Howling Frog Books

 The Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell When I opened this book and started reading, I was a little taken aback when the introduction to the trilogy edition explained that all three books had been edited down in order to become the trilogy.  I didn't sign up for that!  I wanted the whole thing!  But then it turned out that complete editions of the first book are no longer easy to get; they've long been replaced by this shortened trilogy version.  And so, resigned, I decided to read the first part of the book and then see how it was going before committing to all three books.  And I did really enjoy Ring of Bright Water , but I don't think I'm going to continue. Read on to see why. Gavin Maxwell, wanderer and general nature guy, had tried running a shark-hunting business on the Scottish island of Soay.  He'd gone back and forth to the Middle East a few times, for what exactly he does not say, but writing seems to come into it, and probably also gen...

 The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, by Seb Falk You know I always love a good book about how the Middle Ages were way cooler than you thought.  This one came out at almost the exact same time as another book called The Bright Ages , so there was definitely something in the air that year.  This book, however, is specifically about certain aspects of scientific progress during the Middle Ages, especially astronomy, and it constructs its narrative around a monastery in St. Albans, which is just north of London. We start with a very grabby story, about how in the 1950s a scholar found an old hand-written astronomical treatise at Cambridge and thought, for fairly good reasons, that it might possibly be a holograph by Chaucer.  The manuscript described an instrument that was not an astrolabe...what even was it?   And from there we set off to St. Albans and a tour of medieval calendar math, clocks, universities, astronomical prediction (with...

 Here's some more November reading!  I'm thinking about going back to single-book posts, but on the other hand I'm having trouble finding time to write even these quickie riffles through several books at a time.  What do you think?     The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All -- But There is a Solution , by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott:   I've been looking forward to this book for a long time!  The title is a riff on Lukianoff's last book, co-written with Jonathan Haidt, and the two titles work together.  This time, Lukianoff is teamed up with a Gen Z writer, Rikki Schlott, to bring in a younger perspective.  The thesis here: that cancel culture (which yes, exists) is a manifestation of false ideas discussed in the earlier book, and which serve to make us less mentally healthy and less able to function as a society.  The ideas: Fragility: that people are fragile and need comfort; they...

 My semester is over and I'm on summer break!  And the weather has been absolutely fantastic, not too hot, so I've been trying to spend a lot of time outside and hiking.  My goal is to do plenty of that this summer.  I've also read quite a bit in the last couple of weeks, and here is some of it, but it doesn't include the Louise Penny binge I went on of three novels in a row; they were good too! #antisemitism: Coming of Age During the Resurgence of Hate, by Samantha A. Vinokor-Meinrath : A survey and analysis of GenZ Jewish kids and how they feel about their Judaism and the rising incidence of antisemitism.  Most of these kids have GenX parents (like me) who grew up with very little antisemitism in the US, and I was shocked at how it's just common now for GenZ kids to have experienced, at the very least, comments from friends and schoolmates.                  A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabe...

 The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear, by Kate Moore  It's hard to say anything about this book besides --- wowzers, this is a fantastic, amazing story, and everyone should read it.  Including you. This is the life story of Elizabeth Packard, a completely ordinary woman, wife, and mother of six in Illinois.  In 1860, as the United States was headed towards war, Elizabeth and her husband were in disagreement about religion.  Theophilus was a Presbyterian minister, and while Elizabeth had been joyfully discovering new ideas about women's rights, he was under pressure to guide his congregation into a stricter, more conservative theology (which, among other things, was neutral about slavery, in contrast to the church's previous anti-slavery position).  Elizabeth's insistence on her right to read widely, have her own ideas, and argue them in public grated on Theophilus, and he ...

  The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities From the History of Medicine, by Thomas Morris My oldest would love this book!  The premise is simple:  Morris spent a lot of time combing through antique medical journals for the unusual case studies that were sometimes published in them.  The resulting collection is organized on a somewhat thematic basis, and is a wonderful read (though not for reading over your lunch) and, at the same time, a minor survey of historical medical practices. One chapter is "Unfortunate Predicaments," featuring such stories as the sailor who swallowed pocketknives in quantity as a party trick, which worked for years but eventually ended badly; and a young boy who was playing with a goose's larynx (it works like a kazoo!) and coughed, which lodged the larynx in his own throat. "Mysterious Illnesses" contains some very eye-opening stories, and "Dubious Remedies" describes such inventions as mercury cigarettes and...

 Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct, by Abigail Tucker This is a fantastic book, and if you're a mom you'll want to read it.  If you're not a mom, it's probably a good idea to read it anyway, because after all, there are a lot of moms around. Scientists have only recently really started to seriously study the biological changes that come with motherhood.   We've long assumed that adults, on the whole, don't change much .  And it turns out that moms change -- a lot.  Our cells, our genes, our brains...all go through massive reconstruction. Tucker goes through a whole lot of research (she's a journalist, not a science person herself) and combines it with stories from her own life.  She's a mom of four herself and has plenty of relevant experience.  This is definitely a popular science book for laypeople, and it's got a good deal of humor as well. Compared to their rapidly developing infants, moms have a reputation f...

 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal For most of the 20th century, Western scientists stubbornly denied the possibility that animals could have anything approaching consciousness or intelligence.  Surely they could not truly learn, have memories, make deductions or plans, or have real social networks.  Anything that looked like that must really be instinct, blind chance, or in the behaviorist category of learning to do a simple action for an immediate reward.  There was a distinct demarcation between human and animal, and humans have something that animals never have. Well, Frans de Waal is here to tell you all about what he thinks of that nonsense.  After decades of working with animals and studying their intelligences, he has collected lots of research from many biologists, and he's going to teach you about animal cognition -- which we're only getting started with. It makes sense that if you're going to test an animal's intelli...

 Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee As a somewhat messy person who collects books and fabric, I've often worried about becoming somebody with too much stuff.  This was especially true when the kids were younger and we also had tons of homeschooling paraphernalia, and I had a really hard time with keeping things clean and organized (I found that we could have only two of three at any one time: good homeschooling, a reasonably clean house, or reasonable meals.  All of them at once were not humanly possible.)  I would sometimes watch shows like "How Clean is Your House?" or "Hoarders" in order to motivate myself to clean, despite the twinge of conscience I experience from exploitative shows like that. The kids are older now and I've much improved my housekeeping/decluttering skills, so that I'm fairly happy with my stuff level.  (I recommend Dana White's blog/podcast/books ; they have helped me tremend...

 Beasts in My Belfry, by Gerald Durrell I've loved Gerald Durrell's books for many years, and if you've never tried them, I hope you do.  Durrell was the founder of the world-famous conservation zoo on Jersey , and he wrote the books for publicity and fund-raising...plus he had a massive talent for writing about animals, founded in his love of all critters.  I saw Beasts in My Belfry at the public library and grabbed it with gleeful cries, because this is one I've never read. From childhood, Jerry had only one ambition: to become an animal collector and perhaps even have his own zoo.  When he finished school, he wrote to every collector he could find, asking for a job as an assistant, but they all wanted someone experienced.  So Jerry applied to a zoo instead, hoping to gain experience with animals that someone would respect (because raising scorpions on your own doesn't count).   In 1945, he got a job as an assistant keeper at the Whipsnade Zoo, whic...

Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, by Alex Berenson This was a very, very surprising book on all counts.  Even the author was surprised!  I was too. Alex Berenson, journalist, was -- like a lot of Americans -- vaguely pro-legalization of marijuana.  He'd done it himself a few times, no big deal, and had the usual ideas: that pot is safer than alcohol, it's silly to get worked up about it, people don't die from pot.  His wife is a psychiatrist who specializes in criminality and mental illness, and one day when they were talking about a case, she casually mentioned that 'of course,' the perpetrator was high and had used pot his whole life.  "Of course"?  Yeah, they all smoke marijuana; the studies show a link between pot and violence.  --Wait, what?   So Berenson the journalist took a hint from Berenson the psychiatrist and decided to look at the statistics and the studies.  What he found complete...

The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, by Jonathan Rauch All through his forties, Jonathan Rauch* was fairly miserable, and he didn't really have a good reason to be.  His career was doing well, he'd accomplished more than he'd dreamed of, his personal life was happy, he was healthy and strong -- and yet he couldn't stop telling himself that he should be doing far better.  He often felt like bolting from his perfectly good career.  Was this a midlife crisis?  Was he just a really ungrateful, terrible person who didn't appreciate his blessings?  The more he scolded himself, the worse he felt. As a journalist, though, he could find out some things, and in fact he found out quite a bit.  It's quite stunning to me, but it turns out that it is normal to be kind of miserable in your 40s, approximately.  It happens across cultures, in every country.   In fact, it's hard-wired into us and other great apes do it, too.  Of course, ou...

Wesley the Owl: the Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl, by Stacey O'Brien In 1985, a young Caltech biologist took home a newborn barn owl with a damaged wing.  He would never be able to live in the wild, so Stacey adopted him.  For the next 19 years, Stacey and Wesley were best friends. O'Brien describes Wesley's life with great love and with scientific accuracy, introducing the rest of us to the world of barn owls.  It's completely fascinating, and also hilarious, and also tragic.  Wesley communicated in great detail with Stacey, had interesting preferences and a lot of emotions, and eventually helped her get through some extremely rough health problems. Loved this book, am going to make my kids read it -- anybody who remotely likes animals will love it.  I am not an animal person and I did.  Oh, and Jim Henson studios is making a movie of it, so if you read it now, you'll be right on trend! Here's a video with some nice pictures and foot...

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and Other Lessons from the Crematory , by Caitlin Doughty I have this kid, age 18, who plans on a career in the funereal field, and so we've had this book around the house for a couple of years now.  (A signed copy, even!)   I didn't really know anything about Doughty myself, though, until I got around to reading her book. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is half memoir, half ponderings on how Americans deal with death (spoiler: by pretending it doesn't exist).  Doughty was a medieval history major, but then got a job at an Oakland crematorium, where she could freely indulge her  fears and thoughts about death. (Please note at this point in the proceedings that the funeral industry is not about Gothic fascination/romanticization of death.  Nope, should you have leanings that way, do not try to become a mortician, or if you do, it will be crushed right out of you right quick.  Nobody wants their funeral director mooning about de...

The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good For You, and How to Get Good At It, by Kelly McGonigal Well, you have to read a book by Professor McGonigal.  This was actually recommended to me, and now I'm going to recommend it to all of you, even every member of my family, because I plan to make them read it too.  It's just a really interesting book that contains some fascinating research into the nature of stress, how we deal with it, and how we can deal with it a lot better by tweaking a few thoughts. One weird element of modern society is that people tell us to avoid stress in such a way that just makes most people laugh hopelessly.  We're convinced that stress makes us sick and unhappy, and yet most of us cannot avoid difficult workplaces, illness in the family, financial worries, and lots of other stressful things.  BUT!  It turns out that stress is far more complex than we thought, and humans are in fact great at dealing with it.  This makes intuitive...

The Story of Western Science: From Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, by Susan Wise Bauer Did you ever want to thoroughly educate yourself in the history of science?  Well, this is your book!  Some years ago, my guru SWB wrote a how-to book, The Well-Educated Mind , about giving yourself a classical education in the humanities, with chronological sections on drama, poetry, history, autobiography, and fiction.  This is a similar book, except it takes you through the history of science. We start with the ancient Greeks and other early thinkers, move forward to the development of the scientific method, and then into sections that concentrate on the development of (respectively) geology, biology, and cosmology.  Each section is broken into chapters that explain the ideas and the thinkers, and end with recommendations on what to read.  This is a historical perspective, so she's recommending Aristotle's Physics and History of Animals , Ptolemy's Almagest , and s...