And a very happy Free for All Birthday to the National Park Service, which celebrated its 100th birthday yesterday!
Our National Parks themselves have been around a lot longer than that….well, if we’re being fair here, many of them have been around since the continents stopped shifting, but the United States began protecting and honoring these celebrated sites of natural beauty, ecological wonder, and historical significance since 1872, when Yellowstone National Park was designated as a National Park, and run by the Federal Government itself, since there was no one person or body dedicated to overseeing it. Yosemite National Park was designated earlier, in 1864, but as a state park, overseen by the state of California, who later turned it back over the Federal Government to control. It was in 1916, however, that the government created a National Parks Service, which was charged with overseeing, protecting, and managing all of the country’s National Parks. And to all those wide-brimmed and olive-garbed rangers out there, we tip our hats to you today!
Because I get a kick out of random facts like these, the Park Service is responsible for about 84,000,000 acres of land, on the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, some 85,049 miles of rivers, 8,500 roads, and 27,000 historic sites. The largest national park is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, in Alaska, which covers about 13.2 million acres, while the smallest is the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, home of the famous Polish freedom fighter, in Philadelphia PA, at 0.02 acres.
And did you know that Massachusetts has 15 National Parks? With the spate of lovely weather coming up, why not have an adventure to one (or more!) of them soon? And why not bring a book with you to keep you company (she wrote, in the most skillful of transitions)? Here are some wonderful new books that have ambled up onto our shelves this week that are oh-so-eager to join you in appreciating the big wide world out there!
A Scot in the Dark: Sarah MacLean is by far and away one of my favorite romance authors around, and with each new release, she pushes at the boundaries of our assumptions about romance and what romance novels can do, carving out a space that is very fun, very feminist-y, and just plain a joy to read. In this second book in her Scandal and Scoundrel series, we meet Lily, who agreed to sit for a painter as a way to escape her gilded cage–only to find herself abandoned and utterly ruined when the painting becomes public. With no other choice left, Lily turns to her guardian, the Duke of Warwick, a Highland heathen who wants nothing to do with London, or Lily…but in the course of trying to marry her off, the Duke just might discover a reason keep near to both…Kirkus gave this book a starred review, cheering, “MacLean’s signature humor and ingenuity are in evidence throughout this novel…She writes love scenes and romantic dialogue with audacity”–we agree!
A Shocking Assassination: I, for one, am a huge fan of the current trend of Irish historical mystery novels, and Cora Harrison’s Reverend Mother series checks all my boxes: an unlikely heroine (in this case, the Reverend Mother Aquinas), a great historic setting (Cork, during the Irish Civil War, one of the most violent places on the island at that time), and a well-plotted mystery. In this second series installment, a city engineer has been assassinated, and a young man, who was standing beside the body holding a pistol has been arrested. And when the boy’s mother begs for help to prove her son’s innocence, the good Reverend Mother finds herself facing down violence in its many, varied, and most fundamentally human forms, making for an investigation that is winning praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Booklist gave it a star review, hailing, “Period ambience, an absorbing plot, and a wise and intrepid amateur sleuth in the form of the Reverend Mother make this an engaging historical mystery.”
Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum: Gavin Francis has spent his life in medicine, as an ER doctor, a surgeon, and a family practitioner, and its very clear that he loves all the wonderful, crazy, and unexpected things that the human body can accomplish and do. But rather than simply giving us a tour of ‘the body’, this wonderfully thoughtful, surprisingly engaging and accessible book also looks at how we see, and have seen the body in the past, using historical texts, literature, philosophy, and personal memories to really helps us come to terms with the body we inhabit, and its meaning throughout our history. This book has won a number of awards in the UK for being the best non-fiction book of the year, and is already making headlines over here, with the the Wall Street Journal proclaiming: “Dr. Francis…brings certain necessary equipment to this task. These include a keen sense of the marvelous, a prose style as elegant and cutting as a scalpel, and a breadth of clinical experience that is unusual in an age of specialization… with its deft mix of the clinical and the lyrical, [this is] a triumph of the eloquent brain and the compassionate heart.”
Behold the Dreamers: Imbolo Mbue’s stunning debut novel recalls the early days of the 2007-8 financial collapse from the viewpoint of those who were so easily forgotten as huge banks began tottering, and fortunes began collapsing. Jende Jonga is a Cameroonian immigrant, who is determined to do whatever he must to make a secure and prosperous life for himself and his family. Thus, he is overjoyed to get a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a demanding and exacting boss, as well as a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Jende’s wife, Neni, even secures work cleaning the Edwards’ house in the Hamptons. But as the looming threat of financial meltdown becomes real, and Lehmann Brothers collapses, highlighting the interpersonal cracks in all these intertwined relationships, Jende and Neni find themselves facing impossible choices in order to survive. Though necessarily heartbreaking, Mbue manages to maintain a kindness towards all of characters, emphasizing the real tragedy of this novel is not one man’s mistakes, but of a system that was build to fall. As Publisher’s Weekly put it, in their review, “The Jongas are . . . vivid, and the book’s unexpected ending—and its sharp-eyed focus on issues of immigration, race, and class—speak to a sad truth in today’s cutthroat world: the American dream isn’t what it seems.”
Ghost Talkers: For those who like a little paranormal with their history, we offer you Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest, set during the First World War, and focused on the Spirit Corps, a group organized to communicate with, and pass along information from, the ghosts of the fallen. Ginger is a member of the spirit corps, a job that pairs well with her fiance’s work in intelligence. But with Captain Benjamin Harford out on a mission, Ginger gets evidence of a traitor in the Allies midst–and without him to validate her claims, Ginger not only finds herself doubted by her superiors, but charged with working for the Germans herself. Abandoned, Ginger sets out on her own to prove her suspicions correct–no easy task for a lone woman in a world of violent men, but Ginger isn’t about to turn back now…Kowal’s work won over the sceptics at NPR, who raved about this book in a recent review, saying “it was that rare ability of Kowal’s to make what could have been a completely goofy add-on to the British war effort into something that felt completely wedded and solid that sold me — that spark of a great idea, well-executed. It is a story that just works.”
Until next week, beloved patrons–happy reading!