The 2023 Nonfiction Challenge: The Sea in April

Welp, here I am. Better late than never??? Multiple apologies. Could I claim -- in light of this month's theme -- that my ship was becalmed at sea??

However, I hope that some of you have been thinking about what to read next, and perhaps even getting it underway. This challenge was sparked by reading a book about the most profound depths of the ocean, Sinkable by Daniel Stone, as well as listening to a podcast based on the book The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina.

Read anything about the sea or oceans: things that live on or under it; how and why people travel across it (and those who did so); oceanography; wave power or undersea resource exploitation; pollution; ocean liners; etc.

Simon Winchester wrote two books, one about the Atlantic and another about the Pacific. Thor Heyerdahl wrote about his mind-boggling attempt to recreate a voyage by raft from South America to the South Pacific. I'm going to read a book about the shearwater -- a bird that spends most of its life traveling unceasingly over oceans. And I'd love to find something about marine archaeology.

Looking forward to seeing what you discover!

(And don't forget to star *** this topic so you can find it again; the star doesn't transfer unless/until we hit 150 posts per thread...)

Random additional question: does anyone think it would be better to have a "rolling" thread going forward? We'd still have our monthly challenges, but all our non-fiction reading would be in the same thread, making it a bit easier to keep track of threads?

For your future planning:

May: Literary Biography. Books about literary creators, and some of the books they created.

June: Indigenous/Aboriginal Peoples/ First Nations. Explore their history, the first contacts with interlopers, land rights and treaty issues, human rights, social justice issues, etc.

July: Explorations and Expeditions. Define this any way you choose. Someone could walk the length of the Silk Road, or explore the structure of the human genome.

August: The World of the Land, Trees and Plants. So, think the natural world, here. This could be scientific; it could also be a travel book that is tied to geography, ecology, etc.

September: Family Ties. A family-based memoir (so, not just any memoir, but one revolving around family members), a book about family history or exploring a family's past/roots.

October: Crimes, Mysteries, Puzzles, Enigmas. What did happen to the Princes in the Tower? Does the Bermuda Triangle exist, really? Where did DB Cooper go? Or anything puzzling that intrigues you.

November: Matters of Faith and Philosophy. Basically: books about any ideas that shape the way we live and how we interact in society.

December As You Like It. Yes, it's the other perennial bookend! A go-anywhere/read-anything challenge.

I am going to read Submerged by Daniel Lenihan for this month's challenge.

According to the details provided by my local library, "Submerged is Daniel Lenihan's remarkable story of 25 years as founder and head of the Submerged Cultural Resource Unit (SCRU)--ranging from ancient ruins covered by reservoirs in the desert Southwest to a World War II submarine off the Alaskan coast; from the Isle Royale shipwrecks in the frigid Lake Superior to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor; from the HL Hunley, the first submarine in history to sink an enemy ship, in Charleston Harbor to the ships sunk by atomic bombs at Bikini Atoll, and much more" all of which sounds fascinating to me.

ETA: My condolences, Suzanne. I did not know that you had lost a parent recently. I can relate as my father died February 1.

I've pulled Winchester's Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories off the shelf. It was a toss up between that and his book on the Pacific. I have both and have lived on the coasts of both oceans but decided to start reading about the Atlantic because I lived there first.

Thanks for setting up this month's thread. No need to apologize for the lateness. Losing a parent throws everything off even if you know it's coming. My condolences.

>1 Chatterbox: First, I am so sorry for your loss. There is nothing like the loss of a parent.

Second, No apologies needed; everyone understands. I'm amazed you're here at all.

Third, Is this month's topic limited to seas and oceans? I ask because I have a couple of books about the Great Lakes; the one I'm thinking about is Dan Egan's The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. Would that be acceptable?

I am reading The Pirate's Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd for a book club, and I think there's enough about the sea for it to count. I'm learning quite a bit about priates!

And I'm very sorry for your loss. Losing a parent is hard.

Thanks for the condolences, everyone. I'm finding it unexpectedly difficult, given his inexorable decline and ongoing struggle. Instead of how he was at the end, my mind keeps focused on how he was in his 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.

>5 kac522: I think the Great Lakes qualifies, especially given my tardiness. It is, after all, an inland ocean of sorts (except for the absence of salt water.

Similarly if anyone wants to read about giant inland bodies of water -- Lake Chad, Baikal, the Aral Sea -- that's fine. As long as it's wet and very large and significant ecologically, geographically and potentially geopolitically (eg the Black Sea).

I too am so sorry to hear of your loss. It's difficult seeing our parents decline. Take all the time you need to grieve.

My plan is to read Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast. Although I was planning to concentrate on reading my ROOTs this year, this may be the only ROOT I can get to this month. And I won't get to it until later in the month.

My plan for this month is to read Estuary: Out from London to the Sea by Rachel Lichtenstein. The Thames estuary is one of the most important European shipping lanes, the gateway to England in a way, and this book explores the lives of the people of Kent and Essex who live and work there.

I pulled Simon Winchester's book Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories from my shelves and brought it with me to Kansas. Yes, I am back taking care of things for my mother. This time I hope to bring her home from the Nursing Home, but we will see.

If I have time this month I am also planning on reading Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder. I have had this book on my shelves for far too long and need to get it read. Or, I will read Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It by Helen Scales.

A book that I really liked and read a few years ago was Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey. This book, in turn, led me to Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. Both of these are great books about the oceans that might be of interest to other's on this thread.

>11 benitastrnad: Thanks for the mention of Wave, Benita. I have a copy of that one and if I have the time, will sneak it into this month's reading as well.

>12 alcottacre:
It was a fun book to read, even if it had lots of physics in it. (all in relation to waves.)

I'm tempted to grab Tim Severin's book The Brendan Voyage off my shelves. I've been meaning to read it for forever.

>14 mdoris: That was a rare 5 star read for me.

>15 cbl_tn: Thank you for letting me know. We saw the replica boat in Ireland many years ago.

The boat is now featured at the Craggaunowen open-air museum in County Clare, Ireland.

>13 benitastrnad: Good to know! Thanks, Benita.

>5 kac522: I actually saw an article online recently that stated that Lake Superior is actually technically an inland sea, so definitely!

>7 Chatterbox:, >18 ronincats: Thank you!

Humm...I've had Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates on my TBR list for quite a while, but I'm not sure it fits. Thoughts?

>20 dreamweaver529: Go for it. I'm being super flexible this month!! Pirates, and didn't that incident lead to the creation of the Marines?

>1 Chatterbox: In answer to your random question, a rolling thread would certainly work for me.

I've finished Estuary: Out from London to the Sea by Rachel Lichtenstein, and what an interesting read it was! She takes a few sailing trips along the estuary and out towards the sea, also interviewing people such as fishermen, cocklers tugboat men, artists, as well as the "Prince of Sealand", a man who lives part of the time on Sealand, an abandoned sea fort from WW2 just outside British coastal waters. It charts the impact of the building and dredging work of the new London Gateway mega-port project on the wildlife and livelihoods of those working in and along the estuary, and the fascinating history of the area - there are more wrecks in this stretch of coastal water, from Roman times onwards, including some still very much armed WW2 vessels, than pretty much anywhere else in Europe.

The Brendan Voyage by Tim Severin off the home shelves p. 264



This fantastic book has been languishing on my shelves for far too long. After I read Haven by Emma Donoghue about three monks venturing off the west coast of Ireland (7th century) to establish a retreat on the outer islands, I was intrigued with the notion of ocean travel in skin boats. There is a theory that the Irish monks traveled in skin boats to North America in the 500's A.D. so Tim Severin figured out how these boats would have been made from tanned skins, flax thread and sheep fat as a sealant and ventured in the 1970s in a replica boat built to make the same trip. The trip was a nail biter going north along the coast to the Hebrides, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, past Greenland and finally to Newfoundland with 4 sailors and with success. It was a nail biter managing severe gale force storms, ruined food, harsh elements of rain and plunging temperatures and battles with sea ice that punctured their boat. What a great book! The book has a number of amazing photographs and drawings. Many years ago I saw Severin's boat, a curragh, at at the Craggaunowen open-air museum in County Clare, Ireland.


Departure day from western Ireland.

>24 mdoris: I read another of the books in his series of sailing books, The Spice Islands Voyage, a couple of years ago and really enjoyed that one too.

>25 Jackie_K: Thanks Jackie. I will look for it.

I am still working on Atlantic by Simon Winchester. I love the lyrical, almost poetry, of the writing, but I am far enough into the book to think that perhaps it should have been broken up into two books - maybe one on the North Atlantic and one on the South Atlantic. But I am not the author, so I will just read along for the ride.

I had intended to read Pirates, Privateers, and Rebel Raiders of the Carolina Coast for this month's challenge. Unfortunately, between receiving a couple of Early Reviewers and needing to get yard work done this month before the weather gets too hot, I ran out of time. I knew I wouldn't be able to get very far in that book, so I decided to read Raising the Hunley instead. I've started the book and gotten well into it, although I won't be able to finish it by the end of the day. I'll have to go a little into May, but I will finish it soon.

I'm behind in my reading, but have just started The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, and hope to have it finished in a few days.

I decided to go with the following:

What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe

I was going to read Atlantic for this month's challenge but my copy is a hard cover and I didn't want to take it travelling with me. I took Pacific instead because I have it in paperback. It's very interesting but I didn't get very far into it this month. Turns out that I didn't get that much reading done on my trip - of books that is. I was on a genealogy research trip in Salt Lake City and glued to a computer for a lot of the week I was there.

I'm going to suggest that we just continue this thread, with the May challenge: to read a literary biography!

I'll be delving into Hermione Lee's massive bio of Tom Stoppard, a fave playwright of mine. What I know of his background intrigues me, and I'm very curious about how he ends up with such entertaining and intelligent plays.

Happy May to all...

Once I'm done with my Great Lakes read, I'm hoping to get to Bill Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage. I've just finished a re-read of A Midsummer Night's Dream, so I'm in a Will mood right now.

I don't have a literary biography unread on my shelves as far as I'm aware, and I'm getting a bit stressed about other challenges, so I'll sit out this month and see you in June! :)

I have pulled out my copy of Margaret Wise Brown - Awakened by the Moon by Leonard Marcus. Other than her famous children's books, I knew very little about her so was happy to find this on the sale table awhile back.

>34 Jackie_K: Although now I think about it, I've had Artemis Cooper's biog of Patrick Leigh Fermor on my wishlist forever ... argh!

For April I went with a reread--Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. I read it quite a while ago, back-to-back with Salt, which covers similar ground, and loved both. I thought it would be fun to pick it up again and it fit the theme. The collapse of what seemed like infinite cod populations was no less distressing the second time around.

For May I will probably read Charles Dickens: a Life by Claire Tomalin.

I have about 50 pages left to read in Atlantic by Simon Winchester. The book is about as long as the title. (500 pages). I should finish it today or tomorrow and will then write about it here.

I have a question about the category for this month. Does it have to be a biography or can it be a memoir?

I am going to finish reading Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear for this months category. I am also going to read Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester. I only have about 200 pages left in the Beatrix Potter book and the book about Alice is about 250 pages. I think I can manage both books this month. I am just not sure that I can stand the pomposity of another Winchester book this close to reading the book on the Atlantic.

I'm hoping to get to The Brontes: Charlotte Bronte and Her Family this month. It depends on how much time I spend outdoors now that the weather is getting nicer. I'll also be reading Ake: The Years of Childhood for the African author challenge. I'm not sure if it counts since it's memoir/autobiography and not biography.

>38 benitastrnad: I think I specifically mentioned biography -- sorry. The idea is to get the POV of some kind of outsider on the literary impact of a particular figure.

>36 Jackie_K: oooh, Paddy! I've kept the third volume of his epic trek on my 'emergency reads' shelf for eons. That's a shelf I turn to in times of acute stress...

>41 Chatterbox: I caved and have started reading Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure. The third volume is also good - Artemis Cooper who wrote the biog is one of PLF's literary executors (along with Colin Thubron) and it was they who prepared The Broken Road for posthumous publication.

>41 Chatterbox:
Thanks for the clarification. I thought that might be the case. My biography of Beatrix Potter will fit in great for this category. The book Alice Behind Wonderland might not be a biography. The Amazon blurb for the books states "Using Dodgson's published writings, private diaries, and of course his photographic portraits, Winchester gently exposes the development of Lewis Carroll and the making of his Alice." Do you think that is a biography? WorldCat gives it a PR call# and Dewey has it listed in the 800's. Let me know what you think.

Yesterday I finished my read of Raising the Hunley : the remarkable history and recovery of the lost Confederate submarine by Brian Hicks and Schuyler Kropf for the April challenge--The Sea. The book is about the Confederate submarine, the Hunley, which successfully attacked a Union ship and then mysteriously disappeared. It recounts the history of the sub and the subsequent search for it. It also covers the recovery of the sub once it was found. I found the book interesting and unexpectedly compelling.

A more full review is in my thread at https://www.librarything.com/topic/347822#8135201.

>42 Jackie_K: I did know about Artemis Cooper being "Paddy"'s literary executor; it helped explain the only possible flaw in her bio, to wit that she was really an insider writing about someone she cared about. Still interesting -- but it would be even more compelling to juxtapose her bio with one written by someone else.

>43 benitastrnad: Go for it; it sounds as if there's enough in that Lewis Carroll analysis dealing with both his life and his literary works to make it fit.

I've started reading Hermione Lee's new bio of Tom Stoppard.

I finished reading Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester on Friday. This was a long book (almost 500 pages) without counting the index. It was not one of Winchester's better books. Winchester is a trained geologist and a great story teller. However, the geology of the Atlantic Ocean is all in the shortest chapter in the book - the first one. This chapter should have had more information in it. For instance, there is very little about plate tectonics and the creation of the Atlantic, or why this ocean continues to get bigger.

I also found the book to be very Eurocentric - northern Europe in particular. There is lengthy discussions of the Vikings discovering the North American continent, and the possibility that the Irish did as well, but very little on the discoveries of the Spanish and Amerigo Vespucci. In fact, few of the great mappers and explorers of the Age of Exploration were discussed at all - and hardly any mention of those who mapped and explored the Southern Atlantic.

Then there are some things that he flat out got wrong. For instance, he states that the majority of African slaves came to the U.S. This is an error. The largest number of African slaves went to Brazil, with the Caribbean coming in second. Destination to Cuba was third. Winchester makes no mention of this.

Winchester has an impressive vocabulary and uses every word that he knows. I am not sure if he is deliberately trying to impress his readers, or just playing a game with himself trying to see how many obscure big words he can use. This give the book a pompous tone that just didn't sit well with me.

In short the book is too long and too Eurocentric. This is not Winchester's best book and certainly not the entertaining work of nonfiction that some of his other books are.

I'm reading/listening to Hermione Lee's thorough bio of Tom Stoppard, which I've discovered he asked her to write. This may have had an impact on the bio itself, which is less interesting than Stoppard's own works or than Lee's other bios (especially that of Virginia Woolf). This is a bio of a living subject, which may also explain things that niggle at me. It is a warts and all bio, but fundamentally sympathetic. One of the most interesting aspects, to me, is that it's pushing me to think about what makes for a great biography (this exemplar is intriguing and insightful, but not great...)

I finished reading the big biography of Beatrix Potter today! Yeah! It was Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear. This was not a biography/critique of her literary career so there wasn't analysis of her literary works. It was a biography of her life and how connected it was to the natural world. It included her literary works because her art work was all based on her observations of animal behavior and animal and plant anatomy. She would sit in the woods and watch the behaviors of wild rabbits, but she also had her own pet rabbit. Combining these to types of rabbits allowed her to make her illustrations for her famous Peter Rabbit books lifelike and anatomically accurate. The book names every pet she ever had including her pet field mouse.

Potter was also a naturalist and in particular an accomplished mycologist. She was one of the first people to discover the fact that mushrooms and fungi can reproduce using spoors. She was well known throughout the UK for her extremely accurate drawings of mushrooms and fungi. She spent hours looking at them through microscopes and the reproducing what she saw on paper. She wrote an academic paper about the reproduction of fungi and tried to have it published in a British Mycology journal, but it was caught in a real Catch 22 that many academics of today find themselves. Because Potter was a woman she was not allowed to "read" the paper at the Linnaean society meetings or to become a member due to her sex and her amateur status. It turns out that the paper was read to the regular meeting of the Linnaean Society on July 1, 1858, but the members told Potter that they wanted revisions done. Potter gave up and never did the revisions. Soon after this she started working on her stories for children. Fortunately for the world, her work in this area was accepted and she succeeded in the writing of children's books admirably.

In addition to being an accomplished author she was also a hard headed business woman. The Peter Rabbit books made her a wealthy woman. (She came from a wealthy background to start with, but became financially independent of her family with her books.) The fact is that these books made her a very wealthy woman.

She also created licensed toys and games that she copyrighted. This was a smart move in a time when such licensures were not common. The income from these combined with the book sales enabled her to start investing her money, which she did wisely and well. She loved the Lake District of the UK and soon after the royalties for her first book started to come in, she purchased her first farm in the Lake District. She added to her holdings through the years and when she died she bequeathed her holdings to the National Trust. This enabled the National Trust to create one of the first National Parks in the UK. It could be argued that this land grant and a large endowment that provides some of the income to maintain the land, animals, and farms, might be more important than her books.

I enjoyed this book very much. It was a big biography and I started reading it back in January. I got bored with it for a time, and it laid there for about 6 weeks before I picked it up again, through no fault of the book. In my case I got distracted and started reading other books. One of the books that distracted me was Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Classic Children's Tale by Marta McDowell. I had to place an ILL request for that book, and it was due before the biography was, so it got read first. Then other gardening books distracted me as well.

This biography is well written and very interesting because Beatrix Potter lived a very interesting and meaningful life. It would be hard for a biographer to botch that up given the subject. The author stayed true to the title and did not wander off on rabbit trails of speculation about other areas of Potter's life. She concentrated on Potter's life in nature and so opened a whole aspect of Potter's life to me that I did not know about prior to reading this biography. A huge section of the book dealt with the controversy about fungi paper and the biographer does not speculate about it and sticks to the facts. There is no mention that the Linnaean Society DID read the paper and there is not mention of the formal public apology to Potter that was published by that august body in 1997. There is no copy of the paper to be found so far, (it is thought that Potter destroyed it).

This biography is certainly worth the time to read it - but don't expect to learn the intricate details of Potter's home life, as this biography is not about that. Of course, these aspects of her life do come into the biography - but only as they related to her life in nature.

>47 Chatterbox: It's an interesting question--what makes a good biography? For me, it's how much I want to learn about someone else--sometimes a lot, most of the time just enough to get an idea of the person & the times.

Last month I read Queen Victoria: Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life by Lucy Worsley (2018). It was perfect for what I was looking for; as they say, it did exactly what it says on the tin. Worsley takes 24 individual dates in Queen Victoria's life and provides background and context to the events of that day. Besides the obvious dates (birth, coronation, marriage, death), Worsley describes lesser celebrated but significant dates that pull together various aspects of Victoria's life and personality.

I found Worsley's writing style chatty but not simple, detailed without being tediously exhaustive. The book is full of quotes from Victoria's own journals, as well as journals and letters of relatives and contemporaries. Worsley is especially good with domestic details: the clothes, furnishings, homes, servants and food of Victoria's daily life. There are hundreds of notes and references, so it felt well-researched.

Some people may find this an unsatisfying biography because it doesn't try to give a complete history of Victoria's life. For me it was perfect: a taste of everyday life for Queen Victoria, with a basic look at the most important events in her life (and 19th century Britain).

Then this month I read Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson (2007). Again, this was just what I wanted. There are not many real facts known about Shakespeare, so any book that is long and detailed is mostly conjecture. In under 200 pages, Bryson gives a basic look at the facts that are known and some that are probable, the times he lived in and a general look at life in the theater.

One of my favorite chapters talks about the plays and Shakespeare's language. In the last chapter, "Claimants", Bryson looks at the various theories that Shakespeare's plays and sonnets weren't written by Shakespeare, and he doesn't have much use for any of them. Bryson's wit and style kept me interested and turning pages, so it was just right for me.

Last night I finished my other literary biography. This one turned out to NOT be a biography. It was Alice Behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester and it is a biography of the controversial photograph of Alice Liddell, who was the young child for who Carroll wrote the entertaining stories that became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Carroll was a mathematics professor at Oxford and became fascinated with the new art of photography, in particular that of photographic portraiture. He started taking pictures in 1856 and stayed with it for the next 25 years. Eventually he took 3,000 pictures. All were meticulously cataloged and kept in photo albums. Only about 1,000 of his pictures survive. The majority of these are pictures of young children, and most of them are girls. This has led to some speculation and rumormongering's regarding the reasons.

This book is a small volume written by the prolific master of narrative nonfiction, Simon Winchester. Apparently it is part of a series of books, or short essays, about famous photographs. The series was commissioned by Oxford University Press. Winchester's entry for the series was on the portrait of Alice Liddell done by Charles Dodgeson whose pen name was Lewis Carroll. The portrait has Alice posed in a somewhat suggestive pose and this combined with the fact that most of the surviving portraits are of girls has combined to create speculation regarding the purpose of these photographs. Winchester puts these speculations to bed with a thorough investigation into the photograph itself, who Carroll photographed, when they were photographed, and where those photographs ended up. The majority of them are in the U.S. at the Special Collections Library at the University of Texas, Austin. Firestone Library at Princeton University also has a good collection of Carrolliana, including some photographs. Few of the photographs are actually in the U.K. anymore.

As usual, Winchester does a complete job of dissecting the problem, examining the evidence, and debunking the conclusions that many people have, in his view, come to erroneously. In his view, the photograph is artistic in nature and there is no corroborating evidence that there was any perverted motive other than the pursuit of art at work in the portraits that Dodgeson made.

There is a great deal of information about Dodgeson in this short volume. While it did give me the outline of Dodgeson's live, it was by no means a complete biography.

Because the Alice book wasn't really a biography, I found a literary biography in the recorded version at the public library. I am listening to it. Manderley Forever by Tatiana de Rosnay. According to the book flap this is the first biography of Daphne Du Maurier written in French. I am not sure that I will stick with this biography because it is written in first person. I hate first person narratives and I simply can't imagine that a biography could be written this way. One thing is clear, Du Maurier was an interesting person, and so I am hooked on her life, but I am not sure I will continue to the end with this biography. Surely there is a better one of her out there somewhere?

I am adding a title to this list of what I read for this category. I read Churchill & Chartwell: The Untold Story of Churchill's Houses and Gardens by Stefan Buczacki. I am including it on this list because Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. That makes him a literary figure. This book is not a biography and I read it because I have recently become fascinated with famous gardens of famous people.

This book is not what the title claims it to be. It is what the subtitle claims it to be. It is a meticulous domestic catalog of every place (and I mean every place) Churchill lived. It is a biography done by following the moves that Churchill made in his lifetime. It details lease prices, length of lease, prices for furniture, who made the furniture, what condition the place was in when the Churchill's moved in and what it was like when they left. It goes on and on about their money woes and their many many legal battles with contractors, subcontractors, tradespeople, gardeners, farmers, neighbors, and family members.

I read about this book when I was reading the biography of Beatrix Potter (see above). I thought this was going to be mostly about the house Chartwell and the life of the Churchill's while living there. It wasn't. The Chartwell section comprises only about the last 4 chapters of the book. The most interesting chapters were the last two which were devoted to the last years of Churchill - from 1955 to his death in 1963. This was not a waste of time, but I wanted more about the house and gardens. I wanted some insight as to what was the inspiration for the house and gardens and why Churchill did what he did on the grounds. (It seems that money, or the lack of it dictated most of what was done.) What I got was a domestic economics catalog.

This was not a total waste of time, and it was interesting, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.

I ended up listening to The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. It's a dual biography of OED editor James Murray and one of the most prolific of the volunteer readers/contributors, William Chester Minor. Minor had plenty of time to read since he was confined to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after he committed a murder. The book also tells how the OED came to be describes the editorial process in some depth. It's interesting on many levels.

I also realized that another book I just finished sort of fits. Great Short Books is the result of Kenneth C. Davis's pandemic reading. The discussion of each book includes biographical information about the author. I've been dipping into this one for several weeks and I finally finished it last night.

Cross-posting from my own thread:

I finally, finally crossed the finish line reading Hermione Lee's bio of Tom Stoppard. I like Lee as a biographer, and Stoppard's plays are amazing -- I relish the badinage/verbal wordplay and the demands on my brain. BUT -- this too often felt as if Lee had downloaded Sir Tom's diary and written it up, and added well-written summaries of the plays and their critical reception. It was certainly authoritative and will be a great starting point for another biographer in a few decades to delve into his life and his work, but felt like an overwritten (if often exceptionally well written) CV. The insights are the kind I would have expected, and little felt tremendously revelatory, even if the kind of detailed insight into casting decisions, work process, etc. were very intriguing.

The best thing about this book is that it made me want to revisit some of Stoppard's plays, and especially to catch as many as possible in production, since I think they 'play' better than they 'read'. I'm supposed to be in NYC in about two weeks' time, and I may try to find a ticket to "Leopoldstadt" before it closes.

The other bonus from making my way through all the relentless name dropping and calendar entries is that I found myself thinking a lot about what DOES make for a really great biography, and the challenges of writing an authorized bio of a living person that is really critical/analytical. So, I'm glad I read/listened to this and have it to refer to, but will be in no hurry to re-read it.

On a related note: in a few recent books, it's been fun to link my own life to the events/locations described there. For instance, in Lee's bio, I enjoyed the backstory to the NYC production of Arcadia, which I saw in its Lincoln Center debut in the mid-1990s. Ditto, Rufus Sewell as a key character in Rock and Roll, which I saw in London, and his later translation of The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, featuring Simon Russell Beale, which I saw at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). I was lucky enough to go with friends to a discussion with Stoppard and Beale at BAM -- perhaps it was a night that the stage was dark or it was before a performance? -- and as a BAM member, got an autographed copy of The Coast of Utopia.

Apologies for lack of hyperlinks, but I couldn't face scrolling through endless "Rock and Roll" possibilities...

I finished listening to Manderley Forever: A Biography of Daphne du Maurier by Tatiana de Rosnay. I will start this by stating that I didn't intend to read this biography. It wasn't even on my TBR list. However, I needed a book to listen to and didn't have anything ready on my shelves, so while cruising through the public library shelves of recorded books, I found this one. It looked interesting enough and I had finally gotten around to reading Rebecca a few years ago, so thought I would give this one a try.

This was a very strange biography. It was written in first person and I found that disconcerting. Even though the hardcopy of the book has extensive notes and citations, I was never sure what was a quote from sources and what was pure conjecture on the part of the author (De Rosnay). This is a real problem for this biography, so in the end I would recommend that only knowledgeable readers read this book. If that is my recommendation why would I encourage anybody to read this biography? It was engaging. It did suck me in and keep me interested in the life of this author. There is no doubt that Du Maurier lived a fascinating life and her literary work, for the most part, is experimental and visionary, in some cases. All of this makes her an important 20th Century author, but this biography is not the place to start learning about all the things that made Du Maurier and important 20th Century author. There simply is no way to tell what is interpretation on the part of the author - De Rosnay - and the author - Du Maurier.

In the Forward to the book, De Rosnay states that she was approached by her publisher to write the first biography of Du Maurier in French. That adds another layer to this biography. That of the translator. This biography was written in French and then translated into English. Du Maurier spoke and wrote, very good French, but she did not translate her own novels into that language. This caused problems, because it was discovered later that her French translator had not done a very good job on translating a few of the novels and in at least one case, discovered by Du Maurier herself, got the facts wrong.

I did learn a great deal about the life of this famous author, so the book wasn't a total waste of time, but as pointed out up-thread, there are better biographies of Du Maurier, so if you are interested in Du Maurier read one of those instead.

Welcome to the June challenge!

I'll be reading two books for this month's non-fiction challenge, which focuses on the experiences of indigenous/first nations/native peoples. The first is set in New Zealand and addresses the Maori experience -- Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All. The second has a North American focus, and discusses questions about how to make some kind of restitution toward indigenous peoples whose artifacts (and in some cases, bones) ended up in museums for curious descendants of those who had displaced them to study or ogle -- Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits by Chip Colwell.

Looking forward to learning what you guys are finding of interest in this area! From first contact to social justice, it's all open to you to delve into...

I'm still reading (and enjoying very much) Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure for May's literary biography theme, and will hopefully finish it either at the weekend or next week sometime.

After that, for June my plan is to read an ER book I won a few months ago, Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance by Andrew Gulliford. This looks at the contested Bears Ears National Monument, significant to five indigenous tribes, and described in the book's blurb as "a bellwether for public land issues in the American West".

>57 Jackie_K: Wow, that sounds fascinating! I'll look forward to your comments...

I just ordered The Songlines and I'm hoping it arrives in plenty of time to read it for the June challenge.

I hope to get through two books for this month's topic. The first will be Walking the Trail: One Man's Journey Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears by Jerry Ellis. This is a book I have had on my reading list for a long time. This one is written by a Cherokee author who walks the Trail of Tears in reverse (from Oklahoma to Alabama) trying to come to grips with what happened along that trail and why. It was originally published in 1991 and is used in many American History classes and showed up again on a reading list for one of the history classes in which I worked with the undergraduate students. This is a good opportunity to read the book.

My second book will be Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory byClaudio Saunt. This is about the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which resulted in the Trail of Tears. The two books together may prove to be to much of the same, but I thought they also my tag along with each other very well.

I will be reading As Long as Grass Grows by Dina Gilio-Whitaker for the June challenge. According to the summary for the book, "Dina Gilio-Whitaker explores the fraught history of treaty violations, struggles for food and water security, and protection of sacred sites, while highlighting the important leadership of Indigenous women in this centuries-long struggle."

I'm somewhat behind schedule and finished reading The Oil and the Glory last week which fits the April theme really well. The history of the oil industry in the Caspian region and political influences on the industry is quite exciting and I definitely did not know enough about this topic. The history of Baku and how the oil industry's development impacted its advancement is quite fascinating. I liked this book a lot and appreciated all of the research the author did.

Better late than never, I finally finished Artemis Cooper's Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure for May's Literary Biography theme. I enjoyed reading Paddy's story very much, although the succession of (mostly very posh) characters that came in and out of his life were sometimes a bit hard to keep straight in my mind who was who. His was certainly a fascinating life, well lived - the walk through Europe in the 1930s, followed by 4 years living in Romania with a Romanian princess, then the war years in Crete (where amongst other things he was involved in the kidnapping of a German general), and the travels round the world and particularly in Greece and the impact those travels and the people in his circle had on his writing. It was all a bit of a derring-do life, and if someone had written it as fiction it would probably be written off as hopelessly unrealistic.

I have read about 140 pages (not quite half) of Unworthy Republic and am learning lots more reasons why the American South was a corrupt part of the U.S. from the time of the advent of Slavery. I just finished the section where the author describes the start of the Expulsion movement of Native Americans, and the short form of it, that the Southern states, in particular Alabama and Georgia, wanted to be able to import more slaves and own more land. Since slaves were counted as financial assets more slaves meant more worth for individual slave owners. The more the better and the Native American landowners were in the way of that expansion. I am now starting the section of the book about the planning of the forced migration to Oklahoma.

I read Ancient pioneers : the first Americans by George E. Stuart. This book gives a history of the native peoples of the Americas from their arrival around 12,000-15,000 years ago up to the arrival of Europeans. The history given is an overview of the various cultures in the Americas, from Alaska through South America, based on the archaeological evidence. Stuart points out the misnaming of many of the people groups by Europeans. The book contains numerous photographs, most in color, showing aerial photographs of archaeological sites, paintings, and artifacts interspersed throughout the text. Much of the ancient artwork is spectacular. It's a good place to start for learning about the history of the native peoples in the Americas.

I hope to also read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States this month, if time permits.

I finished reading Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt for the Indigenous Peoples topic for this month. I have had it finished for a week, but didn't have access to WiFi to post my review. I am in a Starbucks outside of St. Louis, and so thought I would take the opportunity to get this posted.

The book is an academic tome. It is an in-depth look at the Indian Removal from the American Southeast in the 1830's. This is the removal of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Seminoles, Sauk, Potawatomie, Winnebago, and Onondaga Indian Tribes. These were primarily tribes indigenous to the Southeastern part of the U. S., but the book also has chapters in it about the Black Hawk War, and the removal of the remnants of some of the tribes from Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. The author concentrates mostly on those tribes of the Southeast, because this effected the largest numbers of people and had the greatest economic impact on the U. S.

The author uses data and statistics to back up his assertations and conclusions. The data ranges from census records, to Congressional voting records. His conclusion is that the five major tribes of the Southeast were removed primarily because White people wanted those valuable lands. Once they got their hands on the land, monoculture agriculture based on slavery moved in. (that means cotton plantations.) This in turn increased the power that the Southern states had in Congress based on the 3/5's rule. From this base they could bully the rest of the country into supporting the spread of slavery. The more slaves they had, the more economic power, and, because of the 3/5's rule the more slaves the more representation and therefore the more voting power they had in Congress.

Land speculators and big Eastern banks also come under scrutiny and the conclusions in this section are as shocking as in the chapters about the western expansion of slavery. The author delves into economic records for some of the early banks in the U.S. and uses this to tell the story of the destruction of the economic power of the Southeastern tribes as they were cheated out of the proper value of their lands. He also discusses that often the economic value of the slave estates were NOT in land but in number of slaves because slaves were worth $1,500 per person in the 1830's. Slaves were the economic asset - not necessarily the land, that was counted by the eastern banks. This makes them complacent in the promotion and expansion of slavery. He traces the wealth of one of these bankers to the modern day, with a concurrent descendant assets being valued at 15 million.

The author also gets into the loss of generational wealth. Many of the Southeastern tribes cultivated their land and were quite prosperous small farmers and traders. Their removal, simply because of their race, resulted in the almost total loss of the wealth they had accumulated since their exposure to white settlement. It is one of the reasons why Native Americans are still poor. He makes a very good case for this argument based on what statistics from the 1830's are available. These include records of the sale of household goods, lands, and livestock that was recorded by the War Department and the Indian agents present on the scene at the time.

I learned much from this book. My only complaint is the provocative language the author uses to describe the slave owning people who moved into Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi with the removal of the Native Americans who were living there. This is not really a complaint, but it will make the book unpalatable for use in classrooms in the American South, and probably won't pass the DeSantis test, or the Texas test for that matter for un-American and unsettling content. For instance, the word Plantation is never used in the book. Instead Plantations are called slave camps, or slave labor camps. This language is provocative, but it is truthful. I understand why the author used these terms, but I suspect it is going to be shocking to many and cause them to not read this book, or think it is too radical. It is my opinion, that the time for toning down the rhetoric is past. It is time to call things what they are. The use of these terms are going to make many residents of the American South turn away from this book, but they shouldn't. This shameful history needs to be confronted.

Highly recommended, even if it tends to be an academic tome. I will warn readers that this book starts out slow, but once the author gets the data laid out and starts putting it together to form his argument, the book becomes compelling reading and is full of information that Americans need to know in order to better understand and confront their history. This might lead to a better understanding of racism and why it is holding the U.S. back from being a better nation.

I haven’t been doing very well with the nonfiction challenge this year. I started with good intentions but events overtook me, so I pulled a children’s book off the shelves, knowing that it would fit this month’s challenge. Northwest Coast Indians was a good primer about the indigenous peoples of the Northwest United States and Alaska as well as those of the West Coast of Canada.

My second book for June’s challenge was The Face Pullers: Photographing Native Canadians 1871-1939. The photos were of members of various Canadian Prairie First Nations and were grouped by time periods. The introductions to each section pointed out the changing attitudes to indigenous peoples by the photographers and society at large which was evident in the pictures. It was thought provoking.

I have my book picked out for the July theme - Explorations and Expeditions. I am going to read Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown. This one is narrative chronicle of the deep space mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. It is a hefty book of 400 reading pages so I thought I had better start on it early this month. I think it will be an exciting read about a deep space expedition.

>66 benitastrnad: Thank you for this thorough review! I will be adding it to my TBR list.

I'm on holiday and don't have a suitable unread book on my shelves that I can think of for Explorations & Expeditions, so I'm going to take a break to try and catch up on some of my other challenges. Should hopefully be back here for August though!

I have started reading Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown. This is the story of the first mission to Europa. Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter and the first place outside of the Earth to be confirmed to have water. A small determined group of academics decided that they wanted to learn more about it. They asked two questions "Is it habitable?" and "How do we get there?" The Amazon blurb says that this is the Homeric story of modern space exploration and the inner lives of scientists who study the solar systems mysterious outer planets.

That sounds like both an exploration and an expedition, so this is the book I am going with for this month. It is a long one. (480 pages with extensive notes and footnotes) so I hope I get it finished this month. I started it last night and have read 15 pages, and so far it is very interesting. Carl Sagan plays a major role at the beginning by providing the inspiration and teaching for Dr. Pappalardo - so far the hero of this story. He is the science mind behind this project. It is written in almost a blow-by-blow style that is very different for this kind of book. I was expecting narrative nonfiction and was surprised. I will see how I get along with this style of writing as I read more.

While on holiday I finished my June (Indiginous/Aboriginal Peoples/First Nations) book,Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance by Andrew Gulliford which I won as an Early Reviewer book at the end of last year. It is a really interesting academic account of the history of the contested Bears Ears National Monument area in SW Utah.

It highlights the history and archaeology of the area, both Native and Mormon, the extent of the contested claims to the area, the political history including the impact of uranium mining on the people and landscape, the conflicts over the looting of ancestral Native sites, and the more recent politics which saw five Native tribes come together to fight for National Monument status for Bears Ears. In 2016 President Obama designated Bears Ears a National Monument, but the following year President Trump reduce d the Monument's area by 85%, reopening it to claims for mining rights. President Biden has subsequently restored the original Monument area, but it looks like this land will be contested as a political football for some time to come. In the meantime, this book does a fantastic job of highlighting the significant Native presence in this landscape going back thousands of years, while also acknowledging the history of Mormon settlers and the hardships they faced when moving south to the Bears Ears area. Overall a thorough account of a truly unique and fascinating area.

I finished reading Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All today. The author is a great storyteller and she did an excellent job introducing a reader to the Maori culture and history.

I finished reading my book for the July category of Expeditions and Explorations. I choose a book that was both an expedition and an exploration. Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown has self descriptive sub-title. The full title (what is on the title page) reads "The Mission: or How a Disciple of Carl Sagan, an Ex-Motocross Racer, a Texas Tea Party Congressman, the World's Worst Typewriter Saleswoman, California Mountain People, and an Anonymous NASA Functionary Went to War with Mars, Survived an Insurgency at Saturn, Traded Blows with Washington, and Stole a Ride on an Alabama Moon Rocket to Send a Space Robot to Jupiter in Search of the Second Garden of Eden at the Bottom of an Alien Ocean Inside of an Ice World Called Europa." That title pretty much describes the book.

The book is the story of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's struggle to get NASA to send an expedition to Jupiter's moon Europa to find out if the ocean that is underneath the ice mantel on the surface supports life. Scientists have known since the 1980's that Europa has an ocean of water and that water is probably capable of supporting life. They wanted to find out for sure. However, the idea of manned flights to Mars has kept this kind of space exploration from being funded. Without money nothing flies into space. This book explains how a mission was finally funded by this unlikely group of allies. I should make it plain that this mission has not been sent into space - yet. It is scheduled for 2023, but it is possible that won't happen because funding for NASA projects are not set in stone. They can be terminated at any point until the actual launch date. This mission is no exception to that rule.

I learned a great deal from reading this book, especially about how Congress in the US appropriates money for agencies like NASA. I also learned about some interplanetary phenomena about which I knew little to nothing. This book was an eye-opener for that reason alone.

The book was written in a very readable style. It was by turn funny, quirky, snarky and scientifically specific. The author took a very scientific topic and wrote about it this one proposed exploratory mission to a moon of Jupiter in a very unacademic style. I chewed through this 467 page book in 2 weeks. The book had 400 pages of reading text and 67 pages of notes and index. The author interviewed most of the scientists named in the book and wrote extensive explanatory notes when needed. The author cited academic articles, government documents, interviews, and press releases.

What amazed me was the role that Dr. Carl Sagan has played in space exploration. Most of the scientists named in this book were attracted to the sciences by seeing, hearing, or reading things that Carl Sagan wrote. Severa of them mentioned that they had seen him lecture or watched him on the Tonight Show. I only hope that Neil DeGrasse Tyson, with his star themed shirts, sweaters, and ties, and numerous apperances on TV and other public events, has as big of an effect on the next generation of space scientists as did Sagan. Another big influence on space exploration that was cited time and again by many of the people involved in this space mission was Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry might be as influential as Carl Sagan in the long run.

Another point of interest was the role of the arts in the lives of these scientists. Many of them made references to works of music, literature, and philosophy as points of inspiration. References to science fiction and fantasy novels abounded. Works like Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and books by Phillip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clark were also cited fairly often. Movies like Star Wars, 2001: a Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were all mentioned in this book.

This book was great fun to read, a learning experience, and provided insights into the inner workings of the US Congressional Appropriations Committee. It will probably be one of my top reads of the year.

I am going to take this month's (August) topic literarily and read about plants. I will be reading Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries From a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben. I have been wanting to read this book for ages and now is the time. If I can manage to do so, I will also read Pine Barrens by John McPhee. The last one will combine plants with land forms. This is something at which McPhee excels.

I will be reading Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands by Barbara Kingsolver for the August nonfiction challenge. The book includes some wonderful photography as I understand it.

>76 benitastrnad: I remember my first ground level view of NJ as being, unexpectedly, endless trees. I assumed they were all second growth, which may be true for what I say, but Pine Barrens may give me better data.

I didn't mean to read Dirt Under My Nails by Marilee Foster specifically for the August challenge, but I just finished it and realised it fit, so here's my review! It's an interesting account of a young farmer working her family farm on Long Island by the Hamptons, and the impact of increasing development/housing in the area on the land, plants and animals, as well as on family farming practice. It's quite an old book (published in 2002) so it would be interesting (and I suspect probably a bit depressing) to see how things have changed there 20+ years later.

The book I am planning on officially reading for this challenge is Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

A very slim book, Holloway explored the holloways, worn paths in the softer terrain of parts of England. It was almost poetic the connection between men and nature, and brought in thoughts of past companions in pursuit of the wild and mellow places trod into the earth over the years.

>80 Familyhistorian: This is on my wishlist. I did a writing course once with Dan Richards, one of the co-authors, and he was a very generous and astute tutor.

I read Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, which is a fantastic melding of memoir and popular science, telling the story of her research into the underground micorrhyzal networks that connect forest trees, and her discovery of the extent to which trees of the same and different species cooperate rather than compete, all in the context of a changng climate. I love this sort of book - I would really struggle to read the scientific academic papers she and her team produce, but this book explained the science easily without dumbing it down, and put it in the context of her own life. She is the child of a logging family from British Columbia, so that gave her a more personal perspective than some of the policy makers who initially opposed her work gave her credit for. This is a tale of family life, tragedy, misogyny in science and academia, but ultimately of good science and hope for the future. I listened to the audiobook (read by the author) while following along in the ebook, and highly recommend it.

I didn't have anything to read for the July theme of Explorations and Expeditions, except for one long book on my shelves about Columbus, and I wasn't in the mood to read that one, nor did I have time for it. Surprisingly I didn't have anything on my shelves on space exploration. I do have a few books related to the space program, but none that covered the topic of exploration. So I missed July.

Fortunately, I did have a book on my shelves that fit this month's topic. I read Ribbon of Sand: the amazing convergence of the ocean & the Outer Banks by John Alexander and James Lazell. My copy of this book is the paperback edition, published in 2000. It was originally published in 1992, and my edition only added a preface to update some of the information in the book. So it's not current, unfortunately. However, that doesn't really matter for most of the information presented in the book.

Most of the book focuses on the natural history of the Outer Banks, and how sand, water, and wind have shaped them. It also describes some of the flora and fauna of the Banks, and spends a chapter covering the scientific investigation of a very unusual king snake, which appears to be unique to a specific section of the Outer Banks. However, it also spends a couple of chapters on history. One details Blackbeard's final battle with Lieutenant Robert Maynard and shows how the configuration of the land, channels, and shoals were key to the battle. The other historical chapter reports on the Wright brothers and their flight tests at Kitty Hawk, the difficult Outer Banks weather they had to cope with, and their eventual successful powered flight.

The final chapter of the book discusses several threats to the Outer Banks, including drilling for oil in the Atlantic, proposed construction of jetties to stabilize the Oregon Inlet (which would interfere with the natural processes that build and maintain the barrier islands), and threats to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. This chapter is really the only one affected by the book being 30 years old. The preface updates it to some extent, but only to 1999, and a lot has happened since then. The Bonner Bridge has been replaced after years of arguments, and proposals to build jetties at Oregon Inlet were dropped, only to be recently revived. Threats from global warming and rising oceans have only become much more apparent. It would be useful to have an update on the current threats.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and there were times when I couldn't put it down. Other times it dragged a bit. Maybe the most frustrating thing was that several times the authors referred to pictures that were not included in the book. In particular, they mentioned an apparently famous photo of the Outer Banks taken from Apollo 9 several times in different chapters. I finally had to look that one up online. It makes me wonder if that photo had been included in the original edition of the book, but omitted from the paperback edition I have. I would be curious to read something updated that addresses current issues faced by the Outer Banks, but overall it was a worthwhile read for me.

I decided to read a book related to the natural world and writing: Unearthing the Secret Garden by Marta McDowell. This is a look at the life of Frances Hodgson Burnett, author or The Secret Garden, and how her life, her own gardens and her love of nature influenced the writing of the book. Interestingly, Burnett never worked in a garden until she was 50 years old, but then took it on whole-heartedly. I found the book enjoyable, with a nice mix of biography, gardens, and The Secret Garden story. There are lots of lovely illustrations and pictures, and even a multiple-page index of every plant that Burnett mentions in her works. I paired this with a re-read of The Secret Garden.

In the same vein I just brought home from the library Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit, which explores George Orwell's love of nature and roses in particular, and how it influenced his writing. I look forward to this book, but I probably won't get to it until next month.

>81 Jackie_K:
I love it when I find connections between books and this time I have found them between books that we choose to read for this topic! Suzanne Simard's work is cited in the book I read for this month's challenge on Trees. Wohlleben, the author of Hidden Life of Trees discusses at length the underground connections between trees. At the end of the book Simard writes an afterward for Wohlleben's book. I haven't quite finished the book (I have about 30 pages to go) but will finish it later this evening.

>83 kac522:
I have been doing lots of reading this year about author's and their gardens. I read two books on Beatrix Potter and her life in the garden. I read one about Winston Churchill and his farms and gardens earlier this summer. I find it fascinating how this aspect of their personal lives oftentimes found its way into their writing.

>84 benitastrnad: I first heard of Suzanne Simard through reading The Hidden Life of Trees! Actually I preferred Simard's book - I had heard so much hype about The Hidden Life of Trees that I think my expectations of it were too high. It's a good book, but I felt like there was a bit more substance in Finding the Mother Tree. Either way though, the depth of cooperation and life emerging from dying trees etc was, I thought, very profound and moving.

I finished reading Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben on Sunday night and really enjoyed it. This is one of those nonfiction books that is really more of a compellation of observation and gathering the research to back up the observation. The author is not an academic, but works closely with them. He is a forester in Central Germany and he takes great pains to remind readers that his book is about the forests of central Germany and so the species and the interconnectedness of the forest is going to be different in different parts of the world. But, the point he is making is that forests are an ecosystem and they need to be treated as such.
Managed forests don't do this and so removing parts of the forest endangers the entire forest even if it is ecologically managed. This is not academic writing. The great strength of this book, and I suspect the reason why it has had a world wide impact is that it is written in a breezy folksy style that breaks down tons of academic research into very understandable information. The author skims the surface of all the academic research but that is good enough for most of us. He has managed to make a great many people think differently about forests and forest management and that is also a victory.

This book was totally worth reading.

I am going to read Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla for the September category. I placed my Inter-Library Loan Request and hope that it will be here soon. I am anxious to get started on reading this book. Modern India fascinates and repels me and I want to learn more about it. When going through my gargantuan TBR list I came across this title and I knew that it was the one to read for September. The Amazon Blurb for the book says the following.

The stunning true story of an untouchable family who become teachers, and one, a poet and revolutionary. Like one in six people in India, Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary―and yet how typical―her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible transformation from student and labor organizer to famous poet and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother’s battles with caste and women’s oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.

I've started reading Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister by Jung Chang for this month's challenge. It's about the three Soong sisters who were at the centre of power at the foundation of modern China, variously married to pre-Communist leaders Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, advisor to Chiang and Mao's vice-chair.

I started reading Ants Among Elephants last night and the first 15 pages of it is very interesting. It includes a detailed explanation of what being a Dalit means in practical terms. I think this book is going to prove to be an interesting read.

Here is the link to the new thread for the September topic of Family Ties.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/353608

You can continue to post on this thread if you want to do so, but, with Suzanne's permission I have created a new thread for us. I am going to take over creating the threads for this group for the remainder of the year. At some point we will need to think about how we want to proceed. I hope that we can still have the benefit of Suzanne's guiding hand and that this group will continue into the future, but we can make that decision a bit later. For now, just post your September reading over on the new thread and we will see you over there.