Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

At the unavoidable "request" of their company to attend a bonding retreat, five women with limited experience are sent into the Australian rainforest to build camaraderie. Wearing brand new hiking boots, backpacks that are too heavy, and insufficient clothing for the cold and wind they are sent out on a track with directions that are not quite clear enough as paths diverge in front of them. Three days later and six hours after scheduled arrival time only four emerge from the forest. The returnees are lacerated, bruised, shivering from exposure, one has been bitten by a poisonous snake, and very hungry. They do not know the whereabouts of the fifth in their party. Part mystery, but mostly Lord of the Flies , Force of Nature  describes what happens when a series of small decisions cascade into disaster and five women carrying workplace drama into the woods have to face strong wind, driving rain, falling temperatures, impenetrable darkness, and the less pretty side of human natu...

Meh. Billed as a mystery, a body turns up on page one. Unlike most mysteries, the overarching question is not who did the killing, but in the scary forest outside the decaying Foxcote Manor hidden amongst encroaching British woodland, but to whom does the body belong. The books male characters are reduced to three trite stereotypes. There is an overbearing, controlling husband who takes unknown, important business trips abroad. (Any wagers on whether he is having an affair?) While husband is away, man number two is Businessman's best friend, a Lothario with a drink on the rocks always at hand and a wolfish leer aimed at anything female within striking distance. Man number three possesses all the characteristics to be the opposite: silent strength, the ability to fix or make anything, compassion, a limitless capacity to listen, and even just the right amount of musky, almost sweating, aromatic charisma. The real mystery of Foxcote Manor is how it persuaded reviewers to call it a sus...

  A fish owl stands as tall as your chest. It plucks salmon with its talons from roaring rivers in the Russian province of Primorye, in the far east of the country. And before Jonathan Slaght started his PhD and wrote this book, not much more was known about the owls. The book is one-third scientific investigation, one-third description of a climate of winter blizzards that rage with such intensity and duration that transportation by any means is impossible, and one-third conversations with the people of the forest: hermits, indigenous, old Soviet castaways, and vodka-fueled nutcases. While I suspect Slaght's interests run in order from bird conservation to the weather that gets in his way, and finally the people with whom he must work to observe his birds, far and away the most interesting descriptions are of people living so very far from globalization. The book probably is more engaging for readers who know little about how ecologists work. For me, the long efforts to build succ...

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 reh...

  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 s...