I was a little disappointed in this gardening memoir - it wasn't as humorous as Wm. Alexander (The $64 Tomato), nor as erudite as Michael Pollan or Charles Elliot. But it did have some good information on gardening in the northeast (the book is set in Sharon, CT), and a lot of history for someone interested in that neck of the woods. I also really enjoyed her ponderings about women and gardening and how this differs from men and their gardening pursuits.

Sometimes it got a little too self-involved for me....I could have done without hearing about her divorces and marital problems. It didn't seem to fit with the rest of the book, although I do understand she was trying to write about herself evolving as her garden did.

This is a moderately interesting historical work on the brothers Grimm - and the women (female family friends & acquaintances) who collected or told them the stories they heard from nursemaids, housekeepers, and mothers.

It includes some interesting history on the Napoleonic Wars, the German empire, and just how powerless women were there in the late 1700's-early 1800's. Paradiz draws some rather heavy handed but convincing parallels between the voiceless female collaborators and the powerless women & girls in several of the Grimm's fairy tales. The stories really shouldn't be called Grimm's fairy tales so much as the Wild sisters', the Haxthausen girls', and the Hassenpflugg Tales!

Quick reading, well-written memoir about a writer who moves to a farm in upstate NY, partially so he can have sheep for his Border collies. He has some interesting insights on "dog people" and why people turn to dogs for companionship, and what dogs can provide them with (and what they can't)

This was a short but gripping book - meticulously researched - describing the life of the Hungarian doctor who discovered that doctors, students, and midwives who washed their hands in a disinfectant wash had much, much lower rates of "childbed fever" (puerperal fever) among their patients - like1 in 100 instead of 1 in 6!).

Nuland combines a strong understanding of the history of medicine and academia, how doctors interact professionally, and more than a bit of detective work. Several passages are horribly graphic, giving you just an inkling of what 19th c. hospitals were like and what puerperal fever did to a person.

Turns out many of the doctors and students sticking their hands into women in labor had just come from dissecting pus-ridden corpses. If that wasn't bad enough, unwashed sheets helped transfer infection.

Unfortunately, Semmelweis was such a difficult person and alienated so many people that he was unable to change routine practices in these hospitals. It wasn't until a couple of decades later that Pasteur & Lister showed the world germs in pus from corpses, and infection began to be understood.

Semmelweis suffered various professional and personal setbacks, and may have developed early-onset Alzheimer's. At any rate, he was admitted to a mental hospital in his early 50's, where he appears to have died as result of being beaten by the attendants

This is a witty, fun and very, British novel about a writer and the director of a remake of "Pride & Prejudice". The story's parallels to P & P are pretty clever, with the added twist that the sexes have been reversed - the proud, controlling, and misunderstood character is a woman, and the man is down to earth and charming (with very fine eyes).

Since it is set in the present and not the 19th century, there is some sex in addition to letter writing and country dances. The cover blurb says "frothy" at least twice but I didn't find it frothy at all. Light, but definitely not frothy.