Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Crow Planet, Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, provides the reader with a message of environmental balance between greeting each day as a  pollyanna or being a "hand-ringing nihilist".  She provides helpful ecological bookmarks for those of us who vacillate between despair and hope.

When I ask a client the direction their home faces -- north, south, east or west -- and they don't know I feel despair.  Then, when I ask, "where does the sun come up?" and they still do not know, I'm certain we are doomed.  How can there be a thoughtful interaction with nature and humans when our human connectivity is so lacking, so damaged by our modern ways?  This is when I become one of those hand-ringing nihilists.  Then I look out my window and the world is so remarkable with the garden bursting in beauty, and I find myself singing my way into a Pollyanne state of mind.  Back-and-forth, up-and-down, hopeful one day and in despair the next.

Haupt seems to have a handle on this and can see the strengths of wild and wilderness that survive the human onslaught as she mourns urbanization.  She does so with a balance I strive to achieve.  She honors the adaptive survival of the abundant crow population as hope for the future.  She celebrates the crow's intelligence and adaptability.  She observes and learns, not just about crows but about her world.  She is alert.

The book is meditative and wise, fun and informative, sensitive and entertaining as Haupt's observations of crows blends their place in nature side-by-side with our human place in nature.  She doesn't allow us to be "other" as we often pretend we are and she urges us to connect with a more-than-human world.

Crow Planet is a quick and thoughtful read by a local author.   I recommend it.  But then, I've always loved crows!

Review by Fran

Mississippi Mud by Edward Humes

I just finished the unlikely read of Mississippi Mud.  My attention was drawn to this book because it took place in Biloxi, Mississippi.  Ed spent his Air Force days in Biloxi teaching electronics (teaching being highly desirable to being shipped off to Vietnam), teasing my curiosity.    

Mississippi Mud, A True Story from a Corner of the Deep South, is a tale of southern "justice" and the dixie mafia.  A horrifying read with the unfolding of crime, gambling, murders, prostitution, corruption, nasty deals, unsavory politicians, corrupt judges, dirty-dealing lawyers and bribed prison officials.  It includes prisoners making millions from their cell "offices" and the wonder that a US city could be so completely lawless.  The Biloxi Strip was a hub of sex, drugs, and sleaze. 

Are you ready to read this book yet?  Well, for you mystery lovers, it is also a mystery as a daughter tries to find out who violently killed her Judge father and politician mother.  She stubbornly pursues the answer from 1987 through 1993, with mixed success, while following a complex and fascinating trail. 

This is a true story with the Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Humes providing extensive footnotes.  It proves once again that the truth can be stranger than fiction and left me wondering about the health of our other innocent-appearing  cities.  Have I been living in a bubble?

Ed was definitely living in a bubble.  As a non gambling, non drinking, non carousing  military officer he had no idea, when I asked, that the strip was so famous for low life deals, even back in the 60's when he was there.  I, of course, wonder if it's been cleaned up since.   Biloxi still advertises night clubs, strip clubs and casinos, behind which any number of unsavory activities can still be taking place. 

I'm not sure I recommend this book; I'm not sure I don't.

Review by Fran

Things I've Been Silent About, Azar Nafisi

When one loves an Azar, how can one ignore a book written by an Azar?  That’s the dilemma I found myself embroiled in, within my head.  This book-by-Azar remained on my book group bookshelf, unread, for months.  It would jump out at me as I skimmed the shelf, yet I passed it by, over and over again.  It was both enticing and distasteful as it stared back at me.

It’s interesting about that bookshelf.  Here are the books I’ve toted home from book group, lined up on the shelf, waiting to be read.  Some have sat there for an embarrassingly long time.    Books that sounded enticing, worthwhile, interesting, exciting, or important for one reason or another.  But, when the time came to  select one, were passed by.

Things I’ve Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi sat and sat and sat on that shelf.  How many months ago did I bring it home?  I didn’t read it, but I couldn’t part with it. Azar, Azar, Azar stared at me.  I had to read it and when I finally did I greatly enjoyed it.  Thanks Betty Azar and thanks Azar Nafisi.

Much of my resistance to reading Things I’ve Been Silent About was that it was about Iran, a country both fascinating and distasteful to me. I didn’t want to read about ugly political turmoil, the suffering of people, or the control of women’s freedoms.  But that wasn’t what the book was about, although there was that too.

Instead it was about an exceptional woman, marriage, and a mother-father-daughter struggle.  It is an intimate look at Nafisi's family, the secrets she kept, and the price of political upheaval to a family.  One word I came across in the description of the book was dissection, and that fits.  Nafisi dissected her childhood experiences and relationships as she told her story.

Azar Nafisi is a good story teller, and the story, although difficult, was not depressing.

Another admirable woman and another wonderful memoir.

Wild - From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Last night I turned out the light 10 pages from finishing Wild From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed.   I've yet to finish it.  I don't want it to end, so I'm saving the final words.  Waiting.  For what?  The sequel?  

As each of you reading this blog can imagine, I found Wild exceedingly poignant.  With Brad's adventure unfolding on the Pacific Crest Trail running parallel to my reading of Wild, I couldn't help but compare Cheryl and Brad's adventures (Fran's Blog), both on the trail and in life (they were born in the same year, 1968).   During Brad's Te Araroa Trail tramp, Ed and I went to see The Way at the Clyde Theater,  and found it to be equally poignant. 

Cheryl's writing has a delightful story-telling mode about it, as well as being brazenly candid and forthright.  She was so honest about her relationships, feelings, experiences (including sex and drugs), that I found it to be not only unusual, but refreshing and, at times, alarming.  My mind often  turned to Cheryl's mother,  wondering what she would have thought, and felt, if she were still alive.  Or, what Cheryl's former husband's reading emotions were.

The author's trail experiences, read in tandem with my son spending the year tramping, left me in awe and wonder.   Cheryl was completely unprepared for her journey, yet the trail was forgiving and the other thru-hikers and trail angels along the way provided her with reassurance and support.  I was left feeling both fear and relief.  And, my feet hurt!  Reading about Cheryl's boots and the pain they caused, made my feet ache.  I too have lost toe nails, courtesy of my hiking boots, as recently as last summer's hike to Surprise Lake  to join Brad on the Washington PCT.   Yes, I walked toenail to toenail with Cheryl.

Cheryl seems to be able, with her story telling talent, to make each reader, in some personal way,  identify with her adventure.  I highly recommend Wild and will be following Cheryl Strayed's writing career.