Wicked Plants: the Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother
and Other Botanical Atrocities
by Amy Stewart, with illustrations by Briony Morrow-Cribbs and Jonathon Rosen
The moral of this story, boys and girls, is: never, ever run willy-nilly through the garden putting vegetation in your mouth! What doesn’t kill you can make you itch, twitch, vomit, or go crazy. Seriously, I knew that Johnson grass was a pest, but I certainly did not know that its new green shoots contain enough cyanide to kill a horse. I swear I will never go outside again without wearing garden gloves.
This fascinating little book is a compendium of nightmare plants, including some very common garden friends such as lenten rose, hydrangea, lantana, and Carolina jessamine. Don’t eat these things. And remember when we were hippies and wore those necklaces made from beautiful seeds and berries? When it started going around that the red berries were poisonous, we all thought it was a conspiracy to make us dress better. Turns out those red berries were the deadly seed of the rosary pea, native to tropical Africa and Asia. Yikes.
Wicked Plants is wonderfully designed, beginning with its printed cover. Inside are beautiful etchings from Briony Morrow-Cribbs and macabre little drawings from Jonathon Rosen. The pages are printed with an all-over schmutz, as if the book has been previously handled by a gardener. Although it suffers from the lack of an index, it’s small enough to be thumbed through when you need to know the name of the Australian stinging tree, a mere brush with which can cause unbearable pain for up to a year (dendrocnide moroides, common name gympie gympie).
As for Nancy Hanks Lincoln, she died of milk sickness from drinking the tainted milk of cows who had been grazing on white snakeroot. –Pam
The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag
by Alan Bradley
I wish I were finding this book (and its predecessor, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) twelve years from now. I love discovering a worthy series and then greedily reading all the titles one after the other, in order, of course! More’s the pity when you begin a series early on and have to wait a year between titles.
This second in the Flavia de Luce series is every bit as enticing as the first (read the staff review by Phyllis). We’ve come to adore our heroine Flavia, an 11-year-old chemistry savant with a penchant for poison and an encyclopedic memory for English literature and history. I’ve read criticism that the character is unbelievable in that regard, but my friend Ariel, a retired librarian with legendary recall, could easily have been Flavia in another life. And hey, it’s just a story, so lighten up!
This time around, Flavia unravels two mysterious deaths in her village of Bishop’s Lacey–one in the present (well, in the 1950s present) and one in the past. Along the way, we meet Rupert the creepy but talented puppeteer, the aged singing and piano playing Puddock sisters, overbearing Aunt Felicity from London, and Dieter, an Anglophile POW from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. And there are roles for our favorites from Sweetness, as well: Dogger the shellshocked gardener/butler; Mad Meg the town nutter; and, of course, Flavia’s mean sisters Feely and Daffy. By the end of the book, every human being in Bishop’s Lacey is suspect, including the sainted vicar, and it’s great fun to ponder along with Flavia even if you can’t do the chemistry.
My sole criticism is that the publisher cheaped out on the book’s manufacture. The cover illustration and title of Sweetness is charmingly printed directly on the book’s cover board, with no dust jacket, giving it an old-fashioned look and feel. Random House didn’t do a thing in the world with Weed’s binding, opting instead for a dust jacket design. So they’ve already spoiled the design of what deserves to be a very a collectible set. –Pam
City of Silver
by Annamaria Alfieri
I bumped into this book browsing the new books at the main library and loved the cover so much I had to check it out. Well, let me tell you, it was fascinating. So who knew anything about the silver mines in Peru in the 17th century? Certainly not I—I must have been asleep when we went over Peruvian history in high school.
This is a very nice little mystery featuring Mother Maria Santa Hilda, abbess of a convent in the booming town of Potosi (upper Peru, part of Bolivia now). Mother Maria must prove that a wealthy townsman’s daughter did not commit suicide under her care at the convent in order to save herself from the fires of the Inquisition, brought all the way from Spain to the New World. The mystery is pleasant enough, but it’s almost a side story to the class and color wars, the horror of the silver mines, and the stories of the Spaniards who found themselves trying to recreate their former social system in the thin air of the Andes. The sidelines about the Church and Inquisition are worthy, as well. For those who love clerical mysteries (here’s a huge list of literary priests, pastors, rabbis, monks & nuns), this fits the bill.
The Most They Ever Had
by Rick Bragg
No one in the world can break your heart as beautifully as Ricky Bragg. This slim volume by the author of All Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man tells the story of the men and women who worked in and lived their lives around the textile mill in Jacksonville, Alabama until its permanent closure in 2001. It is the story of hardscrabble lives. It is the story of the meanest of mill owners, of cotton lint and brownlung, of shocking industrial accidents. But it’s also the story of the proud, hardworking generations of folk who never shirked, and did what had to be done to feed their children.
Bragg is the master of powerful, understated description. The first page of chapter one is so perfectly written that I had to read it aloud to a friend. He is also the master of speaking in a southern voice so natural that it catches you by surprise when you realize you’re hearing it: he was bad to drink then, or: he got red in his face. Never gratuitous, perfectly timed.
The mill in Jacksonville ultimately went the way of much American manufacturing: the jobs moved out of the country to workers willing to do them for 33 cents an hour. And make no mistake about it: despite hardship and tragedy, the mill was a life and a history for generations of workers and their families, its loss devastating to them.
Rick Bragg asked a friend of his if he thought anyone would read the book, filled as it is with sadness. His friend replied, “Well, it ain’t a damn barn dance, is it? It’s an American tragedy.” — Pam
The Armchair Birder: Discovering the Secret Lives of Familiar Birds
By John Yow
The birds John Yow profiles are probably familiar to everyone: crows, bluejays, belted kingfishers, wrens, robins and the rest of the backyard bird clan. Neither identification nor feeding guide, the book is a wondrous rundown of each bird’s habits and behavior. More studious observers than I likely know these things, but I found myself reading aloud to anyone who would listen and reciting bird lore to friends at parties. Seriously, did you know that cedar waxwings will stuff themselves full of berries until they fall on the ground? They also play at passing a berry back and forth, or up and down a line of their little friends, and repeat the pass until someone gets bored and swallows the berry. I saw this game for myself recently when the waxwings made their fall pilgrimage to my privet and honeysuckle hedge. Here’s some other cool stuff from the book: belted kingfishers dig 6-foot tunnels in riverbanks and nest in their caves; crows can talk if they want to, and for sure they put walnuts in the street and wait for cars to run over them; hummingbirds steal spiderwebs and use them as a wrapping to reinforce their nests. I have a whole new respect for my winged pals now.
One last thing about waxwings: one fall I found one on the sidewalk outside the Belle Meade Starbucks, alive but wonky and unable to fly. I assumed it had hit the window and stunned itself. I couldn’t bear the thought of the little guy wandering strange in the parking lot, so I begged a box and took it home to my yard, where it spent the night in its cardboard motel room and then went its merry way the next morning. Now I’m thinking the little guy had been on a berry bender and was looking for his after-dinner coffee.
– Pam
The Lost Symbol
By Dan Brown
I openly admit loving all of the Dan Brown books. There, I said it. Well, maybe Deception Point was a little weak; being saved after skidding at high speed across an iceberg is soooo much more unlikely than falling from an exploding helicopter and landing unscathed on a roof, right? But I digress. The Lost Symbol has the baddest baddie of all time. He is creepy; he is relentless; he is tattooed over every inch of his body except a little blank circle on the top of his head. The Lost Symbol has, of course, the Masons. They fare very well in this novel, and it’s a lot of fun learning about their symbols and how prominently they (the symbols) figure in the architecture of Washington, D.C. And The Lost Symbol has noetic science (using scientific methods to explore consciousness/soul and its effects on the physical world), adding just the right amount of spooky-dooky to the mix. Formulaic? You bet. (The folks at Slate have created a very amusing Dan Brown sequel plot generator. Check it out.) Page-turner? Yesiree. Worth reading? Absolutely. Go on and read it–you know you want to!
- Pam
Homer and Langley
By E.L. Doctorow
So shoot me, I’ve never read E.L. Doctorow before now. Guess I was in my feminist science fiction phase when Ragtime came out. No matter. Homer and Langley is a lovely novel. Considering the fact that the main characters are reclusive, hoarding brothers who live in shocking squalor, achieving lovely is no mean feat for the author. The novel is based on the true story of Homer and Langley Collyer, who repelled and fascinated New Yorkers until their deaths in 1947. This is the story of how the brothers, children of privilege, came to be thus. Told from Homer’s viewpoint, the story of Langley’s increasing eccentricity and Homer’s dependent complicity is told with kindness, humor, heartbreak, and love. Doctorow’s departure from actual history (he extends their lifespans by a good 30 years, and invents characters who float in and out of their lives) serves the story so well that you don’t mind at all once you’ve squared your confusion. And the author’s ability to humanize what must have been quite a freak show forces you to look a little differently at what you see on the nightly news.
–Pam
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