Very Blueberry: Preserving

Very Blueberry
by Jennifer Trainer Thompson
Celestial Arts, 2005

To enjoy berries year-round, simply place them, unwashed, in a single layer on a baking sheet and freeze them. Remove the pan from the freezer, place the berries in sealed plastic bags, and return them to the freezer for up to six months.

Never wash berries -- fresh, dried, or frozen -- until you're about to serve them or use them to brighten muffins or pancakes, enliven rice and salad, or add color to desserts. Swirled into your pancake batter in January, they will remind you of that hot August afternoon you picked the perfect blue ball and popped it into your mouth while it was still warm from the sun.

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Now in Review: Fixing the Sky

Fixing the Sky
The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control
by James Rodger Fleming
Columbia University Press, 2010

For more than a century, scientists, soldiers, and charlatans have tried to manipulate weather and climate, and like them, today's climate engineers wildly exaggerate what is possible. Scarcely considering the political, military, and ethical implications of managing the world's climate, these individuals hatch schemes with potential consequences that far outweigh anything their predecessors might have faced.

Showing what can happen when fixing the sky becomes a dangerous experiment in pseudoscience, James Rodger Fleming traces the tragicomic history of the rainmakers, rain fakers, weather warriors, and climate engineers who have been both full of ideas and full of themselves.

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The Abundant Community

The Abundant Community
Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods
by John McKnight and Peter Block
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010

Depersonalization and the corporate centralization of wealth, power and influence has obviously had a deleterious affect on families and neighborhoods throughout America in recent years, creating deep insecurities, inequities and social maladies that have lowered the quality of life and enlarged prison populations.

This book is all about correcting this trend with basic, localized and personal actions that lead to greater cooperation, stronger communities and a sustainable economy.

Educators and social policy scholars John McKnight and Peter Block offer practical suggestions for nurturing voluntary systems, reconnecting with our neighbors and creating an environment of abundance rather than scarcity.

"The culture of community is initiated by people who value each other's gifts and are seriously related to each other," they explain. "It takes time, because serious relationships are based upon trust, and trust grows from with experience of being together in ways that make a difference in our lives."

The process begins with mutual respect, appreciating the abilities of our neighbors, buying and employing locally while also welcoming newcomers and including them in the community, creating associations and supporting one another.

"We take seriously the idealistic notion that our future is dependent on each of us and if one of us is not free, or valued, or participating in a full life, then those are not possible for any of us."

Refreshingly utopian and optimistic, this book gives voice to ideals that have been too long suppressed. Hopefully, it will help strengthen efforts to restore community and neighborhood to their rightful importance in American society.

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The Great Book of Chocolate

The Great Book of Chocolate
The Chocolate Lover's Guide with Recipes
by David Lebovitz
Ten Speed Press, 2004

Former Chez Panisse pastry chef and cookbook author David Lebovitz compiled this compact but far-reaching guide to all things chocolate.

"Chocolate, in my biased opinion, is the most universally provoking and addictive flavor," Lebovitz explains, describing his book as "a gift to all chocolate lovers," an informed tour of the world of chocolates and chocolate-making that includes cooking tips and recipes.

Lebovitz's tour includes an introduction to cacao beans and where they are grown, a primer on the different types of chocolates from couverture to white chocolate, some comments on the healthy benefits of chocolate, and some suggestions on choosing a chocolatier. He devotes a full chapter to the chocolates in Paris, which he claims has more fantastic chocolate boutiques than any other city in the world.

The recipes includes riffs on the classic brownie and Lebovitz's signature Rocky Road as well as Chocolat Tarte de Rue Tatin, Triple-Chocolate Parfait and Black-Bottom Cupcakes. There are 30 recipes in all preceeding a resource section of chocolatier websites.

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The Curse of the Labrador Duck

The Curse of the Labrador Duck
My Obsessive Quest to the Edge of Extinction
by Glen Chilton
Simon & Schuster, 2009

In this memoir of a curious obsession, ornithologist Glen Chilton recounts his travels through North America and Europe as he tracks down every known specimen of the extinct Labrador Duck.

"I embarked on an adventure to examine and measure every stuffed Labrador Duck specimen, no matter where it was, without exception. I was determined to see where the ducks nested (Labrador would be a good start) and where they wintered (the shallow waters around New York City). Not allowing myself to stop for a breath, I would examine every Labrador Duck egg in every museum, and visit every spot on the planet where the ducks were known to have been shot."

Both a travelogue and a lesson on extinction, Chilton's book takes readers along on his low-budget globe-trekking adventure, describing his visits to museum after museum, encounters with curators, flirtations with women, and the spare remnant evidence of the Labrador Duck. The destinations include Labrador and Nova Scotia in Canada, London and Liverpool in England, Paris, and several small German towns and Russian villages.

The last Labrador Duck sighting reportedly occurred at Elmira, New York on December 12, 1878. It was a striking black and white eider-like sea duck, never seen in large numbers, but thought to breed in Labrador. It wintered from Nova Scotia to as far south as Chesapeake Bay.

The last preserved specimen was shot in 1875 on Long Island, shortly before the duck became the first bird extinction in North America after 1500.

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Now in Review: A Grouse Hunter's Almanac

A Grouse Hunter's Almanac
The Other Kind of Hunting
by Mark Parman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009

In an evocative almanac that chronicles the early season of the grouse hunt through its end in the snows of January, Parman follows his dog through the changing trees and foliage, thrills to the sudden flush of beating wings, and holds a bird in hand, thankful for the meal it will provide.

Distilling twenty seasons of grouse hunting into these essays, he writes of old dogs and gun lust, cover and clear cutting, climate change, companions male and female, wildlife art, and stumps.

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When the Rains Come

When the Rains Come
A Naturalist's Year in the Sonoran Desert
by John Alcock
University of Arizona Press, 2009

This book follows the plants and animals of Arizona's Usery Mountains in the Sonoran Desert during the drought year of 2006 when the annual wait for rain went on far too long, detailing their responses to the dry spell and how they responded when the rains finally came down.

Authored by naturalist John Alcock, who has hiked the area for 30 years and is one of its most knowledgeable observers, the text follows the cycle of one year's seasons chronologically. Each month is worth a couple essays about the changes occuring during that time of year. These changes, he explains repeatedly, are related to and stimulated by the presence or absence of rain.

"Only very special plants and animals can survive and reproduce in a place that may receive as little as six inches of rain in a year," he points out, "a place where the temperature may rise above one hundred degrees each day for months on end."

When it finally drizzles one day in December, after many weeks of total dryness, Alcock hurries out to the desert and finds a colony of ants piled up several bodies deep around the entrance to their nests. Down on his hands and knees, he peers closely and sees that "many of the ants have small droplets of water adhering to their head, legs, or thorax, which supplies me with a hypothesis. Perhaps they have formed a rain-collecting brigade, using their bodies to intercept the droplets of drizzle before the water can reach the gravel."

Throughout the book, Alcock makes similar observations about the alarm calls of round-tailed ground squirrels, the mating competitions of male digger bees, the communal hunts of Harris's hawks, the adaptations of peccaries' reproductive cycle to the seasonal rains, the effects of urban sprawl, and more. Illustrated with the naturalist's photographs - many showing side-by-side versions of the same location ten or twenty years apart - the result is an impressive and highly readable document of the man's intimate knowledge of the place.

A professor emeritus at Arizona State University, Alcock also wrote the John Burroughs Medal winner In a Desert Garden as well as Sonoran Desert Spring and Sonoran Desert Summer, all revealing the surprising diversity of the desert's ecosystem.

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