The Landscaping Ideas of Jays: A Natural History of the Backyard Restoration Garden by Judith Larner Lowry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Elegantly organized by season, this lyrical yet practical guide to backyard restoration gardening celebrates the beauty, the challenges and the rewards of growing native plants at home. Judith Larner Lowry,winner or the prestigious John Burroughs award, here builds on themes from her best-selling Gardening With a Wild Heart, which introduced restoration gardening as a new way of thinking about land and people. Drawing on experiences from her own garden, Lowry offers guidance on how to plan a landscape with birds, plants, and insects in mind: how to shape it with trees and shrubs, paths and trails, ponds, and other features and how to cultivate, maintain,and harvest seeds and food from a diverse array of native annuals and perennials. Along the way, she exposes us to information and insights from indigenous traditions, ethnobotany, local history, ornithology, entomology, and restoration ecology."
~~back cover
Sounds pretty dull and dry, doesn't it? But it's not -- it's an enchanting book, and one that made me start thinking about the "web of life": how the loss of native plants dooms the animals and insects and birds that depend on those plants for food, shelter, reproduction, etc. It's made me itchy to try to restore my suburban yard, something I never thought I'd be at all anxious to do.
The Dogs Of Windcutter Down by David Kennard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"There is no good flock without a good shepherd, and no good shepherd without good dogs."
"These age-old words of wisdom have always guided Devon sheep farmer David Kennard. But as her battles to save his farm from extinction, they resonate more loudly -- and unexpectedly -- than ever. David knows he will be able to rely, as always, on his faithful sheepdogs Greg,Swift, Gail, Fern and Ernie. But even he is surprised when the dogs -- aided and abetted by eccentric newcomer Jake -- prove to be Borough Farm's secret weapon."
~~back cover
Lovely book about the perils and the joys of sheep farming, training border collies, and the seasonal round of sheep. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but then I adore border collies, and only wish I could have one. They're not happy unless they're herding sheep, and how many sheep can I get in my suburban back yard?
Miss Peabody's Inheritance by Elizabeth Jolley
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
"Caring for her demanding, bedridden mother and confined to a dreary clerical job, Dorothy Peabody has few pleasures to sustain her until she begins a correspondence with the novelist Diana Hopewell. In this delightful story-within-a-story, the letters between a lonely, middle-aged Englishwoman and an Australian writer become a moving novel of love and the need to create. As the correspondence progresses, Miss Peabody becomes completely absorbed in the fictional travels of Hopewell's heroine, the headmistress Arabella Thorne, and her various students and companions. She discovers that the world of storytelling provides escape, but that the surprises of fiction are nothing compared to what real life has to offer."
~~ back cover
I think what turned me off of this book was the turn of both stories (the story, and the story-within-a-story) into lesbianism -- almost as if to say that no other form of love is available to women who lead sequestered lives. The admiration, friendship and attachment Miss Peabody came to feel for Diana Hopewell could have remained at that level, without beginning to explore anything further. Likewise, I found the basis for Miss Thorne's gallivantings around the Continent with a student and two women teachers in tow odd, and disturbing. Miss Thorne comes quite close to seducing the student, and the student is eager to be seduced -- being the stereotypical schoolgirl at a girl's boarding school, and thus prone to crushes on her teachers. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop -- for Miss Thorne and her particular friend to wind up in bed, and of course they do, only to be discovered by the schoolgirl, whose rosy picture of life is thus burst.
In my opinion, there were myriad other ways to explore the questions of love and the need to create, rather than the ways the author selected. They detracted from the discussion, rather than enhancing it.
Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America by Molly Ivins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
WARNING: political content ahead. Read at your own risk!
"For years, bestselling political commentator Molly Ivins has been sounding the alarm about George W. Bush. In Shrub, her 2000 skewering of presidential candidate Bush, the inimitable Ivins, with co-author Lou Dubose, offered a devastating expose of Dubya's career and abysmal record as governor of Texas. Now, in their second book on our current White House occupant, Ivins and Dubose take the wire brush to the Bush presidency and show how he has applied the same flawed strategies he used in governing Texas to running the largest superpower in the world.
"Bushwhacked brings to light the horrendous legacy of the Bush tax cut, his increasingly appalling environmental record, his administration's involvement in the Enron scandal, and the real Bush foreign policy -- botched nation building in Kabul and Baghdad, alienation of former allies-- and, unfortunately, much more. Ivins and Dubose go beyond the too frequently soft media coverage of Bush to show us just how damaging his policies have been to ordinary Americans -- "The Doug Jones Average" rather than the Dow Jones Average. Bushwhacked is filled with sharp observation, humor, and compassion for the people often ignored by the federal government and the Washington press corps.
"With the war on terrorism posing unprecedented challenges to our civil liberties, it is high time for a close look at the state of our Union. Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose provide just that in Bushwhacked -- an incisive, entertaining, and damning indictment of the Bush presidency."
~~front flap
I love Molly Ivins. She was extremely politically astute, and always presented her opinions wrapped in generous doses of humor. I often laughed out loud at her wry twists of language, all the while admiring her courage in "telling it like it is". She was Toto, a small dog drawing back the curtain that hid the charlatan, in order to show her friends the way smoke and mirrors were being used to distort reality.
It took me a long time to read this book. Bushwhacked is very different than her other books -- her sly sense of humor is conspicuous by its absence, and the chapters are filled with facts and statistics, and stories about the people that Dubya's policies have hurt. It's gut-wrenching to read this book, to be face-to-face with just how much his government is not "by the people or for the people." I knew most of this prior to reading the book, but it was still excruciating to read it again, all neatly packaged and no holds barred.
And as always when I read anything she wrote, I wonder what she would be saying about the current political scene. She'd be having a field day with the Republican wannabes, don't you think? Just as she'd be skewering the failings of the current White House occupant.
Where are you Molly, now that we need you!
The Tao of Time by Diana Hunt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
"More and more, time has come to exercise a tyrannical influence over our lives. There is never enough of it, no matter how carefully or cleverly we organize and plan. As pollster Lou Harris put it ...: 'Time may have become the most precious commodity in the land.' Yet why should this be, when 'time management' has itself evolved into a veritable discipline that sells books in the millions, creates ever more ingenious 'organizers,' and promulgates any number of quick-fix solutions?
"It is the premise of this book that, in keeping with so much we are still learning from Eastern philosophies in so-called New Age theory and practice, there are no quick-fix solutions to be imposed on our lives from without -- only within ourselves can we create true inner control of time and retake charge of our lives rather than let our lives (and the tyranny of the clock) run us."
~~front flap
A well-written book, with step by step directions on how to achieve mastery of your time by immersing yourself in their "deceleration" program based on Taoist (or perhaps Confucianist) philosophy. The system sounds intriguing, and the authors promise that following this system will give you infinite control over time (as opposed to finite control, which is the land of day planners and calendars and watches that calculate nanoseconds.)
I think I would have valued the book more if I hadn't been in active resistance most of the time I was reading it. I want to have better control of my time, but like most addicts, I don't want to do anything differently in order to get it.
I think I'll read this book again, in the very near future.
A Grave Disturbance by D.M. GreenwoodMy rating: 4 of 5 stars"When Deacon Theodora Braithwaite agrees to visit an old friend, Susan Tye, wife of the Provost of the cathedral near Gainshurst, she finds the Cathedral Close in turmoil, following the death of a workman. The accident adds greatly to the burdens borne by Reggie Tye, already battling to fund the restoration of possibly the ugliest cathedral in Britain (or one of the most unusual, depending on your point of view), and, according to his wife, a victim of a mysterious blackmailer."Theodora is unimpressed by the spartan hospitality on offer and even less impressed with the Tyes' wild theories. But as suspicions mount that the tragic accident may not have been an accident at all, but rather a convenient murder, Theordora is reluctantly drawn into a most unseemly ecclesiastical wrangle ..."~~back coverThe opening caught me up straightaway -- a delectable foray into lyrical English, presented by Lionel, whose sharp wit and tongue make such engaging reading. Well-plotted, good characterization -- definitely worth the reading.
Organizing for Life: Declutter Your Mind to Declutter Your World by Sandra Felton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
"Say good-bye to the stress of mess -- for good!
"You can find the order, beauty, and peace you desire--and deserve--in your home. Organizing for Life reveals the secrets of keeping your house neat, clean, and organized without spending every minute of your life working on it.
"Finally a book that goes beyond the how-tos of cleaning and looks right at the heart of messiness so permanent change can take place. You'll learn why things are out of control so you can get them back in order and keep them that way. You'll uncover the mental and emotional roots of clutter--guilt, fear, rebellion, habit--so you can get rid of it.
"Even the best cleaning methods are useless if you can't keep up and soon slip back into old habits. Stop struggling. You can overcome that old, unsuccessful mind-set and discover a new way of thinking that makes messiness a thing of the past."
~~back cover
If I expected this book to solve all my clutter problems, in the rah-rah way the back cover promises, I would have been disappointed. Fortunately, I didn't expect a blueprint for instant unclutter.
The author has created a category of person whose house &/or life is in disarray: the messie. Evidently she started a Messies Anonymous program. I can see where that might be helpful -- there's always comfort in finding you're not the only oddity in the entire world with your problem. The group supports each other, perhaps holds each other accountable for following through on their commitments.
According to the book, I'm a Clutterer Messie. The two reasons that fit me best are:
No place to put things away: the house is small, storage space is scarce, and there is already too much stuff in the storage places. In short, the stuff is spilling over because there's too much of it. Messies find it difficult to know what storage spaces are needed, and they don't think of buying things like cabinets and shelves.
and
Executive Dysfunction: Our more organized sisters have a natural knack for organizing. When they look at a situation that needs organizing, the steps for doing the job form automatically in their brains. Those with executive dysfunction, an inborn inability to organize things easily, do not have that same experience. They have trouble knowing where to begin and how to proceed.
I'm also a Time-Waster Messie, with a poor sense of passing time and therefore no sense of how long it takes to do things.
The author also talks about clutter being a typical ADD trait, but holds out hope:"Knowing why we keep too much stuff, leave things around, and schedule our lives poorly is the first step towards change." The main emphasis of the book is learning to change your mind-set, and the ways to do that changing.
The author offers up many things that are helpful. I especially liked being told the idea that working harder will keep my house clean is a lie. Another way to say that is that doing the same thing, only harder, and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. It's the equivalent of yelling at a deaf person ... louder & harder just isn't going to make a difference.
I am continually frustrated by several physical problems which prevent me from diving in and just whirling through the clutter. The author does talk about doing a little bit on a consistent basis (the old how to eat an elephant theory), and that's what is working for me, slowly but surely.
Mostly I felt this book was a gloss -- highlighting the surface but not providing any real substance. Perhaps I just didn't give it enough of my attention, but I haven't changed what I'm doing to resolve the clutter since I read the book because nothing in the book grabbed me by the throat and impressed me enough to incorporate it in my life.
