Sunday Salon ~ elephants and books

Bloggers gather in the Sunday Salon — at separate computers in different time zones — to talk about our lives and our reading.


Just finished reading:

Sisterland ~ by Curtis Sittenfeld, 2013, fiction (Missouri), 9.5/10

Reading now:

The Last Policeman ~ by Ben H. Winters, 2012, mystery (New Hampshire)

Next up:

And Man Created God: A History of the World at the Time of Jesus ~ by Selina O'Grady, 2012

ELEPHANTS

The Elephant Scientist ~ by Caitlin O’Connell, 2011, children's (Namibia)

D. Fowler, a Top-50 reviewer on Amazon, rated this book 5-stars and wrote:  "One day as she watched 'the huge mammals stopping in their tracks and leaning forward on their front feet,' she had a thought.  Could they actually listen and talk through their feet and how could she prove it?"

In the sprawling African scrub desert of Etosha National Park, they call her "the mother of all elephants." Camouflaged and peering through binoculars, Caitlin O'Connell — the American scientist who traveled to Namibia to study African elephants in their natural habitat — could not believe what she was seeing. As the mighty matriarch scanned the horizon, the other elephants followed suit, stopping midstride and standing as still as statues. The observation would be one of many to guide O'Connell to a groundbreaking discovery.  This book has gotten several awards:

2012 Robert F. Sibert Informational Honor Book, 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Nonfiction Honor Book, ALA Notable Children's Book, and NSTA-CBC Outstanding Science Trade Book 2012.

Learn more about elephant behavior and acoustics by clicking here.

GOINGS-ON

From the coincidence after coincidence department:  Writing an email, I typed that my cat "was sitting in the window, watching the early morning goings-on outside."  It's a word I rarely use, and it's probably one I've never written in a post or a letter or an article.  After typing it, I wondered if there's a hyphen in that word, looked it up (there is), went to my blog, and wrote a story about the word for yesterday's Caturday post.  And today, someone else used "goings-on" in a Sunday Salon post.

It's the 4th of May, so let me be (probably the last) to say to you today, "May the Fourth be with you!"