The Nature of Things

Okay, I think I'm beginning to get it. Tana French's psychological thrillers all feature damaged characters at their core. Their haunting, unforgettable stories are revealed to the reader slowly, tantalizingly. At the beginning of the books, things seem to move at a glacial pace as we get our footing. Then, all of a sudden, we are hurled into warp speed and struggling to keep our bearings as French plays mind games with us and toys with our expectations. Delicious! There's another thing that is becoming clear about French's method as well. Each book, after In the Woods , has a different detective at its center, but, in each case, we have met that detective before, usually in the previous book. Broken Harbor has Michael "Scorcher" Kennedy as its narrator and main character, but I had to read the publisher's synopsis of the book to be reminded that Scorcher appeared as a colleague of Undercover Detective Frank Mackey in the last book, Faithful Place . Frank...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent American feminist, sociologist and writer of the late 19th and early 20th century. She wrote poetry, nonfiction, and short stories, the most famous of which, The Yellow Wallpaper , is the story of a woman who suffers from mental illness and is locked in a room by her husband, supposedly for the sake of her health. The room featured a revolting yellow wallpaper with which the woman became obsessed. The story was based in part on Gilman's own experience with a bout of severe postpartum depression.  I found this poem of hers last week on a poetry website that celebrated women poets in honor of Women's History Month. I found it very meaningful for the times in which we live, particularly that third stanza: The one first duty of all human life  Is to promote the progress of the world  In righteousness, in wisdom, truth and love;  And you ignore it, hidden in your homes,  Content to keep them in uncertain peace,  Content t...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Roseate Spoonbills enjoying the late winter sun. *~*~*~* The current president is proposing a cut in the EPA's budget of 40% from roughly $510 million to $290 million. Moreover, he also intends to cut the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , the government's premier climate science agency, by about 17%. Many scientists warn that these cuts pose a threat to public safety as well as hurting academic and research programs. But we know what this administration thinks about the opinions of scientists. *~*~*~* Scott Pruitt, the new head of the EPA, this week flatly denied that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming . Scientists have understood for more than a century that CO2 traps heat, creating a greenhouse effect that causes the planet to get hotter. *~*~*~* Not only does Pruitt deny that carbon dioxide plays a role in global warming, he is staffing his agency with ...

Just because it's Friday and I love this picture.

Richard Russo's fictional North Bath is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, a town where luck ran out a hundred years before when the springs that made it a popular spa town dried up. The town has been dying a slow death since then. It seems that nothing good ever happens there. We visit the town in the fall of 1984. Ronald Reagan is president but his "Morning in America" certainly has not dawned in North Bath.  Nevertheless, there is hope on the horizon in the form of a theme park called the Ultimate Escape that may be built near the town, breathing in some much-needed life.  The main booster of this putative theme park is the local banker Clive Peoples, Jr., perhaps the only purely unlikable character in this novel featuring smart-alecky, low-key characters. Clive has a mother, eighty-year-old widow Beryl Peoples, a retired teacher who lives in one of North Bath's ancient houses, "aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been ...

Last week, I wrote a blog post about the dangers of invasive species and listed several species of plants that may be available at your local garden center but that you should steer clear of, never adding them to your own garden. Conventional wisdom among gardeners for a few years now has been that we should use native plants in our gardens and that we should be attempting to restore our ecosystems to their pristine state that existed before human interference. This is the view still held by most gardeners that I know. But there is another point of view, one that holds that introduced species are not necessarily so bad and that sometimes the introduction of exotic species can actually benefit natives. That view is expounded in a book that was published in 2011 called Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World . The author, Emma Marris, argues that we live in a "post-wild" world where global warming and the ecological disturbance, as the world adapts to human d...

This is a famous poem, longer than the ones I usually feature here and with many lines that are often quoted in various contexts. I've always liked it.  I find country cemeteries places of bittersweet memories and of peace. Most of my relatives who have left this life are buried in one of them. and I'm often reminded of many of the lines in this poem when I visit them there. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,            The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,  The plowman homeward plods his weary way,           And leaves the world to darkness and to me.  Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,           And all the air a solemn stillness holds,  Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,          ...