Lawn Gone! Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives for Your Yard

#957
Title: Lawn Gone! Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive Alternatives for Your Yard
Author: Pam Penick
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Year: 2013
192 pages

Received from NetGalley as an ARC.

When I moved into my current house, the first thing I did outside was to dig up all the grass and shift the landscaping to reflect the natural character of the yard (wet on one side, dry on the other) and to increase native plantings, including bird attractors and deer inhibitors. A decade later, it's hard to imagine that there was ever a hard-to-mow lawn with wet sinkholes and dry clay outcroppings. I was greatly helped, both in imagining possibilities and in practical matters, by gardening manuals on hard-to-plant areas, but I would have loved a well-illustrated book devoted to replacing the whole lawn.

Lawn Gone! is a terrific source of ideas for non-lawn yards. It features a large number of attractive, clear photos of alternatives to basic grass surroundings for the home. Penick begins with answers to the question of why one might want a different kind of yard. These include issues such as maintenance, environmental considerations, visual texture, and the use of local plants, all of which appeal to me. In addition to many how-to sections (including very useful advice on how to negotiate with Home Owners' Associations and other covenant-generating entities), she provides numerous examples and stories.

Among the major subjects covered are using different ecological lawn mixes; planting ornamentals (with attention to the problem of invasive species), ground covers, shrubs and perennials; hardscapes (and their drainage); ponds; and child-friendly features. Penick provides sufficient coverage of tasks such as solarizing, or planning bed edging, though some instructions (such as "Use a tamper or vibrating plate compactor to compact the paver base" [p. 101]) are over-technical yet would require more detail to be useful.

In addition to the pros and cons of different materials, yard aesthetics, decreasing pests, and fire safety, Penick includes an entire section on the politics, health, and safety of lawn-free yards. I haven't seen this covered so well in other landscaping manuals.

Penick doesn't devote a lot of space to mixing food plants into the landscape. While most of my fruits and vegetables are inside a deer-deterring fence, I do have neighbors in the non-deer parts of town who have converted their whole lawns to vegetable garden-as-landscaping, and many more who grow artichokes and other dramatic food plants as their primary landscape plants. Perhaps Penick will consider including more coverage of this alternative in subsequent editions. 

My Arab Spring

#953
Title: My Arab Spring
Author: R. Zain
Publisher: Lulu.com
Country: [Replacement for Bahrain]
Year: 2012
108 pages

This self-published memoir/essay is certainly heartfelt at times, but I found it extremely confusing and much in need of further editing. The author describes, in somewhat to very abstract language, aspects of the Bahraini Arab Spring phenomenon. This leads into tales of her (I presume "her"--the author is "R." and the 1st person protagonist is "Sara") business entanglements with some unpleasant and problematic people, though this seems only marginally related to the financial upheaval accompanying the political unrest. There's a lot about the author's articles and Twitter posts that I couldn't follow because it again became too abstract and seemed to have documenting the problematic behavior of an employee as its focus. The sections in which the author/protagonist is trying to get to work, or pick up her daughter at school, or drive through checkpoints, seemed most relevant and were the most vivid and emotionally compelling sections. I come away from this having met my goal of learning more about Bahrain, but I could have learned much more if this had been more coherently presented.

Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)

#952
Title: Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)
Author: John Scalzi
Publisher: Tor
Year: 2008
335 pages

 Retells the story of The Last Colony from Zoe's point of view. This allowed Scalzi to clean up some missing or too-implicit information from that book, but unlike Bean's stories of Ender from a different perspective, where I admired Card's ability to build a story behind and supporting Ender's, I didn't feel like Zoe's voice or position added much to my experience of John and Jane's. Throughout, I had a sense of déjà vu rather than of revelation or deeper understanding. I did learn more about Zoe, and there was some entertainment to be had in learning how she went about obtaining what the colony needed in its fight against destruction, but I might have preferred that as a short story rather than a novel.

Wool # 1-5

#950
Title: Wool (Wool #1)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
49 pages

I'll review the whole series below at #5. Of #1, I'll say that normally I wouldn't count something this short as a "book," but since #2-5 are of novella or book length, I'll count it.

#951
Title: Proper Gauge: (Wool #2)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
106 pages

 Of this one I'll say, what's with the wool motif? Wool doesn't figure much at all in #1 or #2, unless the idea is "pulling the wool over their eyes."

#954
Title: Casting Off (Wool #3)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
122 pages

I'll review the series at book #5. To this installment I say, Okay, "pulling the wool over their eyes" does indeed appear to be the active wool-related image. And I don't buy the narrative of why certain people have wound up in their jobs. Not in this society. But more of that at #5.

#955
Title: The Unraveling (Wool #4)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2011
166 pages

I will say here that squeaky cute child-voices infuriate me in an audiobook. Just read the book aloud. Don't do extreme voice characterizations. There's a man in this one with a distinct New England accent. Not going to happen in this book's universe.

#956
Title: The Stranded (Wool #5)
Author: Hugh Howey
Publisher: Broad Reach
Year: 2012
254 pages

**SPOILERS**
2.5 stars for the series overall. There are several important flaws that I can't get around. I'm not much of a video watcher, in part because the problems with this series are ubiquitous in film and television. Like Cowboys & Aliens, this moves right along and there's a lot of action, which I'm sure is sufficiently engaging for many readers. However, my pleasure in reading fiction, especially science fiction, is directly related to effective world-building. This, Wool fails to provide.

For example, argon is extremely cold and can cause frostbite even in small-scale industrial accidents. The first danger faced by anyone staying in the airlock would be freezing, not burning. Freezing badly--the boiling temperature of argon is -302.5°F. Since a similar suit made the person wearing it begin to become hypothermic in uncontaminated groundwater, with a temperature far warmer than negative numbers, I expect that even with a homemade (anti-)heat blanket, the person would be highly insufficiently insulated. Next come the flames. We don't know what gas they use, but its temperature is hot enough to sterilize and char portions of a suit--not the ineffective heat tape on the suit, but the suit itself. Wrapping oneself up in a homemade heat shield, even if one's feet are tucked under, just doesn't seem like sufficient insulation. Perhaps it would decrease burns, but I'm not convinced that the exposure described wouldn't roast you in your own juices. As for re-entering the silo, this ranks among the greatest of this character's many irresponsible, community-jeopardizing acts. If she does successfully fight the flames with her homemade blanket, wouldn't that mean that she'd protected whatever was on her suit from the cleansing fires of the airlock? Is it too hopeful to suppose that she'd be smart enough to consider that the airlock is constructed as it is to kill agents of biological warfare? Agents that might help account for the total destruction of, it appears, pretty much everything? Apparently she's not that smart. She has to get home to the silo that exiled her. Why would she think she wouldn't be shot on sight? Also, in the giant bubbling, ashy mess of a human exposed to this airlock, I highly doubt that she would recognize Bernard's diminutive hands.

There's a lot about the basic premise I don't believe. Despite explanations, the cleaning process seems inexplicable, cumbersome, needlessly complex, and wasteful of valuable and perhaps irreplaceable resources. In terms of careers, I thought it quite unlikely that a society that was otherwise so regimented, and that had a system of "casters" and "shadows" (it's Plato's Cave, dude) would choose untrained, unskilled law enforcement personnel from outside the legal apprenticeship track, especially someone who was a very skilled mechanic and thus presumably needed elsewhere. Surely of the thousands (?) of people in the silo, there was at least one journeyman cop. The same might be said of choosing the evil puppeteer overlord's trainee. Shouldn't Bernard already have a shadow, if not several?

I didn't feel much identification with the characters. I found in their decision-making processes some evidence that life in the silos lowers IQ, and I didn't believe most of the decisions made in Silo 17 believable. Really,  some ickle orphants clang your manchild companion over the head with his own wrench, concussing him to near-death, steal your gear/clothes/food/water, and cut your air supply while you're an hour below that level and under water so that to survive you have to suck air bubbles from the ceilings of each flooded level of the silo (avoiding the bends, also a neat trick, as is the fact that the bubbles collect on the ceilings, but from above you can stick your knife into what I think is the floor grating to prop open a door); then you chase them up multiple levels (the mere descent of which almost killed your previous mayor and the ascent of which was a source of great complaint by you even when not suffering from extreme exhaustion and dragging said manchild behind you), find the punks hiding with a wee wittle baby, awww, order them to help you, then leave your concussed friend in their care?

This slapdash writing may not bother some readers, but it really bugs me. If I want to read a comic book, I'll read a comic book.

Please don't bother writing a comment saying that I'm nitpicking. I have merely scratched the surface of the world-building and plot issues here, to say nothing of the profusion of wooden yet often blubbery, inexplicable characters. For me, construction of a plausible world with interesting protagonists is the essence of fiction. Without it, I'm only disappointed.

For a much more claustrophobic, and realistic, look at life and death in a post-apocalyptic silo, read Mordecai Roshwald's dated but still classic Level 7. For rousing fights between the levels of a closed environment, with many similar themes and concerns, plus mutants, which is always a bonus, read Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky.

The Selfish Gene

#949
Title: The Selfish Gene
Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 1976/2006
384 pages

Perhaps the best use of the audiobook medium I've heard for non-fiction, with Dawkins and the narrator switching back and forth to indicate quotes and footnotes.

The central motif is the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), which Dawkins explains and explores throughout. It reminded me very much of the only perpetual SimLife scenario I was ever able to construct, which included only wolves and sea turtles but ran indefinitely.

Some sections seemed oversimplified; there is what seems like an over-reliance on game theory modeling, which is highly stripped of other variables and makes some assumptions that seem to conflate money with procreation as a reductive explanation of all evolutionary behaviors. These may be useful preliminary models, but seem lacking in real explanatory power.

I'd have liked to hear Dawkins's thoughts about left handedness and homosexual/bisexual behavior, both of which are present in animals as well as humans, and persist over the history of species.

Sweet Promised Land

#948
Title: Sweet Promised Land
Author: Robert Laxalt
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Year:1957/1997
Country: Basque Country
198 pages

A very sweet, poignant memoir/travelogue about Laxalt's father and a trip they took together back to Basque Country, where his father grew up. Well-written in deceptively simple language considering the complex emotional experiences depicted.

Could be used for Nevada or Basque country in geographical challenges.

[The Hobbit: Pocket Edition]

#947
Title: [The Hobbit: Pocket Edition]
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 1937/2011
276 pages

This is an attractive little hardback pocket edition. The type, though small, is very clear, and there's something fun about a hobbit-sized book.

This was a re-read of The Hobbit, which I first read at 7 years old. It was the second chapter book I read, and my first adult novel in terms of vocabulary and themes. I reread it several times as a child and adolescent, then not again in its entirety until now. Having read better books in subsequent years--for example, books with any female characters whatsoever--I still admire its role in the genre, the shadowy evidence of Tolkien's scholarship in philology and northern epics, and the ways in which this is a bildungsroman about going to war and longing for home. The return home elides over larger problems, such as what Bilbo might do with this Ring. Fortunately, Tolkien took care of that little plot element elsewhere.