Tag Archives: Books

Ah, books! As a former librarian, I love the things… especially the well-done informative ones! I don’t have a category just for books on this site, as I put each book into the topic it (more or less) fits into and then I add the tag Books which brings you to this list.

Ebooks are included under this tag, and of course now many titles are available in both electronic form such as Kindle and print versions. If a book is one that you might want to read or refer to in the event of an emergency, I do recommend that you get it in a print version as those are generally more versatile for use. This applies to fiction and to children’s books as well as to practical how-to ones. Since I read Ted Koppel’s Lights Out (link to my review of it here on the site), I think a bit of preparedness is not a bad thing!

This site has a lot of book reviews and some of them are of older books. I do go through the site from time to time and update the book review pages–and I delete pages if the book is outdated–but you can also tell from reviews at Amazon.com and other websites whether an older book is still one of the best books on your subject.

Wild by Nature by Sarah Marquis: My Review and Reflections

My favorite adventures are ones that other people go on and then write a good book about what happened. When I saw the subtitle of Sarah Marquis’ book Wild by Nature, I figured I was in for a treat. The subtitle is From Siberia to Australia, Three Years Alone in the Wilderness on Foot. Would I want to do something like that? No, never. But to read about it… ah! Sarah Marquis, from Switzerland and in her late 30s, has hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and done a long hike across Australia before she pulls this adventure together. Going through Mongolia, … Continue reading →

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman: Review

What if humanity disappeared off the face of the earth in some unspecified way, whether a virus, space aliens, or a Rapture? What if the rest of the world wasn’t harmed by our departure? What would New York City look like after a while? (Hint: the underground passages would fill with water and poison ivy would climb up the buildings.) What do we know from Chernobyl that would give us clues as to how nature might react? What about the toxic chemicals we would leave behind? This no-human scenario, massively unlikely as it is, provides the framework for a very … Continue reading →

Fresh Food from Small Spaces and Other Books by R.J.Ruppenthal: Review

Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square-Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting by R.J. Ruppenthal, is an extremely useful and clearly written how-to guide to urban gardening. Its subtitle gives you the idea of what it covers. It isn’t strong on illustrations, so this is one for readers. Wow, he’s been prolific since it came out. Here are some of his books and booklets at Amazon and my review continues below these images… I would guess that the booklets may draw on the material in the book. Some of these are just in Kindle, but others are also … Continue reading →

The 10 Best Vegetable Gardening Books to Buy Now

Gardening books are a great resource. I want mine to be paperback, so I can read them over lunch, take them someplace, lend them to friends, look at them while sitting on the sofa with my husband, and refer to them in all situations. Here are 10 of the best vegetable gardening books I know, not in any particular order. I chose these books based on three main factors: Whether the authors seem to have spent as much time gardening as they did writing. My knowledge as a librarian of how to ferret out what the most popular garden books are. Which books I refer to … Continue reading →

Surfing! You Never Know Where Your Photographs Will Go

Back in the mid-1960s, before I had met and married Kelly Hart, he roamed all over the San Francisco Bay Area taking photographs. He was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, not incidentally to stay out of the military during the Vietnam War. Then in 2012, he compiled many of the pictures into a book. The earlier part of the book contains black-and-white photos documenting life around the area. The second part is more like the cover: full-color photos reflecting the exploration of consciousness that was going on. One of the black-and-white photographs was at the beach in … Continue reading →

The Curious Librarian Cozy Mystery Trilogy I Wrote

I’ve written three cozy mysteries that form a trilogy.The central character is the Curious Librarian, and yes, I have been a librarian! Lorin Long, the heroine, is about 30 and she moves to a charming Colorado mountain town called Silvermine… it’s a fictitious town which is a blend of Salida and Alamosa. (My husband and I moved to Silver City, NM, after I finished the trilogy… just one of life’s coincidences.) She is the director of the town library and mysteries abound. Why was a library board member found dead in the library? That’s the beginning of the first book. What about the … Continue reading →

Earthbag Building Books

There’s an information explosion going on, about earthbag building! When we built our earthbag house over fifteen years ago, there was almost no information in print. My husband Kelly Hart is part of the trend, with his website earthbagbuilding.com and the book he wrote recently. On this page I’ll draw on my background as a librarian to describe the books available. In a nutshell, earthbags are what you might think of as sandbags, polypropylene bags often filled with rice and other foods. To build with them, you fill them with earth from the site or with other materials, and you put down a row … Continue reading →

Lights Out by Ted Koppel: A Review with Reading Notes

Ted Koppel has written that the U.S. power grid is very vulnerable to cyberattack and that if parts of the grid go down, it could easily be weeks or months before they could be brought back… if they could be. Koppel has been a newsman for most of his long life, including twenty-five years at ABC’s Nightline. He is skilled at pulling the threads of many interviews into a story, and that is exactly what he has done in his new book, . The tale is scary. The government isn’t prepared for the chaos that would ensue if the power … Continue reading →

Keeping Diabetes At Bay

Book cover, Dr. Bernstein's Diabetic Solution

I didn’t know that I had diabetic symptoms, but when I sat on my computer glasses and had to go for a new prescription, my ophthalmologist said, “You have some diabetic retinopathy. You have diabetes, right?” “Not that I know of, but my mother did,” I said, gulping. “Guess I’d better get checked out.” “Ask your doctor to let me know, and come back for another exam in three months,” he said. Yikes. I had been tested for diabetes every now and then because of my mother’s history, but the tests had never indicated that I had it. As soon as I got home, … Continue reading →

Rolling Shelter: Vehicles We Have Called Home

When I fell in love with Kelly Hart, he was living in a 30′ school bus he had converted to a home. It even had a piano in it! I fell in love with his lifestyle as well as with him. Well, now, many years later, we have actually lived in houses much of the time, but Kelly has recently written a book called . It’s available at Amazon, by clicking on the title or on the book cover below. It’s both a paperback and a Kindle ebook. The book could give you a lot of ideas for living in … Continue reading →

Two Delicious Ways that Vermonters Ate Their Veggies in the Depression

Back in the 1930s, Vermonters were not particularly inclined to eat salads. That makes sense, considering that national distribution of fresh produce didn’t exist at the levels it has since reached. Vermont’s climate isn’t the easiest to grow year-round gardens, though now people are doing it with greenhouses. So how did Vermonters get some vegetables into their diet back then and even earlier? I recently read a book that raised that question and many others. It was not something I had ever given a moment’s thought to, I admit. But The Food of a Younger Land (link to my review of … Continue reading →

The Food of a Younger Land, by Mark Kurlansky: Review

is a partly-fascinating tour around the US during the depression. With a subtitle of A portrait of American food- before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, you get the idea. There were major regional variations in those days. Author Mark Kurlansky found the drafts of a Depression project that had never been published. To be called America Eats, it was a compilation of food writing from different regions, but when World War II came along, it was abandoned. It had been part of a huge government project to provide work for writers, and Eudora Welty, Nelson … Continue reading →

Chick Days: An Absolute Beginner’s Gude to Raising Chickens

When I was in the feed store the other, there was a copy of Chick Days on their checkout counter. “That’s a fun book,” I said to the clerk and she smiled and agreed. I didn’t buy it, as I had already bought two copies. I read the first one and then some dear friends with preschoolers came over for dinner. I looked at the book with the kids, and they loved it, so when I learned that they are getting chickens, I gave them that copy. is a very attractive book, as you can see from the cover. The … Continue reading →

The Small Scale Poultry Flock, by Harvey Ussery

by Harvey Ussery, is the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read on chickens. You might guess that from the title! I’ve had chickens twice and we are planning to get them again next year, so I’ve been reading up on chickens. This book, by long-time flockster (that’s a word he invented) and homesteader Ussery, is full of all kinds of ideas and information for other flocksters and wannabes. You could read it and know plenty to get started with chickens or to take your chicken raising to new levels. At over 400 pages, with countless color illustrations, the book is … Continue reading →

Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver, by Diane Ott Whealy

I recently read a fascinating account of the growth of the seed savers movement in the United States. Diane Ott Whealy, who wrote , is one of the founders of the Seed Savers Exchange, which you can go to at seedsavers.org. In one of the most beautifully created books I’ve seen short of expensive art books, she writes about how she and her family became the core of what became the SSE. Her passion for saving valuable old heirloom seeds and keeping them from dying out runs through just about every page of the book. I was moved and inspired. … Continue reading →

Meat: A Benign Extravagance

I was immediately drawn to the paradox of the title , a book by Simon Fairlie published originally in the UK and then by Chelsea Green here in the US. I eat meat myself, and luckily I live in an agricultural area in Colorado where we can get local grass-fed beef, lamb, and even yak, as well as locally raised organic chicken. And that’s what we eat when we eat meat, for the most part. I am not drawn to eat meat where the animals may have been treated inhumanely, fed corn, or fed dubious feeds. So this book turned … Continue reading →

Getting Started with Getting Things Done

Too much to do, too little time. Things get away from us. We forget errands, or even more important things. As for doing the things we really care about, well, when? Ever? In five years or maybe ten? Actually I’m feeling much better about my own time management lately, as I have been starting to use a system called GTD. It’s based on a book by David Allen called . I bought the book when it came out in 2002 but didn’t really start applying till a few weeks ago.Yup, 9 years later. I’d even read the book back then, … Continue reading →

Mortgage Free

Doesn’t “mortgage free” have a nice sound to it? It’s a worthwhile goal and even if it seems like a pipe dream to you now, consider it for the long term. It may not be possible immediately, but things could change. My husband I were lucky enough reach this state five years ago, and it has changed our lives for the better, more than we even expected. Here’s how it happened: we sold a house and traveled for a while, then bought a smaller and much less expensive place. We both feel much less stressed as a result of becoming … Continue reading →

Hamlet’s Blackberry

is a book by William Powers which has a lot to say about simple living. It talks about how hard it can be to be away from your online connections, through cellphones and computers both. And how easy it is for us to skip from one thing to another so quickly that we never have time to concentrate. I didn’t realize how bad it can be out there in the big world! Living in a remote small town and having a home business that rarely involves any kind of clients, Kelly and I are pretty insulated. Powers begins with a section … Continue reading →

Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long

, by Eliot Coleman, is encouraging to every gardener and would-be gardener living in a cold climate. He’s got a newer book out on the same topic, , so I wasn’t sure about adding this one to my blog, but evidently both are well-regarded at Amazon and this is the one I’ve read. Year-round gardening is an increasingly important topic, as we move toward greater self-reliance and local food. If you love the joys of eating home-garden vegetables but always thought those joys had to stop at the end of summer, this book is for you. Eliot Coleman introduces the surprising … Continue reading →

Worms Eat My Garbage

is a classic — and it’s one I got not long after it came out. We were llama ranching in the mountains near Ashland, Oregon, in those days, and living in two old 8×40 trailers we had parked in a V, creating a large enclosed south-facing living room between them. I set up my worm bins in the unused and minimally heated second kitchen. My teenager thought it was gross, and my husband was dubious, but it did work! I’ve lived in a lot of different places since then and hadn’t used my old copy of the book until lately, but … Continue reading →

Make Your Own Cosmetics

Do you make your own cosmetics? It’s an enjoyable way to save some money and to try out different formulations in small batches to see what really suits you. This is an area where you can be as conventional or as purist about ingredients as you wish. Some recipes that you will see do use petroleum-based oils, some don’t. Some use dairy products, some don’t. Here is a book at Amazon that includes a lot of easy formulations to make your own cosmetics: . I looked at quite a few books before choosing this one to feature. It has some … Continue reading →

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

, by Thom Hartmann, is a depressing book and an optimistic one. I found it both VERY depressing and VERY optimistic. When a friend offered to lend it to me, I wasn’t going to take it till I noticed who had written it. Hartmann is a prolific and profound writer on many subjects. I took the book and buried it in a large pile until I had the emotional stamina to tackle the state of the world. That was a couple of days ago. For two days, off and on, I read one discouraging fact after another until my heart … Continue reading →

The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome, by John Wasik

“Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream” is the subtitle of which my husband and I have just been reading. Kelly’s green home building blog has a long review of it, so I just want to reflect on one of its themes. I pretty much missed the macmansioning of America. Sure, I would see the big castles when driving around the US, but in the last couple of decades I’ve lived mainly in an old neighborhood of a city (Olympia, Washington), in an unusual small town in rural Colorado (Crestone, home of numerous spritual centers of all faiths), and in Mexico. … Continue reading →

Climate Change in Prehistory

One day, I wandered over to my husband Kelly’s bookshelf in search of something to read. I came away with by William J. Burroughs. In the book,Burroughs pushes back the dates of early humans by thousands upon thousands of years compared to what most people think. But I already was aware of that research, because Kelly is fascinated by prehistory and reads widely in the field. What was completely new to me, and quite intriguing, is that evidently the climate of the planet stabilized about 10,000 years ago — but before that, humans were contending with a very erratic climate. … Continue reading →

The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt (Building, That Is)

The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt: Hand-Building with Adobe, Papercrete, Paper-Adobe, and More, by Michael Van Hall, is a delight. This downloadable ebook will take you through the steps to make your own simple dirt structure. He doesn’t go into all the details of how to build a house, as he points out that you can find that information everywhere. This 100-page ebook focuses on… as you might guess from the cover… dirt. With close to 100 photographs and numerous drawings, the book is a relatively quick and very enjoyable read. It will motivate you even if you already are … Continue reading →

Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter – Great Idea Book for Green Building

, by Lloyd Kahn, is a large paperback filled with two-page spreads of a wide variety of interesting homes from around the world. The earthbag-papercrete house that we built in Colorado is on pages 88 and 89, so of course I’m always pulling our copy out to show it to guests. And usually they starting browsing the pages. The book is full of amazing and outrageous designs and buildings, but I’m sure that many people have adapted these ideas less dramatically. Whatever your interest in natural building, this is a great book to have around. But watch out – your … Continue reading →

The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery: A Review

I first bought the massive by Carla Emery over ten years ago. I kept it by my bedside for late-night reading because there was no pesky plot to keep me awake. I found it written in an enjoyable style, with lots of sections I wanted to read. I’ve cooked many recipes from it and several have become favorites. The title is a bit misleading: this is not just a book for people living in the country, as anyone interested in simple living will find a lot of interest in the book. It would also be useful to people trying to get … Continue reading →

Broken Open, by Elizabeth Lesser: A Help for Rough Times in Our Lives

, by Elizabeth Lesser, is a book about how “suffering and crisis transform us, humble us, and bring out what matters most in life.” The quote is from a man in the book who was in a terrible accident and experienced much pain. It’s a very loving book, even as she tells heartbreaking stories of people coping with the loss of a child, their own illnesses, and more. Her own life is woven into the tales in a way that I really enjoyed, like getting to know someone. I read it hoping for something that would help me come to … Continue reading →

Simple Green Living

With Rosana Hart