Two reviews

I've fallen a bit behind on reviewing the books that I've read. I blame it all on Thanksgiving. In an effort to catch up, here are reviews of two books that I've read recently from the Thursday Murder Club series.

The Man Who Died Twice

by Richard Osman

This is the second book in the series and it brings us once again the four septuagenarians whose hobby is solving murders. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron join together to find a murderer when Elizabeth, a former spy, receives a letter from an old colleague asking for her help. His life is being threatened by a violent mobster over his involvement with some stolen diamonds.

These four are not your ordinary septuagenarians. They have particularly interesting backgrounds and skill sets. In addition to Elizabeth, the former spy, there is Joyce, the retired nurse who has an eccentric and quirky personality; Ron, the retired labor organizer who is very interested in politics and loves talking about it; and Ibrahim, the introverted psychiatrist who is blessed (or cursed) with a photographic memory.

In addition to the matter of the stolen diamonds, we have a second mystery involving Ibrahim who was mugged right outside the police station. The three other members of the Thursday Murder Club get to work assisting the police in their inquiries in trying to find the assailant. Soon the dead bodies begin to pile up but we can be sure with the Thursday Murder Club on the job all will be resolved and all the culprits identified and locked up.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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The Bullet That Missed

by Richard Osman 

The Coopers Chase Retirement Village where all the members of the Thursday Murder Club reside seems to be a very dangerous place. Bodies are dropping like flies and none of them are dropping from old age or natural causes. 

The Thursday Murder Club continues its hobby of investigating and solving cold murder cases, but in addition to those cold cases, new bodies keep turning up. Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce, and Ibrahim hardly have time to look into those old cases because they are kept busy helping their police friends, Donna De Freitas and Chris Hudson, to investigate the new murders. In addition, someone is threatening Elizabeth and the sleuths need to discover who and stop whoever it is.

There's quite a lot going on in this one involving a fraud and money laundering scheme in addition to suicide and/or murder. But trust the "Fab Four" to be able to sort it all out and root out the evil mind behind it all.

I quite like the members of the Thursday Murder Club and I am looking forward to reading more in the series. I think the series could well become one of my favorite cozy reads. 

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Dust of Snow by Robert Frost

Here's a very short poem by Robert Frost that succinctly explains how a relationship with Nature can affect us positively.

Dust of Snow

by Robert Frost

The way a crow 

Shook down on me

The dust of snow 

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Thanksgiving break

 "This Week in Birds" is taking a Thanksgiving break and will return next week. Thank you to my faithful readers for your patience.

Poetry Sunday: A List of Praises by Anne Porter

This is longer than the poems that I usually feature here, but then there is quite a lot to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

A List of Praises

• 

by Anne Porter

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath, 
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes, 
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry 
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away 
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods, 
At night give praise with starry silences. 

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls 
And the rattle and flap of sails 
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor. 
Give praise with the humpback whales, 
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.
 
Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas, 
Give praise with hum of bees, 
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over. 

Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle 
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.
 
Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning 
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river, 
Wilderness river. 

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities, 
Far even from the towns, 
With piercing innocence 
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes 
And four notes only. 

Give praise with water, 
With storms of rain and thunder 
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar 
That fills the seaside villages, 
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains 

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

This week in birds - #571

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Next week is Thanksgiving and these guys should be on the alert! These Wild Turkeys were photographed in a field near Anahuac, Texas.

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Climate and climate change are a big part of the environmental news this week. A new report documented the toll of climate disasters but also had a bit of good news. Trees are our allies in the fight against climate change but can't do the job all on their own. The city of Phoenix offers a prime example of why we must win this fight. And now a strong El Niño waits in the wings.

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We think of the Amazon as being a lush green area but an extended drought is changing that.

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At a climate summit in Paris, French President Macron pledged a billion Euros to research the melting ice caps. (But do we really need a billion Euros to tell us why the ice caps are melting?)

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Plastic waste is a major environmental problem and it is spiraling out of control across Africa. Countries met in Kenya this week to try to come up with a global plastic pollution treaty. 

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An expedition in New Guinea has turned up a mammal that had been thought to be extinct. And in California, another kind of mammal, wolves, are returning to areas where they had been absent for nearly 150 years.

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In Iceland, people are waiting for and expecting a volcanic eruption. 

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The orcas are mad and some would say they have plenty to be mad about.

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Since there was no TWIB post last week, we have a bonanza of "Birds of the Week."

This is the Red-cockaded Woodpecker which I have extremely fond memories of first seeing in woods near where I live several years ago. It was Bird of the Week last week.

And this is the Wedge-tailed Shearwater, an oceanic species, which is Bird of the Week for this week.

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For now, it is still the Wilson's Warbler, named for Scottish ornithologist Alexander Wilson, but the American Ornithological Society will no longer name birds for humans and will be renaming those that currently are burdened with such monikers.

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The EU lawmakers and member states have reached an agreement intended to restore and protect Nature. 

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When a pond turns pink, there's a good chance that something is out of balance.

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In Minnesota, it's the beavers vs. the wolves. But it's not an athletic contest; it's a real-life Nature drama.

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In California, goats and sheep have been enlisted in the fight against wildfires.

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Viagra for crocodiles? It seems that helicopters do the trick!

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A great way to help birds get through winter is to plant native berries in your yard.

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A Georgia woman got quite a surprise when she discovered that a three-foot tegu lizard had taken up residence under her porch.

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When it comes to oil and gas production regulation, Texas is still pretty much the wild, wild unregulated West.

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Human activities are largely the cause of extreme droughts in the Middle East.

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Plans are being drafted to return grizzly bears to Washington's North Cascades.

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Seed-sowing drones could be an important tool in replanting ravaged landscapes. 

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Here are some amazing wildlife pictures from the 2023 Nature Conservancy photo contest.

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Even within members of a particular bird species, there are variations of color and color patterns.

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Wildfires don't just affect forests; grassland and shrubland fires are a major wildfire risk.

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Texas recently experienced its fourth-strongest earthquake. (I think I must have slept through it.)

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Parakeets in Europe? Thanks to the release of a small number of the birds in the 1970s, that is now a thing. They have thrived and increased there.

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What is now North Dakota was once undersea and a giant mosasaur prowled its waters.

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The Chilean Desert known as Atacama is the world's driest desert.

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Fiona, Britain's "loneliest sheep," has finally been rescued after two years at the foot of a Scottish cliff.

Poetry Sunday: The Killdeer Chick by Richard Owen

I came across this poem a few days ago and it reminded me of several encounters I've had with Killdeer over the years. I am very familiar with their desperate act of dragging the seemingly broken wing to lure me to follow. And I follow, pretending I never saw their two precious chicks hiding there in the grass.

The Kildeer Chick 

by Richard Owen

Each time we drive our grassy road, the kildeer tries 

To lead us from her nearby nest. She drags her wing 

And calls. She's easy prey, we could not resist 

If we were fox or badger. As it is, 

We are a monstrous iron thing, a truck 

That goes its way unthinking, unaware.

I saw a movement and I stopped, got out. Beside the wheel 

A tiny bit of fluff, so close it should be crushed.

I picked it up, and it was live in my hands, 

I put it down. It ran towards mother's desperate cries.

A tiny bit of grace it was. For once,

The beauty of the world 

Was spared from us.

Veterans' Day

The blog is taking a holiday in honor of all of those who have served, including my own dear hubby! Happy Veterans Day. You've earned it. 

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff: A review

Lauren Groff's latest gives us the story of a young servant girl who journeys with her mistress and the mistress's second husband from England to America in the 17th century. The girl's name is a bit of a mystery. She is sometimes referred to as Lamentations and sometimes called Zed. She just refers to herself as Girl.

On the trip from England, the girl meets and learns to care for a Dutch glassblower who is gentle and kind but she becomes separated from him and has only his memory to comfort her in her perilous life.

The girl's duties mostly involve caring for her mistress's severely disabled daughter, Bess. They arrive in Jamestown, Virginia, and we see them there in the extremely harsh winter of 1610. It is a time of starvation and sickness with people dying all around them. This teenage orphan servant girl makes the momentous decision to flee into the wilds.

She gathers the few items that she can and runs away. She has only her innate instincts to guide her, but her plan is to try to reach French-controlled territory and find a fur trader who will marry her and take her to France. So she heads north, hoping to reach Canada. "If I stop I will die," she tells herself, and she pushes on almost beyond endurance.

She has distant sightings of Powhatan and Piscataway people but doesn't risk approaching them. She sees monstrous bears and manages to stay out of their way. She also manages to elude a sadistic and insane Jesuit priest who haunts her passage through the land. 

Finding enough food is always a problem. She is always hungry and to stave off her hunger pains she eats grubs, mud, and whatever she can lay her hands on. 

Though completely uneducated, she is a clever and ingenious girl and she does have a lot of knowledge of the natural world which stands her in good stead on her journey. Every day is a challenge just to stay alive and she must call upon every bit of knowledge and instinct she has to meet that challenge.

This was a hard one for me to read because I identified strongly with the girl in her struggles. I felt her pain and her terror in her fight to make it through one more day. Lauren Groff has managed to deliver us a visceral reading experience about the strength of the human spirit and the will to survive. This is her fifth novel. I think she has the hang of it now.

 

Don't forget!

 

Poetry Sunday: Song for Autumn by Mary Oliver

We are now well into autumn, although you might not be able to tell it by a visit to my yard. But, in fact, the leaves are beginning to fall from those trees that lose their leaves. The big live oaks in our front yard never give theirs up but the Shumard red oak is beginning to look a bit bare, as are some of the backyard trees. And many of the other plants in the yard are beginning to wind down their season and get ready to go to sleep for the winter. I wonder if we'll have a real winter this year. We should get the firewood ready, just in case. 

Song for Autumn

by Mary Oliver

In the deep fall
don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come – six, a dozen – to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

This week in birds - #570

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Not a bird but a flier of a different kind. In past years, Monarch butterflies like this one I photographed in my backyard five years ago would be plentiful in that backyard in late October and November as they passed through on the way to their winter in Mexico. This year, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of Monarchs I've seen. Likewise their cousins, the Queens. Their absence is very disturbing. 

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Thirty-five years ago scientist James Hansen warned us about the warming of our planet. Now he's warning us again. Maybe we should listen this time. 

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Hansen would definitely warn us about the folly of failing to protect our precious wetlands.

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Two new books display the amazing artistry of birders in earlier centuries.

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In the waters off the Galapagos Islands, two previously unknown coral reefs have been discovered.

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In a changing climate, it may benefit the California redwoods to move. Some humans are helping to do just that. 

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In New Zealand, the Maori community is already feeling the adverse effects of climate change.

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Here's a report of birds seen in autumn in the Yolo Bypass in California's Sacramento Valley.

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It takes no great powers of observation to note that plants follow the sun in its course through our skies each day, but how exactly do they do it?

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The American Ornithological Society has announced that it will be changing the names of North American birds that have honored slavers and racists and giving them names that will instead describe their appearance or other characteristics. 

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This little cutie is the Cundinamarca Antipitta of the highland cloud forests of South America and it is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week.

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A car crash caused by a tarantula crossing the road? Only in California!

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Two American Flamingos blown off course by Hurricane Idalia and ending up in Chincoteague, Virginia, have been causing quite a stir among birders in the area and also out of the area as they travel there to get a glimpse of them.

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Twenty-one species were recently declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the news barely got a mention in the national press.

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Here are some amazing pictures from The Guardian's "The week in wildlife."

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The Chumash people of California are working to preserve the coastline there that is an integral part of their tribal culture.

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Here are some beautiful pictures of Barn Swallows in flight.

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The 500-year-old mummy of an Incan girl that was discovered in 1995 now has a face that has been created by researchers.

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There's a new theory that dust stirred up by the impact of the asteroid that hit Earth over 66 million years ago may have ultimately led to the doom of dinosaurs. (Except for those winged dinosaurs we call birds, of course.)

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The annual curse of choking pollution of the air has returned to New Delhi.

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A Barred Owl that got trapped in a sculpture at the National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden has been rehabbed and released.

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Far out in space, a NASA spacecraft has discovered an asteroid that is orbited by its own tiny "moon."

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A Wild Turkey continues to evade capture and cause traffic problems in West Orange, New Jersey.

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A writer details the adventure of raising an orphaned owl and what he learned from it.

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And then there is the story of the injured American Kestrel that lost the ability to fly and gained a new career as an artist.

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We used to see stories every year of cats running onto baseball fields during games. (I am quite sure the animals didn't do it of their own accord.) But now comes a story of an opossum that ran onto the field during a football game and didn't want to leave. 

Be Mine by Richard Ford: A review

Here's Frank Bascombe come to take us on a road trip once again. Since his creator, Richard Ford, first introduced him to us almost forty years ago, Frank has taken us on several holiday trips, most notably in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day.

Once again, Frank is taking a road trip with his son Paul who is now 47 and suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease). Frank and Paul refer to it as Al's, like some neighborhood bar. Frank is in his 70s and dealing with all the problems that come with an aging body, while also trying to serve as caretaker to his son.

So, how exactly is Frank accomplishing that? Well, his latest idea is to hit the road with Paul and take him to Mount Rushmore on a Valentine's Day trip. Paul has been in an experimental protocol for treating ALS at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Frank collects him and they head west. 

The topics of conversation between the two men while traveling range from observations about the midwestern landscape they are traversing to matters of life and death itself. Frank's health has been problematic as well. He's recovered from prostate cancer and now he just wants to be happy "before the gray curtain comes down." 

There's a certain desperation to Frank's personality that has been less noticeable (at least to me) in the previous four books in this series. As his body grows older, weaker, and more uncomfortable to live in, he senses that time is running out for him as well as for his son. It's an awareness that many of us, especially those of us of a certain age, can easily relate to. I think Richard Ford, who was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, may perceive that awareness quite personally, too, and perhaps that is why he is able to write about it so feelingly.

Previous reviews in this series:

The Sportswriter

Independence Day

The Lay of the Land

Let Me Be Frank With You