Kenosha 
Taylors
Falls 
Betty
Brinn children's library, Milwaukee| Book Lists | Book sellers | Writing Services | Quotes | Links |
What are the best series ever written? The series that most consistently maintained a high level of story telling and character development?
Here are the eclectic reader choices:
The best of 2006 - so far this year these are our favorites:
A recommendation: I highly recommend "The Trout Pool Paradox" for a good book about rivers and history! Cheers, John Helland
Favorite libraries:
Kenosha Taylors
Falls Betty
Brinn children's library, Milwaukee
Kenosha looks like it is the capital of libraries. Taylors Falls is an 1888 home making books the possession of everyone.
Book Quotes for the Month
A Dog’s History of America, Mark Derr, North Point Press,
2004.
After the grueling years of war and the satisfaction of victory, foxes and wolves
would seem minor annoyances, yet they stood in Washington's way, obstacles to
creating a smoothly operating farm where all was in balance. Washington evidently
disliked such obstructions, whether harmful to his crops or animals, to transport
by land or sea, or to success in battle or politics. A few years after obtaining
the French hounds, he attempted to find dogs to help him kill wolves that were
threatening his prized sheep.
The problem of sheep-killing canids was as old as European settlement in North
America, but it no longer involved the survival of a few colonists and a handful
of sheep. Now planters like Washington and Jefferson, who were not devoted solely
to monocropping tobacco, rice, indigo, or cotton, and farmers from New England
and western nonslave territories, were more intent on improving the quality of
their sheep, other livestock, and even their dogs than their forebears had been
a century before. Sheep meant wool for homespun clothes, which freed many pioneers
from reliance on settlements, as well as a source of revenue, especially if the
wool was high quality. Sheep also meant cheese, lamb, and mutton. The emphasis
therefore shifted from mere survival to something more sophisticated, to notions
of scientific breeding for quantity and quality, both of which required more
time and intensive effort on the part of the farmer. As the value of the livestock
increased, so did the importance of protecting it from predators.
At Monticello, Jefferson complained regularly about the depredations of wolves
and dogs in northern Virginia—dogs alone in southern Virginia—preventing
the sheep population from growing and farmers from achieving greater self-sufficiency.
The yeoman farmer was the backbone of the republic for Jefferson, and he saw
improvement of livestock—and even people—through selective breeding,
as well as scientific farming methods involving crop rotation and fertilization,
as central to the success of the people and nation. Although Washington and Jefferson
sought the assistance of dogs, they found no easy solution and continued to fight
the problem for the remainder of their lives, as did many sheepmen before and
more after. After extirpation of the wolf from nearly all of the lower forty-eight
states, the coyote became the favorite bandit predator of sheep ranchers, and
without question, coyotes can and do take sheep. But in many areas the star sheep
killer was always the dog, fearing no human or domesticated beast, smart enough
to let its wild cousins take the rap.
The Singing Life of Birds. Donald Kroodsma, Houghton Mifflin, 2005
I record and record, rilling tape after tape; then I film, song after song, their
tiny photographs soon covering every surface in my office. The results \ leave
no doubt. The marsh wrens prove adept at imitating the details of songs from
the training tape, learning not only marsh wren songs but a few of those of the
other three species as well. Nine out of 10 songs developed by these marsh wrens
are imitations of songs on the training tape, only 1 in 10 being sufficiently
different that I cannot know its origin. But the sedge wrens are polar opposites.
One male has 20 songs, one 60 songs, and one 70 songs; none of these 150 songs
are what they heard from the tape. There's some evidence that they might learn
a little from each other, but the vast majority of the songs seem to be pulled
out of thin air, somehow improvised in the mind of each young bird.
But why? Why the striking difference between these close relatives? Jerry and
I reflect on the life history of each, searching for clues. They are similar
in many ways: males of each are polygynous, each male trying to attract several
females; in their bid for success, males sing rapidly, throughout the day and
often even the night; and perhaps because they are polygynous and sing a lot,
their song repertoires are large.
In one key life history feature, however, they seem to differ. Sedge wrens live
in sedge meadows and are highly unpredictable from year to year, almost seeming
to be nomadic. A friend bands 10 adults in Minnesota but finds none of them back
the next year. In Michigan, too, birds are opportunistic, taking advantage of
good habitat when and where it appears. In Iowa they might arrive to breed in
July, August, or even as late as September; in Arkansas babies are in the nest
during September. At these times, most other songbirds have long since finished
all family activities. In contrast, marsh wrens live in the deep-water marshes
and are more typical songbirds: many are resident year-round, and if migratory
they typically return to the same places year after year.
The explanation seems simple, almost too simple. Marsh wrens live in stable habitats,
the deep-water marshes, and as a result are resident or at least site-faithful.
The singing males in a stable community all know each other, and they learn their
songs from each other, as seems to happen with most songbirds. These learned
songs are then a crucial part of the countersinging games that the males play
in their attempts to secure both a territory and mates.
The sedge wrens are different. They move around a lot, seemingly always in search
of a better sedge meadow, the quality of which is dependent on rain fall. Conditions
may be prime at one site in one month, but the next month the birds may have
moved hundreds of miles to breed at a new location. As a result, birds never
get to know each other. Because it is an impossible task to learn hundreds of
different songs from the new neighbors at each breeding location, perhaps twice
each spring and summer, they do the next best thing. They make them up.
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Check out the tribute to Jules Verne in the March Smithsonian magazine - nice bio on a classic author.
A new reader in the family. Check our Matthew's reading habits. Mike trying to explain a good book to Aren.
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