Howling Frog Books

Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds, by Gareth Rees  I loved this book.  Rees has, since childhood, had a fascination with legends of sunken cities, and I get that!  What's more enticing?  So I've been excited to read this, and it was good stuff.  Rees is British, and the British Islands have lots of sunken lands around the edges.  Former ice ages bound lots of water up in glaciers, and when those ice ages ended, the seas rose and covered coastal regions.  He starts off with Doggerland, which was inundated tens of thousands of years ago, and works around through ancient forests to the Lowland Hundred, Lyonesse, and other lands that passed into legend.  Then he looks at manmade land sinks, like the eastern fenlands. The second half of the book ranges abroad, first through myth with a long section on the stories of Atlantis, and then to the ancient Roman resort town of Baiae (across the bay from Pompeii, it was not dest...

 The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel This is one of those very famous books you always mean to read, and so I thought I'd give it a try this summer.  It's short and dense, just 21 chapters long, and published in 1978.  The edition I read has a very helpful introduction from Timothy Snyder, and so here's some information I cribbed from that: Ten years after the Prague Spring, nobody was particularly pro-communist anymore, but Havel was worried about how everyone just...adapted and resigned themselves to the status quo.  He wrote this book asking what ordinary people could do to make change wherever they were; he considered that he was critiquing the West too. Essentially, Havel asks, do we just go along, playing the game (whatever it may be), or do we try to live in truth?  By 'live in truth,' he doesn't mean to take up another Big Philosophy and live by it, or foment yet another revolution; he means to make decisions according to a personal sense of what...

Walking the Bones of Britain:  A 3,000 Million Year Geological Journey from the Outer Hebrides to the Thames Estuary, by Christopher Somerville I suppose it's a bit ironic that this was my first summer book, and it just took me the whole time to read it.  There's a lot of geology and it's not a terribly light read, so I took it slow and enjoyed the walk. Christopher Somerville is the walking correspondent for the Times, because of course the Times has a walking correspondent.   This is the UK, and walking is big.  He's written quite a few books, and this one I picked up two years ago in a little bookshop during our Ridgeway hike.  (I told the bookshop lady I liked books about walking, but not Robert Macfarlane, and she showed me this guy.  Yes!) The premise of this particular book is that if you look at a geological map of Great Britain, especially the simple and colorful kind of Somerville's old schoolbooks, you see that you can kind of start at t...

  On Lying and Politics, two essays by Hannah Arendt I love this cover though This little book contains two very long essays: "Truth and Politics" and "Lying in Politics."  Both take questions of the Vietnam War and apply them to a wider context.  "Lying in Politics" is a direct response to the release of the Pentagon Papers. Arendt is probably a little above my head.  I have ambitions to read her larger works, but I don't know that I even managed to plumb the depths of these short ones.  "Truth and Politics" talks a lot about what kinds of truth there are and how they might be manipulated or if truth is even very findable.  It's less concrete, more abstract than the second essay. "Lying in Politics" meditates upon the question of "how could they?" in relation to Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,  why and how politicians lie, and particularly focuses on lying as a method of trying to make reality conform to the liar...

I sure wish I had this cover Wordhoard: Anglo-Saxon Stories , by Jill Paton Walsh and Kevin Crossley-Holland This must have come across the donation table; it's a library discard, but from a Delta High School.  There's no location and it can't be from the Delta I know, so it's probably from the one near Sacramento; there are several.  I would not have been attracted to it in high school.  The cover is pretty 60s and hideous.  This one, from a Puffin paperback, is much more interesting-looking, and the lettering makes me think Trina Schart Hyman may have done it, though it's not her usual style at all.  She did a whole lot of book covers though! I didn't really know what this book was, so I was actually pretty surprised to open it and find short stories based on famous Anglo-Saxon events or poems.  They're very well-written too, as you'd expect, and they go in chronological order.  Here we see a woodwose captured and find that he's a former British ch...

  The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, by Susan Wise Bauer  My old homeschooling guru, SWB, has also written quite a bit of history, and when she got to the Renaissance she was struck by how very many ways there were to die gruesomely back then:  I was writing about the rise and fall of kingdoms, the quest of rulers for power, the growth of new nations—but I kept getting distracted by people dying. Not just people dying, because we all will. But the ways in which they died. The historical characters I was writing about died of the most mundane afflictions. People died of splinters, sore throats, pimples, earaches. They died of abscesses in their tonsils, of eye infections, of sore knees and infected toenails. They died of stomach aches and coughs and fevers and (my personal obsession) anal fistulas. (That would be Henry II, father of Richard the Lionhearted.) And these deaths are recorded with almost no comment. I was f...

 Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana Jr. Wow, this is a fascinating account.  No wonder it was hugely popular in its day!  It's not well-known now, and I didn't really know what I was getting into, but I sure enjoyed this memoir of life at sea in the 1830s. In 1834, Richard Dana was a law student at Harvard, and he contracted measles, which damaged his eyesight; he couldn't read at all.  He decided that the way to recover his health would be to sign on as a regular sailor to a merchant ship and spend a couple of years at sea.  He entered service on the Pilgrim , which was headed to California -- in the days when Alta California was a sparsely-populated area of Mexico and the back of beyond.  No Panama Canal, no railroad, and no overland journeys from the United States yet.  The financial interest in California was for cattle hides from the herds run by the Spanish missions, brought to the coast largely by the Native peoples being used as ...

 The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe , by Marci Shore  I've had this for quite some time, and was spurred to start it when I started watching a series of lectures online and realized that the professor was the same person who wrote this book.  And also she's married to Timothy Snyder, whose books I love.  So I dove in, and it still took me forever to read, but that's because of my slump, not because it wasn't fascinating.  It was! It's a sort of combination memoir and description of life in many different places in Eastern Europe after the Cold War ended.  To my intense envy, Shore -- who must be only a year or so older than I am -- spent 1990 on studying and teaching in Czechoslovakia and other places.  That's what I wanted to be doing in the early 1990s!  Only I didn't know how to get there, and probably I wouldn't have done too well at it anyway.  But reading about her doing it was pretty amazing. Shore's...

  The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, by W. H. Lewis I've always been terrible at French literature and history, and I find them intimidating.  So I'm quite proud of reading this description of life in the 17th century under the reign of Louis XIV, the one who called himself the Sun King and moved the court from Paris to Versailles.  It's not at all a difficult or heavy-duty tome, but a lively and fascinating overview of a society, perfect for someone like me. Warren H. Lewis was C. S. Lewis' brother and, in later life, acted as his secretary and wrote books about French history.  But before that he made his career in the army, serving as a supply officer from 1914 until his retirement in 1932.  He therefore knew about everything there was to know about military logistics, especially horses, and this really comes through in his chapters about the French army -- and even his judgement of Louis' character, who he describes as so obsessed with de...

  Robin Redbreast, by David Lack I read an old Slightly Foxed issue, which always adds to my TBR list, and this book sounded intriguing and fun.  It's a complete collection of folklore, literary references and poetry, and historical mentions of....robins!  Mostly just in the UK, where robins were popular and beloved -- while over on the continent, they were often hunted and eaten.  Now the European robin and the American robin are two totally different species, so if you're American, you have to think of a different bird. David Lack wrote an entire book observing the life of the wild robin, and this was by way of being a fun but scholarly collection of literary and cultural robins,   We start off with legends about robins, because there was a belief that robins would come and reverently cover the face of anyone they found dead in the forest -- especially if the person had been murdered.  And then, why are robins always boys, culturally married to wren...

 The Book: A Cover-to-cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, by Keith Houston Well, I did manage ten books of summer, but I failed to write about the last one.  And I've been very slow with my reading in the last month or so.  As far as I can tell, I've been under enough stress that I don't have a lot of brainpower left over for reading; there are lots of big, heavy tomes on important topics that I want to read, but I mostly take refuge in stitching and fluffy reading.  Of course, I also spend too much time doomscrolling!  I'm trying to spend more energy and time in the real world, but we all know how difficult that can be.  ANYWAY.... I purchased this fun history of books for the library at work several years ago, but didn't plan to read it.  Then Robin Sloan, author of Moonbound , said he'd had a lot of fun with it, and I thought I'd give it a whirl.  It is a fun read!  Of course I know quite a bit about the history of...

The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary, by Hana Videen This followup to The Wordhord was a lovely read.  Videen uses her wordhord format to write a bestiary, explaining how medieval people loved to used animals as examples of Christian ideas.   Plus I always enjoy learning about Old English words, because they are often cognate with both modern English and with Danish.  Deor (animal), which in English evolved into deer , is also related to Danish dyr  (animal). Videen has sections of everyday animals, 'wonder' animals (such as elephants), creatures that especially symbolized good and evil, and just plain mysteries.  The good animals are the lion, deer, phoenix, and panther, and the evil ones are the whale, snake, dragon, and wolf.  The mysteries are usually taken from Alexander the Great's writings about his conquest of India; one sounds kind of like a crocodile, except that it has a head like the moon and also crocodiles were well-known.  Another...

 Jewish Space Lasers: the Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild Well I sure can't resist THAT title.  I love the Jewish Space Lasers meme/joke.  And it does make a good tail end to this history, which is really about over 200 years' worth of vicious conspiracy theories/anti-Semitism, in which the Rothschilds formed a convenient scapegoat but had nothing much to do with any of it.  Almost anyone would have done. A couple of things first: Mike Rothschild is no relation, not that anyone into conspiracy theories believes that, but he even tells a little bit of his own family history.  I read and loved his previous book, The Storm is Upon Us , about the QAnon stuff.  And, if you are unfamiliar with the origin of the phrase "Jewish Space Lasers," it dates back to 2018, when Marjorie Taylor Greene (not yet as prominent in politics as she is now) tweeted, blaming the Camp Fire on Rothschild-owned weather-controlling lasers from spac...

  All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today, by Elizabeth Comen Elizabeth Comen is an oncologist specializing in breast cancer, and as she worked with her patients, she came to realize just how badly our medical system is set up -- for everyone, but particularly for women.  Looking back into history, she collected evidence and traced stories illustrating how attitudes and beliefs have come down to us and are still hanging around. Dr. Comen works through chapters dedicated to systems of the human body, starting with skin, bones, and muscles, right through to nerves, hormones, and reproduction.    (While the entire book is enraging, this guarantees that the intensity will ramp up and the  most enraging material will probably be at the end.)  Readers will probably be familiar with quite a few of the stories already -- Ignaz Semmelweis' failed attempts to get doctors to wash their hands, the horri...

 The Faithful Spy, by John Hendrix It's a graphic novel biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, aimed at a YA audience!   While this story culminates in Bonhoeffer's involvement in plots to kill Hitler, and his subsequent imprisonment, it's not the sole focus of the book.  This is a biography that aims to give a full picture of Bonhoeffer's life, complete with his childhood and family, later studies, travel, and efforts to start a new kind of pastor training. The art is gorgeous -- complex and layered, but done only in scarlet, teal, and black.  Visually, this book is wonderful, but it does suffer from the size; I think it would be better in a larger size, which may have been too expensive to print or something.  The print is tiny, and I often struggled to read it. Highly recommended for an excellent angle on Germany in World War II* and a fascinating treatment of Bonhoeffer's life, plus the art.  It was really good. But I wish it was printed larger! *Alth...

 Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, by Amy Jeffs This caught my eye when my mom and I spent a couple of hours in Foyles; I was kind of intrigued.  What do you mean, a new mythology?  So I got hold of a copy and found out.  It's a couple of years old now so this will all be old news to any British readers; Chris at Calmgrove probably beat me to this ages ago. Jeffs has taken all those old stories about the founding of Britain and British history -- from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Wace, and Layamon, and such -- and told them as short stories or episodes.  She's had a wonderful time carving lino prints to illustrate the stories, too.   So we start with giants installing Stonehenge on an Irish mountain, and Brutus bringing his Trojans, and the Scotti, and so on.  Then there's Weland the Smith, King Leir and Cordelia, the origin of the Stone of Scone, Deirdre in Ireland, and the two dragons.  We move into the Arthurian cycle, especially stories...

 The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, by Robert Louis Stevenson  It's Spin Day!  Did you read your book? The Black Arrow was fun.  It's set -- as the subtitle says -- during the Wars of the Roses, a chaotic and confusing time when two branches of the English nobility fought over which would control the throne.  Everybody else fought on one side or the other, and quite a few switched sides on the regular, according to who looked like winning.  This lasted decades, in patches, and was essentially a series of civil wars that took up much of the 1400s.  It ended with the death of Richard III in 1485 and the accession of Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian who married Elizabeth of York to unite the two branches.  But in this story, Richard III is a young man.  Strictly speaking he isn't even the Duke of Gloucester yet, but RLS makes him duke a little prematurely to avoid confusion. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is a teenage orphan in the care of Sir...

 How the Girl Guides Won the War, by Janie Hampton This was one of the titles that intrigued me on our last book-binge day in London.  As a former Girl Scout myself, I had to be interested in this!  How could that possibly be? Hampton confesses in her introduction that she meant to write about how awful the Girl Guides were, so hearty and colonial and tragically unhip, but was then surprised to discover that they were in fact amazing .  She doesn't cover just British Guides, but girls in many countries, and though she ranges throughout Guide history since its inception, she mostly focuses on World War II.  This makes it kind of all over the place, but it's always fascinating to read about what these girls and women accomplished! One thing to remember is that for a long time, Guiding reached up well into early adulthood and often functioned as further education back when many girls left school at 14 or 16.  You could be a Guide into your twenties, and lead ...

 Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell You may be familiar with the UK comedy duo Mitchell and Webb?  They're probably best known in the US by this sketch .  The one who asks, "Are we the baddies?"  is David Mitchell, and besides being a very funny comedian, he is also a history nerd, and he wrote this comedic take on the kings and queens of England, at least up to the end of the Tudors.  It's quite long enough as it is, without bringing in modernity. Mitchell is interested in the questions that humans have been working out in real time for the past several thousand years -- how do we decide who's going to be in charge, and how do we transfer power?  What is a king anyway?  So while he's narrating, amusingly, the list of kings, he's bringing out how people thought of their kings and what they did about it.   For example.  Pre-Norman Conquest, the king's sons were all eligible for the crown, and the barons wo...

 The Hard Way: Discovering the Women Who Walked Before Us, by Susannah Walker This book arrived for me while I was gone on the Ridgeway, and that's what it's about!  Sort of.  I was kind of confused about the title at first but eventually Walker moves from the Ridgeway to focus on the much less known Hard Way or Harrow Way, and it is not easy to trace.  Anyway, I helped to back the publishing of this book, pretty much on a whim, so I got a copy and my name in the back.  You can look me up. Walker seems to be about my age, and spent much of her 20s walking and even living on the Ridgeway, before settling down into marriage and a child and suddenly no more walking.  Or at least, it became far more difficult to get out to anyplace as inaccessible as the Ridgeway, which is not stroller-friendly and has hardly anyplace to park and leave the car, and she spent a lot of time thinking about how women get pulled into domesticity once they have kids, in a way that do...