Category: Book Reviews

Another of Alexander McCall Smith’s highly satisfactory reports from the folks at and around the Ladies’ Private Detective Agency, Gabarone, Botswana. It is so reassuring to read that misunderstandings, conflicts and even some mysteries can be resolved with a good dose of feminine common sense like that of Precious Ramotswe, that lady of traditional build and not too concerned about it. Would that the good ladies of AFrica could take charge as she does.

As usual, three subplots are intertwined here: whether Mma Makutsi will tell the truth about the new bed, who is writing threatening letters to the detective agency, and whether an expensive medical re-evaluation of a paralyzed adopted daughter will yield a cure.

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.

Barbara Delinsky has written a moderately good novel and an excellent investigative report  of the sometimes illegal methods used by some journalists to secure information about individuals they wish to feature in tabloid type, headline-grabbing news exposes.

She shows how such a reporter can devastate an individual’s life: a rather naive Lily Blake is forced to give up her teaching and singing and Boston apartment and retreat to a family lake cottage to avoid the press after a seemingly innocent conversation is illegally taped and re-edited to sound as though she has been having an affair with a recently appointed Cardinal of the Catholic Church.

The ease with which any individual’s past can be researched on the web is frightening.  Residences, schools, church affiliations, licenses, misdemeanors all can be mined for landlords, teachers, pastors, officials who can be called on for statements, which can then be used to support whatever story is being concocted.

Our political candidates are obviously subjected to this kind of  data-mining and misuse.  But so are the rest of us.  It is worth reading this book to become aware of how dirty journalism works.

Anne Tyler’s 17th novel begins in the Baltimore airport when two couples, one typically American and the other Iranian-American, meet their adoptive Korean infant daughters.

The story compares the different experiences of these two children, one placed with an American couple determined to preserve her Korean heritage, the other with an emigrant family striving to become as American as possible.

Tyler also makes us aware of the mixed feelings of an Iranian grandmother toward her adopted country: the conflict between wishing to conform and longing for the old Iranian days, with resentment toward the demands of the new society as well as toward the well intentioned but sometimes irritating overtures of an American grandfather eager to court her and her customs.

We learn a lot about Iranian immigrants, what it is like to be an adopted child from another country, and how American eagerness to cross cultural boundaries can sometimes rub other folks the wrong  way.

As always, Tyler brings all her seemingly tangled, knotty strings into an artfully constructed macrame plantholder.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s futuristic novel about Antarctica, published in 1998, is still up to date.  The science fiction plot is a mere skeleton, but on it hang magnificent chapters  descriptive of the still incredibly cold, white and brown landscape features and geology that scientists strive to understand and prospectors compete to exploit.  The place dwarfs the people.  It is unimaginable by any experience elsewhere on earth, but this book helps us to conceive of it.

Anne Tyler takes us with 40-year-old Delia as she steps off the ladder of her family life and starts over from the bottom. How often we have felt like doing the same. The death of a father, increasingly cooler relations with her teenagers, long resentment of her doctor husband’s seemingly superior attitude, and (most of all) anger that he seems to have married her to inherit her father’s medical practice all combine to send her walking off the beach during a family vacation, into the van of a plumber returni