Forensics

This time I read a non-fiction book. Val McDermid is a crime writer and she also wrote Forensics The Anatomy Of a Crime. Each chapter has a different area of forensic medicine. The first chapter was about bugs. The age of maggots can help determine the time of death. The was a chapter on blood spatters and a chapter on DNA evidence. There was a chapter on finger prints. She lives in Scotland so many of the cases are from Scotland. She interviewed forensic experts all over the world. Several of her experts have done work on mass killings like the one in Kosovo. Several of the more famous forensic experts of the time were wrong. The last chapter was on court room drama. A forensic expert has information crucial to the trial but if the lawyers don't ask the right questions the truth does not come out. And sometimes juries make fickle decisions.

 

 

Belgrave Road

Belgrave Road is a novel written by Manish Chauhan. The story is about Mira and Tahliil. Mira was living in India with her family when her parents agreed to an arranged marriage. Mira traveled alone by plane from India to England. Now she resides is a small house outside of London with her husband and his parents. If she remains married for five years she will be able to be a citizen. Her husband and his parents grossly misrepresented their wealth. After taking an English class and gaining confidence, she gets a job at a restaurant. The restaurant is next door to a small market. Tahliil works at that market stocking the shelves and moving merchandise. Tahliil and his sister moved from Mogadishu, Somalia to England to care for their mother. Tahliil and his sister are applying for citizenship. Tahliil and Mira meet during their lunch breaks behind their shops. Both are searching for better lives. They hope to be together someday.

 

 

When The Lights Go Out

When The Lights Go Out is a mystery book written by Mary Kubica. Only she turns the R around in her first name like Toys R Us. The story is about a young woman named Jessica who is nearing the end of high school when her mother, Eden, discloses that her breast cancer has returned and she is now terminally ill. Jessica gets insomnia; really severe insomnia. She goes for a week without sleeping. This part of the story is told slowly and in great detail. I think there was too much of the insomnia symptoms. Also, Jessica goes to apply to college and is told her social security number lists her as deceased. She has no birth certificate. Jessica suspects her mother of stealing her as a child. The ending was ridiculous. Loose strings all over the place. 

 

 

Happy Equinox

 

Baking Cakes In Kilgali

Rwanda is a country that has many issues. Killing gorillas for bush meat, civil war between the Hutu and the Tutsis, HIV infections, female genital mutilation, and poverty. I learned much in reading the book Baking Cakes In Kilgali. In this story we learn what life is like through the eyes of Angel. Angel lives with her well educated husband who is a professor at the local university. The couple lives with their five grandchildren. Their son died of AIDS and their daughter, HIV positive, died of suicide. Now Angel makes money baking cakes for special occasions. She is like an artist with her cakes. Angel uses vast quantities of food coloring. She is big on being professional. She had a cake order form printed up using four local languages. She interviews each client looking for ideas that will give her inspiration. Her conversations with her clients remain private. Over the years she has learned how much to charge for the cakes so she can still make a profit. She thought about declining to make a cake celebrating female genital mutilation. In the end she makes the cake but is fearful to go to the celebration. This author used an amazing plot twist to make a good outcome on that day. I was amazed. While she is doing all that plus being a wife and a mother, Angel finds time to help her neighbors. She encourages a lonely diplomat's wife to teach literacy to some people in the neighborhood. She sponsors a wedding for the single mother/owner of local food mart down the street. She gives a talk at a local high school about her business and how to be an entrepreneur. She helps a young girl who is raising her siblings how to get out of prostitution and make money tailoring clothes. I loved reading about Angel and all her successes.

 

 

Pigs In Heaven

  I finally read Barbara Kingsolver's sequel to The Bean Trees called Pigs In Heaven. In The Bean Trees, Taylor Greer is driving to Tuscon from the east coast. As she stops for a break in a small town in Oklahoma, a woman hands her a 4 year old girl saying her mother is dead and her father is abusing her. So Taylor takes the girl and later adopts her. The girl is very clingy so she gets the name Turtle (because snapping turtles won't let go of a stick). She raises Turtle in Tuscon and gradually she recovers from her horrid past and begins to talk and to grow. Later Turtle and Taylor help a young guy and get national recognition for saving his life. People from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma can plainly see that Turtle is one of their clan. They take steps to reclaim Turtle. This panics Taylor into moving out of their  home and going on the run. Invoking the parable of King Solomon where two mothers are fighting over the same child and Solomon gives the child to the mother who does not agree it should be cut in half, Taylor and the Cherokee Nation work out their differences. This is an epic tale based on a grouping of true stories of children being taken from the Cherokee Nation and raised with Caucasians. 

 

 

History Day

This evening I volunteered to be a judge of history day projects for the southeast region of Minnesota. We met in the student ballroom at Winona State University. Winners get to go to the state history day on April 19th in Minneapolis. I was paired with another judge who has done this before.

First we read their paper. Then we looked over their board. Then we had a list of questions to ask. Our favorite project was this first one on the great flood on 1927. These were all middle school children participating today.

This one was on Rosie the Riveter. Most kids did a better job on the poster than following a theme, laying out a hypothesis, or getting enough research.

This guy even made a mock diorama in a pan with mud and boards and tiny soldiers.

The project on Somalia used only 3 sources.

White Rose was a group of young people living in Germany who resisted the Nazi's. They started out with three people but eventually the group swelled to 80 people. The three original members were killed by the Nazi's.

 

Doorman Wanted

Glenn R. Miller is an author living in Minneapolis. He published Doorman Wanted in 2024. This is a humorous story about a guy named Henry who tries to distance himself from his rich father. His father is rich because he is ruthless in business. Henry's father works in New York so Henry decides he will move to California and help people who are less fortunate than him. When his father dies Henry inherits a ten story apartment building. When he goes to the building to pick up the keys he is not ready to face the fact that he owns the building. He sees a sign on the window about a job opening for a door man so he applies. Henry gets the job as doorman during the day shift. He receives packages for others. He arranges entrance for catering companies when his tenants have parties. The building has a manager but she is quite useless. The evening doorman will do anything to avoid the manager because she is so rude to him. Henry tries to help all the building tenants. He even helps some homeless people who live in Central Park. The story moves along quickly and is very funny. 

 

 

In The Midst Of Winter

 I enjoy reading Isabel Allende's writing. This time I read In The Midst Of Winter which was published in 2015. After a fender bender car accident in New York City, the lives of three immigrants are linked forever. Robert is the one who hit the other car. He is from Brazil and is teaching at a local university. The person driving the car that was struck is Evelyn Ortega, a young undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. Robert gives Evelyn his card with his home address. Later that evening she arrives at his house upset. She stutters and English is not her first language, so he calls the woman who lives in the basement, Lucia, to come up and help him decipher what Evelyn is trying to say. Lucia is a lecturer at his university and she is from Chile. Robert and Lucia decide to help Evelyn with her problem. Along with solving the problem in New York, we learn about their lives growing up in Guatemala, Chile and Brazil. We learn why they immigrated. The story is simply mesmerizing.

 

 

Tell Tale

Jeffrey Archer is the author of the short story collection known as Tell Tale. Two of the stories in this collection were based on a Reader's Digest request to write a story with exactly 100 words in an hour or less. He did a good job on those two stories. A common theme among the stories is irony. I don't want to give away any spoilers. In one story a teacher in England, who visited Dachau as a child, brings his class on the same trip and learns a horrifying fact about his grandfather. In another story a police detective investigates a murder of a mayor in a nearby Italian town. All the people in the town confess to murdering this mayor. It isn't until he gives up the investigation that he learns who actually killed the mayor. These are all good stories. This is a book worth reading.

 

 

The Weird Sisters

Eleanor Brown is an award winning author who wrote The Weird Sisters. Their father is a professor at a college specializing in Shakespeare. He names his three daughters after characters in Shakespeare writings. They live in a college town an hour from New York City. Rose, the eldest daughter, lives in her home town. When she finds out her mother has breast cancer she moves into her family home. Gradually all the daughters move back home. Much of the book is spent analyzing why they left or stayed in their hometown. More time is spent exploring their petty jealousies. I enjoyed the book but I'm not sure I would any of those women as a sister.

 

 

A Clergyman's Daughter

I was in the mood to reread 1984 by George Orwell. So I looked at my library and didn't find that but I did find The Clergyman's Daughter. This book is old, discolored and tattered. This book is so old it still has that envelope with dates indicating when the book was borrowed. October 2, 1982 was the oldest date but it was published in 1935. The story is about a young woman working relentlessly to help her father with his church and his meals. He doesn't appreciate a single thing he does. He is stingy with money. At one time he had a bit of money but gradually lost it by making poor investments. He is grouchy and rude to his parishioners. His daughter, Dorothy, is forever trying to smooth his rough edges.  She is up past midnight working to make costumes for a church play when suddenly she goes missing. A vile woman in the neighborhood who is always telling evil stories about people in the village makes up a story that Dorothy was seen leaving town with a local bachelor who had three bastard children. This isn't true but it created a huge scandal. The clergyman angrily refused to talk to the press so only the false story was in the newspapers. Actually she lost her memory. She was out on the road far from town when she met 3 other people. Together they applied for jobs picking hops. When the hop picking season ended her memory returned. With her wages she wrote letters to her father begging for money to return home. He refused to respond. Eventually she ended up homeless and begging in Trafalgar Square. Eventually she was found my her father's cousin and taken in to work at a school where she was treated unfairly. Eventually a man from  her village arrived. The evil woman who told lies was sued for libel by a banker in town. The evil woman left town. Dorothy returned home to resume her duties with her father. Life for women in the 1800's was tough.

 

 

The Restless Wave

John McCain and Mark Salter are the authors of The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations. The book is about the last ten years of his life when he was working in the Senate and running for President against Barack Obama. I don't agree with everything he says politically. I really admired him for standing up to Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld against the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. Enhanced interrogation techniques is a euphemism for torture. Keeping people awake until they hallucinate, keeping them cold or naked, water boarding, and making them keep their bodies in painful positions is torture. He got a lot of push back for his opinion. He was told he would have blood on his hands. Another thing I  liked about him is that he fought for democracy and for human rights. Also, he is willing to admit when he has made a mistake.

 

  

Mighty Red

I found another book written by one of my favorite authors, Louise Erdrich. This one is called The Mighty Red. The story takes place in a North Dakota town along the Red River. This is sugar beet country. One of the main characters is Crystal. During sugar beet season in the fall, the drives semi-trucks of sugar beets to the plant. She has a daughter just graduating from high school named Kismet. The story is about a love triangle with Kismet, Gary (a beet farmer's son), and Hugh (a nerdy home schooled dreamer). The story is also about the soil degradation due to the chemicals used on beet fields. Besides degrading the rich North Dakota soil the chemicals are harmful to bugs, birds, and humans. I totally loved this book.

 

 

 

  

Love Forms

Love Forms is a novel written by Claire Adams. Most of the novel takes place on the island of Trinidad. Later we go on to Venezuela and the United Kingdom.  I enjoyed reading the descriptions of Trinidad and Venezuela. The author wrote lovingly about the towns, big and small, and the beaches and the hills and the roads. The story was sad. Dawn, a sixteen year old girl in Trinidad is the best swimmer among her friends. Her family is wealthier than others and because of that she has few friends. Then comes the daughter of a traveling businessman and suddenly she has a friend. They attend the Mardi Gras parade together. Dawn takes a tourist to the beach to impress her friend. Later, finding out she is pregnant, she is shamed by her parents and her two elder brothers. Her father arranges an illegal trip to Venezuela to live with the nuns until the baby is born. He doesn't share how the journey will go so she is scared as she gets into various cars with strange men. She has to wear a black pillow case over her head in the boat on the way to Venezuela so that officials won't see her teeth or the shine of her eyeballs in the dark. Later, as an adult, she works as a physician in London while caring for her two sons. Once her marriage fails she decides to try and find her daughter. The author does a better job with descriptions of the land than the descriptions of the relationships between people. 

 

 

Bats

 Tonight the Winona bird club had a meeting. Our speaker is a member of the Wisconsin Bat Ambassadors program. She gave an interesting and enthusiastic talk about the bats in Wisconsin which are the same eight species that we have in Minnesota. Four of our bats dwell in caves in the winter and they migrate. Living communally like that makes them more susceptible to disease. The other four species dwell in trees or rock walls. They like to get under the bark or between the stones. She showed us videos of bats using echolocation to find moths at night. The closer they get to the moth the faster they make the echolocation noise. This noise is undetectable to the human ear but it can be heard with an echolocation detection device. Also, the bats don't put the food directly into their mouths. They have a flap of skin between their feet called a uropatagian. Bats use this skin to catch moths or mosquitoes and put them into their mouth. The uropatagian is also used to hold baby bats while they nurse. Bats are very important to our ecosystems.

 

 

Buzz Sting Bite

 I read Buzz Sting Bite which was written by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson. She is an entomologist living in Norway. She references Norway many times but she also references the United States. To me it felt like she aimed this book at readers from the United States. Her daughter did the chapter illustrations. The book gives an enormous amount of facts but they are written in an entertaining manner. She writes about insects that have ears on their knees, eyes on their penises, and tongues under their feet. I probably won't remember most of what I read but I enjoyed reading it.

 

 

Nosireebob

The snow in Winona is nearly gone except for on the north side of buildings or walls. The sun is warm enough to melt the ice from the concrete. Yet it's still cold enough to keep a shelf of ice above the concrete. One of my all time favorite things to do is to step on that ice shelf and listen to it crack. The sound is SO SATISFYING!

But now I am elderly. I can't afford to fall on concrete. I try to avoid ice. Does that stop me from cracking the ice on the sidewalk? Nosireebob!

 

How Democracies Die

 I have been attending a class every other week at the university on war and peace. I didn't sign up nor pay for the class but I got an email saying the general public was welcome. Initially I wanted to go in order to help myself process the immigrant crisis in our state. Even in Winona three Hmong employees were hauled away. Last week we discussed the situation in Iran and Gaza. One of the people in the group was a professor of physics. He clearly explained how Uranium 235 can be enriched to Uranium 238. The United States enriched Uranium with long underground tunnels in Tennessee. The Uranium is propelled through the pipe slowly and the enriched Uranium gets distilled by going through the long tunnels many times and floating to the top of the pipe. The other way to enrich Uranium is through specially made centrifuges which are hard to come by. Another person in the class said that anytime a country sends that many aircraft carriers and battle ships to an area war is surely to follow. He was right. Earlier in the class a person recommended the book written by Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt called How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. My audio book was 8.5 hours long. These two authors have spent several decades studying the governments around the world and doing research on authoritarianism. They have studied Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Chile, Hungary, Turkey and Russia.  Years ago democracies died with a military coup. This is not the case in modern times. Democracies die a slow death. Law and the constitution is attacked. Voting rights are attacked. Legitimacy of elections are attacked. Legitimacy of political opponents are attacked. Violence is tolerated or encouraged. Civil liberties are attacked. In the years before and after the Civil War, mutual toleration was gone. Mutual toleration is the belief that although you disagree with your political opponents are decent, patriotic, and law-abiding citizens. These days it feels like some of us have lost mutual toleration. The arguments made in this book are convincing and depressing. It was published in January, 2018.