Of Time and Turtles - Sy Montgomery

 Sub-title: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

This was a lovely two-themed story.  The primary tale is about rescuing and caring for turtles - turtles of all kinds and all sizes, rescued from roadways and eroding beaches and neglectful owners.  Parallel to this is a reflective account of adopting a slower, more deliberate pace—what the author refers to as living "on turtle time"—during the challenging years of the pandemic.  It's a gentle, contemplative read that made me recall those two years of the pandemic that I'd blocked from my mind like many of us seem to have done. 

From Wikipedia: In the United States, there have been 103,436,829[3] confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 1,215,005[3] confirmed deaths, the most of any country, and the 17th highest per capita worldwide

The book blends science, memoir, and philosophy and includes artwork and photographs that bring the turtles to life. This compassionate portrait of injured turtles and their dedicated rescuers invites readers to slow down and immerse themselves in "turtle time," providing a fresh perspective on time and healing.

Quotes:

"...the paradox of the 2020 pandemic, a year so momentous also seems, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.  Facing the uncertainties of a mysterious killer virus, political chaos, environmental catastrophe and racial unrest creates a state of chronic stress so severe, it interferes with the brain's ability to form memories- a brain fog."

"To be able to help a cherished elder incites a different kind of satisfaction. ... to aid an old one, in it's fulfillment, is a benediction."

"Humans.. are notoriously bad at correctly perceiving the passage of time. Most people can accurately  keep track of time for only 5 seconds. Signals from the feet take longer to reach the brain than signals from the lips.  We are all, therefore, living slightly in the past."

Published: 2023  Read: February 2025  Genre: Science 

The Last American Man - Elizabeth Gilbert

I've had this book on my TBR for a few years because I'd read the author's book "Eat, Pray, Love"  back in 2007 and in January this year I read her book of short stories , so this completes her writing for me.  

This is the story of Eustace Conway, a man she describes as "the last American Man".  She glorifies his self-sufficient, back to nature ethic and survivalist skills from the time he was a child up until his private acreage on Turtle Island in North Carolina where he tries to teach others to get back to Nature.  He's stubbornly independent and can't understand why he can't find the perfect mate in life, burning through numerous relationships. At the root of his story is a domineering, unforgiving, controlling father whose approval he'll never obtain.  And that's the sad ending to the tale - the last American male is broken, disheartened and unloved. 

Postscript: I looked up Eustace on the internet and found he had was on the Mountain Men TV show so he eventually made lemonade out of lemons.

Published: 2002  Read: August 2024  Genre: Biography

Theodore Roosevelt for Nature Lovers - ed. Mark Dawidziak

Sub-title: Adventures with America's Great Outdoorsman

A short book with snippets and stories about living and loving being in the outdoors from the twenty-sixth president. 

One of the things I love about genealogy his how it leads me to research the historical context of my ancestors' lives.  T.R. was born in 1859 and died in January of 1919.  He was a child during the Civil War, fought in the Spanish-American War and died shortly after the end of WWI.  For my family, he was a peer of my great-grandparents and a source of childhood stories for my grandparents.  They saw the cartoons of him portrayed as a lion or a bear in the newspapers and were the first generations to have Teddy bears.

I enjoyed reading this book for the background on his love of the outdoors that lead to him becoming an avid conservationists and while president, establishing some of the first national parks.  So much good reading in a small package!

Published: 2017   Read: March 2018  Genre: biography

The Wave - Susan Casey

An adventure reporter follows the men who seek out the largest waves in the world to surf them.  On the way she explains the science of large waves and the havoc they have reeked on ships and human beings over time.  Got me to watch the videos of the surfers and made me a little leery of ocean travel!

Published: 2010      Read: August 2017   Genre: Non-fiction, adventure

H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald

This is the best book I have read in a long, long time.  It's a memoir of an English woman studying at Cambridge.  Her father dies suddenly and to deal with her grief, she decides to train a goshawk, a large predatory bird.  She was fascinated with birds from an early age and had become a falconer and trained other hunting birds in the past.  The goshawk is considered difficult to train and she wanted a challenge.  She interweaves the writings on the subject of training a goshawk by the author of The Once and Future King, T. H. White with her journey through her grief accompanied by the goshawk.  
Her book is part memoir, part natural history lesson, part biography.  It sounds strange and odd and even unappealing.  Yet the way she describes the world after losing her father, her relationship with the goshawk, who she names "Mabel", and her analysis of T.H.White's book, The Goshawk, are remarkably rich fascinating and moving.

Some quotes I marked that illustrate her power of description.

"I thought about the book [The Goshawk] cautiously, ran my feelings over it the way you feel for a hurting tooth with your tongue."

"The hawk is on my fist.  Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket..."

[On her child-age reaction to reading a critical review of The Goshawk and T.H.White by the falconers' community]

"I was on the right side, was allowed to dislike this grown-up [the author] and consider him a fool.  It's painful to recall my relief on reading this [the review], founded as it was on a desperate misunderstanding about the size of the world.  I took comfort in the blithe superiority that is the refuge of the small."

"Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky.  How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them.  Once, twice.  Perhaps never again."

She isolates herself from other people and submerges in the hawk's world.  She is suffering and wants to be more hawk-like:  aloof, unmovable, independent.

" 'We are outsiders now, Mabel,' I say, and the thought is not unpleasant.  But I feel ashamed of my nation's reticence.  Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn't entirely normal."

She begins to realize she is slipping, depressed, unable to shake her sadness.

"We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost."

As she gets help and begins to see a way forward she reflects:

"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things.  And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all.  You see that life will become a thing made of holes.  Absences.  Losses.  Things that were there and are no longer.  And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are."

The hawk has taught her things:

"Of all the lessons I've learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there - rock and trees and ...all the things that ...fly.  They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own view of the world.  In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not."

A wonderfully written, different and daring book.

Published: 2014  Read August 2015  Genre: Memoir

ISBN: 9 780802 12341