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.

Gardening is in my Roots, Fall Edition

 

This is the “after” picture. I never thought to take a “before”. The dead stuff and Johnson grass and ragweeds taller than my head—not to mention the okra taller than the ragweed—kept nagging at me until I finally spent a week or so with the digging fork, shovel and hoe and got it under control.

The lovely turnips (and collards and radishes) were planted back in September. 

 

                                                     Turnip tops--> 

Collard Greens

 

 

 

And the garlic was planted when I discovered the row from last year that had been buried in the undergrowth. When I dug it up, some of it had started to sprout so I just separated the bulbs and replanted it. I still have a lot left—maybe I’ll slip another dozen or so into the ground tomorrow.

Garlic 

 

I also planted broccoli, spinach and lettuce but it doesn’t appear to be sprouting. I’ll keep my hopes up.

 

 

 

 

 

A sweet potato that I failed to dig up last year has persisted through the summer, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the other green stuff is horseradish, which planted itself several years ago and sends up leaves in the spring. 

 

 

 And every year at the appropriate time I get a huge sprouting of okra, cilantro, and arugula that I planted years ago. The okra and cilantro come up in the garden beds, but for reason unknown the arugula has been gradually moving itself north toward the compost pile.

 

 

 

and, in the barn, a tiny toad lurks... 

 

 

Forgot to post my turnips, but see this instead

 

Review: Mistakes Were Made

 

What could happen to destroy a well-laid plan to leave one’s house in Georgia and retire comfortably in Spain, shopping for groceries at the little farm stands, lazing on the beach, seeing the sights…?

Well, a global pandemic could. This is the hilarious and heartbreaking tale of a family, two travel-adverse dogs, an overheating car with no air conditioning, and Covid, of course.

Review: The Next Patient:

The Next Patient:

The Incredible World of Emergency Medicine

By J.Thomas Grant

Fascinating from beginning to end.  A set of episodes told memoir-style but not in any particular order that I could tell. Maybe that was explained early on and I missed it. Although each episode was mostly standalone, it wasn’t the sort of book I could leave in the bathroom and read a chapter at a time—because I couldn’t stop reading! Each one was better than the last—some touching, some scary and some absolutely maddening. 

On finishing I immediately looked to see if he’d written another. Not yet.

Review: A Dying Fall

#5 in the Ruth Galloway Series

What a oddball to kick this one off with!  A skeleton is dug up and the bones moved to storage, and the archaeologist doing the excavation mysteriously dies in a house fire. And Ruth is called in to take a look at the bones, only to discover something very, very interesting about them.

And so on, with all the familiar “mood” of the other books in the series (dark and brooding), plus a change of scenery for all of the characters—Ruth, Cathbad, Nelson, and even Nelson’s long-suffering wife.

I’ll probably not write unique reviews of the rest of the series, unless something stands out. In all of them I very much enjoy the historical detail, the personal relationships, and the ongoing character growth. So far. The actual mystery I enjoy too, but the perp’s motives don’t always make a lot of sense.

Review: The accidental veterinarian

 

The accidental veterinarian

 by Philipp Schott

More expository and less episodic than I’d hoped from the title. Which is my mistake for not reading the reviews first. But still enjoyable—I love reading about veterinarians and the pets they treat, and of course as he continually points out, the people of the pets.  If a veterinarian truly hates dealing with pet owners, he will be truly unhappy with his job because that’s a big, big part of it.  But he enjoys all that and seems to come out fine.

 So there are lectures about things like heartworms, holidays, and inappropriate pets. And there are also amusing stories about things dogs eat, inappropriate pets that turn out just fine, and very odd people who put up with absurd (or dangerous) situations because their pets call the shots. Or at least, their pets as the humans perceive them to be thinking.

 Nice little book but I don’t think I’ll read the sequel.

Review: Where the Rhododendrons Bloom

 I was sadly disappointed in this hiking blog turned into a book. I read travel stories because I like to travel, of course, but I read other people’s stories because I like to see how the travel changes them. I want to know everything—where they come from, how they experienced the world around them, and how they changed along the way. Set against the backdrop of mountains, bears, and funky other hikers, I’m still anticipating a highly personal adventure and I want to come out of it knowing the person and wishing I were them.

But this book just didn’t do that for me. It seemed to be good, at first, but soon devolved into a rather boring and repetitious listing of each days happenings—

I met Strider, Hip-hop and Whirlybird at the shelter and we drank a lot of beer and did whiskey shots; I went to my tent and got up and bought snacks at the gas station and hiked another fifteen miles, then we met up with Jaybird and Freddy-Snacks and had trail magic, and then I hiked with Sunshine for another five miles and stopped at the shelter where they had a case of beer and we drank a lot….

I met the names, but not the people.  And the roads she traveled might as well have been city streets, for all the outdoor wonder she wanted to share. She mentioned the outdoors but only as a backdrop to the shallow-copy humans she met.

I’m exaggerating a little, but I was finding myself skipping a lot of pages. The minute she leaft the trail and hit a party scene, I figured I might as well jump ahead for a bit.  But hey, this is HER adventure. Hike your own hike, as they say. I’m sure a lot of people will love reading it.

Review: Ordinary Grace

 Ordinary Grace

 by William Kent Krueger

Awesome book. Very much a religious moral lesson, but not at all silly about it. In the epilogue, the author explains his purposes in writing were to explore a family caught in a series of painful events and also to write about the small town Minnesota of his childhood. He did both things very well.

 

Review: The Living Medicine:

The Living Medicine:

How a Lifesaving Cure Was Nearly Lost—and Why It Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail

By Lina Zeldovich

I’m very conflicted writing about this. It was a great bit of history and well told, all about the persons and personalities that led to the discovery and ultimate re-discovery of the bacteriophage. These are viruses that prey on bacteria; when carefully cultured, purified, and tested, they can be used therapeutically to great effect.

To sum up the mystery of “Nearly Lost”, I’ll briefly explain what the book is all about. They were discovered independently in several places, and used therapeutically to great effect in Eastern Europe. She spends much time writing about their champions and how the research proceeded. But in Western medicine, they were mostly discredited and ignored—antibiotics worked as well and were a lot easier to create. Until, of course, antibiotics stopped working.

It's a fascinating story and I only have a few complaints to share. (None of which should interfere with your enjoyment of this book) One, she tends to spend a lot of words on the love stories and female companions of the scientists who are the subjects of the book. I found that boring and mostly pointless. Two, there are an awful lot of episodes described that follow the same pattern: person gets an infection; person is at death’s door and nothing will help; patient’s family/doctor/lover insists on getting a bacteriophage treatment; patient experiences miraculous recovery.

Okay, once or twice is enough!  It seems to repeat this over and over.

And third complain, the book seems to consistently downplay (and at first, ignore) the issue that bacteriophages, like any living thing, can mutate. And so can bacteria. So a treatment that once worked can stopped working, and also, even the most careful of scientific process can have unintended consequences. Toward the end of the book, these issues are mentioned. But then she’s back on her endless applause for the miracles of bacteriophages.