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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.