Just when we thought it was safe to go into our gardens, writer and gardener Amy Stewart has decided to shake us up a little with her sly compendium of wicked plants. The full title of Amy's newest book is Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrociities. A plant killed Lincoln's mother? Lincoln's mother Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died at the age of 34, leaving her son, Abe, behind at age 9. Her illness, known as milk sickness, was a common scourge of the time in agricultural areas. Little was known about the illness, until a woman doctor named Anna Bixby …
The Help takes place in the Jim Crow South, in Mississippi in the early 1960's. Segregation, no matter how brutal or demeaning, is a way of life, with few willing or able to challenge it. Many white families in Jackson, Miss., had maids to clean their houses and raise their children, and these maids were inevitably black women or "colored" as they were called. Simply put, author Kathryn Stockett's story is told through the eyes of three characters: Aibileen, a compassionate maid who has raised white children for 40 years; Minnie, a firebrand whose quick temper gets her fired from her servant …
With yoga classes, studios, and instruction popping up by the thousands in playgrounds, private clubs, gyms, libraries, and even church basements, it's hard to realize that there was a time in America, just a mere generation or two back, when yoga and anything associated with Indian ritual or culture was regarded with deep suspicion and often with outright hostility. The Great Oom by Robert Love is a fascinating and well-researched study of the life and teachings of the Iowan-born Perry Baker. Early in his young adulthood, Baker transformed himself through intense study and practice with …
"Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." "Avoid food products containing ingredients that a third-grader cannot pronounce." "Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does." These pithy, amusing caveats make up the bulk of a slender volume titled Food Rules by Michael Pollan. The message is simple and undeniable. As consumers of the typical "Western diet," Americans eat more "food-like products" than food. That is, we eat food or food like substances that have been processed and prepped and presented to us in ways that make us crave them, crash after …
One of the most comforting series of books I've ever read are those written by Alexander McCall Smith in his No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels. These books are set in modern Botswana and feature the detective skills and the compassionate, practical philosophy of Precious Ramotswe, a woman in early middle age, who uses an inheritance from her beloved father to start Botswana's first female owned and operated detective agency. In the latest in the series, entitled The Double Comfort Safari Club, Precious and her redoubtable sidekick Mma Makutsi, who works not only as her office secretary …
