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Review: A Radiant Curve

Posted by on 19 Nov 2008 at 5:36 pm under Nature, Poetry

A Radiant Curve
Poems and Stories
by Luci Tapahonso
University of Arizona Press, 2008

Each evening, the mountains surrounding us glow gold,
then pink, then purple that deepens into soft black.
The mountains know such evenings will be only memories decades from now.
Memories that will bring the sudden, light ache of waiting tears
and a gentle pang to the depths of one’s chest.
The mountains remember the tenderness with which they were created.
They remember the way the Holy Ones sang with such beauty,
it compelled them to rise out of the flat desert.

The lyric spirit of the Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah) infuses the poems and stories of this collection by Diné poet and literature professor Luci Tap

ahonso. It whistles beneath memories of horse rides and burials, ancient ceremonies and new beginnings. It lingers in the voice that reads on the accompanying audio CD.

Tapahonso evokes this spirit from a solitary dove “whose delicate coos are the rhythmic pauses of desert mornings,” and from the “sweet scent of refreshed creosote” and “skies of brilliant teal.” Navajo words and phrases mingle with her English verse and prose, offering brief glimpses of prayers and rituals and sacred ways of thinking. Despite its many moments of despair and melancholy, life’s mysteries and meanings continually express themselves in the natural world.

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Review: More Hold’em Wisdom for all Players

Posted by on 04 Nov 2008 at 10:24 pm under Games

More Hold’em Wisdom for all Players
by Daniel Negreanu
Cardoza, 2008

The world’s hottest poker player (aka Kid Poker) reprises his Hold’em Wisdom for all Players , published just a year ago, with this collection of Texas Hold’em strategy tips for players of all levels.

A book of advice on the most popular poker game in the casinos of North America and Europe by its most successful practitioner obviously enjoys a wide audience. This one offers suggested approaches divided into four parts: tournament strategies, adjusting to your opponents, betting and bluffing effectively, and how to think like a pro.

Negreanu knows the percentages of his game and how to use them to his advantage. In discussing “How Much to Bet,” for instance, he explains that a smaller bet can sometimes get a play more “bang for his buck” than a larger one.

“When you actually have a good hand and want your opponents to play with weaker hands, they’ll be more likely to call a bet of one-half the pot than a full pot-sized bet. If you have a monster hand and are looking for action, betting half the pot will get you a few more loose calls, and that’s exactly what you want.”

Other tips in the book cover:

The Stop-and-Go Play
When to be Aggressive in Tournament Play
Kamikaze All-In Plays
Dummy It Down
Coming Over the Top
Five Ways to Spot a Bluff
Limping in with Pocket Aces
Why Professionals Hate to Play A-Q

For beginners or intermediate players, Negreanu’s wisdom bits will certainly help their game. More advanced players, however, may find his revelations familiar.

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Review: The Montana Gardener’s Companion

Posted by on 02 Nov 2008 at 9:19 am under Gardening

The Montana Gardener’s Companion
An Insider’s Guide to Gardening under the Big Sky
by Bob Gough and Cheryl Moore-Gough
Globe Pequot Press, 2007

No matter where you live in Montana, gardening is a challenge. The Big Sky Country, for all its virtues, is a tough place to grow crops or raise flowers. The fourth largest of the U.S. states, Montana encompasses a diverse assortment of soils, climates, pests and hydrologies and hardly any other gardening books specifically address the issues, conditions and choices common to Montana gardeners.

This book offers a primer on gardening as it is practiced successfully in Montana. The authors are veteran Big Sky gardeners and professional horticulturalists. Nowhere else will you find so much information specific to Montana’s gardens. In separate sections on lawns, fruit and vegetables, flowers, trees or native plants, this book identifies the best plants to grow and how to cultivate them successfully.

Refer to the opening section on “Firm Foundations” for advice on analyzing soils, adjusting to the local climate, and conserving water in this drought-prone state. Look to the back of the book for solutions to pests, weeds and diseases, and a glossary of unfamiliar terms.

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Review: Grand Canyon’s North Rim and Beyond

Posted by on 16 Oct 2008 at 3:46 pm under Guidebooks

Grand Canyon’s North Rim and Beyond
A Guide to the North Rim and the Arizona Strip
by Stewart Aitchison
Grand Canyon Association, 2008

“You’re probably on vacation and just want a little information about what you see as you tour the Grand Canyon’s North Rim and the Arizona Strip,” begins this slender guidebook to the lesser known side of the famous gorge.

Most visitors to Grand Canyon National Park, some 4 million per year, take the exit on Interstate 40 for a short drive to the South Rim for a brief gawk at the great chasm. Only about 10 percent of the park’s visitors come through the North Rim Entrance Station, despite its equally astounding views, natural beauty and uncrowded serenity. It takes more time and planning to take the North Rim approach, which makes this handy guide important.

What is typically thought of a the North Rim is the southern extension of the Kaibab Plateau. The name Kaibab is generally translated as “mountain lying down,” an apt description of the high plateau that is relatively flat on top. Kaibab is likely derived from the corruption of the Southern Paiute word Kaivavitsets, which refers to the Mountain Lying Down People (or Kaibab Paiute People). Early settlers usually called the plateau Buckskin Mountain, referring to the numerous mule deer living there.

Divided into sections based on the direction of a traveler’s approach (North, West, or East), the book alerts visitors to little-known attractions like Cape Final, the East Rim Viewpoint, and the Nampaweap Petroglyph Site. The text is complemented by natural history sidebars on the Kaibab Squirrel, the Northern Goshawk, and raptor migrations as well as profiles of important historical figures like John Wesley Powell, Eddie McKee and Burro Bill Price.

Guidebooks and How-to Titles

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Review: Like You’d Understand, Anyway

Posted by on 15 Oct 2008 at 1:56 pm under Fiction

Like You’d Understand, Anyway
by Jim Shepard
Vintage, 2008

The author of six novels and two previous collections of short stories, Jim Shepard, frequently writes about dysfunctional or unstable situations featuring preposterous narrators or characters.

In this collection of 11 short pieces of fiction, Shepard writes about an executioner in the French Revolution, a pair of Russian cosmonaut lovers, a survivor of the tidal wave that struck Alaska’s Lituya Bay in 1958, Aeschylus in middle age, and the brother of one of the turbine managers who worked at the Chernobyl Nuclear plant the night of the catastrophic meltdown.

In “Ancestral Legacies,” his protagonist is a Geman ornithologist sent on a preposterous mission to the Himilayas by the Nazi SS “to explore prehistoric and linguistic issues related to located the core of the Nordic-Aryan legacy,” which translates into a search for an early hominid, known locally as the yeti.

“When Alexander had conquered the entire known world — when he’d finally subjugated even the Indus Valley and pushed his phalanxes up the precipices and chasms of the Kashmir — he’s said to have sent a small expedition off to engage the yeti, maddeningly visible on the higher elevations. The expedition perished and the yeti eluded him.”

Shepard’s stories are similarly small expeditions with duplicitous motive venturing into poorly understood and mostly unsettled reaches of the human experience.

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Review: During Wind and Rain

Posted by on 13 Oct 2008 at 8:13 am under Agriculture, History

During Wind and Rain
by Margaret Bolsterli
University of Arkansas Press, 2008

There may be no richer soil in the world than the alluvial deposits of southeast Arkansas at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. Flat, swampy and somewhat dangerous, this is the place that Uriah Jones settled upon with his wife and son in 1849 and established a 200-acre farm that would sustain some portions of seven generations of descendants.

The author of this family’s history, Margaret Jones Bolsterli, is one of those descendants. An English professor, she has combined her scholarship and research with family records and lore to produce an imporant historical record that captures the spirit of an agrarian dream from the Civil War to the present.

“In this part of the world, where ownership of land is paramount, this farm has been a source of pride and stability from the very beginning,” Bolsterli writes. “It nourished our fantasies, for in the tales of those vanished generations lay a certain realm of magic that gave us, throughout the hard years, a well of romance to draw upon that gave us pride and confidence. It did not matter a whit that the magic and romance lay in the tales, not in the sweat and pain of reality. But it meant something that they had chopped that farm out of the wilderness, held on to it, and made it feed and clothe us through thick and thin.”

The tales included in this volume cover the family’s experience with the Civil War and Reconsruction, the Great Mississipi Flood of 1927, the 1930 drought, the Great Depression, and subsequent adaptations to mechanization, chemical inputs, and irrigation projects.

Motivated by dreams of “a crop so good that the memory of it can warm the drafty floors of adversity for the rest of one’s life,” the Jones family farm story resonates with historic poignancy and universal truths. Too bad more farm families haven’t had an English professor like Bolsterli in their line.

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Review: Wings in the Desert

Posted by on 08 Oct 2008 at 11:30 am under Biology, Birds, Nature, Wildlife

Wings in the Desert
A Folk Ornithology of the Northern Pimans
by Amadeo M. Rea
University of Arizona Press, 2007

This is a bird book based on the ornithological knowledge of an indigenous tribe of Uto-Aztecans who speak the Piman language and reside in the tierra caliente (hot lowlands) between the Gila River and the Rio Yaqui of Arizona and northwest Mexico. These people, who call themselves O’odham, have a keen ornithology of the birds native to their region.

Part One of the volume introduces the O’odham peoples (Northern Pimans) and their environment, discussing how they obtained their knowledge of the behaviors, mating habits, migratory patterns, and distribution of local bird species, and how that knowledge has been incorporated into their clegends, songs, art, religion, and ceremonies. Part Two is comprised of species accounts of each named Piman category of bird from the turkey vulture (fiui, fiuwi) to the house finch (bahidaj u’uhig), each illustrated with line sketches by the author and others.

Ethnobiologist Amadeo M. Rea bases his text on more than four decades of field and textual research along with hundreds of interviews with O’odham tribal members, He previously published Once a River: Bird Life and Habitat Changes on the Middle Gila, At the Desert’s Green Edge: An Ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima and Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans. Once a River focused on scientifically documenting the breeding, wintering, and migrant fauna of the Gila River Indian Reservation with some folk taxonomy and anecdotes included. This work explores at much greater depth the enthnographic role of birds in Piman society. “I think I have almost exhausted what is to be learned from River Pima regarding their local avifauna,” Rea points out, “but in no way is this book a definitive work on Tohono O’odham folk ornithology, although I have made some contacts and, I hope, captured the basic structure.”

Unlike most Piman communities, the O’odham culture survived as a functioning system into the 20th century, allowing this appreciative and humanistic documentation of their indigenous knowledge to be developed. One can only wonder at the volumes of information irretrievably lost.

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Review: The Culture of Calamity

Posted by on 05 Oct 2008 at 5:22 pm under History

The Culture of Calamity
Disaster and the Making of Modern America
by Kevin Rozario
University of Chicago Press, 2007

From a 1638 earthquake in New England to the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco and, finally, the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this study examines the curious role of disasters in the development of the United States.

Kevin Rozario, an assistant professor of American Studies, examines how our fascination with calamity has shaped our outlook and often inspired creative reactions.

“Disasters, and discourses of disaster, have played a long and influential role in the construction of American identities, power relations, economic systems, and environmental practices. It is conventional, and by no means inappropriate, to think of disasters in strictly negative terms, but calamities have also often presented opportunities. The most potent philosophies of the last two centuries have insisted that improvement or “progress” unavoidably moves through catastrophic rhythms of destruction and reconstruction, ruin and renewal.”

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Review: What the Nose Knows

Posted by on 02 Sep 2008 at 9:33 am under Science Writing

What the Nose Knows
The Science of Scent in Everyday Life
by Avery Gilbert
Crown, 2008

Self-defined “smell scientist” Avery Gilbert is a man trained in evolutionary science, animal behavior and neuroscience who has made a career out of noticing, defining and creating odors. His commercial work includes both perfumes and kitty litter. In this book, his first, he provides a refreshingly unique look at odor perception and how it expresses itself in our culture.

“Cooking and spicing are behavioral adaptations with biological consequences. They have shaped out face and made mouth-based smelling a defining human trait,” he points out in a chapter on how essential the sense of smell is to the experience of flavor in food.

In terms of sensory receptor genes, the human nose is relatively weak and our sense of smell has been degrading over time. But thanks to spicy cooking, this may be changing, according to Gilbert.

“In the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, genes for smell receptors, along with genes related to diet and metabolism, have been evolving faster than those in any other physiological system.

“In the recent evolutionary past we have evolved entire subfamilies of odor receptors not shared by the chimpanzee - our closest living relative. An intriguing possibility is that these new receptors are tuned to new smells - ones that only recently became important to human survival. It’s speculation on my part, but I’d bet these receptors pick up the nuances of grilled meat - salmon filets and mastodon steaks - along with the volatiles of fermentation: not only milk products, but alcoholic drinks from beer to wine. On a daily basis we season food to please our palate, but over the long run our palate is evolving to match our menu.”

An entertaining and informative read, Gilbert’s book progresses from the basics of olfactory science to intriguing explorations of what makes for a good smeller, why some smells are malodorous, how odors affect memory, and whether subliminal smells can manipulate behavior.

Covering everything from Smell-O-Vision to scent sensitivity, this fascinating text will appeal to casual and serious readers alike.

Reviewed by Michael Hofferber

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Review: Evil Genes

Posted by on 13 Aug 2008 at 8:18 am under Science Writing

Evil Genes
Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley

The product of the author’s quest to understand the nature of evil people, both the Machiavellian despots on the world stage and the tyrants in her own family, this book probes the pscyhological, sociological and genetic roots of chronically malevolent behavior.

A popular science text that melds scientific research with family history, Evil Genes probes scientific literature for evidence supporting her theory that evil in some people results from an inherent dysfunction.

Where do the roots of evil lie? In what genes is it manifest? Like autism, there is some evidence that a genetically based brain development disorder can lead to self-righteous behaviors in utter disregard for the welfare of others. But the genetics are far too complex and the influence of social, developmental and environmental factors too varied , to predict where or when evil or psychopathic beavior will occur.

Alternating between the story of her dysfunctional family and a wide-ranging look at evil characters — Hitler, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Slobodan Milosevic, among others — the author weaves her way through psychopathy, genetics, medical imaging, narcissism, evolution and genius in a quixotic pursuit of certainty and definition.

How can you tell if a public figure is potentially evil?

“The best an ordinary person can do is to try to lay aside his or her own ideological blinkers and look honestly at public figures. If a given individual seems most interested in villifying others, proceeds to characterize his own in-group as having been unduly victimized, is ruthlessly vindictive, and finally, is discovered to have cozy, self-serving financial deals, there are reasonable grounds to assume that a person is more than a little Machiavellian and that his or her leadership may be aimed more toward self than public service. Unfortunately, our own tendency, at least regarding leaders who purport to share our ideology, is to avoid looking too closely.”

Evil Genes concludes with textbook-style discussion questions (”For Pondering”) that recap the issues:

Do you think that you interact with people differently because of your own past experiences with the “successfully sinister?
Do you see Machiavellian traits in yourself? Are they healthy? How would you know?
Someday dictators will have access to technology to have themselves cloned, allowing for an endless procession of “mini-me’s.” What effect might this have on evil dictatorships of the future?

Go Out There

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