Nonfiction Book Reviews: Braiding Sweetgrass...

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Published: October 15th, 2013 by Milkweed Editions

Genre: Nonfiction, Science

Format: Paperback, 391 Pages, Own

Rating: 5 stars

Publisher's Summary:

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return. 

My Thoughts:

I loved everything about this book! She asks some tough questions about what it means to be apart of nature. How can we take what science has to offer and what her ancestors' wisdom has to offer us about how to take care Mother Earth? She weaves her own background, her ancestors' stories, science, and what plants can teach in how to do this.

Her first story is about Skywoman. She's fallen from the sky and immediately receives help from a goose, a turtle, until they realize she needs land to rest upon permanently. But no animal can make it all the way down to the bottom of the water to bring her some land...except for the muskrat, who sacrifices itself for her and brings up some mud only to lose its own life.

"Skywoman bent and spread the mud with her hands across the shell of the turtle. Moved by the extraordinary gifts of the animals, she sang in thanksgiving and then began to dance, her feet caressing the earth. The land grew and grew as she danced her thanks, form the dab of mud on Turtle's back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals' gifts coupled with her deep gratitude. Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, our home."

She compares this with another story from across the waters...a woman with a garden and a tree...

"But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast."

"One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven...And then they met--the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve--and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories."

Stories are powerful. This sets up the rest of the book. How do Westerners with creation stories like these respond to a land that our ancestors have taken? Do we listen to those who've cultivated for centuries and millennia or do we assume we know best because we take and never give back? How do we treat the earth like we are truly indigenous to it?

Each section and each essay within that section dissects exactly this. This is one I'll be going to again and again. I can't recommend it highly enough!

Source: Goodreads

Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes edited by David Roessel

Published: January 1st, 2006 by Sterling

Genre: Nonfiction, Poetry, Juvenile

Format: Hardcover, 48 Pages, Own

Rating: 5 stars

My Thoughts:

I read this one aloud with G for Poetry month in April. We really enjoyed learning more about Langston Hughes and his poetry. The Illustrations were also vivid and dynamic. They really brought the poems to life. I love this Poetry for Young People series. I've never been a big poetry reader except for high school and a bit in college so I really love diving in this way.

Mini Book Reviews: New Kid, A Wolf Called Wonder

New Kid by Jerry Craft

Published: February 5th, 2019 by Quill Tree Books

Genre: Graphic Novel, Coming-of-age

Format: Hardcover, 256 Pages, Library

Rating: 5 stars

My Thoughts:

Middle Schooler Jordan Banks just wants to go to art school but instead his parents send him to a prestigious private school so he can get the best education possible. But he soon realizes there aren't a lot of kids who look like him.

Jerry Craft writes a beautiful and funny story. Jordan experiences tiny racist moments from people who would call him a friend to teachers he should feel safe with. One annoying kid is always asking inappropriate things about his home life like if his dad's in prison or about drugs in his neighborhood. One teacher keeps calling another Black kid in class another name; someone who attended a previous year and she had a hard time with him. She ends up expecting him to do worse in class and behave badly. 

He expertly crafts classism in here as well as it comes up whether there are people there at the school who have financial aid and scholarships. Does the teacher handle that information well? And what about expectations from other Black teachers at the school? Do they expect more or worse of other Black students at the school?

It's all handled with thought and humor. My son and I both read this separately and had great conversations. I think this is a must-read for anyone in middle school and their parents. Overall, it's a fantastic story that talks about the many experiences Black kids and kids of color experience in schools with a White majority.

Guts by Reina Telgemeier

Published: September 17th, 2019 by Scholastic

Genre: Graphic Novel, Coming-of-age, Memoir

Format: Paperback, 144 Pages, Own

Rating: 4 stars

My Thoughts:

Raina Telgemeier writes a mini memoir about her anxiety in middle school. The way she is able to bring the issue to the forefront with humor and realness is a compliment to her fantastic writing skills that speak to both adults and kids. My son loves every one of her books and this one was no different. We both struggle with anxiety and recognized many of the same things she writes about. Great job to Telgemeier for being open about her experiences and helping kids and adults alike grappling with stress and anxiety. This makes it a lot easier to talk about and get more people talking about it.

The Earth Under Sky Bear's Feet by Joseph Bruchac

Published: September 28th, 1988 by Puffin Books

Genre: Poetry

Format: Paperback, 32 Pages, Own

Rating: 5 stars

My Thoughts:

The poems are beautiful and the illustrations are too. Bruchac introduces various Native American poems from many Nations through a story of Sky Bear. My son and I both loved it.

A Wolf Called Wander by Rosanne Parry

Published: May 7th, 2019 by Greenwillow Books

Genre: Historical Fiction, Nature

Format: Kindle, 243 Pages, Own

Rating: 5 stars

My Thoughts:

This book is based on the travels of an actual wolf in Oregon, OR-7, who left his pack and traveled from his home more than a thousand miles through eastern and southern Oregon and up through northern California. Parry has created a beautiful and empathic journey for us to take with Swift/Wander. What does a wolf think about a road with cars on it that speed so quickly or about men with guns? What is the relationship between crows and wolves? What makes mountains to enticing for wolf packs? Her world-building is phenomenal. We see and hear and taste Swift/Wander meander and survive through deserts and hills and forests and even a fire. One truly feels like they're a wolf wandering for survival and trying to find a new place to call home. I can't recommend this book enough. This is one I read out loud with my son.

Manual For Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown

Published: March 12, 2019 by W.W. Norton & Company

Genre: History, environment, non-fiction

Format: Hardcover, 432 pages, library
Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Publisher's Summary:

Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children.

So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health—which, despite its optimistic beginnings, went on to warn its readers against consuming local milk, berries, or mushrooms, or going into the surrounding forest. This was only one of many misleading bureaucratic manuals that, with apparent good intentions, seriously underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between thirty-one and fifty-four people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

No major international study tallied the damage, leaving Japanese leaders to repeat many of the same mistakes after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other nuclear incidents, and the fact that we are emerging into a future for which the survival manual has yet to be written.

My Thoughts:

I started reading this after I became fascinated with Chernobyl and its after-effects while watching the HBO series and listening to the podcast by Peter Sagal and series creator Craig Mazin. Mazin referred to Kate Brown's ground-breaking book on the environmental impacts of nuclear energy and the effects we'll continue to see now and in the future.

Basically, the USSR and the global communities refused to look at the effects of low-dose radiation over time, how it has impacted the local communities: their food, water, etc. No one at the time wanted to confront the fact that they had been exposing their citizens to nuclear fallout for decades from the time the first nuclear bomb was created.

According to one study: "...in 1961-62, the two superpowers blasted the earth in a last-minute race to discharge bombs before the 1963 atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty went into effect. That last grand finale of radioactive fireworks emitted an eye-popping twelve billion curies of radioactive iodine into the Northern Hemisphere and left its mark on everything, even fine French wine."

Plants and humans readily take up radioactive strontium, cesium, and iodine that mimic potassium, iodine, and calcium. The fallout is ingested by the plants, animals, and ultimately humans.

Even with the health risks known, governments refused to shut them down or make them safer, or even acknowledge how dangerous they were. Reputations and national security were more important than human lives.

Brown goes onto to show that accident at Chernobyl while the biggest and most disastrous, was only a point on a continuum of accidents, experiments, mining, bombing, etc. The territory "...was already saturated with radioactive isotopes from the atomic bomb tests before architects drew up plans for the nuclear power plant. And, after Chernobyl as before Chernobyl, the drumbeat of nuclear accidents continued at two dozen other Ukrainian nuclear power installations and missile sites." The forest surrounding Chernobyl turned red after the accident, soaking up all those radioactive material. What happens when it burns? Well, it did in 2017.

She goes on to say: "Instead of an accident, Chernobyl might better be conceived of as an acceleration on a time line of destruction or as an exclamation point in a chain of toxic exposures that restructured the landscape, bodies, and politics."

Nuclear powers have minimized the deaths of the Chernobyl disaster in order to dodge lawsuits and investigations in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, when records of decades of bomb productions were declassified. These records have shown how government leaders took little care or responsibility "...for damages caused by the detonation of the equivalent of 29,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs...The ill-advised detonation of nuclear weapons in Nevada delivered to milk-drinking Americans across the U.S. continent an average collective dose of radioactive iodine similar to that of people living in Chernobyl contaminated areas."

This line comes from the last chapter and sums it all up: "The period of nuclear testing qualifies as the most unhinged, suicidal chapter in human history. In the name of 'peace' and 'deterrence,' military leaders waged global nuclear war."

I don't think I could've been prepared for how emotional I'd become while watching the series, listening to the podcast, and reading this book. It's a heavy book. You realize how far we have to go to get our shit together, how much suffering we've caused, and how much people are still suffering due to our terrible and abominable policies and short-sighted thinking. We don't have a lot of foresight as humans. I can only hope we can come together before it's too late.