It's interesting how often Native peoples are invoked when writing about nature for kids. I know there are several academic papers out there linking American stereotypes about "Indians" as a whole with our ideas about nature. The idea of "people living in harmony with nature" is a powerful one that certainly transcends the notion that different Native peoples in different places and times had many different types of relationships with the environment (both natural, and that resulting from thousands of years of human modification) around them.

Anyway, I would venture to say that Karana in Island of the Blue Dolphins was mainly a convenient person to hang O'Dell's descriptions of Channel Island ecology upon.

Interestingly, this site (which ranks Newbery winners according to how well a bunch of librarians and teachers in Indiana liked them) says this about Island of the Blue Dolphins (56th out of 85):

An OK story, we had some questions about authenticity and character voice.

Although I violently disagreed with some of the comments from the Allen County Public Library librarians and teachers group (see my comments here), I did wonder about authenticity in Island of the Blue Dolphins, too. O'Dell seems to get the Native technology and the environmental surroundings of the island of San Nicholas right, but when it came to Karana's feelings - let alone her spiritual and cultural values - I really think there's a big hole in the book.

A Year Down Yonder

2007-04-26T15:09:00.000-04:00

A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck was the most recent book that I read and reviewed for The Newbery Project. It was funny, it was touching, and it was filled with letter-perfect descriptions of the place I grew up. A little Googling reveals that Richard Peck actually grew up in Decatur, Illinois, and that "Grandma Dowdel's town" was partially based on Cerro Gordo, Illinois. But I'll bet that Richard Peck visited Utica sometime, given the burgoo and the "Souvenir of Starved Rock" pillow in the book.

I'm waiting to get A Long Way from Chicago from www.paperbackswap.com. These are books that I want my children to enjoy and have on their bookshelves for years.

I liked the introduction to these books on the publisher's site - I think that Peck wrote it:

Young readers who live in age-segregated suburbs need the wisdom, and the wit, of elders. After all, this is a young generation who no longer even have to write thank-you notes for gifts from grandparents. They rob themselves of their own histories and are once again at the mercy of each other.

But stories are better than that. They champion the individual, not the mass movement. They mix up the generations. They provide a continuity growing hard to come by. And laughter. Best of all, laughter.

I Can't Stop! Book Review

2007-04-21T12:26:00.000-04:00

I Can't Stop! A Story about Tourette Syndrome, by Holly L. Niner, is a picture book about tics (and TS, obviously) for kids. The kids portrayed in the book are in elementary school, and I'd say the text is good for grades 2-5, and easily read to kids somewhat younger.

It describes what tics are, and shows how Nathan (the protagonist) deals with some common ones. It also relates how tics can be easily misdiagnosed as habits or allergies (as with a constant sniffing tic), and talks about how tics can only sometimes be temporarily suppressed, and how to talk to other people about them. All of this is good, and important, and the note to parents and teachers in the front of the book also includes clearly written, useful information and a link to the TSA (Tourette Syndrome Association). The illustrations by Meryl Treatner are engaging and interesting.

But I have some reservations about recommending this book to my 10 year old with TS, who also deals with OCD and ADHD. First all, Nathan only deals with tics - he is popular, does well in school, has no problems with social interactions (except for a few that crop up with some of the tics), and he is athletic and does well in several sports. His best friend is understanding and his parents and teacher find ways to help him. Everyone is supportive and matter-of-fact when dealing with Nathan's Tourette's Syndrome.

I would have welcomed a little more realism - maybe a grandparent who huffs "I don't believe in this stuff. In my day, we just stopped when we were told or got a spanking!". Maybe a teacher who gets annoyed, or a sibling that is embarrassed (like the wonderful protagonist in Rules, by Cynthia Lord).

Nathan seems to have a pretty perfect life, except for those tics, and this made him a bit bland. And I worry that my son will think that it's ok to have Tourette's, as long as everything else is really, really good. And it's true - as long as you don't have to hear yourself blink a certain number of times before you can finish a math problem, as long as you have a such a great and supportive best friend, and as long as you win soccer tournaments, having tics doesn't have to be such a big deal.

As with many disabilities, in the world of TS there seem to be some big divides between people with different degrees of severity, and/or different types of problems that are often associated with TS. This book would probably be fine - good even, if a bit pedestrian - for kids dealing with "TS only" (as Nathan does), but it's not great for TS Plus (TS+ includes OCD and ADHD, which many agree can be more challenging than tics). I guess I'm still waiting for a good kids' book on that. Maybe someone at Life's a Twitch! could write one?

While I'm at it, here's a useful post "minimizing confusion" about TS. If I were to write a children's book on Tourette's Syndrome, I would include this site (along with many of the others given above).

Tales from Silver Lands

2007-04-14T15:40:00.001-04:00

If you want to read what all the smart kids were reading in 1925, check out my review of Tales from Silver Lands, by Charles J. Finger over at The Newbery Project.

It's got hummingbirds and huanacos and evil white toads (the "Silver Lands" are South America). And the origins of monkeys and armadillos are explained.

The Saline District Library had the original 1924 edition, with this interesting woodcut by Paul Honore on the cover:

If I'd seen the most recent cover, I don't think I would have checked it out of the library:

More Spring Flowers and Feminist Carnival

2007-04-05T17:55:00.000-04:00

I think these flowers are from a box elder tree. I took this on Monday, when it was in the 70's and my kids were playing with their cousin at a playground in suburban Chicago (the former Grossdale, for those of you that know your Chicagoland history), and today it is snowing again, and the water in the hoses outside (which we just turned back on two weeks ago) is frozen solid.

At least I have the latest Carnival of Feminists to read, which has stories from Bollywood, 18th century Jamaica, Saudi Arabia, Poland, thirty centuries of Persian art, and the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. And a lot more on pop culture, politics, body image, etc.

More Signs of Spring (Despite Snow Today)

2007-04-04T16:33:00.000-04:00

What are these little yellow flowers? They popped up in a scrap of woods near our house last week. From the car I thought they were crocuses, but when my daughter and I walked over there after Kindergarten, I saw that the leaves are all wrong for a crocus. They don't look like any of the yellow flowers in my wildflower book, so maybe they're a garden escape.

This was right next to the yellow flowers - a lovely skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus). My daughter and I both took a sniff but didn't smell anything yet.

Songs of the Gorilla Nation: Book Review

2007-03-27T09:07:00.000-04:00

I have to thank Julie for these two blog posts (Medical Student's Syndrome, I Hope and Why I Blog), which led me to this wonderful book: Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism, by Dawn Prince-Hughes.

I'm interested in anthropology (though my specialty was archaeology, not biological anthropology or primates), and I'm interested in autism (partially because my son's Tourette's/OCD/ADHD shares so many similarities with Asperger's syndrome), so I was pretty certain I'd find Songs of the Gorilla Nation a fascinating read. I still think about some of the things I learned from reading Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation a couple of years ago.

But I was totally unprepared for the beautiful, lyrical writing and the heart-wrenching stories (of both the gorillas and of the author herself) in Songs of the Gorilla Nation. What a fitting title. Even the organization of the book - independent from its radiant prose - well, it just blew me away. Gorgeous. There are three parts, pulling all the stories together: A Life Without Song (Prince-Hughes' childhood, teen years, and early adulthood), The Songs of the Gorilla Nation (her years observing gorillas, what they taught her, about humans and herself), and How Can I Keep from Singing?, which is an unflinching look at biology, family, and advocacy and activism, and much more.

I learned a lot, and I loved reading this. What more can you say about a book, really? Go request that your library buy it, and then buy a copy to give to someone as a gift.

Opting, Rising, Moving, Mojo-ing

2007-03-26T15:10:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm just happy that Linda Hirshman included links to MomsRising, the Mothers Movement Online, and MojoMom's blog in her latest diatribe: "A Tale of Two Workplaces".

Go on over to 11D and read "The National Scold" for some great commentary on Hirshman's latest, and then read "We Have Met the Enemy, and She Is Us" for a fascinating perspective on reporters and E.J. Graff's piece (see here or scroll back a few days for more on the "opt-out myth").

And "The Writing on the Wall" made my day. Plus, I love Judith Stadtman Tucker's closing: In solidarity. We don't use formal closings enough anymore. I use "Regards" in some e-mails, but I miss the variety I used to see in letters and books. Affectionately. Truly.

Yr. Obedient Servant, Sandy D.

Feminism Between X's and Boomers

2007-03-24T10:51:00.000-04:00

The most recent Carnival of Feminists (are you reading it twice a month? It's like a free magazine, with every issue edited by someone new with a different perspective, with few if any adverstisements) also had an interesting post on generational differences amongst feminists: From Onlydom to Sisterhood....Interrupted, which led me to Jessica Valenti's insightful article on The Feminist Sorority.

Add today's mothers of young kids to feminism (if they have time - ironically, I think SAH mothers probably have more time to think about gender & politics), and you get a generation of women sandwiched between the Boomers and Generations X and Y (Xoomers? Gen Bx?), who are struggling with "work/life balance". We may have only recently pitched out the old 8-track tapes from the boxes in our basement, but we can download podcasts. We might listen to Prairie Home Companion, but we read Dan Savage's column too.

Anyway, this is another reason why I think that reading the comments about parenting and careers at MojoMom (Wake Up and Smell the Money and Dialogue with Linda Hirshman) and RebelDad and Linda Hirshman has been so interesting. this week - they highlight some of our assumptions about age, gender, and the worth of various kinds of work.

And if you like history, check out my post on Lincoln: A Photobiography, by Russell Freedman over The Newbery Project.

Myths, Research and Opinions about Opting Out

2007-03-23T10:03:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything about the politics of motherhood, but there have been a lot of interesting articles on it recently, both in the mainstream press and in blogs.

E.J. Graff published a thoughtful article entitled The Opt-Out Myth in the Columbia Journalism Review, which brings important work by Joan C. Williams, Jessica Manvell, and Stephanie Bornstein of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California - 'Opt Out or Pushed Out? How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict - to a much greater audience.

There was immediate response to Graff's article from two different feminist perspectives: Linda Hirshman griped that elite women are betraying all women by not becoming feminist martyrs and sticking with their influential jobs (shame on you for even thinking of joining "the saccharine and retrograde tsunami of moral tales of sainted mommies"!), and journalist Leslie Morgan Steiner applauded Graff's work in her Washington Post column and blog: The Opt-Out Myth.

This morning I saw that Our Bodies, Our Blog (an excellent resource that I can't recommend highly enough) had a story on Graff's article - Media Myth-Making: The Moms-Go-Home Story and What It Means for Public Policy, including a link where E.J. Graff (who is affiliated with the Gender & Justice Project, at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University) includes a version of her Opt-Out article with footnotes and references. I found this almost as amazing and laudable as the original article itself. Wouldn't it be nice if more newspaper and magazine articles included this? And it is rather interesting that Linda Hirshman includes "Visiting Professor at Brandeis University" amongst her credentials. You have to wonder if Graff and Hirshman ever crossed paths on campus.

All of this was accompanied by a huge Mother Load of articles at The American Prospect (check out the web-only content there), and another fantastic Carnival of Feminists (the 34th!), at A Somewhat Old, But Capacious Handbag, which has one of my favorite blog titles of all time. Grabapple does a great riff on Graff's article in this Feminist Carnival, called The Birds and the Bees and the 401K.

It's hard to find time to blog when there's all of this to read and digest. But it is nonetheless encouraging, like our approaching spring (crocuses spotted!) and the upcoming elections.

The Dark Frigate

2007-03-21T16:23:00.000-04:00

There's something to be said for reading children's literature. It's short, much of it is well done (I'm reading the Newbery winners, after all), it usually isn't too depressing, and it is something you can discuss and share with your children. Also, the other books I've read recently are rather intense and sometimes graphic (March, by Geraldine Brooks, and Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground, edited by D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeannette Corbiere Lavell), and the Newbery books offer a nice balance.

Anyway, the latest YA book I read and wrote about over at The Newbery Project is The Dark Frigate, by Charles Boardman Hawes, which won the prize in 1924. If you like Patrick O'Brian (yeah Julie@Bookworm and Sloth, I'm talking about you), there's more than a good chance you'll like this one. And it's got pirates!

The Higher Power of Lucky

2007-03-17T10:52:00.000-04:00

I've enjoyed reading all of the hoopla about The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron (this year's Newbery medal winner). The fact that I've always thought that "scrotum" is an inherently funny word makes reading about the controversy that much more entertaining.

Here are some of the blogs and articles whose commentary I most enjoyed:

People Are Stupid, Children's Literature Edition

Newbery Controversy

Statement Regarding the True Value of "Higher Power of Lucky" (by ALA)

'Scrotum' as a Children's Literary Tool, by Susan Patron

Something interesting, though - I've noticed that few of the people commenting on Lucky and Patron's scrotum use (pun intended) have actually read the book. Or if they did read the The Higher Power of Lucky, they haven't talked about anything but the first page.

Anyway, I read the book this last week and absolutely loved it. I blogged about it in detail over at The Newbery Project (see More Lucky) - and you can also read some thoughtful comments by others who have actually read the book there.

March in Michigan

2007-03-11T17:43:00.000-04:00

February is a pretty bleak time of year in Michigan, and until the last few days, March has been just as bad. Everyone in our family has been sick except the dog. Maybe all that rabbit poop she nibbles off the top of the snow has special vitamins in it.

I'm still reading Newbery medal winners - see The Newbery Project for my reviews of A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal, 1830-1832, by Joan A. Blos (1980 winner), and Holes, by Louis Sachar (1999 winner).

I've also enjoyed reading the most recent Carnival of Feminists, as well the Radical Michigan Blogging Carnival, and I recommend both to you.

King of the Wind

2007-02-28T22:14:00.000-05:00

I blogged about Marguerite Henry's 1948 classic (the winner of the Newbery Medal in 1949) over at The Newbery Project today.

A Patch of Snow

2007-02-24T09:35:00.000-05:00

There's a patch of old snow in a corner
     That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
     Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
     Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I've forgotten -
     If I ever read it.
                         (Robert Frost, 1916)

The Story of Mankind

2007-02-23T13:08:00.000-05:00

The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Van Loon won the first Newbery Award (for children's literature) in 1922. I blogged about it today over at The Newbery Project, which I recommend for anyone interested in books for older kids. Four of us (so far) took a look at this old classic, and it's interesting how we each had a different take on it. Group blogging is fun.

First Robins

2007-02-22T09:37:00.000-05:00

I saw a bunch of robins eating pin cherries in the melting snow this morning. In Michigan, I guess that means spring is only about three months away (big sigh).

If you're interested in children's (or YA) books, I blogged over at The Newbery Project today.

I've been remiss in not recommending

2007-02-21T14:22:00.000-05:00

not one but two Carnivals of Feminists: the early February one, in two parts at Truly Outrageous, and today's (the 32nd!) at Bumblebee Sweet Potato.

And if that's not enough for you, there's a new edition of the Mothers Movement Online out, featuring The Politics of Breastfeeding and a wonderful collection of features, essays, and links to interesting articles elsewhere.

Not Really a Book Review, But a Few Snippets

2007-02-05T10:14:00.000-05:00

...from what I've been reading.

A typical quote from You Suck, by Christopher Moore:

It turned out that superhuman vampire strength came in handy when shaving a thirty-five-pound cat. After a couple of false starts, which had them chasing Chet the huge shaving-cream-covered cat around the loft, they discovered the value of duct tape as a grooming tool. Because of the tape, they weren't able to shave his feet. When they were finished, Chet looked like a big-eyed, potbellied, protohuman in fur-lined, duct-tape space boots - the feline love child of Golem and Doddy the house elf. p. 29.

And from The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, by David Kamp:

In a letter to Charlie in December 1949, Paul [Child] described, for the first time, the sight of his wife, in their home kitchen, cooking French food - mostly likely a cassoulet, given the details: "The oven door opens and shuts so fast you hardly notice the deft thrust of a spoon as she dips into a casserole and up to her mouth for a taste-check....Now & again a flash of the non-cooking Julie lights up the scene briefly, as it it did the day before yesterday when with her bare fingers, she snatched a set of cannellini [beans] out of the pot of boiling water with the cry, 'Wow! These damn things are as hot as a stiff cock.' " p. 52

I have nothing but praise for these two books. You Suck (a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends) combines manic description, a totally unpredictable plot, and a unique cast of characters, including vampires (duh), the night crew at Safeway, and Goth teenagers.

The United States of Arugula mixes culinary history (mostly from the last fifty years) with fascinating biography - most notably, of Julia Child, James Beard, and Craig Claiborne. It is educational as well as entertaining - I never realized that rocket and arugula were the same plant. And it's pretty interesting how Kamp describes just how and why I (and thousands of other Americans) have particular cookbooks on my bookshelves: The Joy of Cooking, Recipes for a Small Planet, The Art of Mexican Cooking, The Moosewood Cookbook, and a Silver Palate cookbook are all mentioned in some detail. And since I've lived in this area for over twenty years, it was satisfying to see that Zingerman's got described, too, though not in the same detail as several New York delis.

Ha. Even though this is titled 'Not Really a Book Review', I think I'll label it as one.

They're Hardy over in Dexter

2007-02-05T09:32:00.000-05:00

Hardier than the rest of the county, anyway. All of the public schools (except Dexter) are closed because of "dangerous wind chills". It was -8°F (not including that wind chill) this morning when I got up. Good thing I checked the school district website before waking up the kids.

Here's a snow flurry sweeping across the field behind our house a couple of days ago. One of the nice things about having a view of the landscape is that you can actually see the weather. At least it's sunny today, even if it is brutally cold. And we have lots of books to read.

Cranberries, Ice and Book Lists

2007-01-25T16:07:00.000-05:00

Some shots from last week's ice storms. You're looking at a highbush cranberry (Viburnum trilobum), which is attempting to block the entire dining room window despite vigorous pruning.

If you've read here a while, you know that I'm a fan of all kinds of lists of books (see, for example, Lists of 100 Books). One of my favorite book blogs - 50 Books - just had a pretty entertaining post on some alternative book lists: The Big List of Lists. You have to read the comments there, because people keep coming up with ever better ways to categorize their books. My favorite lists so far (and the first book I would include on that particular list) are:

- Best Book Titles of All Time
(Island of the Sequined Love Nun or The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove ? It's so hard to pick between Christopher Moore's books)

- Books That I Expected to Be Dirtier
(Lady Chatterly's Lover)

- Books I Bought More than Once Because I Forgot I Already Owned It
(Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media)

- Books I Adored as a Child But My Son Thinks Are Boring. (But that I insist on reading to him anyway because he's five and what does he know?!)
(My Side of the Mountain)

- Books That I Love Even Though The Last Twenty Pages Made No Damn Sense
(Summer of My Amazing Luck)

- Books I Re-Read When I Have Nothing Else to Read
(anything by Lois McMaster Bujold)

- Books I Shouldn't Admit Made Me Cry Like a Baby
(The Cubicle Next Door)

Now go on over to 50 Books and add your own categories.

Ethnobotany Meme

2007-01-24T16:07:00.000-05:00

I borrowed this from Jennifer Under the Ponderosas, but I'm changing the title because there are already lots of Green Memes out there. There's no "Ethnobotany Meme" out there anywhere. What's ethnobotany, you ask? It's the relationship between people and plants. Yes, you do have a relationship with the plants around you, whether you know it or not. I'll write more about it someday.

Think of the plants (trees, flowers, etc) which grow within 50 yards of your home. Which is your favorite?

I hate to pick just one. How to chose between the violets I transplanted from my parent's house, where my grandmother planted them 70 years ago, and the jewelweed that attracts all of the hummingbirds every summer? What about all of those huge perennial swamp milkweeds that all came from a tiny seed packet, that attracted all those butterflies last year? How about the forsythia that my mother-in-law gave us? We pulled that bush out of the ground with our Honda hatchback when we moved out of our co-op townhouse, then left it frozen, wrapped in a garbage bag in our yard in here Saline when my daughter was born three weeks before her due date, and it still flourished when we planted it in the spring six months later.

I guess I have to pick the elm tree (Ulmus americana) that we just cut down, though. It was such a beautiful tree that shaded the whole back of our house from the morning sun and kept most of the backyard fairly cool until late afternoon.

Here it is two years after it was diagnosed with Dutch elm disease, getting the dead branches trimmed and just before its second injection with fungicide.

Is any portion of this plant edible in any form? Can you boil the root, eat the berries, make tea from the leaves?

According to Dan Moerman's Native American Ethnobotany database, different Indian groups used the inner bark in a variety of medicines, usually in a kind of tea (much like the related slippery elm bark as a cough remedy). I've never heard of anyone eating the seeds, which are papery and rather flat and not as interesting as most tree seeds.

Can you use any portion of this plant to make something that would be truly useful for you? Alternately, can you use any portion of this plant to make something just for fun, just one time?

The wood was used by Native peoples and then later Americans for all kinds of things: house posts, tools, furniture, wagon wheels, sewage pipes. We have a big stack of wood that was cut for our fireplace, my son has attempted to make slingshots and various other toys from the smaller branches, and my husband has a stack of longer branches that he plans to use to damn the seasonal creek that borders our yard and the farm field behind.

Can this plant survive on the groundwater available to it, or does it need to be watered?

It did fine on the water it got naturally, although we did water it and fertilize it after it became sick in an attempt to strengthen its fight against the fungus that the elm beetles brought.

Do you see any other creatures -- birds or bees or squirrels -- using this plant?

A squirrel once took one of my sunflower heads and dropped pieces of it on me from this tree. I've seen squirrels eating the buds or the ends of twigs in the spring, too. And all kinds of birds have used the tree: crows liked to sit there in pairs, the occasional hawk used to watch our birdfeeders from the tree, and I've seen many flocks of starlings, and many nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, bluejays, robins, and cardinals up there.

After the tree died rather abruptly the summer before last, a whole new suite of creatures moved in. Weird fungi appeared, pieces of bark peeled off, and more woodpeckers and nuthatches than usual came - I guess that they were probably attracted to the insects that specialized in dead wood. My son pointed out this weird wasp-like thing last summer (when the tree had been dead a full year), which we identified as a giant ichneumons. Apparently it was laying eggs under the bark in the hidden galleries of larva tunnels. The Audubon guide said each egg would hatch and consume a horntail or some other wood-boring bug.

It is surprising how much the tree influenced our yard even when it was dead. It framed the landscape, it shed twigs that had to be picked up before we mowed, there were all the new and interesting creatures in it (more easily visible without leaves), it still provided some shade....it still had a certain presence.

I wish we could have watched it decay naturally, but it was too close to our house, and we got increasingly worried listening to it creak on windy days. Just before Christmas, the lumberjacks cut all the branches off it, toppled the trunk with a thud you could feel in the house (leaving an impressive dent in the soil), and ground the stump into a two foot high pile of mulch.

The tree's absence is still shocking....looking out at the moon rise, we see a gap where something always stood. The yard looks empty, the squirrels have to run a lot further to get away from our dog, and the pile of mulch looks disturbingly like a fresh grave.

What does this plant look like right now, during this season and at the time of day you're writing?

Here's a piece of firewood, minus the bark. Pretty cool, isn't it?

30th Carnival of Feminists

2007-01-17T13:59:00.000-05:00

is up at The Feminist Pulse. Check out a feminist look at 2006, many different points of views in (and on) feminism, pop culture (including that Problem Solved T-shirt, agh) and some critical responses to it, flame wars, Civil War women, and quite a bit more. And while you're there, page down and look at some of the earlier posts on The Feminist Pulse. They've got great talent for finding advertising (and other!) photographs that make you stop and think.

Letter Writing

2007-01-15T14:17:00.000-05:00

Just a brief note to say that I'm not blogging (much) because I'm writing an honest-to-god letter today.

I think it's been about fifteen years since I've mailed anyone something that is more than a quick thank-you note, get well card, holiday greeting, or a paragraph on a scrap of paper included in a package. I used to regularly send long angst-filled letters to my grandfather (and he sent long rambling replies in return), but it's been sixteen years since he died. It doesn't seem like that long.

I also used to send long letters to my significant other, usually when I was doing archaeological fieldwork for eight weeks somewhere far away from him. Although this was after the advent of e-mail, it was before laptops and solar batteries and wireless networks were common and cheap enough for a college student to afford. We actually wrote in addition to talking on the phone. Now, living together, some weeks we hardly even get a chance to talk.

Do you think that old hard drives will take the place of boxes of correspondence in our archives some day?

Meanwhile, I'm off to do my letter to an old friend from high school. She sent me a card out of the blue, after not speaking to me for several years, and I was actually glad that she didn't give me a phone number or an e-mail address, because it gives me a chance to write a genuine letter again.

Below you see sunrise from my bathroom window as it was a few weeks ago, framed by the dead elm tree that has since been reduced to a pile of mulch and some firewood. It's a good thing it wasn't still standing last night, because I don't think that the heavy coating of ice on all the branches and twigs out there today would keep all of that increasingly brittle wood up in the air. I should go take some photographs of all the picturesque ice, but the freezing rain makes indoor activities (like letter writing) infinitely more appealing.

Currently Reading

2007-01-12T10:34:00.000-05:00

Resolving to write better lead sentences wasn't such a good idea. Since I was unwilling to put anything down that didn't immediately appear eye-catching and smart, I stopped myself from putting anything down at all. And I had a lot of new books to read, and my kids were home from school for the winter holidays, and there are just lots of reasons to do something other than blog, especially when you can't think of a good first sentence.

So, forging past my writer's block with an easy topic: what I've been reading. Here's their lead sentences and a note about why I'm reading each and what I think of it:

__________________

Serene was word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.

- from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. What an incredible book. I'd heard of it for years (it was a bestseller after it was published in 1943, and a popular movie, which I've never seen either), but I was shocked by how modern and enjoyable this was. Thanks again to my book club for pushing me to read about Francie Nolan and her complicated family and what Brooklyn was like in the early 1900's.

And I loved the fact that Francie goes to Ann Arbor at the end of the book. Did you locals know that Betty Smith and her husband lived in Ann Arbor after she got married? I found her on the 1920 census (where both she & her husband apparently lied about their ages), living in another family's house in the heart of the Burns Park neighborhood, on Forest Ave. a couple blocks from Packard. She was never was an official student at U of M, but audited or unofficially took just about every writing class available in between having two daughters and writing plays.

__________________

You're stuck in traffic again.

- from Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. My book club's selection for next month, at my urging. I hope they don't all hate it.

__________________

There it is.

- from Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, by Rachel Kadish. "There it is" refers to Tolstoy's famous first line: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I haven't read further, but it sounds good and a blogger whose taste in books I like recommended this.

__________________

'A'a: While highly fluid pahoehoe lava can flow like a river, with no more than a slight metallic hiss, rubblelike 'a'a lava moves with a sound like crockery breaking.

- from Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez. This is a gorgeous, entertaining and enlightening book, the best kind to browse on a cold winter's night with a cup of coffee and some chocolate cherry bread (from Zingerman's Bakehouse, for you locals). The literary quotes are delightful, the authors chosen are all worth reading in their own right, and the words are fun. Just this morning I've read about anse (aha, so that's where L'Anse, Michigan comes from - it's French for 'bay'), armored mud balls, desire paths, Detroit rip rap, and pimple mounds.

I'm also reading (and have recently finished) some trashy paperbacks, but I'm not going to list all of those first sentences, let alone the authors or titles.

First Sentence Meme

2006-12-28T17:29:00.000-05:00

Because I thought it was fascinating on some other people's blogs. Turns out it wasn't so interesting here:

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. (quote by Mark Twain).

I've read a couple interesting posts lately on what bizarre strings of words people searched to get to your blog.

Well, I have four different blog posts started, but haven't had time to finish any of them.

I don't have much time to blog, having just started a part-time job doing research and writing.

Now playing at Women's Autonomy and Sexual Sovereignty Movements. (Carnival of Feminists).

I've been neglecting my blog lately. (Note: is there anything more pathetic than whining about not blogging in your blog? Unless it's talking about blog posts you never finished. My new year's blogolution will be to never start another post like this).

Perhaps prompted by my recent reading of Caitlin Flanagan's critique of compost ("compost heaps in the backyard: moldering heaps of garbage, rich with worms and loamy rot...hideous caches of broken eggshells and wet coffee grounds squirreled away on kitchen counters" p. 143, To Hell with All That), I've been thinking about our compost.

(Poverty, Class, and Lebanon)...are featured in the 20th Carnival of Feminists at Super Babymama.

Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, by Linda R. Hirshman, starts out well enough: If Betty Friedan had lived just a little longer.

Don't Send Twisty a Picture of Your Breasts when you go to I Blame the Patriarchy and read I Got Yer Boobython Right Here...and she'll send a dollar to Breast Cancer Action.

I have lots of books.

The busyness of actual life has been interfering with my blogging. (OMG! Again with the inane lead sentence! Never, never, never again.)

29th Carnival of Feminists

2006-12-20T15:01:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the 29th edition of the Carnival of Feminists

What a lot of fun putting this together was! It gave me the perfect excuse to conscientiously read my favorite blogs, to thoroughly explore their links, commenter's homepages, and blogrolls, and then to browse all manner of new blogs, using some of my favorite key words (shown below - try pairing them with gender or feminism for some interesting search results). I discovered all sorts of new bloggers, a number of vile stories and some inspiring ones, hilarious commentary, wicked sharp wit and humor, and a wealth of fascinating and insightful perspectives - all on feminist blogs. If I got paid for doing this, let's just say it would be my dream job.

If any readers and contributors out there are thinking about volunteering to host, I encourage you to contact Natalie. The few weeks that I spent on this Carnival was an altogether enjoyable and eye-opening experience.

Sexism
In which we look at examples of sexism from all over the world - sometimes blatant, occasionally subtle, often insidious. Some key words for posts in this section: stereotypes, gender bias, toys, pretty, and porn.

Women Come in 12 Flavors: Female Stereotypes in Urban Culture, at luscious life by isis kali.

The utterly amazing Action Heroes in Bangalore is presented by Blank Noise.

From Chaos Theory: a look at Girls and Cars. And, of course, BOYS.

Fergie Sets Women Back a Gajillion Years (complete with YouTube clip) is brought to us from the Daily Hysteric.

In Ready, Aim, Puke, MissPrism of A Somewhat Old, But Capacious Handbag takes on some trite and oversimplified evolutionary psychology. Why don't newspapers ever cite feminist sociobiologists for their science stories? I know they're out there, because I've read their articles in popular magazines like Natural History.

Quite a few well-known feminist bloggers in the US have written about the Discovery Channel's gendered selections for science toys for kids, but in Girls and Science: More Than Just Nail Polish, Dana at Mombian also points you to "online resources for girls interested in science and engineering".

Tara C. Smith writes about Science, Intelligence and teh Pretty in Aetiology (this is may be of special interest if you also like science fiction). This also seems like a good place to put in a plug for the most recent Feminist Carnival of Science Fiction and Fantasy. And then check out Stereotypes and Subtext: A Wee Primer, by Thus Spake Zustra (and take note of her wonderful category labels while you're at it).

Sciencewoman (On Being a Scientist and a Woman) also has some interesting commentary and linkage in Women in Science - A Few Things of Note.

Emily from the Kiwi branch of the All Girl Army (composed of bloggers between the ages of 10-23 years old) adds her perspective on gender bias in Boy Things, Girl Things.

If you haven't already read about the brouhaha over feminist bloggers, Britney Spears porn, and Googlebombing, check out A Brief History of Google Bombing, or: If A Feminist Does It, It's Wrong, No Matter What "It" Is at Screaming into the Void.

photo provided by Screaming into the Void,
from Britney Spears Crotch is so hot! FREE PUSSY PIC!

Sour Duck adds a thoughtful response to the crotch shot debate at The Feminist Way to "Download Britney Spears Sex Video - FAST!".

I've seen several responses to Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair article, but Shark-Fu of AngryBlackBitch had perhaps the funniest one at Fun with Vanity Fair.

And Shakespeare's Sister brings us Men Are Not Babies - a post that makes a few points that are so damn obvious (now that she's said it) that I really wish I'd written it myself. I don't know of anyone else who has explained feminism in everyday life so well though, so go and read and then smack yourself in the head for not saying it yourself, too.

Labor Paid and Unpaid, and Work/Life Balance
In which we look at another aspect of sexism, as it is experienced in the domestic sphere, and how private life interacts with our public life. Or vice versa. Key words: income, glass ceilings, maternal walls, wage gap, crafts and invisible work.

Photo by Ann Rosener, 1942. Library of Congress,
Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, [LC-USE6-D-005878 DLC]

Uma has a short but enlightening (pardon the pun) story on Power Women at Indian Writing.

There's a cogent discussion of Division of Labor, and Income at the Reproductive Rights Blog - a nice follow up to the Work (and Women) post - and some thoughtful comments on Secret Lives of Breadwinner Wives by Rich at Queercents.

Dr. Mom writes about the gender gap in academia in My Postdoc Left.

Amy Tiemann, of Mojo Mom asks Does the Gender Wage Gap Begin at Home? in her blog at MomsRising.org.

If you don't know who Kiki Peppard is, and you've never heard the term 'maternal profiling', then you need to check out this Update on Kiki and PA from Cooper at been there, who also blogs at MomsRising.

Kiki herself wrote an Obituary for (proposed Pennsylvania state laws) HB352 and SB440, which "are survived by women everywhere who believe in equality and justice and are trying to provide the best they can for their families."

Elizabeth at Monster Blog ponders childcare problems and solutions, and mothers' participation in the paid labor force in "Hurray for Snow Days?" Asks This Mom.

If you live in the US, and you're part of a family, you should definitely read Elizabeth's post on FMLA Input Needed at Half-Changed World.

Artemis at the Feminist Mormon Housewives has a thought-provoking post on Domesticity, examining our stereotypes about craft and crafts, professionalism, and the value of women's work.

Status and Equality
In which we look at some of the social, legal, and political ramifications of sexism. Key words: law, culture, ICT, equality, cutbacks.

Artemis at One Woman Army sums up the situation with Canada's Status of Women program succinctly in Women Are Angry.

photo by Artemis of One Woman Army: Protest the Cuts

Remembering....And Taking Action! on Canada's National Day of Remembrance and Action Against Violence Against Women, is by Inside the Box, who notes that "Women’s chances for equality in Canada are slowing dying - but without youth they’re all but gone away."

And speaking of "young feminists", Online with Zoe has a bit to say about that phrase in Calling All Ages.

FeminisTIC, a bilingual blogger from Montreal, has many fascinating posts, but I was most interested in her participation in Take Back the Tech as described in Me, Moi, Violence & ICTS/TIC . ICT is "information communication technology" - read more at Take Back the Tech about how new forms of communication and representation are influencing women's global status and roles in surprising ways. You might also want to check out Fried Tofu and Scrambled Egg's defense of her ideas at A Take Back the Tech Challenge.

Ann Bartow of the Feminist Law Professors presents a Bloggish Overview of Feminist Legal Theory.

ThreadingWater brings us an update on US federal policy in Pain Killers, comparing the recent failure of the fetal pain bill in the US and federal cuts "to local communities attempting to collect child support money from delinquent parents".

Violence
In which we look at sexism taken to its most appalling extremes. Key words: abuse, rape, murder.

Zambian ICT Journalist Brenda Zulu provides an eye-opening look at ICT Tools and Gender Based Violence in Africa (see the section above if you don't know what ICT is).

Susan Loone, a Malaysian activist living in Bangkok, provides her thoughts on recent disturbing events in her homeland in 16 Days of Activism...But Women Bashed in All Directions.

Thinking Girl has an insightful post entitled How to Avoid Becoming a Rapist (with unusually thoughtful commentary, too). Which leads us directly to the next few posts.

Poster from Mind the Gap's Flickr photostream.

I wanted to avoid the most popular feminist bloggers, since so many Carnival readers probably already read them, but the story about a University of New Hampshire student's criticism of a safe sex poster in the campus newspaper (the link and hundreds of appalling comments have since since been removed by UNH) and the resulting flood of online misogyny was too important to ignore. Twisty featured the story in Season's Beatdowns (at I Blame the Patriarchy), and Amanda at Pandagon followed up on it with Giving Boneheads a Bad Name. Read the comments. Although you might think these posts should go in the section on Sexism, the violence that so many commentators threatened puts it unquestionably here.

From Suffolk, England, Ellen Seymour of ProActive PR looks at the recent murder of five women, and then asks her readers What Do Prostitutes Really Want?

Nimue from Notes, Recollections, etc. adds Some Thoughts on Legalising Brothels, and Winter from Mind the Gap examines mainstream media reactions and feminist blog coverage of the killings in Doesn't Everyone Love a Good Femicide?

And don't miss Women Like Me, at Diary of a Goldfish. She sums up the situation very well indeed.

Ourselves, Our Bodies and Our Choices
In which we examine the implications and limitations of our choices about our bodies. Some key words for this section: miscarriage, pregnancy, identity, ambition, family, childbirth, sexuality.

We have three thoughtful and interlinked posts from Australia dealing with the different aspects of childbearing and their sociocultural and psychological consequences.

Kerry at Pavlov's Cat examines the choice to become a mother (or not), and the role her feminism plays in Some Days You Make the Choice, Some Days the Choice Makes You. Ampersand Duck presents Working Through a Few Issues, a powerful post about her feelings on not having a second child following a loss and major surgery. Cristy writes frankly about pregnancy, her future choices, and feminism in A Woman's Work at Two Peas, No Pod.

On a related note, the Oxford University Press blog presents A Few Questions for Rosanna Hertz, the author of Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family.

A Womb of Her Own (what a great blog title!) writes an enlightening post that asks What About the "Community" in "Midwifery in the Community"?

Storm Indigo writes about sexuality and self-acceptance at Last night I dreamed I decolonized my thighs.

Did I Miss Something? presents an amazing and powerful post about real women in Inspired By. Don't miss it if you think that an important part of feminism is questioning your own assumptions. And while you're at it, read A Touchy Subject, by Book Girl at Falling Off My Pedestal.

Books and History
Because I can't blog without bringing up either or both of these topics. Key words: literary review, middle ages, meat, poetry, novelists, women writers.

Erasing Louise Labe describes the controversy over a French poet who wrote so eloquently about women over four hundred years ago at Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Too.

Soy, Masculinity, Warriors, and Monks: Again, with the Meat is from In the Middle (a Medieval Studies Group Blog), and ties a current soundbite (get it, a sound bite) about soy products in with some interesting thoughts about medieval diet.

The new Feminist Review blog provides interesting commentary (and a couple more books to add to my holiday wish list): there's recent examinations of Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism, by Linda M. Scott, and Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Middle Ages, by Anne Winston-Allen.

The review of Michele Landberg's Women and Children First: A Provocative Look at Modern Canadian Women at Work and at Home at Frieda's Feminist Book Blog brings a book that you may have overlooked back into the limelight (and onto my library request list).

Bitch Ph.D.'s Last-Minute Feminist Gifts has more recommendations for a couple of books that I'm sure many of us would appreciate as gifts.

20th-Century Women Writers at the National Portrait Gallery, by Natalie Bennett (posting at the My London Your London cultural guide) provides an intriguing look at "the glam and the homespun" portraits of some of my favorite writers, and a couple more authors to add to my reading list.

And Finally
We have a few posts that can't be classified, but are definitely worth reading. Key words: music, language, the blues, and winter.

dogpossum writes about the blues in Just a Couple of Thoughts about Cold, Hot, and Va-Va-Voom.

Laurie and Debbie from the body impolitic tell us about Insults, Profanity, and Metaphor.

Malachi at Feminist Allies writes about teaching Japanese in I Reinforce Gender-Roles.

And finally, Tiny Cat Pants brings us a heart-wrenching but achingly beautiful piece of prose in Tribal Soul Mothers.

Thanks for reading. Happy holidays to those of you that celebrate in the next few weeks, and best wishes for a new year full of diversity and debate in the feminist blogosphere.

Update

2006-12-17T11:18:00.000-05:00

I haven't done any regular blogging because I'm having too much fun pulling together all of the posts for the next Carnival of Feminists for next Wednesday.

And in a moment of madness last September, I volunteered to be the "paint parent" at my daughter's Kindergarten every Wednesday morning. Have I mentioned that I hate handprinting and fingerpainting? AND to do the holiday party, which meant planning a couple craft & game activities, and coercing other parents to donate materials and treats for tomorrow. At least I don't have to make cookies for the party now.

I was forced to buy a glue gun. Actually, my husband got it when he picked up the extra foam for the snowman ornaments on Friday. After an exciting Saturday night gluing monofilament to foam circles (which the kids will decorate with buttons and foam carrot noses, etc.), I did have the crafty urge to glue more things, like pine cones and dried seedheads.

The urge went away after I started reading Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford, and then watched an episode of the last season of Dr. Who (the Daleks!), though, and it hasn't re-surfaced.

I really wanted to write something for the Carnival myself, on the whole Neandertal women hunting vs. archaic Homo sapiens women gathering possible origins of the modern division of labor article in the NYT (now hidden behind their you-must-pay firewall), and went so far as to read the original article in Current Anthropology (also behind a firewall, but you can read the abstract here), but I doubt if I can actually get it done by Wednesday. There will be a lot of other great articles in the Carnival, though, and I urge you all to check back here then.

The 28th Carnival of Feminists

2006-12-06T21:55:00.000-05:00

Now up at Diary of a Freak Magnet. There are some very funny posts there, and some very thought-provoking ones. Go read now, about the uproar in Norway about boys sitting vs. standing to urinate, about modesty and rape and a new law in India, about secretaries, and sexism in academia, about porn, on taking your baby to work, about girls, and "dirty words", and socialized stupidity.

I'll be hosting the next Carnival of Feminists here on Wednesday, December 20...just two weeks from now. I'm particularly interested in your posts concerning feminism and motherhood (or parenting), women in history (or prehistory!), and the difference and the contradictions between the feminism we preach or read about, and the feminism we practice in our lives. As the other hosts have mentioned, posts on other topics related to feminism are also encouraged. If it's a good piece of writing, I want it. Please send your submissions to zeafem@yahoo.com before December 19 - especially if you've never contributed to the Carnival before. And don't be shy about nominating a great post that a friend of yours has written, or that you ran across while you were surfing something obscure.

The Busyness of Actual Life

2006-12-05T15:27:00.000-05:00

...has been interfering with my blogging. In the last month, both of my kids have had birthdays (complete with ultra-messy chocolate-frosted chocolate cupcakes for their respective classes of 26 and 15 kids, not to mention extra for staff), we've had the always exhausting and enlightening annual IEP (Individual Education Program) meeting, to continue to educate my son's school faculty and staff about Tourette's "Plus" (OCD and ADHD), and to brainstorm appropriate accommodations for a mysterious disability that is as unpredictable as the weather, four children's doctor visits (with one follow-up and a dental appt. coming up), one adult nurse practitioner visit (as a result I am going to buy a nasal irrigator, and hope it's easier to use than a Neti pot), teacher conferences, dead elm tree removal scheduled (only to have it postponed by weather) and driven to Chicagoland for Thanksgiving. If you're driving I-94 across Michigan through Indiana into Illinois, I recommend that you avoid the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. But the Friday afternoon following Thanksgiving is a great time to make the same drive (two and half hours shorter for our return to the Ann Arbor area).

Last week my son was riding his bike to school wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. It was 13°F this morning (with a windchill around 4°F), and we had to shovel an inch of light snow off of our sidewalk.

I haven't had much time for reading, though I did finally manage to finish The Omnivore's Dilemma. I post-it-ed (is that a word? if not, it should be) a bunch of stuff to discuss, but I don't have time to do it now. Interested readers might want to check out Pollan's shorter essays on his website - I was thrilled to find many of my old favorites there, including "Weeds Are Us", "Opium Made Easy" (warning: it's only illegal to grow the wrong kind of poppies if you read this article), and "A Gardener's Guide to Sex, Politics, and Class" (you didn't plant magenta zinnias, did you? Cause that's just so ..... slatternly).

As American as Pumpkin Pie

2006-11-21T21:33:00.000-05:00

From the most recent book I'm returning to the library but wish I could keep in my personal library: Far-Flung Hubbell: Essays from the American Road, by Sue Hubbell:

...Americans were the first to understand what pie could be. For instance, the English had been making what they called pompion by cutting a hole in the side of a pumpkin, extracting the seeds and the filaments, stuffing the cavilty with apples, and baking the whole. New Englanders improved on this, combining the apples and pumpkin and putting them in a proper pastry. Then they eliminated the apples and added milk, eggs, spices, and molasses to the mashed, stewed pumpkin.

Pie has never been more loved than in nineteenth-century America, where it was not simply dessert but also a normal part of breakfast. The food writer Evan Jones quotes a contemporary observer as noting that in northern New England "all the hill and country towns were full of women who would be mortified if visitors caught them without pie in the house," and that the absence of pie at breakfast "was more noticeable than the scarcity of the Bible." (from pp. 7-8, Chapter One, "The Great American Pie Expedition").

Hubbell describes banana, coconut, raisin, lemon, cherry-cream, blackberry, raspberry, blueberry, cherry, pineapple, apple, Dutch apple, peach, apricot, peanut-butter, walnut, pecan, sour-cream raisin, sweet potato, coconut-cream, green-tomato, chocolate-meringue, lemon meringue, Key lime, shoofly, strawberry, strawberry-rhubarb, graham-cracker (pie, not just piecrust), Nantucket cranberry, butterscotch, banana-pudding, buttermilk, apple-raisin, and icebox mixed fruit pies in her delicious account, which includes some recipes that I'd like to try. My husband, however, will be making the pumpkin pies tonight for dinner at his parents' house the day after tomorrow. I really prefer apple pie, but I'd rather wait until I can make one myself than eat one from the grocery store.

One of my favorite things about the day after Thanksgiving is a breakfast of apple pie and coffee. And I'd rather have a slice of very sharp cheddar with my hot apple pie than ice cream, thank you very much.

I wanted to add some interesting quotes from Laura Shapiro's Perfection Salad on the anti-pie movement at the turn of the century (which perhaps is better described as the failed "pie temperance" cult), but I can't find my copy. So I'll just provide a link to Linda Stradley's History of Pie until after the holiday. And a link to The Wrong Pie, a funny discourse on Crooked Timber from a few years ago. Healy is wrong about the neglect of pumpkins in the social science literature (well, in anthropology, anyway, where Curcurbita pepo has become a star in the constellation of prehistoric Native American domesticates), though he may be right about pumpkin pie.