Month: June 2008

I have just re-read this Barbara Kingsolver novel and could read it a third time with equal pleasure because she weaves such a rich tapestry of flora and fauna, wildlife lore and ecological information into her three intertwined stories.

The first protagonist is Deanna Wolfe, aptly named for the extinct red wolf whose modern successor, the coyote, she is trying to study and protect in the Kentucky foothills.  Divorced and in late middle age, she thinks she is happily rid of men in her life, but a Montana sheep rancher turned backpacker shows up, somewhat her junior but as irresistible as moth pheromones to her pre-menopausal hormones.  They spend a passionate but conflicted summer as she knows he has come to hunt coyotes, which he sees as sheep killers.

The second story involves a Polish Jewish/Muslim graduate student specializing in the study of moths at the University of Kentucky.  She too falls in love, marries a husky lusty farmer and soon finds herself a widow with a huge unfriendly family and the challenge of finding a way to make the farm pay without destroying the environment with pesticides and herbicides used in growing tobacco.  Knowing her New York butcher cousin can sell a fortune in goat meat at the right time of year, she goes into the raising of meat goats.

The goats are supplied by a crusty and unsociable retired ag teacher equally devoted to breeding a pest-resistant strain of the almost extinct American chestnut and to the use of herbicides and pesticides.  He feuds with his next door neighbor, a crusading organic farmer and Unitarian who shocks his Baptist sensibilities.

It all adds up to three great stories of good hearted if sometimes misguided Kentucky folks and a marvelous experience of Kentucky wildlife from mushrooms to moths to mammals.

This historical fiction by North Carolina  Appalachian  Civil War descendant Sharyn McCrumb combines glimpses of ghostly raiders with present day re-enacters, 19th century mountain folk divided between union and confederacy with contemporary retirees.

She fleshes out the true story of Malinda and Keith Blalock.  Malinda dressed as a boy and went with her husband to enlist in the confederate army, though their sympathies were with neither side.  After Keith got himself sent home with self- inflicted poison ivy rash, he joined the union army as a scout and she again went with him.  We see the atrocities inflicted by neighbor on neighbor through their eyes.

Also McCrumb brings to life the career of Zebulon Vance, a charismatic senator, general and governor, the  Appalachian Abe Lincoln.

It becomes clear that  the cruelty and suffering of civil war was experienced in our country no differently than in the Balkans, Africa or the Middle East in this century.

John Grisham always manages to friehgten me with the amount of criminal, behind-the-scenes money-making that goes unchecked in our society. This fictional but very representational story shows how big business can buy  judges in states that still elect their supreme courts.

A chemical company that is found guilty of polluting the water supply of an entire town and killing many of its residents with cancer is easily able to hire a political blitz team that spends millions donated by all the companies and professional who fear lawsuits to pay for the election of a pro-business judge.

It is all under cover and the public is cleverly hoodwinked by a barrage of misleading but persuasive ads. Powerful government figures are involved. One fears that a democracy has little chance of eluding the control of powerful financial interests  The press is also manipulated and its eventual revelations come far too late to rectify the situation.

Natalie Bober has written a very readable account of an American 18th century wife’s experiences managing a large family and running several farms while her husband serves with little or no pay on his fledgling country’s first political bodies and eventually as its second president.

The unexpected and, to me shocking, revelations were the extreme economic hardships and diseases that were experienced. On the other hand, I was also also impressed by the strength and support of Abilgail’s large extended family in rearing one another’s children and helping with chores, loans and professional skills.

It was also interesting to see Adams become the proponent of a strong presidency backed by the upper classes…. strangely predictive of the present administration.

Michael Pollan confirms what biochemist Margaret Enig and the West Price Foundation early warned us about: the dangers of transfats and the exaggerated avoidance of good quality natural fats.

The bunch of fresh Romaine on the cover pictures the real food, not chemicals, that we should seek out.  Food grown on organically enriched soil.  Food our great grandparents would have eaten.  Nothing with more than three additives.  And grass-not grain fed meat and eggs from chickens who scratched for a living.

To that I would add unpasteurized goat milk with its beneficent antibiotics.

Or The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Nassim Taleb shakes up all our expectations with this cogent and humorous description of how social and economic events are swayed more by herd influences and fadism than by random chance.

He cites example after example of overwhelming events that came out of the blue, such as the present soaring of oil prices, with little or no prediction. And he emphasizes the tendency of social “scientists” (laughable term) to forget or explain away these surprises because the human mind likes to think it can control or at least foresee, so explanations are made up after the event.

We need to be on the alert for these life shaping developments or at least mentally prepared to deal with them.

This was the most liberating book I can remember reading. Although I have been  a Unitarian for years and accepted as myths the Christian as well as all other god stories, I have still been haunted by the sense of a personal god who somehow manages to tend to some people’s needs but not everyone’s.

Now I feel comfortable with Dawkins’ description of Einstein’s God…the Force that set the hydrogen and helium big bang in motion…inexplicable but awesome. I have always felt the most reverence for the woods and streams, mountains and shores and all the natural wonders of our planet.

Dawkins’ clear and repeated description of the evolutionary process for cells and everything on up, which precludes an a priori God figure, is the only rational one.

I can now peacefully accept that eventually that my children (hopefully) will scatter my ashes into their flower beds and life will go on.