People who know Joan - the doctors she works with at the hospital, her boss, her new neighbor, her brother - are pretty sure she is not okay. Joan isn’t sure why they can’t just leave her be - let her work constantly, keep her apartment minimally furnished, and skip out on holiday bashes.
Read MoreThe story is familiar. A Sunday morning bacon breakfast, seared steaks on the skillet. What they make gets transferred to plates and devoured. What they leave behind is a goopy, fatty mess in the frying pan.
Read MoreLanguage of loss and love suffuce the novel with poignant descriptions that cut to the bone of life. The unstated question which echoes throughout is: What is worth dying for? Is it love, is it loss, is it a belief in a political state? Krishan, the main character, may be on the verge of asking a new question: What is worth living for?
Read MoreLife is all about perspective.
We went camping for a couple of nights earlier this summer at Loft Mountain Campground, a short drive up Skyline Drive, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains about an hour northwest of Charlottesville.
Our SUV was packed to the gills with all matter of perishable and non-perishable human and dog supplies. Also humans and dogs. We had to dig our camping box out of the basement and dust it off. Somehow we hadn’t gone camping in 8 years. This is one of those unnerving moments of adulthood where something that feels familiar and recent hasn’t occurred in many years.
Read MoreWe spent a week in Paris back in April 2019. With everything that has happened since, that truly seems like a lifetime ago and a galaxy away. If you think a week in Paris is enough time to see everything on a standard first-timer’s list, think again.
Read MoreWhat publisher would risk publishing a book under this title? You can sure it is one who has a hell of a lot of confidence that this will, in fact, be one hell of a book. My verdict: a resounding yes.
Read MoreAs we looked up at the heights of the mesa, we could see teeny tiny people atop it and, while it was hard to envision how it would happen, it was clear we had just chosen to scale it. Yikes!
Read MoreDrive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is part crime novel, part animal rights activism, part a tale about aging, and part a tale about living as an outsider in your own community. Sprinkle in a dose of mysticism and astrology, and this is a book that is more than the sum of its parts.
Read MoreMuch has been made about the urban and rural divide in America, a topic that reached new urgency as pundits, pollsters, and social scientists sought to make sense of the 2016 presidential election. Overnight, books such as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy became best-sellers. A national narrative was told by reporters from Big City, USA, popping in to visit rural Kentucky and other rural spots, to identify their “otherness”.
Read MoreWe drove for about two and a half hours to reach Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. The first twenty minutes or so of the drive, down from the heights of Lincoln National Forest, were pretty and filled with trees. For the next two hours, our route took us along the east and then north sides of the Tularosa Basin, home of the White Sands Missile Range. The route was, in a word, desolate. Driving for two hours with basically nothing in any direction left me feeling isolated, as if our car’s interior was the entire world.
Read MoreThis science fiction trilogy begins against the backdrop of the real-life Cultural Revolution in China, which occurred from approximately 1966 to 1976. The commentary, details, and perspectives offered about that time period are interesting and are told through the eyes of the author, who lived his formative years during this experience.
Read MoreWe spent the fifth day of our trip exploring spots very near to our accommodation in Cloudcroft, nestled in the Lincoln National Forest. In fact, one of our destinations was even walkable from our B&B! You would think that our elevation in Cloudcroft - about 8,600 feet - was plenty high enough but no, we headed further up into the mountains, a far cry from the prior day’s visit to the low elevation of the desert!
Read MoreLife has not been easy for Kit Biddle, which is evident from the opening pages of The Essence of Nathan Biddle. Six years prior, Kit's beloved and special cousin, Nathan Biddle, had been sacrificed by his father in a modern-day rendition of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac.
Read MoreWe have both had multiple opportunities as children and adults to view various petroglyphs around the United States and still find them fascinating and mesmerizing. For those less familiar, a petroglyph is a general term for any (human-made) rock carving, typically noteworthy for those from the pre-historic era. Petroglyphs, often referred to as “carvings” outside of the United States, were often made by using a chisel and hammerstone (or similar objects) to carve away the surface of the rock-face, leaving behind the lighter-colored rock underneath, thus illuminating the image.
Read MoreThe Speed of Mercy immediately introduces a number of strong female characters that range in age from youth to elderly and are spaced across the two time periods through which the novel moves. The book is about friendships among women and their protection for each other - in a physical sense as well as in an emotional, a psychological, and even a magical way.
Read MoreFor those readers unfamiliar with Roswell, it holds a place in popular imagination for some or as practically a holy mecca for others. What is certain is that in 1947, something crashed to the earth and a cattle rancher discovered it in his field, located about 75 miles outside of the city of Roswell.
Read MoreSalem, Massachusetts, is home to year-round witchery, a phenomena that shows up in most cities only around Halloween. The historic city is a mecca for those who are fascinated by the idea of witches, interested in the 330 year old history of the witch trials, and of course represents ongoing debate about the role of women throughout history and how the claim of witchcraft was used to subjugate and control the ‘weaker sex’, as it were.
Read MoreThe best way to describe Living Desert State Park is as a desert botanical garden and zoo. Near the parking lot is a visitor’s center that includes all of the highlights of state park visitors’ center: information to read about the area, interactive displays, animal skeletons, and other touchable items. The back exit of the visitor’s center opens out to the 1.3 mile self-guided trek through a microcosm of the Chihuahuan Desert.
Read MoreIn the 1800s, a Viking burial site was unearthed in Birka, Sweden. The burial included a Viking ship, weaponry, game pieces, horses and riding accessories, and other tools. The grave was documented as that of a Viking warrior, as evidenced by the contents of the burial. As Brown shares in her book, most “sexing” (that is, determination of whether a skeleton is male or female) throughout the history of archaeology has been sexing by metal. That is to say, where weapons are found, it is deemed to be a male, where jewelry is found, female. There are a number of reasons why the field of archaeology has used this approach even as DNA testing has emerged, and Brown provides an interesting overview of this process.
Read MoreThe Guadalupe Mountains stand as a big, bulky mass rising out of the otherwise endlessly flat landscape of west Texas. They are startling and unexpected. The mountain range is also enormous, home to the highest peak in all of Texas, Guadalupe Peak, which measures 8,751 feet. For anyone who has ever been in a desert, grassland, or anywhere else that is very, very flat, you have likely experienced the inability to understand size and distance. Without any reference points, a mountain can appear close, and you can still spend an hour or more driving towards it. This was definitely our experience of these particular mountains!
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