Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

I have made this bread for many years during periods when our collection of potatoes has grown too large. I boil four or five potatoes, mash them with their skins on, added them to a sourdough starter, and included corn meal.  In the past two weeks I made one first with red potatoes and a whole wheat sourdough, and then another with white potatoes and my rye starter. Both loaves were edging up on five pounds when they were done because the boiled potatoes contain so much moisture within them that to get the dough to finally set requires nearly five cups of bread flour. Using a cup of coarsely ground cornmeal gives the final bread toothiness, while the potatoes impart richness. Finishing up five pounds of this bread is not that difficult, really.

This book accomplishes exactly what the author hoped for. As small as the planet seems to have become -- we all share a disease, the internet, What'sApp -- the ocean still covers three-fourths of it, and the activities aboard ships at sea is nigh impossible to scrutinize. Urbina does it for us, fearlessly reporting from ship decks sailing all of the world's seas. His reporting is shocking, but not surprising in the degree to which international law is so easily undermined.  The world's oceans are a global commons, and much like the atmosphere, available for everyone's abuse, but not in one country's individual interest to police. Fish are taken in illegal quantities and with illegal methods. Uncountable so-called low-quality fish are discarded along with tens of thousands of fin-less sharks. Ship workers from developing countries are beaten, battered, raped, underpaid, and held captive by unscrupulous captains and shipping companies that are corporate shells for oth

This is an excellent bedtime book. It contains a compilation of short essays about human nature, the nature of animals, the myriad interaction of humans and animals in domestic and wild spaces, and simply nature. You can read one story at a time, be fully transported to a new location, be introduced to a bird, birder, goat, boyfriend, parent, flock, or sunset and you will see each one with new eyes, because in addition to being an exceptional writer, Helen Macdonald is also an extraordinary seer.  What she makes clear to us is the visceral loss accompanying the Sixth Extinction, the rapid, on-going, seemingly unstoppable disappearance of species diminished by human planetary dominance. Yes, depressing, but also a crystal-clear, heart pounding view of the world around us that so few of us take the time to observe, carefully. Even within a few pages Macdonald can make you think about the connection between migraine headaches and climate change, the power, for better and worse, of rehabil

  Jai, the 9-year-old resident of a slum on the outskirts of an Indian city like New Delhi is the most adorable detective I have ever come across. Jai lives in a one room house with his older sister and loving parents. His mother keeps house for a demanding "hi-fi madame" in the fancy apartments towering above their basti; his father is an optimistic construction worker.  His neighborhood is crowded with goats, chickens, bazaars, trash, a single toilet complex with a long, contentious queue, and neighbors too numerous to count. While Jai's parents work all day, Jai and his friends have the run of the place accompanied by all the joy of being an unchaperoned 9-year-old with limitless imaginations. When Jai's friend Bahadur fails to return to his mother and father, Drunken Laloo, Jai appoints himself chief detective. His main qualification is that he has watched nearly every episode of Police Patrol  on TV. His skills will be important because the local police remain so

  By 2015, one-quarter of Americans were born after, or were too young to recall , the 9/11 attacks. This year, aside from some of the students in the senior class, the remainder of America's college students were born in the aftermath of the attacks and have always know of America's ongoing war on terror and the hassle of TSA at the airport. For those who can recall the images of airplanes hitting the World Trade Center, reading Garrett Graff's recounting is an act of courage. Using excerpts from nearly 4,000 oral histories, Graff has assembled a minute-by-minute account of a cloudless, super-clear day in September, perceived by the people who lived it. The airport staff tell us what it was like to check in the terrorists at Logan airport. F-16 pilots with the National Guard explain what it means to receive an order to launch as quickly as possible from airfields in Massachusetts, at first to protect America's skies from unknown intruders and soon thereafter to receive

In a series of interconnected short stories the history of a Jamaican family and the culture of Jamaica come together in a kaleidoscope of island imagery. The family includes a British slaveowner in the early 1800s whose white seed lives on among his enslaved (and raped) Africans. Characters from the 1820s are rediscovered decades and centuries later in Jamaican villagers struggling to make their wayi n the poor hill-country of the home island or the isolating islands of immigrant poverty in twentieth-first century Brooklyn.  Each story is a self-contained shard of colorful glass whose light interacts with sights, sounds, and smells of its neighbors, and though the author's decision to forego a traditional, chronological narrative feels foreign, there is something that feels authentically Jamaican in meeting each segment of the family in her or his own era and dwelling. Some ghosts of plantation ancestors hover on the edges of New York City apartments where overworked health care a