Review: The Beautiful Snow

 The Beautiful Snow:

The Ingalls Family, the Railroads, and the Hard Winter of 1880-81

by Cindy Wilson 

Being a devotee of all things Little House related, I found parts of this book extremely interesting.  But not nearly as many parts as I hoped. It was a whole lot railroad history and facts about how the railroad companies tried to deal with the snow. And that part was pretty interesting…but I’d had enough after five or so pages of it.

Then she treated the winter month by month, with a section for each describing how the Ingalls family got along, then how the various settlements in and around De Smet fared. For each settlement she described newspaper publishing, fuel, food, railroad, human entertainment, and a vague subject she called “boosterism”. This latter described how the various entities (newspaper writers, politicians, railroad companies, ets) promoted life in the Dakota territories despite the little inconvenience of snow.

The book was well written and very much well researched, and it had lots of interesting stuff in it, but I found it a little bit overkill for me. Another history buff might say it was just right, though, so I won’t try to speak for everyone.  Just my opinion—a great book to check out of the library but I’m glad not to need to own a copy.

Review: The Battle Cry of the Siamese Kitten

By Philipp Schott DVM

This is what I was expecting from the first of his books that I read!  It’s almost all anecdotes from his life and his time as a small animal veterinarian. (Very few lectures or chapters explaining the complex answers to frequently asked, seemingly simple questions.)

It was very entertaining.

Gardening...not exactly

 I think I need a new category to describe interesting plants I find on the property. Here's one:

Possum-haw Holly

It's native to the southeast U.S. and forms a nice little tree. But apparently in order to have berries you have to grow a female tree, so if I save these seeds and plant them, how many would I have to cultivate--and for how long--to get a tree?  

 Maybe I'll try planting the stem I cut off.

 

 

Review: Stalking the Angel

Elvis Cole #2 by Robert Crais

 I’m sure there are plenty of reviews that will tell you all you need to know about the content and plot of this book. But here’s one from the perspective of a reader for whom this is just a little bit out of the comfort zone.

There’s a lot of killing. And just like in the previous book, I just don’t think it’s realistic that Elvis Cole and his partner, Joe Pike, get away with killing people, breaking and entering, and other shady stuff. How are we supposed to believe they wouldn’t have to endure a whole lot of police interrogation?  And there are descriptions of some hideously gruesome and brutal murder/torture scenes. I skimmed the worst one.

But there’s some redeeming introspection and depth to the Elvis Cole character that made it sort of worth while. I got to liking him, even while I thought his motives were a whole lot unsupported by what he was seeing and hearing. And there were unanswered and unanswerable questions. Like life.

 It would be worthwhile trying a third one. To me. But I’ll squeeze in a couple of cozy mysteries first.

Review: Jayber Crow

by Wendell Berry

How could such a beautiful book be so damn depressing?  I don’t know whether to recommend it or to warn you away from it!  If you love nature and human kindness and old-time small town life, you’ll find it all here—told in slow, sensible and glorious prose. No fancy turns of speech here, and no sentences you have to read twice to get the sense of them. Just stories.

And it’s all so very sad. This is an elegy to the death of a way of life and those who loved it. Only a small family of backwoods people survive unscathed, and probably only then because the book ended before an economic development company acquired their lAnd and bulldozed it over.

But of course god heals all in the end. It’s kind of an elegy to “life sucks and then you die”… but it’s a beautiful life sometimes while you’re living it.

First Song Sparrow of Winter

  Taking a nice bath!   They could theoretically hang around all year, but I only see them in the winter.

Review: Our South

 Our South

Black Food Through My Lens - A Cookbook

by Ashleigh Shanti

I can’t really give a rating for cookbooks because I can’t say that I’ve read every word or cooked very many, if any, recipes from them.  But if I could, I’d give this one a 5-star review. The introduction and head notes are very interesting and there are a whole lot of recipes in here I’d love to try. I probably won’t, but if I get back into “cooking mode” it would be worth buying a copy of this just to have the options close at hand.