Last November (2025), I got a pre-publication download (from Netgalley.com) of Cat on a Hot Tin Woof: A Chet & Bernie Mystery by Spencer Quinn, which has just been published on paper (April 2026). I enjoyed this latest (#16 in the series) as much as I liked the first couple of books. I'd kind of lost track of the series after Scents and Sensibility (#8), which I didn't think was as good as earlier ones, and hadn't read any since that one. However, this one still works even without knowing all the details of Detective Bernie Little's life in the intervening books. Chet, the canine member of the Little Detective Agency, doesn't always remember that kind of thing either. But the two of them are still solving cases as well as ever; this one starts with a missing cat and, like most mystery novels, gets a lot more complicated. The story being told from Chet's viewpoint makes this series stand out when a lot of mystery series blend together, and that's what made me come back to it.

Nöthin' But a Good Time by Tom Beaujour; Richard Bienstock Pub Date: 16 Mar 2021 I've read lots and lots of musicians' memoirs and books about rock music. During the years when I was in high school (1987-91) I read every rock/metal magazine I thought was worth reading (so, no Circus or Hit Parader), over and over, because I managed to be both a headbanger and a bookworm. However, Nothin' But A Good Time still managed to teach me a few things about the bands of my era, and keep me enthralled for the weekend it took me to read it. (That I got through it so fast is proof of how difficult it was to tear myself away.) I enjoyed the format (using the words of the people who were interviewed, instead of hearing the authors' voices directly) because it made me feel closer to the musicians and others who were there for all this. (However, it did get confusing at times to remember who each person was if they weren't one of the band members whose names were engraved in my brain 30 years ago.) I particularly like that it doesn't just end in the early 90s and blame the downturn in hair metal completely on grunge bands, but spends some time on what else happened, and a little bit about what figures in the scene did later. It's as much of a happy ending as the facts allow.

Secretary of Labor James Davis conceded in 1927 that even if the U.S. government placed the Army on the Canadian and Mexican borders, “we couldn’t stop them; if we had the Navy on the water-front we couldn’t stop them. Not even a Chinese wall, nine thousand miles in length and built over rivers and deserts and mountains and along the seashores, would seem to permit a permanent solution.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh? Ninety years ago, people in the United States were worried about illegal immigrants and suggesting things like giant walls to keep them out (and already being told how that wouldn’t work). However, the thing that’s changed is that the immigrants in question at that time were Asian, and that almost never gets mentioned in U.S. history classes. Indeed, in all the ones I’ve ever taken, the only Asian people in America to ever be mentioned were Chinese immigrant workers on the Transcontinental Railroad, and that was only a brief couple of sentences.

The source of the above quotation, Erika Lee’s The Making of Asian America: A History begins to remedy that omission. It’s mostly focused on people of Asian ancestry in the United States, but there is also some coverage of Asian immigrants to Canada and Latin America (indeed, Asians came to Latin America almost as soon as Europeans did). It also covers a wide variety of Asians: people who came from China, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and their American descendants. (It did occur to me that large portions of the continent of Asia aren’t mentioned — I suppose the Asian part of Russia and the former Soviet Central Asian countries may not have been the source of much immigration to the Americas, but that’s a little harder to believe of areas as populous as Indonesia and Malaysia. And then there’s the Middle East, which is mostly on the same landmass but somehow not thought of as “Asian” in the U.S. — that would make a longer book on its own.)

Anyway, Lee covers the history of Asians coming to America and how badly they were often treated by those of European ancestry; it’s quite interesting to someone like me, who grew up when (East) Asians were called the “model minority,” to see how people opposed their presence a century earlier, and how it was assumed people of Asian descent couldn’t possibly assimilate into the mainstream cultures of countries of the Americas. And even if you know of the incarceration of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II, it’s most likely a complete surprise to hear that Latin American countries sent their residents and citizens of Japanese ancestry to the United States to go into the same kind of camps. These are the kind of things that shouldn’t be forgotten, on their own account and because the knowledge can really affect how people look at current events, particularly immigration to the U.S. from anywhere, and relations with between different countries.

Recently found on the new books shelf at the main location of the St. Petersburg Public Library: Ann Morgan's The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe, a chronicle of Morgan's time trying to read a written work from every country in the world and blog about it at A Year of Reading The World. (The original British publication title is Reading the World.) This is mostly not, as some people writing reviews at Goodreads expected, a discussion of the individual books she read. (Those seem to be what's on the weblog, for people in search of reviews of world books; myself, I generally prefer when a book by a blogger isn't just a reprint of what I could read online.)

What this book covers is the doing of the project and thoughts on the issues that came up. The idea to "read the world" was inspired by an Australian reader recommending a book in the comments of her previous blog, and Morgan's realization that her bookshelves were "a host of British and North American greats...apart from a dog-eared copy of Madame Bovary and a jumbled assortment of Freuds picked up during a student book-buying binge and barely touched since, there seemed to be nothing at all in translation." (Mine are hardly better, despite an interest in the history of all sorts of places -- almost all I've read seems to have been written by English speakers, mostly US and UK natives.) There's a lot of thought on why it's worthwhile to make the effort to branch out to works from different places, different cultures, different languages, even when it's intimidating to face settings so unfamiliar.

Then came all the pre-reading tasks, such as:

• deciding what even counts as a country, which isn't always simple;
  
• finding works from each of those countries, no matter how small (San Marino, just over 61 square kilometers/23.5 square miles in area, but only the fifth-smallest country according to Infoplease) or brand-new (South Sudan had been independent less than a year when her project started);
  
• and finding them in English (or for Sao Tome and Principe, getting them translated specifically for this project).

These tasks lead into detailed considerations of the publishing industry around the world, the difficulty in getting things written down that originate in oral storytelling culture, and the official censorship of some governments. Once the reading part of the project starts, more things to think about arise: the culture shock of reading things that seem truly "foreign" to the reader's mind, the possible changes made when the translator is added to the author-reader connection, and the influence of technology on making written works available. I enjoyed the discussion of all these subjects, but I can understand why it might not be the right cup of tea for people who prefer just getting on with reading the stories.

The bibliography of the 196 works that Morgan read is included at the end of the book. I was pleased to see a couple I was already familiar with: Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (representing Mexico) and, for Latvia, With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows by Sandra Kalniete, which I talked about in March 2010. I have already put in requests at the library for two more that sounded particularly interesting: An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie from Togo, and In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman Waberi from Djibouti. Obviously these are not extremely obscure, in that they have both been translated into English and are physically available somewhere in the Pinellas County Public Library Cooperative, but I'd never heard of either book or author. But I'm glad to have had them pointed out for me; it's weird how a longtime science fiction reader like me can let slide the works of people from cultures that really exist and may be as different from how I live as anything set thousands of years in the future.

I would be interested to hear more about Morgan's project before this one, A Year of Reading Women, but I can see where there would be a lot less background of the selection process to talk about in a book about that project, so I'll just have to content myself with reading through that site.

I would highly recommend When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning to anyone who cares about books, or about people in military service (and what kind of person are you if neither of those applies to you?). It covers a facet of daily lives of American service people in World War II that I had never heard of, despite having a degree in library science, and I easily imagine my grandfathers, both of whom served in WWII, reading Armed Services Edition books on Pacific islands. You don't often think about how people pass the everyday time away from home in a situation where everything has to be shipped to them (particularly at a time when the most advanced entertainment technology was the radio, and the broadcast with the best reception might be "Tokyo Rose" spewing propaganda). First libraries' "Victory Book Campaign" donated books, and then Armed Services Editions printed especially to be sent out to GIs, gave a lot of Americans (and even other countries' service people, when they were working with Americans) a leisure distraction and chance at relaxation or education, whether in a trench or on a ship or even in a prisoner of war camp. As one sailor said about their value, no matter how beat up, "To heave one in the garbage can is tantamount to striking your grandmother."

That in itself is an important enough subject to know about, and think about for service people now. There are multiple charities and campaigns devoted to getting reading material to US military stationed outside the country, such as:

• Operation Paperback,
  
• Books for Troops Tampa Bay and even
  
• Operation E-Book Drop

However, the Armed Services Editions' millions of copies of 1322 different books also influenced peacetime publishing and reading. They spread the idea of paperbacks, which had been previously been rare in bookstores and more likely to be cheap afterthoughts in a drugstore. They made some books and authors famous; the ones mentioned in particular are F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a commercial failure when it was first published, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. There's an interesting story about the political wrangling before the 1944 Presidential elections where opponents of incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to limit the political discussions that could be part of the ASE books and other material available to the military, and the uproar over censorship that followed. And at the end of the war, there were continued readers who hadn't been before the war, some of whom used the GI Bill subsidies to go to college when they never would have thought of that before the war (and were good enough students to be called "Damned Average Raisers" by their younger classmates). These "books that went to war" ended up influencing the social and economic climate of the United States for decades.

When I first heard that a "reboot" of H. Beam Piper's book Little Fuzzy was coming out, my first thought was "Why?" I first read Piper's Fuzzy stories as a young teenager and have come back to them over and over. Yes, the human society they take place in reflects the early 1960s when Piper was writing -- women are nearly all secretaries and nearly everyone smokes. (You get used to that kind of thing when reading a lot of science fiction classics.) But I think characters such as sunstone miner Jack Holloway, and the beings he discovers on the planet Zarathustra and names "Fuzzies" are timeless. At least one review I read compared Holloway to an old West prospector, and I can see a lot of parallels between human exploitation of other planets in these books and colonial exploitation of places inhabited by people with less technology and different skin colors.

Piper himself wrote a second book (Fuzzy Sapiens, originally published as "The Other Human Race") and a third manuscript lost at the time of his death, which was eventually discovered and published in 1984 as Fuzzies and Other People. (All three are now available in one volume, The Complete Fuzzy.) However, before his manuscript was found, Ace Books had published two other authors' works on the Fuzzies: William Tuning's 1981 Fuzzy Bones and Ardath Mayhar's 1982 Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey. Both of those worked with what had been stated in the first two Piper books but not the third. And then there were two more sequels (which I haven't read yet) by Wolfgang Diehr: 2011's Fuzzy Ergo Sum and 2012's Caveat Fuzzy.

So there were 7 Fuzzy novels, though the timeline sort of divides in two after Fuzzy Sapiens. It seemed really pointless to start from the beginning again, and I didn't think I'd bother to read John Scalzi's 2011 Fuzzy Nation when I first heard of its existence. I hadn't read any of Scalzi's work before, so I didn't originally have an interest in seeing how yet another author would handle the story. This changed a bit after I read bits of Scalzi's blog, specifically entries that some of my Facebook friends linked to in discussions about sexism in science fiction. After that, I felt positively enough about Scalzi that I was willing to try Fuzzy Nation when I happened across it in a library.

It's pretty good. Not as good as Piper's, but I'm aware that I may be taking off mental points for just trying to tell a version of the Fuzzy discovery narrative that isn't Piper's. Still, there were times when I kept the book open against my chest so I could read it while web pages loaded, because I was just that interested in what was happening. I don't like Scalzi's version of Jack Holloway as much as Piper's, but I can see how he's a more complex character in some ways and some readers will prefer that. The basic events are the same; the company exploiting the planet Zara XXIII is still willing to do almost anything to keep the discovery of the Fuzzies from interfering with their profits, but I think the Fuzzies actually come off as more intelligent in Scalzi's version, at least if you're only comparing with Little Fuzzy and not the parts of the sequels that delve into the Fuzzies' points of view. Piper spends more time developing other people besides Holloway, and I prefer that kind of detail, but Scalzi's version is equally readable. I am reasonably pleased to be proved wrong in my original opinion that there was no benefit to this reboot; it was both entertaining and brought me back to the previous Fuzzy stories, a good thing itself.

Also, do you knit toy/stuffed animal type things? If so, can you send me a link to the design? I'm interested in getting some knit monsters for my daughter.

corvus

So, after some back-and-forth with my friend about what kind of monster exactly, I started searching online for patterns with pictures of the finished work available. Of the possibilities I submitted, Corvus picked one for Dracula that had been in The Knitter magazine (issue 50) but was more widely available in the 2013 book Knit Your Own Zombie: Over 1,000 Combinations to Rip 'n' Reassemble for Horrifying Results by Fiona Goble.

Goble has written numerous books of patterns for stuffed animals and people, such as Knitivity: Create Your Own Christmas Scene, Knit Your Own Dolls: Over 35 patterns for dolls and their outfits, accessories, and pets, and even Knit Your Own Royal Wedding. I think this book will appeal to a somewhat different audience. What's really fun is that all the figures are knitted in pieces, and you can actually attach arms, legs, heads, etc. with Velcro and snaps instead of permanent sewing. Therefore, you can tear your zombies apart for stress relief, voodoo doll usage, or just to make new combinations. The patterns included are:

• Classic Zombie -- dangling eye made from a bead, hole in his torso where little red guts can be visible or spill out, a little rat to nibble on him
  
• Frankenstein's Monster -- hole in his neck for a nut and bolt
  
• Zombie Cop -- blood-spattered uniform, one boot, truncheon made from a knit-covered drinking straw, even little handcuffs that can be made from two toggle rings and a short chain.
  
• Zombie Fatale -- bandaged hand, chest pocket for removable heart, dress, hat, even little beads for painted toenails
  
• Dracula -- I think the little white beads for fangs really make this pattern, but there's also the cape and the gentleman's cane
  
• Zombie Chef -- leg with broken bone sticking out, little knit-over-cardboard cleaver and knife
  
• Zombie Grave Digger -- more like a skeleton stitched on a dark gray body, with a rope and shovel accessories
  
• Zombie Rock Star -- long hair, hole in the top of the head with removable brain
  
• The Mummy -- technically this one is just a very long "bandage" to wrap around any of the figures to make it a mummy
  
• There are also "zombie mashups" where elements from the different characters are combined to make additional characters, such as Village Idiot, Mother of the Bride, Biker Chick Zombie, and Yoga Zombie.
  

If you have done any knitting, these aren't very difficult. The work is small (US size 2 or 3 needles) but not complicated most of the time. (The bit I found hardest was the ragged edge of one of Dracula's pant legs -- knitting something that looks like it's going to come apart but won't involved a sequence of stitches that took me a couple of tries.) I found the instructions pretty easy to follow, and a lot of the supplies can be found in many crafters' leftover supply stashes. I had to buy the pale green yarn for the skin, but clothes and accessories were all done with yarn and beads I already had.

The finished Dracula dissatisfied me slightly because the face didn't look much like that on the photo in the book, but it's recognizably a vampire. What's most important, Corvus and his daughter both like it. While I have the book from the library, I'm making a Frankenstein's monster as well.

My grandfather died a month and a half ago, at the end of May 2013, at the age of 95. He was a World War II veteran. It's incredible to think about all the things that happened during the span of his lifetime.

And then I read The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War by Richard Rubin. Over the decade or so before this book was published in 2013, Rubin managed to find remaining members of my grandfather's parents' generation, all over 100 years old, and interview them about their service in the military and government during World War I. For Americans, the First World War, at the time "The War to End All Wars," is usually overshadowed by the Second World War, since the U.S. was in WWII a longer time and had American territory directly attacked. The Last of the Doughboys does a very good job of bringing focus back to the earlier world war, fought during the earliest years of modern technology (for example, one of the interviewees recalls delivering belts of ammunition to machine gun emplacements -- using a mule-drawn wagon). It's amazing to get personal perspectives on everything from trench warfare to race relations a century ago from people who were there, and were old enough in 1917-8 to fight or work but still lived into the age of cellphones and the Internet. (Rubin notes that he would never have been able to track down as many living veterans as he did without Internet resources, particularly lists from a French government program started in the 1990s to honor Americans who served on French soil).

There's also a fair amount of non-interview historical material which is also very interesting, particularly the sampling of sheet music art and lyrics for patriotic songs of World War I (and some less patriotic ones from immediately before the war). The book also covers stories such as those of the "Yeomanettes," women who were able to serve as members of the Navy (though doing work on land) during the war, and the treatment of war veterans after the end of the war and particularly during the Depression. In short, it covers a lot of ground, but this does a good job of introducing current readers to times that should not be forgotten, and providing a tribute to the individual people who fought or worked behind the lines in this important juncture of history.

Charles Fishman's The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water is a book full of things that will make you say "Wow . . ." or "My God!" or whatever phrase you use as shorthand for "I can't believe that's the way things really are!" Unless you work in water systems, you will probably find out a lot of surprising things -- maybe even if you do. Because here in the USA, and I expect in most developed areas, we just don't think about our water supply. You turn on the water and out it comes. (When Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne knocked out our electricity here in Tampa for two days each, the water was still fine. Despite the warnings when a hurricane is expected that people should stock up on bottled water, it has rarely been needed.)

The Big Thirst shows how quickly, as history goes, we've stopped thinking about water, and how many problems that lack of thought can cause. In 2008, droughts caused Barcelona, Spain, sufficient water shortage that the city arranged to have supertankers full of water delivered to the city regularly. In the same year, the much smaller Orme, Tennessee, had to have fire trucks deliver its drinking (and bathing, and washing) water. Neither city is located in a desert, either. Las Vegas, Nevada, is in a desert, but 60,000 people move there annually anyway, never thinking about where the water they'll use comes from. Much of Australia has similar problems, particularly given the recent years of drought that have nearly shut down the Murray-Darling river system, which both southeastern cities and farmers rely on. On the other hand, most of India's largest cities only manage to pump water through their municipal systems for at most a couple of hours each day. Fishman talks to both the people in charge of some of these urban water systems throughout the world, and those who have to figure out workarounds or cope with not getting the water they need. It's a real wake-up call for people who have always had water available.

I've read some interesting and thought-provoking books recently -- thanks to the new stuff shelves at the St. Petersburg (Florida) main library.

The first is Judith Stacey's Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China. I am not a marriage traditionalist: I think any consenting adults who want to marry should be able to, but on the other hand people who aren't interested in getting married (like myself and my boyfriend of 14 years) are fine without a ceremony or legal registration. However, I've only lived in this one culture, that of the modern U.S.A., and in an accepted-by-all-but-the-sternest-Biblethumpers heterosexual relationship. Stacey's book examines relationships and child-raising in different cultures -- first, that of West Hollywood gay men, but then some even less familiar to most Americans:

• South Africa, at the time of writing the only country in the world where same-sex and polygamous marriages are both legal, though with some limits on the latter, and
  
• the Mosuo, a minority people of southwestern China who may be the only human group not to include couples living together in marriage to raise children in their traditional way of life.

The book's exploration of these ways of life managed to bring new information and arguments to the sometimes repetitive discussion of what marriage and family can be and should be. It's really fascinating to read about how the non-heterosexual-monogamous minority groups interact with the different majorities around them; I was rather amused South African marriage law's attempt to accommodate the original African "customary" plural marriage while still encouraging European-style monogamous marriages, leading to the result (if I understand it correctly) that only a black man can legally have multiple wives, but not a white man or a woman of any race, despite the racial and gender equality legally prescribed in the South African constitution. (Future legal challenges may get interesting.) And then there's the Mosuo, who used to just leave everyone living with their family of origin, so children are raised by their mother, with her own mother, siblings, and extended maternal family, whether or not the father is continuing to see the mother or not (even if he is, he still lives with his mother and family of origin). To some degree this lifestyle has survived intense government pressure in earlier years of China's Communist government, and even become sort of a tourist attraction now under less-repressive regimes. These are cultures that might have something relevant to say in the modern U.S. marriage debates, as well as just being interesting examples of ways people live.

The next is On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (And Ourselves) by Jonnie Hughes. The author is a British man who frames his discussion of how ideas change and grow within his trip with his brother across the U.S. and Canada looking at such things as changes in barn architecture among settlers and differences in structure of Native American tepees between tribes. Parallels between how Darwinian evolution shaped the plants and animals of the Great Plains and how the needs of Westerners shaped the origin of the cowboy hat, or any of the many other examples of cultural changes Hughes cites, become clear when you look at them from this angle (and the author being British means he has a fresh view of some cultural things that North Americans are so used to as to never consider). Whether or not you can believe in the idea of a "meme" as an entity akin to a "gene" that can exist independently of the organisms that contain it, this book is a fascinating look at how things change.

The final book I felt strongly enough about to blog is Taras Grescoe's Straphanger: Surviving the End of the Automobile Age (originally published with a different subtitle). I am an American rarity: someone without a driver's license. Outside of a few northeastern cities, it's commonly accepted that it is "impossible" to get by without a car in the U.S., and zoning, building, planning and transit work on this assumption. Of course, this screws over the too-young; too-old; people who are blind or otherwise physically unable to drive; and those who are too poor to afford car, insurance, and gas (plus weirdos like me who just never seemed to be able to learn for no obvious reason). Public transportation exists but rarely makes anything remotely convenient; even here in St. Petersburg, some areas of which pre-date cars, my "local" service center for the county Worknet program is an hour and 3 minutes away or an hour and 5 minutes by different bus routes. (Google maps says driving to the same destination would be 16 minutes, or 21 in current traffic conditions.) And my experience is that St. Petersburg has better transit than say, Tampa, which is a lot more spread out.

This is partly due to the cultural status attached to private car ownership. The book's introduction starts by quoting Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of twenty-six, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure." (Bitch.) These attitudes are preventing a lot of places from making it possible to reduce car pollution, urban sprawl that takes animal habitat, and even obesity rates by cutting down on individual car use.

So I like reading about places where non-private-automobile transportation (not necessarily "public transit") works, and Grescoe catalogs a wide variety of them, as well as a few where it's not so successful. Subways, trains, buses, and bicycle commuting work for people all around the world, allowing them to avoid spending on gas and parking even if they do have their own cars, spewing fewer pollutants per passenger-mile than individual cars, and in some cases even letting them get things accomplished during their commute because they don't have to spend that time controlling the car. But there's no one-size-fits-all plan for every area, and some of the functioning systems Grescoe visits were arrived at after trial and error led to urban blight and gridlock. So Straphanger is a very interesting historical-and-current look at how people get where they need to go, and something people should read in places (such as here in Florida) where transit systems like light rail are being suggested as possibilities.

I haven't added to this blog in a long time, but some books have stuck in my head for months after I read them, which seems like true proof that they are worth blogging.

I can only remember three books in my life that made me cry. They are William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Albert Camus' Les Justes, and Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. The last is the only one in twenty years to make me cry, but the story of the life and death of Merle the dog and the depth of his relationship with Ted, hit my emotions in the same way as the life and death and love of Romeo and Juliet (or Yanek and Dora) had done in high school. I've read a lot of memoirs focusing on people-animal relationships, but this one truly stands out. Rather than just reminding me of the best relationships I've had with animals, the book made me feel like I was missing something by never having known this particular dog, and it also made it clear that dogs (at least some of them) have a lot of potential that their human owners don't allow them to live up to -- even though with the best of intentions to protect the dog's own safety. Ted had the good fortune to live in a relatively rural area, where adding a dog door could allow Merle to truly make his own decisions about where and when to be in any one place, what people to go visit, etc., making Merle "a responsible individual rather than a submissive pet," in the words of the Publishers Weekly review. While many dog owners would find this an uncomfortable situation because they have to rely on the dog's desire to come home and ability to avoid accidents, Ted seems to have been able to trust that Merle, who chose Ted as the one he wanted to stay with rather than the other way around, would continue loving him and always want to be with him, despite Merle's deep friendships with nearly every other person in the area.

The book also contains references to a lot of scientific work about dogs and other animals which back up the ideas about their abilities being greater than humans often realize, and at least one Amazon reviewer considered this to be a liability, but I think it's woven into the story very well; it did not seem at all intrusive, even though the real-life events made much a deeper impression on me. Merle was lucky to come across Ted Kerasote (and made a good choice in going home with him), but the rest of us are lucky that the person Merle chose to make his life with was also someone talented enough to tell the story so movingly.

On a very different note is Sandra Kalniete's With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows (translated by Margita Gailitis) -- this book didn't make me cry but it kept me up at night. Kalniete's family were from Latvia, which was at the time of her birth a part of the Soviet Union. However, she was born in Siberia because both her parents' families had been moved there by the Soviet government; the title comes from the lack of supplies available to the deportees in the small towns where they were essentially dumped, far from home with no preparation for the very different conditions they had to live under. I read Esther Hautzig's The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia years ago in elementary school, which tells the story of a similar Soviet deportation (Hautzig's family were Polish Jews sent to Siberia), so the fact that the Soviet Union did this was not new to me. But Kalniete's book seems more aimed at adults, first because she has to rely on her older family's stories of how things happened before her birth and when she was just a baby, and also because we know a little more, just from the book jacket, of Kalniete's adult achievements. Hautzig's story, on the other hand, is often given to younger readers because it's her own memory of her life from ages ten to fourteen, without mention of her adult self. But both books had the same effect on me that one of the Amazon reviewers says that Endless Steppe had on her: pondering how I would cope in that situation, what would I have thrown in a suitcase on short notice, could I have even gotten through what these people survived? These are the sort of questions a lot of people living comfortably in developed nations ought to think about at least once in a while.

The blog has not been forgotten. And these books are about people who should not be forgotten.

Dana Jennings' Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music hit me the most personally. Jennings talks about the role of classic country music in his life and that of his family growing up in rural New Hampshire -- not the location one most associates with country music, but his stories resonate with my North Carolina family. I remember a story about how my great-grandfather was apparently needy enough to trade his gun for liquor. That's the kind of people Jennings talks about, and he was there for some of it in his family; I just heard the parts people were willing to pass down (my great-grandfather and his daughter were both dead before my grandfather told me about his father-in-law's drinking). But these stories make the country records on my grandparents' turntable make sense to me in a way they didn't when I was a 12-year-old listening to Culture Club and Duran Duran. Not that growing up didn't make me realize how deeply the Osbourne Brothers' "Rocky Top" and such bluegrass and country were embedded in my brain from childhood hearings, but this book made me a lot more aware of the emotional purpose these songs served for their contemporary listeners. It's the same emotional purpose Suicidal Tendencies' "How Will I Laugh Tomorrow (When I Can't Even Smile Today)?" served for me when I was a depressed 17-year-old -- an age at which these rural girls were often coping with marriage and/or motherhood instead of my own problem of not being able to pay for college. And so the book made me feel a lot closer to people I only knew as elderly ladies bent over a quilting frame, or as names in genealogy records, and closer even to many, many Americans who didn't get much American dream for themselves in the past and even now.

But at least I always knew something about rural Americans. Despite spending a stretch a couple of years ago reading all kinds of books on Russian history, most of the place names I could name in the Asian part of Russia were learned off a Risk board. The conquest of Siberia, one-twelfth of the world's landmass, by Russians from the European side of the Ural Mountains was lucky to get a couple of paragraphs in those tomes. A partial fix for that is in The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia by Anna Reid, who journeyed across Siberia to see the homelands of some of the native peoples and survey what had happened to them under tsarist, Soviet, and now Russian Federation government. A single 200-page book can barely scratch the surface of the subject -- Reid points out that she only visited and interviewed members of nine of the thirty-one "Small-Numbered Peoples" of Siberia, as the Soviets labeled these ethnic groups. (As with Native American Indians, a few centuries of fighting with Europeans and getting exposed to their new diseases took quite a toll on the size of the original population.) Still, the book is a fascinating introduction to groups such as the Buryat, Tuvans, Sakha, and Chukchi, through both Reid's visits and the records from the Russians and other groups who showed up to live on their land. The collapse of Communism seems to have strengthened some of their ethnic identities, and it will be interesting to see if any of these groups show up as the next Chechens fighting for independence from Russia, or if they just quietly keep on trying to survive, with or without the culture and traditions that Reid searched for.

Perhaps the atrocities of Nazi Germany are in less danger of being forgotten or ignored than those perpetrated on indigenous peoples who had less chance to tell their stories. But that's no reason not to pay attention to the life stories of people who lived through World War II, and author Mark Kurzem's father Alex (anglicized from "Uldis Kurzemnieks") has had a fascinating, surprising, and sometimes horrifying life, chronicled in The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood. As far as his wife and children in Australia knew for most of their lives, a five- or six-year-old Alex was found wandering alone in the forests near the Russian border in 1942 by Latvian soldiers. The trauma of surviving alone for an unknown time (the shortest possible time guessed in the book is several weeks; it might have been longer) had made the little boy forget his name and origin. The soldiers named the boy, kept him with them for a while as a sort of mascot, and eventually their commander arranged a foster home for him in Latvia's capital, Riga, with a family who kept Alex through the war, their time in a displaced-persons camp, and their emigration to Australia. It was not until more than sixty years after the war that Alex revealed to his son Mark that he remembers, not his name, but the circumstances that left him alone in the forest -- that he remembers seeing his mother and younger siblings killed by soldiers. Latvia was occupied by the Nazis at the time and its soldiers used as part of German forces invading Russia; it probably wasn't hard to get Latvians to help with that invasion, since the USSR had invaded Latvia barely a year before the Germans did. The Latvian soldier who saved Alex from being executed with other "partisans" when he was found in the forest undressed him to find that he was circumcised and therefore most likely Jewish, but nonetheless kept the boy with his group of soldiers (with a warning not to let anyone see him undressed). The things Alex saw while he accompanied the soldiers haunted him, and even long after the war and on the other side of the planet, pressure continued on Alex to keep quiet about anything he had seen as a child that might incriminate the people who had cared for him in war crimes. But eventually the Kurzems researched and traveled to confirm as much as possible of Alex's memories and find his birth identity, despite the pain involved in revisiting that kind of past. The mix of historical and psychological mystery made this a book that I could not put down and read all in a single morning; I can't agree with reviews on Amazon who found the beginning to be too slow.

A recent book to be surprised that this agnostic was interested in: Jim and Casper Go to Church: Frank Conversation about Faith, Churches, and Well-Meaning Christians by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper. I think all Christians who have the urge to preach to non-Christians should read this book. Jim Henderson is a Christian, former church pastor and co-founder of Off the Map, which "helps Christians learn to communicate better with non-Christians, or as some of my more outspoken 'lost' friends put it, 'Off the Map helps Christians learn how not to be jerks.'" (I've got to support any organization with that aim!) Matt Casper, on the other hand, is a very well-spoken, outspoken atheist. And for this book, the two of them attended various churches and discussed their views of what went on in their services.

"Casper the Friendly Atheist" says a whole lot of the things I always want to say when Christians try to preach to me, and Jim asks for his reasons, leading to some really interesting discussions. Jim is a somewhat unusual Christian in my view (which perhaps is why he's willing to take a nonbeliever to church without trying to convert him) -- he makes a distinction between simply having faith in Christ and actually performing behavior that Christ would approve of, and he seems to believe that faith is not enough, that Christians need to do good on this earth and not just by trying to forcibly save people's souls.

The two visit Saddlebrook, the California "mega-church" of Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life; the "Dream Center" and "Mosaic" in urban Los Angeles; another mega-church outside Chicago (Willow Creek); a medium-sized Presbyterian church and the more urban Lawndale in the Chicago area; a sort of casual church in the home of a friend of Casper's; offbeat "emerging churches" in the U.S. Northwest; Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church and T.D. Jakes' "Potter's House" in Texas. This is, as Jim points out, more types of churches than most Christians ever attend. So followers of Jesus might be interested in Jim's feelings on their own in this sampling of how Jesus is worshiped across the United States. (For that matter, non-Christians could find that interesting from an anthropological point of view as well; I certainly did.) But the person who wants to spread the "good news" of Christ -- well, honestly I think that person should let us non-believers alone to run our own lives. But for those who really don't feel they can give up on trying to "save" us supposedly "lost," considering the issues that come up between Jim and Casper will definitely reduce the likelihood of driving away the very people you want to attract. And that goes for attracting believers searching for a church that feels right to them, too.

I've been busy packing, moving, and going on summer family visits for the past few months and have let the blogging lapse, but here I am again, finally. There are lots of things I want to mention.

I pick up pretty much anything written by the incomparably funny Daniel Pinkwater, and have done so for more than 20 years, even though I'm rather older than the intended audience for most of his books. His latest, The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization is no exception; I bought it as soon as I saw it. It's set in the late 1940s, which is mostly obvious from the choice of a train for the rich Wentworthstein family's move across the U.S. and the type of movies discussed, but it's just as wacky as other Pinkwater works, with an Indian shaman named Melvin, a ghost who enjoys sniffing people's meals, and a brief appearance of the fat men from outer space who show up in multiple Pinkwater novels. Schoolboy Ned has been given custody of a sacred stone turtle and is being chased across the country by an incompetent villain who wants to take it; luckily he meets new people who are on his side and their adventures are fun and ridiculous without seeming particularly unreal, like all good Pinkwater.

It was a much greater surprise to find so much fun in a history of 20th-century architecture, Tom Wolfe's 1981 From Bauhaus to Our House. Not only the subject, but the author didn't sound like easy reading to me; I had great difficulty managing to get through Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, even though normally reading about 1960s counterculture greatly interests me. But From Bauhaus to Our House was quite short, so I was willing to give it a try, and it turned to be a hilarious look at the people behind "glass box" architecture. Its point of view is obvious from the first sentence: "O BEAUTIFUL, FOR SPACIOUS SKIES, FOR AMBER WAVES OF grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?" I suppose a lot has taken place in architecture in the 26 years since the book came out, so this is no longer completely current, but that doesn't make it any less applicable -- the buildings from the decades described are still looming over us. Wolfe manages to make reading about concrete cubes way more pleasant than looking at them.

Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World by Liza Mundy was very interesting in a completely different way. It doesn't just go through the technology of in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, donor eggs and sperm, and other relatively new ways of making it possible for people to become parents; it goes through the personal issues involved. How can a baptism ceremony acknowledge an egg donor? Should medical personnel be able to choose who they will help with fertility technology (single parents, same-sex couples, people they feel are too old?) Or how much help to give -- balancing the risk of in-vitro fertilized embryos not implanting in the uterus with the risk of too many implanting, which makes it harder for any of them to survive to an age to safely leave the uterus? I never thought of most of these risks, but I'm not planning to have children. Since I seem to be in the minority here, these are definitely issues that should be widely thought over, and Mundy makes it interesting to consider.

Stuff I've only Read BzzAgent Excerpts of:

• When I read an excerpt from Jen Lancaster's Bitter is the New Black I found her dot.com-era rich self extremely annoying. However, the excerpt of her new book of personal essays, Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl's Guide to Why it Often Sucks in the City, or Who are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me? wasn't nearly so bad, even with the memory of not having liked the author as I saw her in her previous work. Anyone who is as annoyed by Rachel Ray as I am can't be all bad! Lancaster's living a life I have a lot more experience with -- riding the public bus, putting off medical checkups (though it's the dentist, not the gynecologist, who scares me) and so I find her snarky remarks much funnier now.
• The beginning of Leslie Kagen's Whistling in the Dark is mostly concerned with setting up the situation of ten-year-old Sally: Milwaukee in 1959, jerk of a stepfather, mother entering the hospital for surgery, Sally and younger sister Troo are largely reliant on each other -- and a neighbor girl has recently been found dead. That summary is far too blunt to convey Sally's viewpoint, a realistic 10-year-old who doesn't always understand what adults are telling her and gets just as much of her information from children's gossip. I'm really curious to find out what happens.
• The excerpt from Patrick Rothfuss' fantasy novel The Name of the Wind I read was actually chapters 13-17, but it's mostly a flashback to when the character Kvothe was twelve and so is a sort of beginning. There's only a few sentences in the setup of the flashback to indicate why we should be interested in Kvothe, although obviously the two characters he's telling the story to are very interested in his past. However, the look at Kvothe's growing up and the tragedy that happened when he was twelve make him seem a sympathetic character, and the rest of his life as told in the whole book and the two upcoming ones could certainly be worth reading.

Another set of excerpts from BzzAgent:

• J.D. Robb's Innocent in Death. Apparently this is the twenty-somethingth book in a series of crime mysteries set several decades in our future. I'd never heard of this series before but I might have to read more than just this excerpt; I like the science-fictiony aspect of the setting as well as the mystery. This future isn't overpoweringly different from the current world; Detective Eve Dallas is here investigating the sudden death of a history teacher in a private school who turns out to have been poisoned, and little differences such as "a tube of Pepsi" are the greatest reminders in the three chapters I read that this isn't modern-day New York. But writing a consistent slightly-different setting takes as much or more skill than creating a place where nothing at all is the same, and like all long-running series, the characters are what draw the reader in. The detective, her husband, the ex-girlfriend of his who turns up when they're out to dinner -- they incite as much curiosity as the murder investigation and I want to see how it all turns out.
• Steven White's Kill Me didn't really grab me at all from the excerpt. In what I read, we see an unnamed man come to see Dr. Alan Gregory, a psychologist who is apparently a regular in White's books -- but nearly everything is told from the point of view of his "anonymous rich white guy" patient, who likes skiing unbroken slopes (even after getting caught in an avalanche) and driving fast cars and has a friend become a vegetable in a diving accident. It wasn't enough to give me any clue about what was going on. The Amazon reviews filled me in that the guy will be creeped out enough by his friend's condition and his brother's death from Lou Gehrig's disease that he will hire a group called the Death Angels to kill him if his own health and quality of life ever goes that far downhill. And he then he finds out he has both a possibly fatal health condition and some new reasons to want to stay alive. I suppose I can see where that could make an interesting thriller, but the supposedly-exciting scenes of the avalanche and avoiding car accidents and so forth in the excerpt didn't thrill me.
• J.R. Ward's Lover Revealed didn't grab me either. Partly this is because it's book 4 in a series, and it doesn't seem like a series that one can pick up in the middle. I couldn't keep track of most of the characters, other than the protagonist, Butch O'Neal, apparently a human in the weird situation of working with vampires, and his ex, Marissa, herself a vampire and an unmated outcast in her own society. Everyone else swirled together; this might not have been the case if I had read their stories from the start.
• George Saunders' In Persuasion Nation is a collection of short stories, so what I read was two stories, both of which I enjoyed, just as I enjoyed Saunders' The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil before. All of Saunders' work that I've read is absurdist and satirical and wickedly funny, whether it's a story about a device that makes babies seems to talk ("I CAN SPEAK(TM)," in this collection) or a country so small that only one of its citizens can actually fit into it at a time (Reign). Lots of pointed fun.

There isn't really just one version of the Robin Hood story. The one I'm most familiar with is Howard Pyle's The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from 1883. In retrospect, it seems a little self-consciously archaic, with its thees and thous (but at least they're used correctly, unlike most people trying to fake archaic English, while still being easily readable to modern people, unline actual English of the period). However, having grown up with one version of the story can make it very difficult to accept a different variant. While reading Jennifer Roberson's Lady of the Forest, I kept having "But that's not how it's supposed to be!" moments. The major one is the origin of Robin himself. Pyle has Robin as an ordinary yeoman who's particularly good at archery and becomes an outlaw when he's goaded into shooting some deer which turn out to be the King's and thus off-limits to all others. Roberson takes the tack familiar to viewers of the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, where Robin was born a nobleman and comes back to England after fighting in the Crusades to find that England is a harsh and unfair place, so he takes the side of the ordinary people, even if it means breaking the law to do so. I don't know if I prefer the version where Robin is of ordinary birth because it's most familiar to me, or because it doesn't seem to me that it should take a nobleman rebelling to lead a band of outlaws -- the idea of the yeomen being able to stand up for themselves appeals to me more. I guess what appeals to others is the self-sacrifice of a nobleman in abandoning his birth status and all the opportunity that might come with it -- more in Roberson's version, where Robin's father is alive and the family castle is intact, then in the Prince of Thieves version where the father has died and the castle is in ruins when Robin comes home from the Middle East. But stealing and giving the loot to those who truly needs it is self-sacrifice enough for one character, I'd say.

Other characters in Roberson's version differ from the way I expected them to be enough that it irritated me -- it just seemed wrong for Guy of Gisbourne to be an insecure knight in love with Marian, rather than the cold-blooded hired killer sent after Robin Hood, or for Friar Tuck to be an idealistic young monk who can't even ride a horse instead of an independent friar who carries a sword and threatens to use it on Robin at their first meeting. And I'm not sure whether to trust Roberson or Pyle on one issue -- Pyle specifically has Friar Tuck perform a marriage, while Roberson just as specifically has Friar Tuck state that as a friar rather than a priest he doesn't have the authority to perform a marriage. (I'd be more inclined to trust Roberson, who seems to have done so much historical research, if it weren't that her book has an abbot and an educated woman talk about "adultery" when the subject is actually "fornication.") In a way, though, this difference says a lot about the difference between the the two approaches to the stories -- Pyle focuses on the simple lives of people in the forest and Roberson deals with the never-ending manipulation of nobles and gentry to get themselves status, money, power, or they woman they want to marry.

And a woman is the focus of the novel, and its sequel Lady of Sherwood, as the titles indicate. Marian doesn't even appear in the earliest Robin Hood ballads -- she is a late addition, but a story without romantic love is unpopular these last few hundred years. Here, Marian is the only surviving child of a widowed knight who has died on Crusade, which makes Marian a ward of the King of England. She is a grown woman without control over her future; the only other major female in the first book, the Sheriff of Nottingham's daughter Eleanor, is a grown woman too, but with no more control because her father has the power to manage Eleanor's future as he wants to. As a woman, I became frustrated on these characters' behalf to see the men around them treat them like chess pieces. Robin is the exception, but Robin's father, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Prince John and Sir Guy of Gisbourne all have other plans. Again, this is more of a reflection of nobles' lives. Ordinary people -- the Saxons who were there before the Norman Conquest killed of many of the Saxon leaders -- didn't come across Normans under normal circumstances. When they did, the results were often unpleasant: pressure to pay higher taxes, or worse. (Perhaps this is why Roberson is careful to establish Robin and Marian both as of Saxon ancestry -- though being a Saxon doesn't make Robin's father any more pleasant or less manipulative.) Roberson's books spend some time on the concerns of others' lives, but they are instances like Will Scarlet, who here became an outlaw for murdering the Norman soldiers who raped and killed his wife. Pyle's version shows a few of the more pleasant sides of life outside the castles -- I expect both approaches have some truth to them. I found Lady of the Forest and Lady of Sherwood well-written and interesting, and they did make me think about the older versions too, but I doubt they can replace the stories I grew up on completely in my affections.

Another set of excerpts from Penguin and BzzAgent.

• The first excerpt, from Unwound by Jonathan Baine (who turns out to be filmmaker Gorman Bechard), was a bit difficult to look at as part of a novel for me; it seemed nearly complete in itself. So I can't quite vouch for whether the book is a twisty-turny thriller later on, though the Amazon reviews seem to imply that it is; what I read is the semi-normal setup that has to exist before shocking turns of events can shock anyone. The setup is that author Peter Richardson has flown to another city to see the premiere of a play based on his popular book "Angel," the story of a teenage prostitute, and meets a girl named Dina who seems to have taken on the persona of Angel and everything about her is created from his own fevered dreams, so of course he is attracted to her to the extent of cheating on his wife. It sounds like it could turn into "Fatal Attraction," but one Amazon reviewer says it's "not Fatal Attraction at all. Not even the same genre." I don't know if I am curious enough to see how it comes out.
• The next excerpt is from Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty, the most recent in his Dresden Files series. Weirdly enough, these stories of Harry Dresden keep getting compared to Harry Potter (BzzAgent's blurb for Proven Guilty starts off "If you loved Harry Potter, but wish he had a little more edge and a few years on him, this is your kind of book.") Yes, Dresden and Potter are both good guys who can do magic in a modern world where some magic is evil. But I've read some of the earlier books in the Dresden series -- they have more in common with hard-bitten detective stories than the teenagers-in-a-boarding-school-fight-evil (though still lots of fun) Potter novels. The Sci-Fi Network's Dresden Files show is probably most like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer's spin-off Angel would probably not make anyone think of the Harry Potter movies either. But this doesn't mean the Dresden books aren't good.

  Proven Guilty is book eight in a series, so it might not be the best place to start, but some backstory is given as to the war going on between the White Council of good wizards and the Red Court of blood-drinking vampires (no, that isn't redundant; this universe also has life-force-sucking vampires). Harry Dresden is a wizard and a consultant for people who need a sort of detective in magical matters, and he hasn't always been on the White Council's good side, to say the least, but as of the time this book starts he's their Senior Warden for the Chicago area and int the excerpted five chapters, has been charged with looking into some black magic going on there. And he's been asked to talk to the leaders of the Faeries and see what their positions in the war are. And someone's tried to run his car off the road. So there's a lot on his plate -- and that's without his half-brother, the life-force-sucking wizard, and mental visits the dark angel trapped in a coin buried under his basement. There's guaranteed to be a lot happening in the rest of this book, and I expect I'll read it -- but I think I'll borrow my stepmother's copies of the earlier books I haven't gotten to yet before I do.

• The last book excerpted was Generation Debt: How Our Future Was Sold Out for Student Loans, Bad Jobs, No Benefits, and Tax Cuts for Rich Geezers--And How to Fight Back by Anya Kamenetz. I myself have generally lived within my means even though I didn't earn much, but I can see how a medical or other emergency would screw up my finances completely and I don't like the picture. The excerpts were the chapters on marriage/family choices and worker organizations, which I found very interesting as sociology but not completely applicable to my life; I don't know how the rest of the book would strike me. It is written in a very readable style, though, unlike what one might think of books dealing with economic and political subject matter, and whether or not you agree with the suggestions for solutions, definitely makes the reader think.

And finally, a book I chose myself and have read all of: The Golden Key by Melanie Rawn, Jennifer Roberson, and Kate Elliott, who are all fantasy authors in their own right but who I've never read anything by. Their work together, however, was seamless; a fascinating novel set in a sort of alternate Italy where some Renaissance-equivalent art masters can work magic with their paintings, and since paintings are how contracts and treaties are recorded, they have a lot of opportunity to do so. The book covers centuries of history of the city-state of Tira Virte, its ruling dukes and their official painters, and the women they love, since both ruling and professional painting are limited to men, and the twists and turns of the plot were unexpected but completely believable. The characters are also believable and well-drawn, and I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to people who don't like "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy, as this is something very different.

This Christmas, one gift from my dad was the science fiction novel Variable Star. The names on the cover are Robert Heinlein and Spider Robinson, but the circumstances of authorship are a little unusual, since "Grand Master" science fiction writer Heinlein died more than 15 years ago. The outline and notes for this novel were found in Heinlein's papers after the death of Heinlein's wife Virginia, and Spider Robinson, a well-known sf writer who was once called "the next Robert Heinlein" in a review that has probably been quoted on every one of his book jackets, actually wrote the book. My father, a dedicated Heinlein fan since childhood with no special preference for Robinson, said he found the book depressing -- not because of the events in the book (though some of them admittedly are depressing) but because it wasn't Heinlein. And it isn't Heinlein, though there are references and turns of phrase that will certainly recall his work. (The plot, however, is definitely 1950s/early '60s Heinlein, as well as many of the characters -- I can see echoes of Citizen of the Galaxy, Time for the Stars, Space Cadet, and even the much later Friday in it.) I enjoy both authors quite a lot, and I enjoyed this book. But if both men get credit for this novel, then John W. Campbell's name should be on the cover of Heinlein's Sixth Column, as the magazine editor Campbell gave Heinlein the plot outline for that book (which first appeared as a serial in Campbell's magazine, Astounding Science Fiction) with a request to write it. If Heinlein gets solo credit for that one, then Robinson should get sole credit for this book -- but Heinlein did not keep Campbell's contribution a secret and Robinson would not want to hide Heinlein's. However, the reader who looks at this as a Robinson work will probably enjoy it more.

I read a lot of history and a fair amount of medical books, so the combination of the two is something I particularly seek out. So I was particularly pleased to see one in the latest set of book excerpts I was provided by BzzAgent, Molly Caldwell Crosby's The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History. I knew a little bit about yellow fever from the section on it and Walter Reed's proof that it was carried by mosquitoes in Microbe Hunters, but Crosby's book gives a lot more historical surroundings for the disease. She opens in 1878, an extremely virulent year in the Americas for a disease that affected those of European ancestry far more than those whose African ancestors had developed the ability to deal with the virus, and affected those moving into the South more than those who had grown up there. The description of the great Mardi Gras celebration inaugurated that year gives a deeper understanding of what it was like for the people living in that time and place and the doctors faced with the epidemic. And the situations described once the epidemic hit Memphis resemble something from a horror novel. It is, however, a story I want to finish, rather than just reading the excerpt.

Bill Lamond's Born to Lead: Unlock The Magnificence In Yourself And Others was the next excerpt in the set, and it was definitely not my cup of tea. It is mostly aimed at women, to help them lead and accomplish things (the introduction says "You have a new assignment -- to save the world by ensuring that it goes on for your children and grandchildren.") through "a new style of leadership" that "combines the strengths of the feminine and masculine models to become whole." I've got no problem with any of those concepts, and I am a dedicated believer in women's equality. I just wouldn't normally choose to read a book about learning to lead and act -- I see myself as a member of the "geek" subset of humanity, where male and female stereotypes have less hold on our behavior and the difficulty in dealing with society is more likely to be learning to speak non-geek than crossing the gender divide. I agree with most of what Lamond says; it's just not all that new to me. This is a book for someone who hasn't read stuff about models versus reality, or about how gender differences may or may not be culturally prescribed.

Elliot Perlman's The Reasons I Won't Be Coming is a story collection; the excerpt I read was the story "I Was Only In A Childish Way Connected To The Established Order," narrated by a middle-aged poet who has had some psychotic episodes that landed him in a mental hospital -- but he doesn't sound all that abnormal to me. Stuck in a life where he doesn't fit in, certainly, but comprehensible and sympathetic. I read reviews on amazon.com which praise Perlman's ability to create distinctive voices in his work, and this story definitely fit the bill there; I believe I will have to seek out more of his work.

Another set of excerpts from BzzAgent and Penguin. The only one I liked enough to talk about is Charlaine Harris's Grave Surprise, the second in a series starring Harper Connelly, a woman who can supernaturally find bodies, or if their location is known tell how the person died. I haven't read the first book, but I have enjoyed Harris's Southern Vampire series starring Sookie Stackhouse as a Louisiana waitress who has a lot of vampires and similarly supernatural creatures in her life. This series seems to be set in a more normal setting, meaning that Connelly is surrounded by people who may not believe in the supernatural (rather than the supernatural being accepted as it is in the other series) and closer to a sort of detective story, though most detectives can't actually sense when they have found a buried body. The excerpt I got (the first four chapters, 68 pages) definitely made me want to read the rest of the book and find out what happens, or what happened, since the book opens with the discovery of a modern body in a centuries-old cemetery where Connelly is giving a demonstration of her ability for a college class.