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.)

Review: What My Bones Know

 What My Bones Know

A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

By Stephanie Foo

Wow, pretty fascinating. I don’t think I ever fully understood the title (what did her bones know?), but it was an amazing and honest depiction of the prolonged recovery of a woman from the years of abuse—mostly mental but sometimes physical as well—by her parents. She also explores her family history, trying to understand why no one intervened to help her. The answer seemed to be simple—what good would it do? Standing up for her would only make her Mother beat her harder. But there were a number of historical reasons for it, too. She goes into them, and it’s awfully depressing. 

She also went to her teachers to see why they didn’t intervene. I won’t spoil the story by telling it here, but remember, she was a very intelligent little girl who coped with nutcase parents as well as she could.

When she finally got a diagnosis to what she was suffering – Complex PTSD – that explained a lot. But simply knowing it didn’t help her heal. This book is about what DID help.

Review: If You Can't Take the Heat

If You Can’t Take the Heat:

Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

By Geraldine Deruiter

I loved her. I could read a thousand memoirs just like this. She was funny and biting and satirical and deeply honest at times, and I just couldn’t get enough of her little stories. Especially her writing on the toxic masculinity expected in celebrity chefs. Oh, and her horribly awful experience that a restaurant run by one. How in the world did she ever survive?