Book: Rare Birds by Elizabeth Gehrman

Subtitled: The Extraordinary Tale of the Bermuda Petrel and the Man Who Brought It Back From Extinction. The man is David Wingate and the tale is his passion for protecting and restoring the native flora and fauna of Bermuda, especially the Bermuda Petrel.  

The Bermuda Petrel is known locally as the cahow. It was never extinct of course but nearly so. It is not a user-friendly bird as it loves dark and stormy nights, nests in odd burrows, is small and out at sea for much of the year, flying tens of thousands of miles over open water as petrels do. 

This is a wonderful book, not only about the cahow, but also about Bermuda and its island topography, its history and climate, animal predation and introduced species (often with unexpected, undesirable consequences), shipwrecks and hurricanes and idyllic periods of time living on Nonsuch with family and summer friends and few amenities. 

"By the time Wingate returned from school, the unoccupied buildings had been written off by the government and were close to ruin, ransacked by vandals and stripped of their fixtures, and even the cottage was in disrepair. Literally all but one of the two-thousand-plus cedars on the island were dead, making it appear from the water like a giant floating wire hairbrush. The understory had been shaved to nothing by overgrazing and, without the cover of trees to protect it, swept away by gales. Even the migratory and land birds had disappeared, heightening the sense of lifelessness. But when Wingate looked at Nonsuch, he saw another world." 

And at the end of the book: "With every one of the thousands of trees he planted, Wingate pictured cahows some day burrowing under its roots....To an outsider, the island's apparent wildness would be impossible to square with the idea of one man meticulously hand-planting every tree and shrub."

A year ago, in November of 2011, Wingate, now in his late 70s and regrettably (to him) no longer in charge of the project which will be forever a part of his heart and soul, was given the opportunity to do a "night watch" out on Nonsuch....He was "mesmerized...He and Madeiros called to the birds, and four subadults began to take an interest in them, fluttering and hovering over the men's heads before pairing off again and then zipping away. Eventually, one of the four dropped out of the sky and landed between Wingate and Madeiros, close enough that the younger man could easily have reached out and picked the bird up...."

His daughter Karen remembers that "Whenever Dad had to come to something at school, my sister and I would be in agony. We knew he'd be late. And if he comes, what will he be wearing? Ripped shorts and a shirt covered in bird poop? He was always scruffy with his hands bleeding and burrs clinging to him, because he'd be off in the bushes after a bird." 

A husband and a father and a man who loved cahows...this is his story. 

Book: The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds by Alexander McCall Smith

An Isabel Dalhousie novel set in Edinburgh, the ninth in this particular series. They are all full of civility and Isabel's musings as she tends to her work (owner and editor of Philosophy of Applied Ethics) and engages with her housekeeper Grace, her now almost 4-year-old little boy Charlie, and her young and handsome husband, Jamie. 

A painting has been stolen from a private country estate and Isabel has been recommended, sort of as a sympathetic advice-giver. And she does exactly that, as she continues living her reasonable, comfortable, (enviable?) and happy life. I wonder, do all women who read these small stories envy Isabel? 

Mr. Smith has at least four other series of books, but I've read mostly the Isabel ones; however, I intend to check out the three books in his Portuguese Irregular Verbs series next. 

Unsure of how to handle the situation, Isabel turns to the window and muses: "And that thought changed everything. To turn a blind eye was morally reprehensible; it was an affront to the whole concept of seeing--and it was the beginning, in so many cases, of significant failure. No, she would not turn a blind eye. She would not allow herself to be a moral coward." 

And so she confronts Grace, who can often be prickly, about not teaching little Charlie mathematics quite yet and certainly not without his parents' permission..

Book: Hard Twisted by C. Joseph Graves

Based loosely on a true story which germinated from the author's discovery of two human skulls in 1994 in "a remote Utah canyon."

It's a little like a Bonnie and Clyde story as Clint and Lucile vagabond their way around the west in the 1930s. Lucile is just a little more than a child and Clint is a psychopath with no redeeming features. 

"At the sound of the first gunshot, she sat upright. the moon was newly risen, and it bathed the canyon floor in a wan and bone-colored light She stood. From the edge of the escarpment she could make out the shape of an old line shack, but nothing else beyond. Not horseman nor buckboard wagon nor the night camp of the Indian drovers. The second gunshot was met by the barking of the sheepdog, and at the third gunshot, the barking stopped."

Vincent Bugliosi (author of Helter Skelter) reviews this as "a remarkably fine novel in prose as stylish and engaging as one will find: a compelling saga of murder, mystery and good and evil at its rawest in the hardscrabble rural Southwest of the 1920s." 

One can read this in a day and it has a great photo on the cover. I almost always choose new books on the basis of reviews and intriguing dust jackets. 

Book: Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Dave VH had heard about this book on NPR so I wrote down the title and actually remembered to look it up one day in the library. 

It is the tale of a young, nearly feral girl/woman named Margo Crane. She and her parents live on a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Her mother runs off and her father is killed. Margo is beautiful and blossoming (although she has no awareness of herself as an object of desire) and she is raped by a neighbor, the patriarch of a large clan just upriver. 

Interestingly, for Margo, the rape is not really a seminal event in her life although it does set in motion the series of circumstances that determine her life for the next few years. She is remarkable as she is forced to leave and as she travels upriver, socially awkward but not averse to human companionship, spending several months with two vastly different men, and then fleeing again, this time downriver. 

"Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus. She had not objected to Cal's actions in the shed, had even been curious about what was happening. For the last year, however, it had been gnawing at her, and Margo had been forming her objection." 

She is a survivalist and can shoot a gun nearly as well as Annie Oakley, her heroine. Always, Margo wonders where her mother is and if she can find her. She does eventually, which is also part of this story...

For me, it was interesting because the milieu is close to where I live. It seemed like a tale out of Appalachia a century ago but really is quite modern. There are wonderfully redemptive characters, especially at the end of the book, but also Cal's wife Joanna, and Michael, one of her upstream lovers.

Through it all, she perseveres and matures as the river continues to be her comfort, her haven, her home. 

She eventually meets Smoke and his friend Fishbone and Margo's life settles somewhat in satisfying ways. Which you will discover should you read it. 

Book: A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Joinson

It is 1923, three Englishwomen, Millicent, Eva and Lizzie, start out on a bicycle journey in eastern Turkestan, skirting the Tien Shan Celestial Mountains, with Tibet directly south of them and Mongolia and China to the east. Their intent is missionary work, although for Eva the trip is more of a grand adventure, a release from her sedate life in England. But before they even get a proper start, they come upon a young woman about to deliver a baby. The baby survives but the young mother hemorrhages and dies, and the women are taken to Kashgar under house arrest.

Meanwhile in present day London, Tayeb, a Yemeni living illegally in England, and Frieda, a journalist who travels extensively in the Mideast, meet by chance and they become friends.

The novel switches between these two scenarios as the author richly and with lovely evocative scenes weaves their stories.

I especially liked the descriptions of life in the desert:

"I conveyed to Mr. Mah that I must sleep on an upright kang, not one down under the ground. I must have a proper meal and I must bathe Ai-Lien who, I noticed, had black ridges of dirt behind her ears and her hair was sticking to her head.....The village, like most Mohammedan towns, was surrounded with a protective wall. The gatekeepers were not friendly. Moreover, they were hostile, and I should have realized that it would be unwise to enter. Through one doorway I saw an elegant, long-stemmed blue iris...Back to the hovels and the road then; and what a turn in my mind, what a mix, with the sun taking off layer after layer of my skin...The wind blew constantly, raging my face and I kept Ai-Lein tight against me, wrapped in silk and cotton cloths..."

"Ai-Lien was wrapped up well and nestled in the bicycle basket...It was dusk as we left and the guards on the city gate blew their horns to announce the closing of the gates. Rami had conveyed to me that the Moslem army was gathering outside the mosque and an attack on the Chinese section of the town was imminent. She had given me a full abaya and with my face covered I gave the guards a coin from Rami's money and was allowed through quickly, although they saw my bicycle and obviously knew who I was."

The travels in Kashgar are a counterpoint to modern England and Frieda's life with her awakening senses and realizations about her lover, her parents, about Tayeb and her necessary involvement in a mysterious circumstance which she initially thinks is a mistake.

If you read fiction, this is worth it...

Book: Easy Prey by John Sandford

Murder and mayhem and decadence and drugs and guns.

"They're just souls trying to get through life. It's the culture that does it. It's a death culture, and it's here, right now. It comes out of TV, it comes out of magazines, it comes out of the Internet, it comes out of video games. Look at that television set that poor Martin Scott had. The biggest, most expensive thing he owned, except for this truck. And all those video games. And he was a hardworking man; worked hard. But the culture burned him out, reached out through that satellite dish and grabbed him."

This book was published 12 years ago which is sobering, especially as our nation is currently in a frenzy about mental health, popular culture and guns.

Book: Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman

A collection of short stories, most about people and animals.

"The month after I found out my husband, Nate, slept with a woman who rode dressage, I rented a run-down cottage on Abbet's Cove with sloping pine floors and a large front porch that caught the sound-side breeze....Dear Mary, I prayed, let me be celibate and rational. Let me, for once, forget about men and be happy."

Yeah, it's that kind of book but much more. There is a story about a community garden in the inner city, a story about a woman who has to choose her lover or her rescued animals, a story about a veterinarian who had been attacked by a wolf hybrid, a story about a daughter taking care of a mother who is dying of breast cancer, stories about the elderly, a story of a woman and a lemur center and alcohol and staying sober...

"She was tireless. She could stabilize an emaciated horse in the morning, trim a goat's overgrown hooves before lunch, attend a court hearing in the afternoon, and still be home to feel all of the animals she kept herself."

"I was a thirty-six-year-old single woman living in a poor man's theme park, running birding trips into the swamp. Most of my binocular-laden clients were pushing sixty....I drove them into the swamp in Dad's pickup, left them with a map, a bagged lunch, water, a GPS device, and a phone, and picked them up at twilight in a place that seemed less wild every day. For the most part, I was happy."

I don't even like books of short stories but the title of this one had an owl on the cover.....so I picked it up, read the first few and liked them enough to read all of them. She lives in Vermont and her husband is a veterinarian.

Book: Surviving Survival by Laurence Gonzales

The Art and Science of Resilience

The dust jacket is a photo of a tree bent by severe winds, leaning almost 90 degrees from the vertical...

The chapters in this book are tales of people who have endured and survived horrendous catastrophic events: the death of a child, life in the concentration camps, encounters with bears, crocodiles and sharks; one chapter is about Aron Ralston, the hiker who cut off his arm to survive in a Utah canyon; there are stories of surviving war, of surviving domestic violence, of dealing with metastatic breast cancer.

These are nonfictional accounts. The author tells their stories and he writes of the neuroscience associated with severe trauma and of the different ways people cope and find grace and reasons to live again.

The last chapter is The Rules of Life, not only for survivors but for all of us, since none of us will be exempt from trouble in our lives. Our striving for a life without stress and stressors will never be totally successful so how we choose to live determines our measure of psychic comfort. And most of us can make choices: we can choose to travel (even if only around the block), to stay physically healthy (eat right, exercise and not abuse substances), to learn something new, to help others; we can learn patience and acceptance; we can stay organized; we can refuse to isolate ourselves; we can be grateful, and we can laugh. None of this is new nor is it easy, but while reading of those who survive nearly unimaginable ordeals and who subsequently find a path through the morass of memories and disabilities, perhaps we can be instructed, inspired and even humbled by them.

There are many paragraphs like these:
"What we know is that in study after study, activities with characteristics such as these (physical, repetitive, organized, directed toward a goal) have proved therapeutic for people suffering from trauma or grief."

"The brain and body are possessed of a great many push-pull systems. The sympathetic nervous system excites us, while the parasympathetic nervous system calms us down. One hormone pumps steroids up another brings them down. The amygdala excites an emotional reaction while the thinking brain inhibits it. The brain itself is a push-pull system balancing reason and emotions under normal circumstances."

"A circle with a curlicue in the center makes many people think of a pig. You have a lot more detailed information in your brain about pigs, but those marks are enough to call up a generalized pig. The hippocampus is doing this all the time with everything you perceive through the the senses and through whatever rises up out of memory."

Leon Weliczker survived the Holocaust and his story is truly one of such horror that reading it provoked a visceral reaction. Yet, he had resilience and continued his interrupted life. The author writes: "Leon went on to live a rich life. He taught mathematics at New York University and did research for the Office of naval Research. His work in optics eventually led to the development of the first video-cassette recorders. He carried out one of the primary tasks of the survivor: He made himself useful."

Book: South of Superior by Ellen Airgood

I really liked this novel.....Dave VH had either read it or heard a review on NPR, and I vaguely remembered I had also, so I immediately got it from the library.

This was a satisfying book. I was drawn into the characters and milieu in equal measure. Writing about what she knows (the author lives in Grand Marais, on the shores of Lake Superior), her fictional town of McAllaster is easily imagined for anyone who has ever passed through the northern Upper Peninsula.

It's a small town without big city amenities and/or distractions; no Starbucks, no movie theatre, one grocery store, only a couple of restaurants; no gyms or masseuse or yoga instructor, not even a library...so Madeline, a Chicago girl, wonders what she is doing in McAllaster and whether she will stay.

Originally, she had agreed to come and help with the care of Arbutus, a sweet, elderly, arthritic woman, when asked by Arbutus' sister, Gladys. There are family connections and part of Madeline's reason for leaving Chicago is the pull of her childhood and questions about why her mother abandoned her and why her grandfather refused to help. Also she is unsettled about her future and pending marriage. Soon after she arrives, she is seduced by the wild beauty of Lake Superior, and the quiet dramas of McAllaster and the people who live there begin to give her life a new structure.  I liked how the author drew her characters, simply and realistically, yet revealing their underlying complexity, and of course I loved the descriptions of the natural world, the weather, the seasons, the quality of light unique in proximity to a great lake or ocean.

"Gladys knew very well that Madeline was not like her mother. Jackie had been careless and selfish and immature from the day she was born and obviously Madeline didn't fit that bill. But still, every now and then, Gladys felt a deep stab of uncertainty at what she'd done, pleading with Madeline to come help them, bringing her into their home. Why had she done it, why had she not left well enough alone?"

"Madeline found the cabin, a low-slung building made of massive logs, around a curve in the shore of the vanished lake. In the years of neglect the cedar-shake roof had rotted, exposing the structure to the elements. She ran a hand over the logs and pushed open the front door, which hung by a broken hinge. The interior was nearly empty and the wide plank floor had begun to rot like the roof....She settled her head against her backpack, closed her eyes, and basked in the sun, listening to the buzzing of flies and calls of ravens and jays, the insistent hammering the woodpecker. Smelled the pungent wild roses that were blooming all along the back wall of the cabin. She felt drowsy and relaxed, as happy as she'd been in a long time. "

Up North in Michigan...a good story.

Book: A Surrey State of Affairs by Ceri Radford

Constance is a very proper, middle-aged, contemporary upper-class British lady with a lawyer husband named Jeffrey and two grown children, Sophie and Rupert. She lives in a charming English village. She has a gardener and a cook/housemaid. She is a bell ringer in her church and is on the flower committee. She wears sensible shoes. She has definite opinions of how life should be lived.

She decides to write an anonymous blog for a year. Life happens, affecting her children, her husband, her friends and, of course, Connie herself. It's funny, sweet and entertaining...like some of Meryl Streep's movies.

At one point, Constance has to retrieve her wayward daughter from Ibiza:
"The combined effects of the heat and the emotional stress gave me such a terrible headache that I had to raid the bathroom cabinet for some pills. They perked me up so much that I soon felt like taking a brisk stroll to get some fresh air, and I ended up walking the length of the bay and back fourteen times....Blotting out the near-naked revelers and the ghastly, thundering, monotonous music, the natural beauty of the scene made me feel strangely euphoric...I nursed Sophie back to health, attempting to cook wholesome food in her tiny, dark kitchen, which was stocked with nothing more than a box of stale Frosties and a bottle of ketchup...As soon as Sophie was better, I booked our flights and here we are. Fortunately, she had to remove her tongue stud to pass through the metal detector in the airport."

"Last night I went to the Hilton bar, alone. I realize that in usual circumstances a woman should not drink by herself, but I think the fact that after thirty-three years of marriage my husband has abandoned me in favor of a herd of cattle should be taken as a mitigating factor. The bar in question is very plush, with dark oak fittings, a sweeping view across the city and no men in baggy T-shirts eating crisps in dark corners."

If you like Alexander McCall Smith's books, you'll like this one. He calls it: "Wonderfully amusing...a comic gem."