The Long Call by Anne Cleeves

"He'd left the window down and now he could hear the surf on the beach and the sound naturalists names the long call, the cry which always sounded to him like an inarticulate howl of pain. These were the noises of home.
~from The Long Call by Anne Cleeves

I was intrigued to read The Long Call when reading the blurb about the main character: when Detective Matthew Venn left the community of the Brethren he lost his family, too. What a fascinating back story for a detective! Plus, I wanted to delve into something by Anne Cleeves since I have heard of the television series--Vera and Shetland--based on her other book series. The first book in a new series seemed the right place to begin.

The Long Call has a vivid sense of place--North Devon. "North Devon seems to attract the weirdos, don't you think?" one character accuses. Weirdos or not, the Barum Brethren may be dying out but the tight community still holds a lot of local power.

The novel opens with Matthew watching his father's funeral from afar, knowing he would not be welcome. He carries the bitterness of rejection, a remnant of hope of reconciliation. "Doubt was a cancer that grew unbidden," he knows.

Matthew went into police work because he sought the order and meaning lost when he left the Brethern. Isolated from the world while growing up, he was an outsider at university and dropped out. He is not a sociable man, he can be short and single-minded and stiff. But he is a good man.

Matthew is married to Jonathan, his opposite in many ways. Jonathan's dress is informal. He has a marvelous ability to connect to people. And he works for a community center, Woodyard, that includes a day center for special needs and offers classes to the public.

While at his father's funeral, Matthew was called when a dead body is found on the beach near his home. Simon Walden was new to the community and worked at the kitchen at Woodyard. Walden had a complicated life; he carried the burden of accidental homicide and had a history of alcoholism.

While Matthew and his team piece together the mystery of Walden's death, one of the day center women goes missing. The incidents may be related.

Matthew must reenter the Brethern community during his inquiry, which brings him face to face with the Brethern's spiritual leader.  Then another day center woman goes missing. What Matthew discovers is a community cover-up of a hideous abuse of power.

I enjoyed Cleeve's story-telling and felt Matthew was remarkably sympathetic and well-drawn. I was propelled to continue reading the last half of the novel. I would read the next book in the series. And will soon be checking out Cleeve's television series!

I received access to a free book through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Long Call
by Anne Cleeves
St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books
Publication September 3, 2019
$26.99 hardcover
ISBN: 9781250204448

So Many Apples...So Many Recipes!

Our apple trees in the back yard have produced thousands of apples this year! We have never seen it yield like this before. Dad planted the trees close to 30 years ago and my brother said it never had more than one or two apples.

Nine years ago we started to trim them back--they had grown so huge! And the apples started to come. Last year they had loads of fruit, but the drought left them tiny and useless. Other years the trees had a fungus from a wet spring and the apples had to be cut up with a small slice or two useful from each.

But this year....We are giving them away right and left. I have already made several batches of applesauce.

I looked up recipes in my cookbook to see what I am going to bake today. According to my Facebook Timeline, last year on this day I made Apple Scones. Yum!

I have heirloom recipes. From my mother-in-law Laura Grace O'Dell Bekofske, there is this easy $50 Apple Pie.

 From my mother Joyce Adair Ramer Gochenour, I have Dutch Apple Pie.

In 1979, Gary served a small Philadelphia church in Kensington, Mt. Pisgah, and they made an Applesauce Cake.

In Bucks County, PA we picked up an Apple Cake from Wolgemuth Fruit Market.

The Lansing State Journal had a Caramel Crunch Apple Pie that my son and I made.

28 vanilla dairy caramels
2 tbsp water
4 cups peeled, sliced apples
1 unbaked pie shell
3/4 c flour
1/3 c sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/3 c butter
1/2 c chopped walnuts.

Another newspaper recipe that was very good is Cranberry Apple Crisp.

 Some of the recipes in my book I haven't even tried yet.

 This looks yummy! Why haven't I made it?

 I believe this is a recipe from family, but I don't recall.

I remember this was from a cookbook, perhaps the 1972 Betty Crocker one in a binder; the pages all tore out and I tossed it long ago.

On my Paprika app I have thirty or more recipes of all sorts, including Squash Apple Soup and an Apple Bean bake.

So many decisions...

Helen Korngold Diary: September 1-7, 1919

This year I am sharing the 1919 diary of Helen Korngold of St. Louis, MO. Helen graduated from Washington University and is now teaching.

Helen Korngold, December 1919, New York City

September
Monday 1
Started teaching at Wellston.

Tuesday 2
Have 7th grade. This is some room! Went out with Si Russack. He’s pretty nice.

Wednesday 3
The kids are just too cute, but oh, such a lunch

Thursday 4
There were such kids as Jimmie Murphy & James Daniels – oh!

Friday 5
Then there were nice girls & such biddies – real gals! Temple.

Saturday 6
But on the whole, they were a rotten bunch

Sunday 7
I generally spent Sundays wishing for the next Sat.

Notes:

Sept 1

Wellston High School, located at Ella and Green, had its first graduating class in 1911 with four students. In 1923 a new building for upper grades was constructed. The school relocated in 1940 and again in 1962 and was renamed several times. It was closed and torn down in 2010. http://stlouis.genealogyvillage.com/hsws.htm
http://www.builtstlouis.net/northside/mlk07.html

Sept 2
Helen mentions Mr. Russack in January as warning her against a boy who had proposed to Helen. I can't find a Si Russack in the records.

Sept 5
Article from the Sept 1. Jewish Voice



Russack Family
June 22, 1906, The Jewish Voice:


In the News:

An interesting article on WWI soldiers receiving 'new faces' with the help of a woman portrait painter.


And next to this article is an advertisement about 'the most thrilling words' a woman can hear--

A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins by Lloyd Spencer Davis

My eye caught three things: Robert Falcon Scott--Antarctica--Penguins--and I submitted my request for the galley. Later I noted one other stand-out word: Sex. Specifically, the sex lives of penguins, but the book embraced more than just the birds' proclivities.

My first introduction to Antarctica was Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater, which an elementary school teacher read aloud to my class. I read it many times. When I was about eleven years old I picked up The Great White South by Herbert Ponting, the photographer on the Scott Expedition to the South Pole. Scott's story caught my imagination. He was a tragic, flawed hero. Ever since, I have been drawn to read books about Polar expeditions and explorers. 

One of Herbert Ponting's amazing photographs

A Polar Affair by Llyod Spencer Davis is a highly readable and entertaining book about Davis's career in penguin research and the stories of the explorers who first encountered the Antarctic penguins. Specifically, George Murray Levick, physician with the Scott expedition, who became the first to record the habits and lives of penguins.

Levick wrote a book but it was never made public. When Davis discovered a copy he was shocked to learn that he was not the first to observe what Levick had already documented.

The book is a wonderful blend, offering science and nature, history, first-person account, and adventure. He vividly recounts the story of the men who vied to be the first to reach the South Pole, including their human frailties and ill-thought decisions. 

The story of Levick and two other men trapped over an Antarctic winter in an ice cave is especially horrifying to read! The harsh realities of the penguins' struggle to survive was eye-opening.

Davis's quest to understand Levick and the mystery of the suppressed research takes him across the world, snooping into libraries and museums. 

Even though I know the stories, I was riveted, especially since Davis includes the explorer's personal lives. As Davis writes, "Our idols are never so virtuous as we make them out to be."

The next visit I make to the Detroit Zoo Penguin Conservation Center I will be looking at the penguins with more appreciation.

I was given access to a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

by Lloyd Spencer Davis

Pegasus Books

Pub Date 03 Sep 2019  

ISBN 9781643131252

PRICE $29.95 (USD)

Other books I have reviewed about Antarctic exploration:

To the Edges of the Earth by Edward J. Larson

https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-last-of-old-fashioned-heroes.html

Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition by Paul Watson
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2017/03/ice-ghosts-200-years-searching-for-lost.html

The White Darkness by David Grann
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2018/10/white-darkness-by-david-grann-story-of.html

Fiction about Antarctica:

My Last Continent by Midge Raymond
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/06/my-last-continent-by-midge-raymond.html

The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-birthday-boys-by-beryl-bainbridge.html

Quilts, Books and News

No, I do not need any more books...but who can resist a 50% off deal? I can't. And I dragged my husband along and he found several books as well. 

I tried to get the galley for The Darwin Affair. Miracle Creek has had rave reviews. And Greek to Me had me laughing out loud the first page. My husband has enjoyed Linda Castillo's novels and thought When Life Gives You Lululemons would be a fun read.

Several LibraryThing books had never arrived but an email to the publisher got a great response. I now have Bill McKibben's Falter on my TBR review pile.

And Archeology From Space by Sarah Parcak.

I am reading:

• America is Immigrants by Sara Novic, a Goodreads win
• Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin, a Book Club Cook Book galley win being read by my library book club 
• Adventures of the Peculiar Protocol, a new Sherlock Holmes mystery by Nicholas Meyer who wrote the Seven Percent Solution
• Anti-Diet by Christy Harrison
• Little Women Cookbook by Wini Moranville and Louisa May Alcott
• Patchwork Picnic: Simple-To-Piece Blocks that Celebrate the Outdoors by Gracey Larson

Parade Magazine in our weekly Free Press often has a book column. This past Sunday they highlighted This Tender Land by Kent Krueger, a book I loved. My review is coming upon its publication. Krueger is reading the fantastic Virgil Wander by Lief Enger, which I reviewed here.

I shared my 1857 Album quilt at my weekly quilt group and they took some great pics.

I also shared the Halloween table runner I made as a gift.

I used leftover fabric to make placemats to match, shown below with a cute black cat mug I thought could hold candy or an arrangement as a centerpiece.

Close to 30 years ago my dad planted two apple trees next to the patio. Over the last nine years, we have trimmed them back every winter and they have become prolific fruit bearers. This year they did not get the black-spotted fungus and we had a rainy spring and a dry, sunny summer. We have more apples than we can handle. The pic below shows what we gathered in TEN MINUTES!

We will be making apple butter very soon.

And I am enjoying the weekly farm stand in the city part two blocks away.

Last of all, I have joined a fitness center and have signed up to work with a fitness coach! This is taking me out of my comfort zone for sure!
I want to build strength and balance and muscle tone. I have issues with vertigo and also am working with a doctor to deal with it.

What are you up to?

This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger

Set during the summer of 1932, This Tender Land is a story that embraces tragedy and cruelty, kindness and love, murder and salvation. Most of all, it is about hope. Hope that we can find home, hope that we will find love, hope that life offers more than terror and injustice and cruelty. Hope that we can forgive and be forgiven.

This mythic story is a combination of Huckleberry Finn for its river journey and episodic adventures, with characters and events encountered from The Odyssey, and the darkness of The Night of the Hunter with children under threat fleeing downriver. And it recalls to mind the Book of Job as Odie grapples with the nature of God.

In 1932 Minnesota, orphaned brothers Albert and Odie are sent by their aunt to a Native American school, where she believes they are being well taken care of. The Brickmans run the school, siphoning off funds for themselves and allowing cruelty and abuse to reign. The boys befriend the mute Native American boy Mose. Albert and Mose are hard workers, but Odie rebels and is often punished. They have a friend in the teacher Voght, and the kind, widowed music teacher who offers to take the boys into her home to help run her farm. But a tornado takes her life, leaving her daughter Emmy in the hands of the cruel school headmistress. 

The 'tornado god' wrecks more disaster in Odie's life, leading to an accidental death. The children together flee down the Mississippi River in a canoe, pursued by the headmistress of the school and the police who believes the girl Emmy was kidnapped. 

William Kent Krueger writes, "I love this book every bit as much as I loved Ordinary Grace," and that offering this book he is "offering his heart." I, too, loved it every bit as Ordinary Grace, if not more.

It's a big 400-page book, engrossing and beautiful and heartbreaking. There is a lot of 'God talk' between Odie and the people he met who help him understand the timeless problem of why God allows evil in this world. 

I was given access to a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Read my review of Ordinary Grace here.

This Tender Land 

by William Kent Krueger

Atria Books 

Publication September 3, 2019

hardcover $27.99

ISBN13: 9781476749297

Whose Water Is It Anyway? Taking Water Protection into Public Hands

I have read the headlines and news articles:

In Detroit, surviving without water has become a way of life, 2018 Bridge Magazine article headline
ACLU Petitions State to Stop Detroit Water Shut Offs, 2019 Michigan Public Radio story
Water Shut Offs Could Reach 17,000 Households, 2018 Detroit Free Press article
According to the EPA, an affordable water bill costs about 4.5 percent of a household’s monthly income, but metro Detroiters are paying around 10 percent. 2019 Curbed Detroit article 

My own water/sewer bill in the Detroit suburbs has doubled over ten years. We have installed low water toilets and appliances and we don't water the grass in summer. We have four rain barrels to water the gardens.

Luckily, we can pay our water bill. I can't imagine how people survive without reliable, clean, tap water. People who can't afford water like thousands in Detroit--and across the world. People like those in Flint and Oscoda other Michigan communities whose tap water is polluted with lead and PFAS.

In Michigan, surrounded by the Great Lakes, and embracing 11,000 lakes, we still don't provide clean water to all. In Osceola, Michigan Nestle pumps out our water for $200 a year, but our citizens in vulnerable communities suffer. Where is the justice in this?

Author and water activist Maude Barlow has fought for water justice since 1985 when NAFTA gave Americans access to Canadia's water resources. Alarmed at the implications, Barlow questioned, who owns the water?

In Whose Water Is It Anyway? Barlow celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Blue Communities Project. She describes her personal journey as an activist. She explains how water became privatized and the impact world-wide. Finally, Barlow presents the Blue Communities Project which has been adopted across the world, putting water back into the hands of the people, with sample documents to help local citizens begin their own campaign.

Companies have bought water rights and pumped the groundwater dry across the world. And all those plastic bottles have created a nightmare. Not just as trash--Barlow shares that bottled water testing shows most contain micro-plastic!

I was surprised to learn that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights did not include access to water as a basic right because seventy years ago it was assumed all people had and would have access to water. Today we know that water is not limitless. Barlow tells how privatization of water takes local water away from citizens to be sold for a profit. In 2015 the UN finally addressed the human right to water. Included is the statement that governments must provide clean water to people, "must refrain from any action or policy, such as water cut-offs," and are obliged to prevent businesses from polluting a community's water.

But to fulfill that promise, citizens must claim the power over their water. Barlow's book tells us how to do that.

I received access to a free ebook through the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher:

The Blue Communities Project is dedicated to three primary things: that access to clean, drinkable water is a basic human right; that municipal and community water will be held in public hands; and that single-use plastic water bottles will not be available in public spaces. With its simple, straightforward approach, the movement has been growing around the world for a decade. Today, Paris, Berlin, Bern, and Montreal are just a few of the cities that have made themselves Blue Communities. 

In Whose Water Is It, Anyway?, renowned water justice activist Maude Barlow recounts her own education in water issues as she and her fellow grassroots water warriors woke up to the immense pressures facing water in a warming world. Concluding with a step-by-step guide to making your own community blue, Maude Barlow’s latest book is a heartening example of how ordinary people can effect enormous change.

the authorMaude Barlow is the international bestselling author of 19 books, including the bestselling Blue Water trilogy. She is the honorary chair of the Council of Canadians and of the Washington-based Food and Water Watch. She is on the executive committee of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and a councillor with the World Future Council. In 2008–09, she served as senior advisor on water to the 63rd president of the UN General Assembly and was a leader in the campaign to have water recognized as a human right by the UN. In 2005, she won the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, the “alternative Nobel.” She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Whose Water Is It, Anyway?: Taking Water Protection into Public Hands
Maude Barlow
ECW Press
Publication September 2019
$19.50 CAD
ISBN: 9781770414303