They hanged witches, didn't they?

The Devil in Massachusetts:
A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials

by Marion L. Starkey

Well, darn.  Fascinating book, well researched, well told.  The author did her job well, pulling no stops and naming all names.  She followed up, too--didn't just stop with the first witch hanged but kept the story moving until the close.  Well...there's never really a "close" to history, but you know what I mean.  Until the people were moving on with their lives, making amends (or not), and the history was history--not current events.

But I yearned for details, explanations, even theories.  When I read the introduction, Ms. Starkey said she'd been inspired to do the researched by her two college classes on psychology.  So I expected a lot more psychology than I got--and what I got, was darn little. The book was published in 1949 so I didn't hope for a modern-day analysis, but I still expected her to explain terms like "hysteria" using the interpretation of the day.  But no--all we got was the word, as if it explained everything.  I had to look it up in the encyclopedia to understand what it (used to) mean.

She also had a tendency to throw around names of religions and doctrines like they were common knowledge, like everyone knew what Puritanism was and predestination meant.  I did--vaguely--but I didn't know enough to make any sense out of the paragraphs that cited them as causal to the phenomenon.  He'd talk about the limitations in the lives of young girls in that era, but seldom give the details that would make us understand just how god-awful boring they were.  And how limited.

And thus, my disappointment.  I give her A for exposition, C for world-building, and F for introspection.  I might have disagreed with every single psychological diagnosis she offered, but at least she could have offered them.

Stories. The best.

Stones from the River
by Urusla Hegi



I did this magnificent book a disservice.  Thinking it was short stories, I kept wondering when the story was going to come to an end.  The episodes were concise and pithy--each could be plenty for a short story--but they didn't end.

Soon enough I realized my mistake and thought it might be a novella packaged together with some stories, but by then I was so hooked I didn't want that to be true.  I couldn't consult the book cover--it was already back at the library.  And I didn't dare consult the online resources (Goodreads, Library, etc.) for fear of spoilers.

Needless to say, I was very, very happy to spend six more weeks living through thirty years in 'Trudy's life.  The narrator's gentle German accent read her name as "Twoodie" and it was a long time before I realized it was short for Gertrude.  No matter--I was in love with her. Gertrude, Twoodie, Der Zwerg.  The woman.  I cried for her--cried with her--rejoiced at her triumphs, admired her attempts at understanding this strange and confusing world she was landed in.  I could spend another twenty years with Trudy and her stories.

This is my failure

These is my Words

By Nancy E. Turner

Contemplated finishing this tonight...realized I didn't have to.  It's the sort of book I find easy to put down and hard to pick up.  But when I'm reading it, the story flows along.  And along.  And along.  There's only one plot line that should be keeping me interested, but it isn't.  I know the guy will get the girl in the end, and the suspense is definitely not killing me.

There's so much promise here--frontier girl blossoming into womanhood.  Rakish and inscrutable Captain in the Army.  Long wagon ride to Tuscon.  Starting a ranch.  Getting married, having a baby.  None of these are fleshed out well enough to make me really care.  There are side characters that I hope for her to explore...and they stay unmutably flat as pancakes.

So, sad to say, abandoned.  Page 184 out of 384.

Reading cookbooks. Sheez.

Nourishing Traditions:
The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition
and the Diet Dictocrats

by Sally Fallon, with Mary G Enig. Ph.D.

I had high hopes for this book but they rapidly diminished.  She's got a lot of good ideas and some of them are backed up by facts. Some of them.

Her take on fats and oils is right in line with current research, and her description of how most vegetable oils are extracted from seeds brings back the nightmare that I got after reading how canola oil is made.  Refined carbs are evil in anyone's book.  But then she moves on to protein.  How can ANYONE who is serious about nutrition writing trot out that hackneyed old cliche about it being "essential" to consume complete proteins in every meal?  We've gotten past that fantasy, all right? Even the author of Diet For a Small Planet refuted her own thesis--years ago.

So, basing her argument on an obsolete theory, and tradition, Ms. Fallon concludes that good old animal protein is essential for optimal health.  Having just read the Richard Dawkins letter that illustrates the danger of basing beliefs on faith, tradition, or authority, I shouldn't have picked up the book at all.  She takes traditional methods of cooking, treats them as the ultimate authority on correct nutrition, and cherry picks her evidence to support it.

Ignoring the basic fallacy of her approach, I suspect she has some good ideas here.  Especially in the area of "sprouted grains" and sourdough methods of making bread.  It's true, mankind doesn't have the intestinal fauna to digest whole grains, nor do we have enough stomachs.  (I prefer to take my wheat in the form of beer, which over time, creates its own stomach.)  It would be really interesting to see some good, solid research in the area of nutritional benefits of slow soaking of whole grains.

But you won't find that here.  All you'll find is a bunch of recipes with a more-or-less random commentary running down the sides of the pages.  None of the commentary is footnoted or backed by references.  You might as well be reading Ye Olde Farmers' Almanac.

One last beef: in the introduction she stresses the differences in nutritional benefits between meat and eggs that are raised free-range vs. those mass-produced in a factory on corn based feed with a generous helping of antibiotics.  But after that, it's seldom mentioned.  I'd have put it in every recipe.

Took a while but worth it

A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love
by Richard Dawkins


Collection of essays, mostly on evolution and its mechanics but a few on topics like cultural transmission of memes, human nurture, and cloning.  There were also a few book reviews and a letter to his daughter that spoke--heartbreakingly--to me. It's about evidence-based beliefs as compared to those from tradition, faith, and authority.  I wish I'd written in.  I should print it and send it to my son.

There was only one essay specifically blasting religion, but I must say it had its moments.  For example, regarding religion's tendency toward divisive labeling of "the others":

1. To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough.  To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons, and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.

I can't say I understood all the details in the first essays on subjects of a slightly technical shade, but it was a helpful jolt for my mind to see how he disagreed with Steven Jay Gould.  I thought Gould was the last word on evolution, but I now I see--and rejoice to know--lively debate is still ongoing.  Science soars on!

Enjoying one of the five airplane books

Good thing I have a Kindle.  Usually on a vacation I take about 4 books per week and read less than half of one.  This time, with a lengthy airplane ride and a 2-week vacation, I bought 5 books on Kindle and carried along two paperbacks, in case of electronic emergency.

I did well--I read one and one-half of the Kindle books; neither of the others.  Some day I'm going to figure this out.

Accidentally On Purpose: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made

by Mary Pols


Sometimes an author's sheer honesty can carry a story and this was one of those times.  With other memoirs I've read, I sometimes felt like the author was lying a little, sinning by omission.  That's their privilege, of course--you don't have to tell all to write a great memoir.  But if you choose to do so, it can help.

On the other hand, I felt like this was only half of a story.  Story first, then a very long appendix of personal history, added on in order to bring it up to book length.  The first half of the story--pregnancy and childbirth and a few early months--were fascinating.  Gut wrenching, yes.  Funny, yes a lot!  And sincere.  I learned to love her and baby what's-its-name.

The second half was more about her parents and siblings, a family history from the perspective of a single mother.   I loved it too, since I'd learned to love her, but it wasn't what I'd expected.  Still, she's a right to tell her story the way she wants to tell it.

No matter.  Wonder if she'll write a sequel in a few years?

Another popular science enjoyment

The Alchemy of Air:
A Jewish Genius, a Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery that Fed the World But Fueled the Rise of Hitler

by Thomas Hager

Not as good as Demon Under the Microscope but that doesn't mean it's not good.  I'd been primed with overly high expectations--no one to blame for that but me.

Simply put, how do you get nitrogen out of the air where in the form of N2 it's one of the most stable and unreactive substances on the planet, and turn it into a salt that can become fertilizer.  And of course bombs, as we survivors of the Oklahoma City disaster know only too well.

Bacteria seem to do it without effort, but mankind can't.  Couldn't.  Until Haber the scientist and Bosch the industrial engineer got their heads together, created a lot of pressure and heat, and discovered a catalyst to sweep the reaction along, and...BOOM!  Not literally "boom," although there were plenty of those, but "boom," ammonia.

And that's only part of the story.

Plane trip #2 made short by

The Demon Under the Microscope

From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search foo the World's First Miracle Drug

by Thomas Hager

Superb!  At its narrowest, one man's search for a cure for gas gangrene, a bacterial infection that would appear several days after a wound was closed.  Prior to the invention of sulfa drugs, almost all bacterial infections had but two treatments--wait, and hope. 

But at it's broadest--and this is a far-reaching work--it's the story of the invention of modern antibiotics and how they changed the world forever.

Chemistry, biology, personalities and politics.  The creation of a factory line approach to drug research that left nothing to chance, plus the rare accidents that uncovered (or obscured) anomalies in the results--anomalies that might end up being the whole point of the research. You find yourself rooting for the Germans, Gerhard Domagk in particular since his story is the center of it all, and can't help feeling a little heartbroken when his team overlooked the results from molecule Kl-821.  This test molecule consisted of sufanaliamide linked to a simple carbon/nitrogen string instead of an azo dye, and it had better results on strep than the dye-based compounds.  There are indications in Domagk's lab books that he recognized the effect.

But the whole point of the research was to find the best dye-based compound, so these results were ignored.  Whether he was inadvertently sidetracked or whether the Bayer management refused to allow further development on a cheap, unpatentable bulk chemical, is not known.  For whatever reason, Bayer continued development on the dye-based products and left discovery of the simpler solution to the French.  Which is still another story, just as fascinating as the first--and it's all here.

Thomas Hager is a genius and a nobel-prize worthy researcher.  And he has another book, and it's at the library!  I'm heading out now.

Short and smiley

Front And Center
by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Good ol' DJ wrestles with a new set of problems--new boyfriend, hoops team leadership, division one basketball scholarships.  All of which she approaches in the old familiar DJ way...who, me?  Run and hide!

I hope the author will write a senior year book but I'll be okay if she doesn't. I might just re-read the first book instead of waiting for another.  I did the first one on audiobooks and I don't remember why she ever decided to go out for boys' football in the first place.  She's so thoroughly a basketball nerd now.

Catch up for year end

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
the play by Edward Albee

Some things I just don't get. Back in the sixties when the nuclear family ideal was being exploded, watching a frustrated husband and his lunatic wife tear each other to bits in front of a naive younger couple might be just the thing for an evening's entertainment. The shock of it all--the twisty turny of reality--the thumb in the nose to false illusions of forever marital bliss--that might have made it "the thing" to see.

I goofed by trying to read it some fifty years after it lost relevance. My mistake. Some plays are timeless; this isn't.




Etched in Sand: A True Story of Five Siblings Who Survived an Unspeakable Childhood on Long Island
by Regina Calcaterra

Read in one looooong airplane trip and it shortened the trip by several hours at least. Couldn't put it down and didn't want to.

This is a first person report of the third girl in a family of four girls and one boy. They all share a common mother but she's not part of the family--she's more of the destructive force that pushes them together until they learn to rely on each other for survival, both physical and emotional. The love that the oldest girls learned in a few early years spent in the care of relatives was preserved and passed on, miraculously, to the younger children.

It's also a report of the callous indifference of social services and the foster care system. The children learned at an early age that if they told the truth about their mother's abuse, two things would happen--they would be split up, and they would be farmed out to hired caretakers--foster parents.  I know that many foster parents are wonderful people with love and intelligence to care for society's rejects. I know that some are just plain scumbags, skillful at doing and saying the right thing to keep the job but with no intention of doing the job right.  But I suspect that many more are people who need a little extra money and think that taking on an extra kid or two is no big deal. You feed and clothe them and send them to school; keep them in line with simple rules; maybe even take them to church on Sundays.  What else could the job require?

But don't let my comments put you off--this is NOT a essay on social responsibility. She just tells the facts and feelings, pulling no punches and writing no lesson plan.  It's incredibly sad and incredibly uplifting and just plain old damn! Why the hell did that have to happen?

One minor beef--she sort of dropped the brother's story after a bit, don't you think?  I wish I knew how he'd managed.