Friday Finds – August 13

Friday Finds is hosted at Should Be Reading.  This week I was browsing some publisher’s sites for upcoming releases and found some great looking non-fiction.  One of the books (The Lampshade) I almost didn’t add to my list or this post because it makes me feel ill every time I look at it.  However, I think it is an important topic, not to be avoided just because it makes me feel uncomfortable.

The Match: Complete Strangers, a Miracle Face Transplant, Two Lives Transformedby Susan Whitman Helfgot – Releases October 12, 2010.

The story of how two wildly disparate lives come together in a dramatic and unusual transplant operation: the gift of a face.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love by Kristin Kimball – Releases October 12, 2010.

Single, thirtysomething, working as a writer in New York City, Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But she was beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Kristin knew nothing about growing vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she shed her city self and moved to five hundred acres near Lake Champlain to start a new farm with him. The Dirty Life is the captivating chronicle of their first year on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through the following harvest season—complete with their wedding in the loft of the barn.

Kimball and her husband had a plan: to grow everything needed to feed a community. It was an ambitious idea, a bit romantic, and it worked. Every Friday evening, all year round, a hundred people travel to Essex Farm to pick up their weekly share of the “whole diet”—beef, pork, chicken, milk, eggs, maple syrup, grains, flours, dried beans, herbs, fruits, and forty different vegetables—produced by the farm. The work is done by draft horses instead of tractors, and the fertility comes from compost. Kimball’s vivid descriptions of landscape, food, cooking—and marriage—are irresistible.

“As much as you transform the land by farming,” she writes, “farming transforms you.” In her old life, Kimball would stay out until four a.m., wear heels, and carry a handbag. Now she wakes up at four, wears Carhartts, and carries a pocket knife. At Essex Farm, she discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved in the form of a man, a small town, and a beautiful piece of land.

The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story From Buchenwald to New Orleans by Mark Jacobson – Releases September 28, 2010.

Yellow Dirt by Judy Pasternak – Releases September 21, 2010.

Atop a craggy mesa in the northern reaches of the Navajo reservation lies what was once a world-class uranium mine called Monument No. 2. Discovered in the 1940s—during the government’s desperate press to build nuclear weapons—the mesa’s tremendous lode would forever change the lives of the hundreds of Native Americans who labored there and of their families, including many who dwelled in the valley below for generations afterward.

Yellow Dirt offers readers a window into a dark chapter of modern history that still reverberates today. From the 1940s into the early twenty-first century, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe for the sake of atomic bombs. Secretly, during the days of the Manhattan Project and then in a frenzy during the Cold War, the government bought up all the uranium that could be mined from the hundreds of rich deposits entombed under the sagebrush plains and sandstone cliffs. Despite warnings from physicians and scientists that long-term exposure could be harmful, even fatal, thousands of miners would work there unprotected. A second set of warnings emerged about the environmental impact. Yet even now, long after the uranium boom ended, and long after national security could be cited as a consideration, many residents are still surrounded by contaminated air, water, and soil. The radioactive “yellow dirt” has ended up in their drinking supplies, in their walls and floors, in their playgrounds, in their bread ovens, in their churches, and even in their garbage dumps. And they are still dying.

Transporting readers into a little-known country-within-a-country, award-winning journalist Judy Pasternak gives rare voice to Navajo perceptions of the world, their own complicated involvement with uranium mining, and their political coming-of-age. Along the way, their fates intertwine with decisions made in Washington, D.C., in the Navajo capital of Window Rock, and in the Western border towns where swashbuckling mining men trained their sights on the fortunes they could wrest from tribal land, successfully pressuring the government into letting them do it their way.

Turkish Delight & Treasure Hunts: Delightful Treats and Games from Classic Children’s Books by Jane Brocket – Releases September 7, 2010.

With the delightful activities and delicious recipes in Turkish Delight & Treasure Hunts you’ll learn how to follow in the footsteps of your favorite childhood heroes, from the Borrowers and Alice in Wonderland to the Ingalls family and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Whether you’re young or not-so-young, learn how to:

* Make Turkish Delight, like the treat served in Narnia
* Create Laura Ingalls Wilder’s exciting Sugar on Snow
* Master the art of breakfast in bed with Paddington Bear
* Play your own version of croquet, as Alice in Wonderland does
* Learn poems by heart, like Anne of Green Gables
* Watch a spider spin her web, like E. B. White’s Charlotte
* Enjoy Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin’s favorite pastime- Poohsticks

Black Cats & Four-Leaf Clovers: The Origins of Old Wives’ Tales and Superstitions in Our Everyday Lives  by Harry Oliver – Releases September 7, 2010.

In this charming and endlessly diverting book, Harry Oliver delves into the stories behind the traditions and superstitions that permeate our everyday lives, unearthing the fascinating histories of these weird and wonderful notions. 

So before you search for any more four-leaf clovers, worry about the next Friday the 13th, or avoid walking under any ladders, dip into this amazing tome and discover: 

* Why breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck.
* The best day of the week to ask for a favor.
* Why you should never jump over a child in Turkey.

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