Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Books, books ~ and two more books

I came home from teaching today to find a package the mailman had propped carefully beside my door.  In it was a new paperback copy of The Link: Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor by Colin Tudge (2009).  Many thanks to Joy Renee of Joystory for the book giveaway.  About this nonfiction book, the publisher says:
"For more than a century, scientists have raced to unravel the human family tree and have grappled with its complications. Now, with an astonishing new discovery, everything we thought we knew about primate origins could change. Lying inside a high-security vault, deep within the heart of one of the world's leading natural history museums, is the scientific find of a lifetime -- a perfectly fossilized early primate, older than the previously most famous primate fossil, Lucy, by forty-four million years."
On my way home I had stopped at the library to run off a few copies.  The book I put on hold last night while typing up the post about Janisse Ray had already arrived at my branch of the library while I slept.  (What I wrote was scheduled to post itself at 3:00 a.m., and it did.)  Here's the book:

Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home by Janisse Ray (2003) is a memoir.
"Seventeen years after she'd left home 'for good,' Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story ... of the adventures of returning home. For Ray, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of place -- of recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with syrup boils, quilt making, alligator trapping, and the wonderful characters of a place where generations still succeed each other on the land. But her town is also in need of repair, physical and otherwise. Ray works to save her local school, sets up a writing group at the local hardware store, and struggles with whether she can be an adult in a childhood place."
I'm ready to read about her life's quilt, maybe as I wind down the day before I sleep.

4 comments:

Susan Tidwell said...

You got my attention again with 'Wild Card Quilt' - may have to check it out!

Bonnie Jacobs said...

If we like it, maybe we could suggest it to the Book Buddies.

Susan Tidwell said...

Wild Card Quilt - I am lovin' this book! Just reading the jacket I wanted to start writing things down to remember. If I was the kind of person to write in books, I would be underlining phrases, but since I'm not, I am writing them down. So many things remind me of growing up in the South, like when her grandmother died, "we listened to stories while neighbors brought chicken and dumplings, pound cake," and as a young girl riding in the back of the pickup truck, "the music of choirs trailed out of country churches," and one of the many quilt references, "Anything big is a lot of little pieces stitched together, a page a day, a day at a time."

Bonnie Jacobs said...

She does call her book Wild Card QUILT!