Nancy Eister > Recent Status Updates

Abandoned for now

Mabel’s prose is too long on descriptive terms and too short on nouns and verbs. I had to keep rereading sentences to understand her meaning. Elmore Leonard she is not. I’m abandoning this as an interesting but not for me period piece from the 1940s.

Wonderful short and deep chapters you can read as slowly as a tree absorbs nutrients.

This is a scholarly work but quite readable. Fascinating view of how cooking evolved, how our ancestors learned to feed themselves from the natural world, how the foods they ate shaped their lives and enabled empires to be built. The disparity of foods for the wealthy and foods for the poor. I'd like to own this as a research book for my library.

A nice blend of science and stories about crows, as well as observations about nature and our relationship with the wild : the zoopolis, as Haupt calls it, that even in the city we share space with. Good advice on how to interact with urban animal life from a former wildlife rescuer and Audubon guide. She touches on the pain and heartbreak of climate change, and how we as humans can learn to be better Inhabitants.

I will not be able to finish unless I buy my own copy. Fascinating history of the area many now consider to be the cradle of European civilization.