Review: Hunted Girl

Hunted Girl by Carolyn Ridder Aspenson

I guess I’m glad to have picked up the second book in this series, because I liked it very much. Full of action and death and destruction, especially near the ending. In this story the detective herself appears to be stalked by her husband’s killer’s family members. But it’s all mixed in with some murders and drug deals so she really can’t be sure.

 Pretty good mystery. Or should I say action thriller?  Nope—I’ll stick with mystery or even “police procedural” for a description.

Review: The Spoon Stealer

The Spoon Stealer

I found this book impossible to put down—but I knew I had to make it last. So I forced it out of my greedy hands and didn’t rush through it, to the end. Still, the end came exactly when it should have, neither too early nor too late. The author is a masterful plotter!  Somehow she manages to let a topic down gently, so you don’t feel robbed, but bring in a new twist seamlessly, so you don’t feel jerked around.

 Okay, enough hinting around. It’s a story of an old woman with a dog who speaks to her. You immediately love them both, deeply.  And the woman’s history, which she reads to her friends in a memoir writing class,  is harrowing and wonderful. Alternately and both at once. And then we’re back to present time…and then back to the past, and….

 And that’s all I’m going to say. One of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

Review: Native America

 Native America: The Story of the First Peoples

Kenneth L Feder

With a scope as wide as a continent and a wry, sudden sense of humor, this author has written an amazing book. It tells the prehistory and some of the modern history of the North American native peoples. In a lot of detail, including archeological digs and records written by the European settles, plus some native peoples’ legends and historical memories as well.

He did not include Central or South America much—I guess that was out of scope. Too bad!  I would have enjoyed reading about it. But I was still amazed at the cities and civilizations of North America that I’d never even heard about. Mound builders, yeah, I’d heard of them. But the whole Cahokia (modern name) settlement in the Midwest? It was huge! Wow.

His archaeology stuff was really fascinating to me, but I wish he’d included a little more of the genetic analysis results that are helping to explain the connections and divergences between populations. The food and agriculture sections are good, but I wanted more.

 Still, a fabulous work of scholarship. And some humor.

Review: Blisters, Bears and Bliss

  Blisters, Bears and Bliss

A Pacific Crest Trail Memoir

by Yonatam 'Raven' Weiss

What a disappointment!  I thought it was a memoir or a travel log.  But not at all.  It was, as the reviewer prior to me wrote very succinctly,

“non-stop rant…practically yelling at the reader over and over again to stop conforming to society and go on a thru-hike. He found around 100 different ways of phrasing the exact same thing over and over and over again.”

I couldn’t say it better myself. Luckily I’m quitting before wasting any more time on it.

Review: Tides

 Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean

Okay, you can’t believe there’s enough to say about tides to fill up an entire book, can you?  So read this book and you’ll know—in intimate detail—just how much you don’t know.  Yeah, there’s the moon and the oceans, which cause tides, but there’s also the sun and the earth’s topography and rotation and slant on its axis, plus the moon’s non-circular orbit and to top off all the complexity-causing factors, wave patterns. Wow.

Pretty much fascinating stuff throughout. Maybe not “riveting” reading at times, but never by any stretch of the imagination boring.

 

Review: America’s Greatest Road Trip!

 America’s Greatest Road Trip!

Key West to Deadhorse

9000 Miles Across Backroad USA

By Tom Cotter, photos by Michael Alan Ross

Remember reading the old National Geographic magazines? Back when they only had about four stories per issue and the issues were much larger?  The photos and captions interwove with the fascinating stories—each time you turned a page, it was hard to decide which to tackle first.

This is like that and a thousand times better.  Tom Cotter and his photographer, Michael Alan Ross, talk the Ford Motor Company into loaning them a Bronco and they attach an airstream trailer (not the typical one but a short, boxy model) to it. And off they go, starting in Key West and staying on the back roads as much as they can stand to.

Along the way they talk to a bucket-list load of interesting people. And they see (and photograph) a lot of old cars, too. Tom is the creator of the YouTube channel Barn Find Hunter, which I believe is a search for old restored and unrestored cars tucked away in remote locations. I need to watch an episode one day.

The book is gorgeous and the adventures are amusing, and the coffee shops keep coming. But it’s the people they meet and interview that really make the book great. A hundred stars of great!

Review: In Search of the Old Ones

 In Search of the Old Ones

An Odyssey Among Ancient Trees

By Anthony D Fredericks

What a lovely, lovely book!  One of the best natural history books I’ve ever read. He travels around to visit the old trees of the U.S. and writes about each. He did the coastal redwoods, bristlecone pines, and sequoia, of course, but also bald cypress and some oaks and juniper. Most surprising to me is that one of the oldest is a Quaking Aspen called Pando. Not what you’d think of as a single tree but rather a grove of clones that all share the same root system. Dating of this trees is not possible by modern technology (his words) because there is no single piece of step from several thousand years ago, or any ancient remnants. Where would you look—the current expanse of Pando is 106 acres, so somewhere in there might be the oldest part. Or not.

But the best guess based on how fast an aspen clone spreads outward in a year, is between 8000 and 12,000 years. It cannot be older because the geologic record indicates that glaciers covered the ground until about 12,000 years ago.

 So I loved this book and would recommend it highly…with one issue. He begins each tree with a short description of what was happening to some unknown person of human history at about the same time as the tree was born. This humans used always seems to be halfway around the planet, in Tigris or China or Greece or some place totally irrelevant to the tree’s birth. It’s educational, a little, but it got old really fast.  (I started skipping the random people’s stories.)