Piano Lessons: Music, Love & True Adventures

by Noah Adams (Delacorte Press 1996)

Noah Adams, host of NPR’s All Things Considered, had always wanted to learn to play the piano. This book chronicles, in monthly chapters, the year that he finally purchased a piano and learned to play (sort of). He did not, as I expected, engage a teacher and take weekly lessons. At least not at first. Instead, he purchased a computer program called the Miracle System and attempted to learn from that. The Miracle took him only so far. Later in the year, he attended a piano “camp” for adults, where at least he had lessons from actual living, breathing teachers. (I confess I am prejudiced in favor of live teachers.) And throughout, his goal was to learn to play Träumerei, from Scenes from Childhood by Robert Schumann. People kept telling him Träumerei is actually very difficult to play, trying to persuade him to set a more realistic goal; but he forged ahead. And he manages to play it (slowly) for his wife at the end of “December”. (Actually, I get it; when I was a teen taking lessons, I was motivated to learn to play the Waldstein Sonata, which was way out of my league! I was less successful than Adams, though I did make it through the brief second movement. And as an adult, my motivating piece was the Goldberg Variations. Again, I had some limited success; I couldn’t learn more than the Aria and four Variations.)

The book is not solely about Adams’ quest to play the piano; he includes a number of interviews with pianists and piano teachers. For me, the most interesting thing is in “November,” when Adams interviews piano teacher Denise Kahn in New York City. Apparently, current practice is to get students play with their entire bodies (“with free movement”), not just their fingers. All those scales and drills aimed at strengthening the fingers? Useless! Even harmful! Kahn tells Adams, “Once you understand that you can avoid the percussive effect on the fingers, that the arm is really supplying the motion, it’s like being let out of jail. You make larger, continuous motions behind a group of notes, and so you overcome this inherent problem of the piano, which is that the keys go up and down but the music goes horizontally.” This was something I had never heard before.

The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman (Penguin 2020)

I waited for so long for this book to become available in some format at my public library that I finally broke down and purchased it (gasp!). It was worth it. (I got a copy for my sister, too.) We are not birdwatchers in the sense of traveling to faraway places to spot exotic species to add to our Life List; nor can we tell one sparrow, or one warbler, from another. But we love to watch birds come to the feeders in our yards, and we worry to read of plummeting populations and new outbreaks of bird flu.

We humans are so arrogant. We arbitrarily decide that human ways of being in the world are the most advanced, and we like to measure how close or far every other animal on the planet comes to duplicating what we can do (talk, compose music, make art, make stuff grow where we want it and not where we don’t–with spotty success–build stuff, etc.). Disdainfully, we refer to people we deem unintelligent as “birdbrains.” Ha! Little do we know. In this book, Jennifer Ackerman details just how smart birds are, in all kinds of ways. She traveled the world to write this book, but her most surprising examples in the various categories of her subtitle might be the birds of Australia (where birdsong originated before spreading around the world). She notes how European and American ornithologists had little experience with the birds of the southern hemisphere, with the result that many long-held beliefs about birds in general have now been proven wrong. One example is the belief that only male birds sing (talk about arrogant!). Another is the dismissal of brood parasitism (laying one’s eggs in the nests of other species of birds) as rare. It is not. (And the host birds have their ways of fighting back.)

All in all, a terrific book that opened my eyes to a host of fascinating facts about birds.

The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

by Anand Giridharadas (Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House, 2022)

Both Indivisible National and my local Indivisible Montgomery both recently featured this as their Book Club choice. I didn’t finish the book in time for the discussions about it, because I had to wait too long to get it from Libby. Then I ran out of time and they took it back before I finished the final chapter! The current wait time is 14 weeks. Yes, you read that right. I will write about the part that I read, and I plan to borrow a copy to finish the last chapter.

Giridharadas focuses on people playing different roles in the progressive movement. Some are famous, some are not. Chapter 1, “The Waking Among the Woke”, features the leaders of the first Women’s March in 2017, Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Loretta Ross. The decision to participate in the march was a difficult one for them; they did not trust white women not to push them aside. In the end, they decided to join and lead–but as we know now, that did not end well.

Chapter 2, “Can Love Change a Mind?” is about transracial adoption and white privilege, about how white parents adopting children of color might mean well, but they are truly clueless about how their children experience the world. A “camp” endeavors to get white parents to understand racism from the point of view of their children.

Chapter 3, “A Movement That Grows”, follows Bernie Sanders, and Chapter 4, “The Inside-Outside Game”, focus on Sanders protege Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Chapter 5, “The Art of Messaging”, was perhaps my favorite chapter, with its focus on Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive “communications strategist” whose ideas about how Democrats should communicate their message are radically different from most traditional messaging campaigns (but apparently, they work!). Her “call-out sandwich” must have inspired Indivisible Truth Brigade’s “truth sandwich”–Begin with a shared value; then call out the bad actors for lying (maybe show how they benefit from the lie); and conclude with a vision of a bright future based on the truth.

Chapter 6, “The Vaccine Against Lies”, focuses on Diane Benscoter, whose expertise and lived experience are in deprogramming cultists and conspiracy theorists. Chapter 7, “Meaning Making at the Door”, is about Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democratic senator from Arizona, and Cesar Torres, a “deep canvasser”.

All very different people engaged in the art of persuading others to open their minds to another way of looking at things.

Horse

by Geraldine Brooks (Penguin Random House 2022)

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by Geraldine Brooks that I didn’t like. She is a master of historical fiction (she calls this one “a work of fiction inspired by actual events”). The reader (this one, anyway) is drawn in from the first chapter. There are multiple themes and several story lines woven into the novel, which is set both in the antebellum and Civil War era, briefly in the 1950s, and the present. First, there is the story of the eponymous horse: Lexington, a nineteenth century racehorse and thoroughbred sire. Then there is the story of Lexington’s enslaved groom and trainer, Jarret Lewis, known variously as “Warfield’s Jarret”, “Ten Broeck’s Jarret”, and “Alexander’s Jarret”, depending on who his master was at the time. Jarret’s story, as imagined by Brooks, reflects the heartbreak of being the property of another, never free to choose his own way, yet he contrives to stay with his beloved Lexington for the horse’s entire life, being there when he was foaled as well as when he died, age 25 and blind, with a few short periods in between when he was forced to work apart from the horse. Jarret risks everything for Lexington, and Lexington loves and trusts Jarret as he loves and trusts no other. Finally, the 19th century storyline is completed with the point of view of Thomas J. Scott, a painter of horses whose depictions of Lexington have survived to this day (Follow the previous link to see one such painting.). Brooks integrates known facts about Scott’s life with a fictionalized Scott who “befriends” the enslaved Jarret.

Then there are the interwoven stories of

**Jess, an Australian living in Washington, D.C. and managing the Osteology Prep Lab at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Suitland, Maryland. Jess has been fascinated by bones and skeletons her whole life, and her role in Brooks’ novel is as the discoverer that Lexington’s preserved skeleton has been mouldering in a Smithsonian attic for years, and as the person who corrects the mistakes of the person who originally articulated it. And

**Theo Northam, a half Yoruba, half White American art history Ph.D. student at Georgetown University, who is attracted to Jess but doubts that she can ever really understand what life is like for a person of color in America. And to a lesser extent,

**Martha Jackson, owner of a New York gallery, lover of art and of horses, whose discerning eye recognizes a missing painting and helps to restore it to its rightful owner.

Along the way, in addition to the themes of racism, slavery, and white supremacy, we are privy to Civil War history, the history and ethics of horse racing in America, the challenges of biracial relationships, the study of bones, the world of horse portraiture, and more.

I loved this book, as I love all of Brooks’ work, and recommend it highly.

The Island

by Victoria Hislop (Headline Review Tenth Anniversary Edition 2015; originally published in 2005)

British author Victoria Hislop’s first novel tells the story of Eleni Petrakis, her husband Giorgis. her daughters Anna and Maria, her granddaughter Sofia and great-granddaughter Alexis, an Englishwoman whose Greek mother Sofia has never told her daughter anything about her life on the Greek island of Crete. On a trip to Crete with her boyfriend, Alexis learns the tragic story of her family, and she helps Sofia to see that she has no reason to be ashamed of her past.

Spinalonga, the eponymous island, is a tiny island off the northeast coast of Crete. During the first half of the twentieth century, it was a leper colony, where people afflicted with the dreaded ancient disease were sent to live and die, separated from their families and friends and the rest of society. (This is true.) The fictional Petrakis family lived in the village of Plaka, a short boat trip from Spinalonga. Giorgis, a fisherman, makes a little extra money delivering goods and sick people to the island. It is a horrific shock when he must deliver his own wife, a beloved teacher, to the island when she shows signs of leprosy, for which there was at the time no cure and no effective treatment. Their young daughters, Anna and Maria, will grow up without a mother–Anna a wild thing, thoughtless and reckless, and Maria a dutiful daughter in every way.

Eleni discovers to her surprise that Spinalonga hides a pretty decent way of life. There is an elected leader, a school, and a hospital. Each person is assigned a place to live–an apartment in “the Block” or a small house. After the arrival of a group of lepers from Athens, life becomes even better once the Athenians take over and encourage people to open shops, grow food, go to the movies, and generally live their lives. Away from the island, no one realizes that life within Spinalonga’s walls is not bad at all. Even during the Second World War when the Nazis occupy Crete, they leave the leper colony alone, not wanting to be exposed to the disease. However, the fact that no one ever leaves the island cannot be forgotten. Exile to Spinalonga is a prison sentence that ends only in death.

Eleni’s daughters grow up, and Anna marries a wealthy olive baron’s son, but she doesn’t marry for love and soon falls for her husband’s cousin Manolis. Manolis flirts with Anna, but he wants to marry Maria, enraging Anna. But fate intervenes when Maria is diagnosed with leprosy. Giorgis takes her to Spinalonga to live out her days. Maria meets many good people there, including Papadimitriou, the elected leader; Dimitris, her mother’s former student, now a teacher at the little school; Elpida Kontomaris, wife of the previous leader; and Dr. Kiritsis, whose research into leprosy will eventually yield a cure (the drug dapsone) that will result in the abandonment of Spinalonga as a leper colony in 1957.

Unable to marry Maria because of her diagnosis and subsequent exile, Manolis returns to his flirtation with Anna. This time their attraction develops into a full-blown affair, and eventually, Anna’s husband Andreas cannot avoid the truth, and tragedy ensues. At the age of three, little Sofia loses both her parents. After a period of living with her paternal grandparents, she goes to live with Maria and her husband in Agios Nikolaos, a town not far from Plaka. Unable to find the right time to tell Sofia the truth about her parents, they let her believe that they are her parents. When they reveal the truth the night before she is to leave for university in Athens, Sofia is shocked and angry. Unable to forgive them this monstrous omission, she refuses to return to Crete, sure that everyone there knows her story and judges her. She falls in love with an Englishman and leaves Greece, determined never to return. Once in England, raising her son Nikolaos and daughter Alexis, she never really forgives her aunt and uncle for lying to her. But Alexis teaches her mother that a little child is not responsible for the sins of her parents.

Hislop researched the story of Spinalonga carefully, and its history as a leper colony is described in detail alongside the stories of Eleni, Anna, Maria, and Sofia. The juxtaposition of history and fiction is not always done as successfully as it might have been (transitions between the two are sometimes awkward), and the dialog is often stilted and stiff. Still, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for Eleni, Maria, Giorgis, Dr. Kiritsis, and several other characters. There were moments when I felt that Hislop had gotten Greek culture all wrong. (Maria “sat down to drink the coffee which had been brewing on her stove”, but Greeks do not brew coffee; they prepare it immediately before drinking it in small, long-handled pots called brikia and pour it directly into tiny cups once it has boiled and covered with foam. And the baptism of Anna’s baby daughter apparently takes place within two weeks of her birth; but Greek babies are generally not baptized until at least forty days after the birth, and many are baptized months after that.) But these are small details. Hislop has written an intriguing history of a people and a place that most people would never have imagined.

What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman (Penguin 2023)

When we first moved to this house in Gaithersburg next to Seneca Creek State Park almost forty years ago, we would occasionally hear owls hooting in the woods, but we never saw one. I became obsessed with those owls. I looked for opportunities to be in the park after dark, but I never saw an owl. Over the years, I have, very infrequently, caught a glimpse of a Barred Owl or two, in the woods next to the creek near our house. One memorable year, an owl raised a brood of chicks somewhere in our neighborhood, and we saw the owlets as they were learning to fly, while they were still in the vicinity and unused to keeping themselves hidden from human eyes. But for the most part, I had to give up my quest to see owls because they just don’t show themselves. I had to be content with listening to their calls and hoots to each other. Reading this book, however, I realized that I am not alone in my failure to spot owls in the wild. They are so well-camouflaged and able to stay so still, even ornithologists who specialize in owls have a hard time observing them.

After Time and Turtles, which was so enchanting, I had a little bit of a hard time getting into this one. Ackerman’s style is less personal and more scientific than Montgomery’s, more about the owls and less about the people who love and study them. Still, as I read on, I found myself amazed by the information she shared about “the world’s most enigmatic birds.” There are so many different species of owls, grouped into several major families. Some are really large (Snowy Owls weigh in at four pounds, and their feathers make them seem even bigger than they are), and some are tiny enough to fit into your hand, like the Elf Owl, which is the size of a sparrow. Some nest in tree cavities high up in the canopy, others take over other birds’ nests, and Burrowing Owls, as their name indicates, nest in burrows in the ground. There are “Eared” owls (but those tufts are not their ears) and owls with tuftless smooth heads. But despite all this variety, owls are perhaps the most recognizable birds in the world. Though we rarely see them, we all know what they look like. Cultures around the world share owl lore, some revering owls while others hate and fear them. And because owls are mostly active in the dark of night, when humans are vulnerable and relatively uncomfortable, they are hard to study, and there is much that we don’t know about them. Ackerman summarizes what we do know and points out the many gaps in our knowledge.

The chapters in the book are:

One: Making Sense of Owls: Unpacking the Mysteries

Two: What It’s Like to Be an Owl: Ingenious Adaptations (like their extraordinary hearing and vision, their hunting prowess, their nearly silent flight)

Three: Owling: Studying the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds (how scientists around the world study owls in the wild, like using specially trained dogs, passive audio recordings, satellite images and more to detect owls)

Four: Who Gives a Hoot: Owl Talk (Owls have a huge variety of sounds which they use in many different ways)

Five: What It Takes to Make an Owl: Courting and Breeding (Most owls are attentive mates and devoted parents who fiercely defend their nests; some owls raise chicks of varying ages in one nest)

Six: To Stay or to Go? Roosting and Migrating (Owls are typically solitary, but the Long-eared Owls of Serbia and other parts of Europe roost in large communities of hundreds of individuals. Migrating owls can be “irruptive”–sometimes they stay put, and sometimes they migrate, like Snowy Owls and Northern Saw-Whet Owls)

Seven: An Owl in the Hand: Learning from Captive Birds (These are mostly injured, rehabilitated birds who are unfit for release back into the wild; some are used as ambassadors to teach people about owls)

Eight: Half Bird, Half Spirit: Owls and the Human Imagination (from cave paintings 36,000 years old to Harry Potter)

Nine: What an Owl Knows: How Wise Are Owls? (They know a lot more than we give them credit for)

Afterword: Saving Owls: Protecting What We Love (lots of suggestions for actions readers can take to help save endangered owl populations)

Quite a complete tour of what we know, as well as what we don’t know, about owls.

Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell

by Sy Montgomery; illustrations by Matt Patterson (Harper Collins 2023)

While waiting for The Bird Way, which never came (so I bought it, but I haven’t read it yet), I put a hold on two books about animals and the people that love and respect them. And then both of my holds arrived within a day of each other. How can I read 2 books in 3 weeks? I decided I would try. I picked this one to read first, and read it in 3 days. It read like a novel, which it isn’t. I was reminded of when I would start my yearly Dick Francis novel. I’d have to clear my desk because I knew I would just inhale the book from start to finish, barely stopping to eat and sleep! This wasn’t quite like that, but I did read obsessively until I finished it.

Sy Montgomery and her friend and neighbor Matt Patterson are obsessed with turtles of all kinds. They leave their respective spouses in New Hampshire and spend months volunteering at TRL, the Turtle Rescue League, in Massachusetts. TRL is the brainchild of Alexxia Bell and Natasha Nowick, who love all animals, but especially turtles. They have learned how to rehabilitate turtles that have been hit by cars while migrating from their summer ponds to their over-wintering quarters or searching for nesting sites when they are ready to lay their eggs. They never give up on a turtle, no matter how badly it is injured, because turtles, they say, never give up. They may appear to be dead, but can sometimes be resuscitated. They also rescue turtles that have been kept in captivity in the wrong environment or fed the wrong food, and they sometimes take their volunteers to places where a lot of turtles will be crossing busy roads, where they risk their lives to get cars and trucks to stop while they carry the turtles across.

They often name the turtles they rehabilitate (Fire Chief, Peaches, Pizza Man, Louise, Chunky Chip, . . .). They bond with certain turtles and grieve for them when they die, and also when they are able to return them to the wild (because it is known to be so perilous, and because they will not be likely to see them again). They are completely obsessed with turtles–not only Alexxia and Natasha, but all of their volunteers, and Sy and Matt, who fall in love with Fire Chief, a snapping turtle in his seventh decade who was gravely injured when he was hit by a car. I was surprised to learn that snapping turtles are much gentler than they are believed to be. Fire Chief even allows Sy and Matt to stroke his face. People cuddle the turtles, swim with them, hold “hands” with them, look deeply into their eyes, and learn from them how to be in the moment.

I learned many interesting turtle facts reading this book: Turtles have existed for more than 250 million years; they survived the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. If not starved, frozen, baked or hit by a vehicle, they can live for a hundred years or more, depending on the species. They are the most endangered species on Earth. They can survive grievous injuries. They recognize individual people and can bond with them.

There is a nationwide community of turtle lovers dedicated to saving turtles. Who knew? I am grateful to them for the work that they do, trying to save these amazing animals. I will definitely look at the next boxie, snapper, or paint that I see with newfound respect and admiration.

The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

by Barbara K. Lipska with Elaine McArdle (First Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2019)

This astonishing memoir of madness caused by cancer reminds me a lot of Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight and Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire. In all three cases, the writer descends into temporary madness caused by a physical illness: a brain hemorrhage in Taylor’s case, anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis in Cahalan’s case, and metastatic melanoma in Lipska’s case. Lipska’s illness first manifested itself in 2015. As multiple raisin-sized tumors grew in her brain, Lipska’s behavior and personality changed radically. Her family–husband Mirek, son Witek, daughter Kasia and sister Maria–and her doctors and caregivers supported her despite her tendency to abuse them while she was ill. When it metastasizes to the brain, melanoma almost always kills its victims; somehow, Barbara Lipska beat the odds. She was given (among other treatments) immunotherapy, which appears to have done the trick (while also causing some really awful side effects). Although aware that the tumors can still recur, Lipska is (as far as I can tell) still working at NIMH, where she directs the Human Brain Collection Core, still engaging in fairly extreme sports (she is partial to triathlons), and very thankful to be alive. Her descriptions of her own reckless behaviors, impatience with her family and colleagues, and difficulties with vision, executive function, memory, and more are detailed (I thought she must have interviewed those she interacted with, since at the time she had no understanding of what was happening; but she claims they don’t want to talk about it). Although she was not truly mentally ill, the tumors and swelling in her brain allowed her to experience mental illness for herself and then share with her readers what it feels like to totally lose control of your life: “For the first time in my life I realize how profoundly unsettling it is to have a mind that does not function.” Writing about her experience is how she is processing it, and in so doing, she enlightens us and reminds us to be compassionate.

I finished the book in two days! It grabbed my interest and never let go.

The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

More than two years ago, I was looking for this book but could only find The Little French Bistro, so I read that instead, and I liked it. I finally found this one in Libby, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. Jean Perdu (“Lost”) owns a “book barge”, aka the Literary Apothecary, where he dispenses literary prescriptions for his lovelorn and otherwise unhappy clientele. Monsieur Perdu has rejected love and the society of others in favor of endless grief because his true love, Manon, left him twenty years ago. He and his young neighbor Max Jordan (a successful writer) take off towards the south of France in the book barge. They meet with various adventures, take on a few more people, and eventually return to Paris, sans barge. M. Perdu has ample opportunity to stop obsessing about the tragedy of his lost love, but he holds out until the very end, dispensing life’s wisdom to others while ignoring it himself. I found it challenging to appreciate the characters, though in the end, I suppose I liked them well enough. But jeez, it took a lot of chapters to get them where they needed to be!

The Hummingbirds’ Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings

by Sy Montgomery (Atria 2021)

I’m on the list to borrow Jennifer Ackerman’s The Bird Way from my public library, but it seems all copies of the book have disappeared and unless they purchase more, I (and a lot of other people) am (are) out of luck. I’m actually considering buying it–a radical move for me, as I really don’t have room for more books than I already have (and to be honest, not even for all of those). Hence, Libby suggested this little volume to while away the time while I wait. Sy Montgomery visits hummingbird rehabilitator Brenda Sherburn La Belle at her home in Fairfax, California to watch and help as Brenda cares for and successfully raises two hummingbird chicks brought to her. In between her descriptions of the tiny birds and their care, Montgomery writes about what sets hummingbirds (“little more than bubbles fringed with iridescent feathers–air wrapped in light”) apart from other birds: their size, speed, unique flight capabilities, voracity (baby hummers will starve if not fed nectar and insects every 20 minutes, all day long!) and more. The book is filled with interesting facts about hummers, tied together with the narrative of Maya and Zuni, the Allen’s Hummingbird siblings rehabilitated by Brenda and released into the wild, where they “own the sky”. If you love nature and birds in particular, you’ll enjoy this hummingbird-sized book (only 79 pages!).