Also titled "A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession."
Craig Childs is a self-proclaimed desert rat sort of person, one who thrives in the dry landscape of canyons and mountains in the archaeologically rich Southwest. He tells of those who collect, steal, ravage, curate, buy, sell and discover artifacts, whether they are great museum pieces or a collection of broken potsherds. There are amazing stories of others' discoveries and of a few he found himself.
The book is provocative, fascinating, peopled with crooks, high and low, with collectors, with salvage archaeologists (those hired when a new development or strip mall or stadium is to be built on grounds that very possibly contain artifacts) and with a few, like the author, who believe these treasures should remain in the ground and crevices where they were placed or where they were left behind and where they remained years or decades or centuries after the humans who made them were long gone.
He talks of Aurel Stein, who finds the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas on the Silk Road in China in the early 20th century. He talks with Thomas Hoving who wrote "Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art." He tells of the artifact diggers on St.Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait and the amazing artifact wealth of southeastern Utah and the Four Corners area. He tells of his own rambles in the southwest and of returning to one of his secret places to get a small sample for carbon dating; how he and his wife lose their way temporarily and spend the night on a two-foot ledge with a rock underneath his sleeping bag on the drop-off side so he wouldn't roll over in the night. "I have never slept so well, so beautifully, as that night...still as a mummy...It was like being suspended by a silver thread over the desert."
He tells of a collector in Santa Fe who has Sitting Bull's pipe in his home and of the repatriation of artifacts, all the while arguing gently for artifacts to remain "in situ."
He ends with this: "I walked a circle until I spotted a small red arrowhead. It was perfect. I picked it up, a fine piece made of jasper stone....I held it against the sky, a fine little bird-point no bigger than a dime, something a person had knapped with great skill.....FInders keepers, I thought....I considered the gamut of opinions, from archaeologist to dealer, from conservators to collectors and no one has convinced me there is a better thing to do at this point than this: I flicked the arrowhead away with my thumb, and it landed back in the dirt. I left it here, wishing the earth to be populated with memory, a stone on the ground as bright as blood."
Even if the subject isn't particularly interesting to you, this book is certainly well written and has stories of human nature and large passions, adventures in the landscape of the southwest and an account of one way one man lives and makes a living outside of a cubicle. Vicarious living.....
Monday, December 27, 2010
Book: Growing, Older by Joan Dye Gussow
Joan lives on the Hudson River in Piermont, New York. She is Professor Emerita of Nutrition and Education at Columbia University's Teacher's College. (Have you even seen the word 'Emerita' before?)
She has written and continues to write, now in her "ninth decade" about local farming, over-consumption, materialism, global crises and global footprints, growing one's own food, her battles with the tides, the rain and the several floodings of her gardens. She writes of woodchucks, skunks, rabbits, muskrats and bees. She is refreshingly candid about growing older and how she continues living after the death of her husband.
She reminded me of my sister Maria, in many ways..smart, honest, principled about her global footprint but also generous and one who delights in the intricacies of the natural world.
Interestingly, she reveals that her mother was born in Orange City, Iowa, and was Dutch Reformed!. This revelation comes soon in the chapter titled, "If My Parents Had Danced in the Supermarket." (Of course, they hadn't, being Dutch Reformed.) She tells of making a visit back to Orange City with her parents when she was a little girl. It was hot and a Sunday. Her Mother, who had moved to California, dressed her daughters in shorts but "Aunt Cora sniffed in shock, 'Joyce, it's Sunday! We were taken back upstairs to be properly dressed. For us it was a novelty; for my mother it was her upbringing." This will be familiar to my cousins and older sisters. In my early years we were not allowed to change from Sunday church dresses to shorts, even while at Big Star Lake on our summer vacations.
Joan also writes of butterflies, of books that have influenced her, of zucchini (the only chapter with recipes) and of trying to plant rice, as her garden is underwater so often.
So, if you like Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, Dan Barber or Alice Waters, all of whom praise Joan for her writings, then you will almost certainly like this book.
PS. I do have to admit that I don't yet understand the comma in the title.
She has written and continues to write, now in her "ninth decade" about local farming, over-consumption, materialism, global crises and global footprints, growing one's own food, her battles with the tides, the rain and the several floodings of her gardens. She writes of woodchucks, skunks, rabbits, muskrats and bees. She is refreshingly candid about growing older and how she continues living after the death of her husband.
She reminded me of my sister Maria, in many ways..smart, honest, principled about her global footprint but also generous and one who delights in the intricacies of the natural world.
Interestingly, she reveals that her mother was born in Orange City, Iowa, and was Dutch Reformed!. This revelation comes soon in the chapter titled, "If My Parents Had Danced in the Supermarket." (Of course, they hadn't, being Dutch Reformed.) She tells of making a visit back to Orange City with her parents when she was a little girl. It was hot and a Sunday. Her Mother, who had moved to California, dressed her daughters in shorts but "Aunt Cora sniffed in shock, 'Joyce, it's Sunday! We were taken back upstairs to be properly dressed. For us it was a novelty; for my mother it was her upbringing." This will be familiar to my cousins and older sisters. In my early years we were not allowed to change from Sunday church dresses to shorts, even while at Big Star Lake on our summer vacations.
Joan also writes of butterflies, of books that have influenced her, of zucchini (the only chapter with recipes) and of trying to plant rice, as her garden is underwater so often.
So, if you like Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, Dan Barber or Alice Waters, all of whom praise Joan for her writings, then you will almost certainly like this book.
PS. I do have to admit that I don't yet understand the comma in the title.
Book: The Last Ghost Dancer by Tony Bender
The cover of this library book seduced me: A narrow road with mountains in the distance and fence-lined fields on either side. A dark-haired boy in jeans and a loose white shirt is running towards the mountains.
The book is set in a small western Dakota town. The characters are a wise Indian named Joe Big Cloud, a group of friends who spend their last summer together, still relatively carefree kids before entering the adult worlds of more responsibility, a neighborhood evil person, and the townspeople and families and shopkeepers who live in Pale Butte. This is a short novel but is a story with a beginning and an end, satisfying and somewhat bittersweet. It is a vignette...a snapshot of a summer under the wide western skies in the late 20th century. It can be read in an evening and informs and colors one of the thousands of places in our country where history, sociology and geography mesh and make a story unique to time and place.
While Joe Big Cloud is part of the book, his isn't really the story that the title suggests.
Also, the cover was a promise that didn't happen, but I still liked it....
The book is set in a small western Dakota town. The characters are a wise Indian named Joe Big Cloud, a group of friends who spend their last summer together, still relatively carefree kids before entering the adult worlds of more responsibility, a neighborhood evil person, and the townspeople and families and shopkeepers who live in Pale Butte. This is a short novel but is a story with a beginning and an end, satisfying and somewhat bittersweet. It is a vignette...a snapshot of a summer under the wide western skies in the late 20th century. It can be read in an evening and informs and colors one of the thousands of places in our country where history, sociology and geography mesh and make a story unique to time and place.
While Joe Big Cloud is part of the book, his isn't really the story that the title suggests.
Also, the cover was a promise that didn't happen, but I still liked it....
Book: The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen
There was once a family living in New Brunswick: parents, two daughters and a son. Though life wasn't easy, they were surviving as their father worked his potato farm and their mother worked at making their humble home on the edge of the sea a haven for her family. She found the beauty in life, and their father loved her for that even if he didn't exactly know this. Their mother instructed her children in the rhythms of life and the glories of the natural world and tempered her husband's hardness. But this world falls apart, and the sisters have to learn to survive as best they can, mostly on their own. This is their story, Idella and Avis, and it is a wonderful novel, spanning half a century. Stephen King says, "It's profane, loving, hardnosed and completely beautiful."
It reminded me a bit of The House on Salt Hay Road which I read a few weeks ago. Both novels are far removed from our modern lives and the mental, emotional and psychic turmoils of contemporary people, troubles we recognize from all the novels written about them, but different from the troubles of those who lived 50 to 100 years ago. Hardscrabble Bay is sweet and sad and full of nostalgia for those of us who actually remember some of those times. For those who are younger and for whom this book will not be evocative, it is still a wonderful novel bringing to life a time not so far gone with its universal, timeless characters.
Sadly, the author died in 2003.
It reminded me a bit of The House on Salt Hay Road which I read a few weeks ago. Both novels are far removed from our modern lives and the mental, emotional and psychic turmoils of contemporary people, troubles we recognize from all the novels written about them, but different from the troubles of those who lived 50 to 100 years ago. Hardscrabble Bay is sweet and sad and full of nostalgia for those of us who actually remember some of those times. For those who are younger and for whom this book will not be evocative, it is still a wonderful novel bringing to life a time not so far gone with its universal, timeless characters.
Sadly, the author died in 2003.
Book: The Confession by John Grisham
I like most of John Grisham's writing and this latest book was not a disappointment.
A Lutheran minister, living in Topeka, Kansas, becomes involved with a convicted, but paroled felon, who now lives in a halfway house near his church and who confesses to the minister that he is the actual murderer of a high-school girl, not the black man who is scheduled to be executed in a small Texas town for the murder after nine years on death row. The man tells the minister that he has a malignant brain tumor and wants to rectify this injustice before he dies. He appears very ill, suffers severe headaches and convulsions and his story checks out, for the most part. So the minister reluctantly gets involved. Meanwhile, the lawyer for the convicted man is frantically doing everything he can to prevent the execution. These are the bare outlines of this story. Along the way, Grisham also describes the history of the death penalty in Texas. He weaves into this tale the stories of the families of the accused and the victim, descriptions of the politicians' involvements in the appeal processes and also of the collusions between law officers and lawyers years ago which led to the murder conviction and which were mostly based on lies and fabrications and illegal procedures.
So, this is another story based on the inequities between whites and blacks in a small Southern town. It is also a serious look at the institution of the death penalty and a sobering, interesting glimpse into the mind of a psychopath.
A Lutheran minister, living in Topeka, Kansas, becomes involved with a convicted, but paroled felon, who now lives in a halfway house near his church and who confesses to the minister that he is the actual murderer of a high-school girl, not the black man who is scheduled to be executed in a small Texas town for the murder after nine years on death row. The man tells the minister that he has a malignant brain tumor and wants to rectify this injustice before he dies. He appears very ill, suffers severe headaches and convulsions and his story checks out, for the most part. So the minister reluctantly gets involved. Meanwhile, the lawyer for the convicted man is frantically doing everything he can to prevent the execution. These are the bare outlines of this story. Along the way, Grisham also describes the history of the death penalty in Texas. He weaves into this tale the stories of the families of the accused and the victim, descriptions of the politicians' involvements in the appeal processes and also of the collusions between law officers and lawyers years ago which led to the murder conviction and which were mostly based on lies and fabrications and illegal procedures.
So, this is another story based on the inequities between whites and blacks in a small Southern town. It is also a serious look at the institution of the death penalty and a sobering, interesting glimpse into the mind of a psychopath.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Book: Knife Music b y David Carnoy
This is a debut book by Carnoy and I thought it was a compelling, albeit, zuzu book. A doctor treats a young girl in the emergency room after she is injured in a car accident. Months later, she commits suicide, and he is implicated in her death and accused of having had sex with her. What the author does so well is get the dialogue right, be it fraternity boys, computer hackers, doctors, teenagers with their self-absorption and angst, detectives....The story also moves right along as the doctor insists he is innocent and hires a lawyer, a woman he has known intimately in the past. The detective on the case also has a past that could be relevant as he works on this case...So read it and find out what happens if you need a book now and then with little redeeming value but is a well-written contemporary tale. There were a few details that strained credibility but mostly it all seemed possible.
Knife Music, BTW, is the music the doctor listens to while operating.
Knife Music, BTW, is the music the doctor listens to while operating.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Between Two Worlds by Sainab Salbi and Laurie Becklund
Zainab Salbi grew up in Iraq. Her father was a pilot for Saddam Hussein. As Saddam became more powerful, Zainab's family became more distraught, afraid and anxious. They had position, material wealth and were part of Saddam's group of friends, but they hated him for his excesses and egomania. Zainab tells her story as she grew up while Amo (as they called Saddam) became a monster, raping and pillaging, destroying their beloved Iraq. Her family and friends lived in fear of this evil capricious man, all the while having to pretend to enjoy the parties and outings and his "friendship."
Eventually, she leaves Iraq and enters into an arranged marriage which brings a different kind of misery. She eventually remarries and founds Women for Women International, an organization which helps women victims of wars, especially those who have been raped. She wrote this book, both to tell what kind of man Saddam really was but also because it was necessary for her personal growth and it helped neutralize some of the posttraumatic stress she experienced. She made a choice to focus her anger and pain in ways that help other traumatized women...women who endure atrocities that are seldom acknowledged. Over and over in her book, Zainab is outraged at the lack of support for these abused, damaged women who are as much casualties of war as the soldiers who are wounded. After hearing about "rape camps" in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, she travels there to hear the stories of these women, and she and her husband Amjad found Women for Women in Bosnia which evolves into Women for Women International.
This is another story like Greg Mortensen's, illustrating the Power of One. One person's idea expands exponentially and thousands of lives are improved.
The website is: www.womenforwomen.org.
Eventually, she leaves Iraq and enters into an arranged marriage which brings a different kind of misery. She eventually remarries and founds Women for Women International, an organization which helps women victims of wars, especially those who have been raped. She wrote this book, both to tell what kind of man Saddam really was but also because it was necessary for her personal growth and it helped neutralize some of the posttraumatic stress she experienced. She made a choice to focus her anger and pain in ways that help other traumatized women...women who endure atrocities that are seldom acknowledged. Over and over in her book, Zainab is outraged at the lack of support for these abused, damaged women who are as much casualties of war as the soldiers who are wounded. After hearing about "rape camps" in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, she travels there to hear the stories of these women, and she and her husband Amjad found Women for Women in Bosnia which evolves into Women for Women International.
This is another story like Greg Mortensen's, illustrating the Power of One. One person's idea expands exponentially and thousands of lives are improved.
The website is: www.womenforwomen.org.
Chinese Vegetable Soup
OK, I admit defeat. I cannot continue to cook much more from Still Life with Menu. This particular soup had a broth made from Chinese black mushrooms, onion, garlic and ginger, which was strained, and then mushrooms, water chestnuts, boy choy, green peas and snow peas were added. The result was a watery broth with green and brown stuff in it, and it had an earthy odor. I felt I should be eating this while sitting on a forest floor with chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, muskrats and mice for dinner companions.
It wasn't that awful to taste...certainly nutritious and low in calories, but TOO low and TOO nutritious.
I feel I now know if I will like a recipe or not. So, I plan to keep working my way through the book but will no longer be committed to trying EVERY recipe. I will report on the successes ...maybe.
I realize this is quite boring, unless the recipe is extraordinary.
I bought Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds and now also plan to learn Chinese cooking. I have tried a couple of recipes so far (Pearl Balls and Curried Fried Rice) both of which were tasty. I now need to find a light iron wok if I can. And a steamer and a cleaver. But, I will never be able to cook a few of the dishes in this cookbook, like those with "medium-sized live blue crabs" which I actually saw one day in a cooler in the local Asian market. They were wiggling. The crab recipes call for "live blue crabs" which are plunged into "boiling water for about 1 minute" and then basically dissected! But I can do dishes like Stir-Fired Shrimp with Cucumbers and Pine Nuts, or Cold Tossed Tofu and Celery Shreds, or Shrimp Bonnets. If I have a spectacular success, I will write about it. Otherwise, the cooking part of this blog will wane.
It wasn't that awful to taste...certainly nutritious and low in calories, but TOO low and TOO nutritious.
I feel I now know if I will like a recipe or not. So, I plan to keep working my way through the book but will no longer be committed to trying EVERY recipe. I will report on the successes ...maybe.
I realize this is quite boring, unless the recipe is extraordinary.
I bought Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds and now also plan to learn Chinese cooking. I have tried a couple of recipes so far (Pearl Balls and Curried Fried Rice) both of which were tasty. I now need to find a light iron wok if I can. And a steamer and a cleaver. But, I will never be able to cook a few of the dishes in this cookbook, like those with "medium-sized live blue crabs" which I actually saw one day in a cooler in the local Asian market. They were wiggling. The crab recipes call for "live blue crabs" which are plunged into "boiling water for about 1 minute" and then basically dissected! But I can do dishes like Stir-Fired Shrimp with Cucumbers and Pine Nuts, or Cold Tossed Tofu and Celery Shreds, or Shrimp Bonnets. If I have a spectacular success, I will write about it. Otherwise, the cooking part of this blog will wane.
The Wave Watcher's Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
This nonfiction book is subtitled From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of LIfe's Undulations. So, with a title like that, how could I resist? Especially the "life's undulations" part. And that is exactly what the author talks about...waves of all kinds. About one-quarter of the information was over my head, it being physics and such, but so much was fascinating, relatively easy to understand and often funny. The illustrations were superb with photographs and paintings and diagrams. He would often also illustrate with quotations.
His previous book was The CloudSpotter's Guide, which I haven't read and didn't know existed. These books are not exactly best sellers; still, The Wave Watcher was chock full of interesting facts about water waves, light waves, sound waves and electromagnetic waves, etc. Gamma rays, for instance, are electromagnetic waves and have the highest frequency and shortest wavelength. They are produced by radioactive materials and can be dangerous and destructive but are also beneficial when they are used in radiation treatments to target and kill cancer cells.
"Have you ever woken in the middle of the night with the horrifying realization that you haven't the faintest idea what an electromagnetic wave is? [asks the author] Me neither. But since these waves are everywhere around us, I felt that it might be a good idea to find out." And he does.
The locomotion of worms, the "mucociliary escalator" that is inside your windpipe, or a "word" as Oliver Wendell Holmes describes it: "A word, whatever tone it wear, is but a trembling wave of air." Or guitars and sympathetic resonance, or breaking the sound barrier, or the Corryvreckan Maelstrom, or the electron microscope, Einstein, quantum physics and Luc De Broglie who won the 1929 Nobel prize in physics for figuring out the "wave behavior of elections." This is not nearly as boring as it probably sounds to most people. I found I could let go what I didn't understand and still enjoy this delightful, witty writer and his quirky curiosity.
At the end, he decides he needs to go to Hawaii on what he calls a "research trip" to study the huge surfing waves. And so into a world of boogie boards, body surfing, pipelines, death....
The author decides to try bodysurfing: "They were too fast for me to catch, and I felt foolish, frustrated and drained This was ridiculous. Who did I think I was kidding? I'm no bodysurfer, I thought to myself, spitting out yet another mouthful of salt water. And then I gave up worrying....."
OK, now look up viola d'amore. Vignettes like the one about the viola d'amore were what made this book such a treasure.
His previous book was The CloudSpotter's Guide, which I haven't read and didn't know existed. These books are not exactly best sellers; still, The Wave Watcher was chock full of interesting facts about water waves, light waves, sound waves and electromagnetic waves, etc. Gamma rays, for instance, are electromagnetic waves and have the highest frequency and shortest wavelength. They are produced by radioactive materials and can be dangerous and destructive but are also beneficial when they are used in radiation treatments to target and kill cancer cells.
"Have you ever woken in the middle of the night with the horrifying realization that you haven't the faintest idea what an electromagnetic wave is? [asks the author] Me neither. But since these waves are everywhere around us, I felt that it might be a good idea to find out." And he does.
The locomotion of worms, the "mucociliary escalator" that is inside your windpipe, or a "word" as Oliver Wendell Holmes describes it: "A word, whatever tone it wear, is but a trembling wave of air." Or guitars and sympathetic resonance, or breaking the sound barrier, or the Corryvreckan Maelstrom, or the electron microscope, Einstein, quantum physics and Luc De Broglie who won the 1929 Nobel prize in physics for figuring out the "wave behavior of elections." This is not nearly as boring as it probably sounds to most people. I found I could let go what I didn't understand and still enjoy this delightful, witty writer and his quirky curiosity.
At the end, he decides he needs to go to Hawaii on what he calls a "research trip" to study the huge surfing waves. And so into a world of boogie boards, body surfing, pipelines, death....
The author decides to try bodysurfing: "They were too fast for me to catch, and I felt foolish, frustrated and drained This was ridiculous. Who did I think I was kidding? I'm no bodysurfer, I thought to myself, spitting out yet another mouthful of salt water. And then I gave up worrying....."
OK, now look up viola d'amore. Vignettes like the one about the viola d'amore were what made this book such a treasure.
Carolina Wren
Here is why I love birding...
Today there were "lake-effect" winter storm warnings all day. It was blustery, about 30 degrees, with alternating blowing snow and periods of quiet. It went on like this all day. This was my weekend to work, so I sat with a view of all my feeders for two days straight, since there is window right next to my work computer. I had the usual birds...a nice collection of about a dozen species, including doves, a cardinal, bluejays, juncos, woodpeckers, etc., but nothing out of the ordinary.
So on Sunday afternoon, I looked out and saw a bird that almost immediately seemed not ordinary. It was hanging on one of the feeders, and at first I though "finch." I haven't seen many house finches OR purple finches this year, and they are good possibilities at feeders, but then I realized I was looking at a Carolina Wren! This was thrilling for me. I have NEVER actually seen a C. wren. When Deborah and I went on the last-of-season birding hike with Don at Ft. Harrison in Indiana late this fall, he heard (so I also heard, but would certainly not have known the song without his expert ear) a Carolina wren. They are usually south of here, and they usually do not show up at feeders in Michigan during a lake-effect mini blizzard. It made me catch my breath. I was delighted, excited, happy.
The Carolina is a large wren, with a strong long white stripe over the eye (supercilium), a long curved bill, a warm rusty wash underneath and a rich brown body like most wrens. It only stayed about 30 seconds, and so far has not returned, but I am positive it was a Carolina.
This bird is mostly a year-round resident in the eastern half of the US, but not as far north as Michigan. Common enough to the south, but not here. Yes!!!!!!
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