I loved reading The Boys in the Boat over the summer. Impossible doings, like helping build a dam by dangling over and down a cliff face, and using a hammer while you hanging there, without sending yourself into an out-and-back ride ending with a smash, are legendary, and a legend is something that you share, [...]
Category: books
Musings on the Biosphere
I went to college in a warm, flat, southern place, so I never gave much thought to a place like Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. It is perched above the Connecticut River, but owns part of a mountain. Not flat. I stumbled over the alumni website and read articles about the Biosphere project and climbing [...]
Public health in the 1920’s
I thought about putting hookworm in the title and decided that was a bad idea. I’ve been wandering through Project Gutenberg and found a story that I’m reading very slowly. It’s about a public health campaign I never heard of before, carried out with Rockefeller foundation money, in the tropics in the 1920’s. A Yankee [...]
Apples, apples, apples
When I was little my mom made applesauce out of Granny Smith apples. She occasionally made pie, probably also Granny Smith, but I was ignorant and didn’t like apple pie so I didn’t pay attention. Cherry pie was a different story and I lobbied hard for it. I also suspect that no-one was too worried [...]
Descriptive writing and arthritis
Arthritis is a metaphor for … something. Or maybe responses to it are the metaphor? I’ve been rereading, or at least skimming, books by Elizabeth Goudge, an English writer who died in 1974. One of her lesser known works is The Rosemary Tree. I was deliberately looking for it because I remembered the description of [...]
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