The Ogallala Road by Julene Bair

Posted on March 12, 2014 by pagesofjulia

An environmentalist revisits the family farm with mixed feelings about water shortages, and finds a love story along the way.

ogallala

Julene Bair left the family farm in the high plains of Kansas for the bigger world of San Francisco, then the solitude of a rock house in the Mojave Desert. She returned pregnant, worked with her father on the farm for as long as she could stand it, then found security in a cowboy town in Wyoming, where she raised her son alone. She returned again to tour the ever-diminishing creeks and springs on foot and to study the Ogallala Aquifer, which the United States relies upon for 30% of its irrigated crops. Next to a big cottonwood, she meets a cowboy who admires Cormac McCarthy–and falls in love.

For most of The Ogallala Road, this cowboy, Wade, accompanies Bair as she struggles to reconcile the wilderness-loving, liberal-minded, Subaru-driving writer she’s become with her roots as a farmer’s daughter of Kansas’s conservative rural plains. The memoir clearly began as the story of a shrinking aquifer and a nation’s (or a world’s) self-destructive hubris, and one suspects Bair is as surprised as readers will be that romance takes so much of the spotlight. Wade embodies everything that both nourishes and infuriates her about Kansas, which is a challenge to their love story.

The farm that has sustained generations of her forebears retains a strong hold on Bair’s heart, and her family’s–and her own–role in depleting the aquifer becomes a central source of conflict. The Ogallala Road meanders through the history of the Cheyenne Indians’ longtime residence in the region, seeking insight into a more balanced relationship with earth and water. “Hang on to your land!” Bair’s father exhorted his children, but under the pressures of a changing world, they’ll consider selling. Bair comments on the difference between growth and progress, and a feeling of connection to the land that she suspects her father would have snorted at, while wrestling with her own guilt. In the end, it is the water, not Wade, that causes her the most pain–but the memoir closes with a tentative note of hope.

In its combination of nature writing, environmental concern and love story, The Ogallala Road is unusual. Bair’s contemplative praise of the high plains and the western deserts, her yearning for a father for her son and her lament for a dying way of life will strike chords for diverse readers.

This review originally ran in the March 7, 2014 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 million gallons.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill

Posted on March 11, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

hotel florida

I am, of course, enjoying immersion in the beautifully composed Hotel Florida, a history of six individuals in the Spanish Civil War.

“THE PICTURE WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND SO WAS YOUR ATTITUDE,” wired Scott Fitzgerald after the screening he saw, at which Hemingway had spoken about la causa and the loss of Lukács and Heilbrun. Fitzgerald sensed in his old and now distant friend an attachment to the film project, and to the war in Spain itself, that had “something almost religious about it.” As so often, he saw Hemingway more clearly than Hemingway saw himself.

I appreciate the larger truth in these lines about the relationship between Fitzgerald (who doesn’t much play into this story) and Hemingway (who is one of its stars).

Also, I am thrilled to note just a handful of pages later an extended excerpt from Goethe’s poem, Der Erlkönig, which I memorized in its entirety for my German class in high school. (In German.) That was fun.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis by Thomas Goetz

Posted on March 7, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

remedy

I have an awesome new book to tease you with today. I hope the title alone begins to interest; it did me. The first paragraph sets the stage:

In train after train, consumptives filled the passenger cars, their hacks and coughs competing with steam whistles and screaming brakes as the engines came to a halt in Potsdamer Platz. They came to Berlin without any sense of where to go or what to do once they arrived. And they kept coming, for days, weeks, and months. It must have struck Berliners as a sort of zombie pilgrimage: here were the walking dead of Europe, all suddenly flocking to their city in search of something – some fantastic substance that did not yet officially exist.

Not out til early April, so stay tuned for my review til then. But for now: I am quite impressed with the writing (my favorite: accessible, engaging, nonfiction science), and the fascinating story of the race towards a cure for tuberculosis, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s rather surprising role in it.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart

Posted on March 4, 2014 by pagesofjulia


drunken botanist

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

I have only just begun this audiobook but have very high hopes that it will follow A Garden of Marvels beautifully. Booze & botany, where can we go wrong? The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks makes perfect sense to me. In her introductory pages, Amy Stewart writes:

If you’re a gardener, I hope this book inspires a cocktail party. If you’re a bartender, I hope you’re persuaded to put up a greenhouse, or at least plant a window box.

I think that puts it very well and succinctly, and I’m on board.

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A Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants by Ruth Kassinger

Posted on February 26, 2014 by pagesofjulia

A charmingly accessible history of botany, full of the strange and wondrous, for readers intimidated by science.

garden of marvels

Ruth Kassinger (Paradise Under Glass) was frustrated by the kinds of mishaps with which many amateur gardeners are familiar: failures to thrive, unexplained deaths, mysterious midseason droopings. So she did what any reasonable science writer would do: research. How do plants really work? In hunting for a simple, layperson’s guide to botany, however, she came up short. Particularly in seeking “the story of the first discoverers of the basic facts of plant life”–that is, a history of botany–she could find only scholarly texts for which “Botany 101 is definitely a prerequisite.” From these frustrations was born the masterful, engaging A Garden of Marvels.

Kassinger’s greatest strength is unquestionably her quirky, conversational tone. She begins with a murder mystery (spoiler: the victim is a kumquat tree) and from these delightful opening lines, even the most science-averse reader will be hooked. While A Garden of Marvels does contain the odd gardening tip, it is more concerned with Kassinger’s travels: she visits farms, conservatories and laboratories around the nation, encountering diverse and eccentric characters she describes with humor and skill.

Her research into human history is likewise revealing: she points out that religious and societal philosophies caused our ignorance of and lack of interest in botany until very recently, and highlights those few pioneering minds whose experiments, observations and strange machineries caught us up. Darwin gets a chapter, and is accompanied by myriad little-known early scientists, all brought to life by Kassinger’s enthusiasm. A handful of relevant illustrations by Eva Ruhl assist along the way.

Kassinger is properly amazed at the science she discovers in nature, as well as the men (“and they were all men”) in history who broke ground with their scientific studies. For some readers, though, she may be a trifle overenthusiastic about the possibilities of genetic modifications of plant life and dismissive of concerns regarding these technologies–although the genetic possibilities in the simple garden petunia are positively mind-boggling.

Topics like plant sex, the history of scientific exploration and the fundamentals of genomics are all equally accessible in Kassinger’s capable hands. That she makes botany so approachable is a feat; that she makes it downright enthralling is almost as miraculous as an adorable photosynthesizing sea slug.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the February 24, 2014 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 9 different fruits on one tree.

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Teaser Tuesdays: John Muir and the Ice that Started a Fire by Kim Heacox

Posted on February 25, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

muir ice

You know I couldn’t pass up a history of John Muir and his role in creating the American conservation movement! I am learning a lot, and not only about Muir and glaciers.

Today’s demographers have estimated that of the roughly 110 billion people who have lived on earth the last 50,000 years, only a small fraction have achieved age fifty and beyond; of those, half are alive today. In other words, Muir was already the beneficiary of a relatively long life.

…although of course, being Muir, he did not go gently into that good night. I am not surprised at these numbers but had never considered such a thing; it’s a little boggling, isn’t it?

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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book beginnings on Friday: Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill

Posted on February 21, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

I am quite pleased with Hotel Florida, about the Spanish Civil War and concentrating on six individuals – three couples – who experienced it. I’m offering a little more book beginning than usual today, because I think this way gives a good feeling of Amanda Vaill’s work; so bear with me.

hotel florida

Three book beginnings…

Author’s Note:

“It is very dangerous to write the truth in war,” said Ernest Hemingway, “and the truth is very dangerous to come by.”

Prologue:

On July 18, 1936, at Gando in the Canary Islands, a short, balding, barrel-chested man in a gray suit, carrying a Spanish diplomatic passport in the name of José Antonio de Sagroniz, boarded a private seven-seater de Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft that had arrived at Gando three days previously and had been waiting on the tarmac for him ever since.

And chapter 1:

Arturo Barea lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of a forest in the Sierra de Guadarrama, northwest of Madrid, with his head in his mistress’s lap. It was mid-afternoon on Sunday, July 19, and the resinous air was loud with the sound of cicadas.

The effect I noticed immediately here, is the connection between the Hemingway quotation and the Hemingwayesque first line of the first chapter. For one thing, note all the sensory detail in that second sentence. This is instantly recognizable to me as Hemingway’s style. And most pointedly, recall the opening line of Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.

I surely don’t need to tell you that this parallel was established on purpose. For that matter, Vaill ends her book with the opening line as (she tells us) Hemingway wrote it in his first draft:

We lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest…

I like her use of structure here, the bookending of her book using Hemingway’s own words. I find that this really pulls it together.

Rather more book beginning than usual, I confess. Thanks for your patience. And let me say that Hotel Florida is about much more than Hemingway; but he is the most widely known of her six individuals, and arguable the biggest and most colorful personality, so I think the occasional emphasis can be excused. That said, I really enjoyed learning so much about her other characters. They include Martha Gellhorn, journalist and Hemingway’s partner (mistress during the war, wife after); photographers Robert Capa and Gerda Taro; and press officers Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar. As usual, you’ll have to stay tuned for my book review, but for now: I recommend.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Dying Every Day by James Romm

Posted on February 18, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

dying every day

Dying Every Day is well named. Nero’s rule over Rome beginning in the first few years AD was marked by death & murder in a multitude of forms, and Seneca, his philosopher/teacher-turned-adviser, offers enormous ambiguities. I chose a teaser for you that makes that point in a single sentence.

To act as imperial panderer, dispatching an ex-slave to the princeps to stop him from sleeping with his mother, brandishing Burrus and the guard as an implicit threat – these were hardly roles he had envisioned when he returned to Rome from Corsica, his trunk full of ethical treatises.

Stay tuned!

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia by David Stuart MacLean

Posted on February 13, 2014 by pagesofjulia

A memoir from within the mind of an amnesiac, in full terrifying color.

riddle
In the opening scene of The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, David Stuart Maclean “wakes up” in a standing position, in a train station, in a place where English is clearly not the first language. He doesn’t know who he is, where he is or where he was going. A friendly policeman tells him that many tourists there do too many drugs and end up confused; Maclean concludes that he is a drug user and follows as he is told.

This scene is only the beginning of the enormous world of what Maclean can’t remember, and assumptions he’ll be led to make that will often turn out to be false. He was living alone in India on a government grant to aid his work as a novelist when an antimalarial drug he was taking overcame the blood-brain barrier and wreaked havoc. The Answer to the Riddle Is Me is Maclean’s story of amnesia and recovery, with all the false starts, depression, despair and small victories that come with such a trauma. Maclean often wishes himself back in a hospital where he’ll be spoon-fed and his decisions will be made for him, but he slowly, eventually resurfaces.

This heartfelt and painfully candid memoir tracks Maclean in real time, in fractured scenes and then in measured, purposeful steps, and comes with research into the medical issues involved. Readers will be mesmerized by the effort, and perhaps feel as rejuvenated in the end as Maclean does.

This review originally ran in the February 11, 2014 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 7 faces.

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book beginnings on Friday: Turtle Island by Gary Snyder

Posted on February 7, 2014 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

turtle island

I’m a little out of order, as I’ve reviewed this book already. But for further musing and perspective, I want to share with you a piece of the “Introductory Note” that explains its title.

Turtle Island–the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millenia, and reapplied by some of them to “North America” in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.

…Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores all share such views at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions–African, Asian, or European. Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.

I collected turtles in high school. Stuffed, carved, as pendants and pillows. It’s the animal I chose as my own somehow. They still resonate; I don’t have all those turtles any more, but I’ve kept a small group of small ones, which turn out to be (by coincidence? I doubt it; but not on purpose) to be crafted from natural materials: stone, wood, shell. I feel at home here.

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