A Call to Action

 This blog post is intended for my friends and fellow bloggers in the book-reading and reviewing community.  This article is a must-read: The New Republic: "Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, is More Important than Ever" .

Newspapers that had book-review sections are dropping them.  Nonfiction, never easy to get published (by my personal experience and that of others I know), is becoming even more difficult.  And this is happening when documented facts, well-conducted and well-sourced research, and accurate information are needed more than ever.

 Those of us who blog about books, who review them, who look to each other for suggestions for good nonfiction reading, are now on the front lines of the fight to preserve what the article calls "long facts" in this age of misinformation, disinformation, and just plain ignorant nonsense.

I haven't blogged lately because of family concerns.  Hopefully, some of these matters will be resolved soon, so I can return more frequently to the blogiverse.  This matter is so important to the life of the United States as a functioning democracy that I am calling this matter to your attention.

We need to keep on blogging about books and reviewing them.  But how can our blogs receive wider dissemination?  I'm not on Facebook anymore.  When Mark Zuckerberg fired his fact-checkers and threw out anything resembling DEI, I could not stand it anymore, and I left.  Substack is a possibility.  BlueSky is an alternative, but unfortunately, a pale one at this time.  It needs more participants.  Or we could form a consortium of book bloggers similar to Geneabloggers (if you're familiar with that), and get a presence on Facebook, Substack, BlueSky, and wherever else.  But that takes more work than I am capable of right now.  2026 has not been kind to me: 2 friends have died, one a very dear and close friend who was also a cousin.  The IRS is on our backs saying we owe $2000 more in taxes, which I disagree with and have hired an accounting firm to challenge.   And our daughter's cancer, after three years of remission, has "reasserted itself aggressively," in her oncologist's words.  The stress is just too much for me to take on any new projects, but I will help in whatever way I can.  Is anyone willing -- and by "anyone" I mean more than one, because one person cannot handle such an enterprise alone -- to at least entertain the notion of a book-blogging consortium?  Can we at least discuss it?

At any rate, we need to keep blogging.  Our blogs are now more important than ever.

 

Sunday Salon: Is there a sports fan in the family?

I can't say I come from a long line of sports fans, but, inspired by Sunday's Super Bowl LX broadcast, I'm going to talk about sports and my family for this week's Sunday Salon.  I don't know whether my father followed any sports, because he died about two weeks after my seventh birthday.  

I have a very fragmentary memory of attending a game in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, with my mother and father and my uncle, dad's brother, and his wife.  What I remember most is that I really did not see much of the game, because it was apparently exciting enough that people kept standing up, and what I saw most was their backsides!  I was five or six, and I didn't know a thing about football.

My mother was a football fan, and she shared that enthusiasm with our next door neighbor on London Road, Mrs. Baker, on the south side of Jacksonville, Florida.  They would gather either at our house or our neighbor's house and watch the games on Sunday.  

My brother was on his high school football team and track team, but other than that, I don't know that he particularly followed any sports.  I don't much remember him at home watching games.  In our neighborhood, we had our own sports.  We were a motley crew playing basketball in a neighbor's driveway, with participants ranging in age from six to nineteen, and in stature from three or four feet to over six feet.  I also played baseball with other friends, usually a small game in the street, or "flyers 'n' grounders" with a friend.

In summer in the 1950s, I would go over to my grandmother's house, in the next block from our house, and we would watch baseball.  I latched onto the Brooklyn Dodgers -- yes, they were still in Brooklyn at the time -- as my team, and they have been ever since.  

When I was in high school, I would often attend games, and enjoyed watching my friends on the team play, and also enjoyed the social contact at the games.  I was a member of the "intellectual elite" of the school, and a bunch of us would gather at the games and make up pseudo-erudite cheers:  "Progress!  Progress!  Ambulate over the turf!"  And such as that.  We enjoyed the word play; other students looked at us like we were weird.  Which we were.

Football at my college in the 1960s was a very big deal.  Florida State University had a great team and a great coach, Bobby Bowden.  My boyfriend (who became my husband in 1971) and I attended many FSU home games.  At one game, it rained and rained.  Despite having on our London Fog raincoats, we were eventually drenched to the skin! 

I married a sports fan.  He enjoys watching football, baseball, tennis, the Olympics, and auto racing.  I have shared that enjoyment with him.  We used to like watching golf, but since the PGA made some decisions we consider questionable, we have dropped golf from our watchlists.  One day, for his birthday, I bought tickets to a rugby game at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, where I was a student at the time, having gone back to college at the age of 60.  The game was an international contest, the United States team v. Jamaica.  There were several UNF graduates on the U.S. team.  We got a good dose of just how weird rugby is!

My husband also enjoys basketball.  I can't stand it.  It's silly.  

For a time, when our city, Jacksonville, Florida, finally was awarded an NFL franchise in the form of the Jacksonville Jaguars, we had season tickets.  We were there at the founding in 1995 and for about five years afterward.  We went to an organizational meeting of the Jaguars Boosters, where a Green Bay fan came and spoke to us:  "You're gonna get crazy!"  He was right.  But my arthritis started presenting mobility problems, and we stopped going to the games.

 We have since enjoyed watching many games on television.  This football season, we watched the playoffs intently, as the Jaguars became the Division Champions (AFC South), but were eliminated when they lost to the Buffalo Bills.  The team had made amazing progress from 2024's season to 2025's with coach Liam Coen.  We're anticipating even more progress for 2026's football season.

 I have not found any professional sports team members among my family, nor even any amateur players.  Nor have I found any sports-team members among my family members who attended college, except for my father, who played Lacrosse for the Naval Academy.  

We enjoy being spectators, and at times making a family occasion out of the viewing.  For this year's Super Bowl, we had our older daughter and her husband over.  We had munchies -- cold cuts and cheese, veggies and dip, chips and dip, and pie and mini-cupcakes.  The game itself was not the most exciting Super Bowl ever.  All the excitement came in the second half, when the New England Patriots finally got on the scoreboard, but the Seattle Seahawks won, 29-13.  One thing that astonished me is how young the Patriots quarterback is -- 22.  Out there on that field, he looks like not much more than a child!  Of course, I'm 78, so they all look young to me!

#SundaySalon 

 

 

Sunday Salon: Everybody Talks About the Weather

Time for Sunday Salon, hosted by Readerbuzz.   

The weather has been in the news this week, for sure!  I have friends all over the area hit by the storm, and am waiting to find that they are all okay.  Here in Florida, we dodged that nasty storm.  It does get cold here in northeast Florida, and I've seen snow several times in the 70 years I've lived here.  

We had an ice storm when I was in high school, in 1962.  My best friend's family were all from New York, so it was not so much a surprise when she called me and said her mom was going to take us bowling.  Yes, there was a bowling alley open, though there weren't many people there.  We had a great time.  The results of the storm were pretty spectacular, with ice hanging from tree branches in crystalline beauty.

 In 1979 or thereabouts, we had a snowfall that left our daughters' swing set sprinkled with sparkling white.  In 1956 we had one in which we made a snowball.  Mom put it in the freezer, where it turned into an iceball.  

In 1989, we had another very cold experience, where my car, a Plymouth station wagon, ended up encased in ice!  Our grass was also sheathed in ice, and when our poor dog had to go out, he would take a step, stop, and pick up a paw and inspect it to see if he'd been stabbed by an icy blade of grass.  Poor Diamond.  He had never experienced anything like that.

Tonight it's getting down to 22 here in northeast Florida.  The faucets are dripping, a light bulb is switched on under the cover of our well pump, so we still have running water.  

It's a good night to curl up with a blanket and the cat, a cup of tea, and a book.

 

2026 Nonficiton Reader Challenge: You Went to Emergency for WHAT?

Number two among my posts in the  the 2026 Nonfiction Reader Challenge.  My category is that of a Nonfiction Grazer, the description of which is: "Read & review any nonfiction book. Set your own goal, or none at all, just share the nonfiction you read through the year." This best fits my nonconformist style. 

This next choice was You Went to Emergency for WHAT?: Bizarre, Bloody and Baffling True Stories from the Hospital ED, by Tim Booth, an Australian paramedic.  His tales of the oddball, the weird, and the unfortunately too mundane calls he and his colleagues receive rang all too familiar with me.  I spent time as a registered nurse, working in the emergency department of a large-city teaching hospital.  You might be examining a hangnail one minute and, right after that, you could be going into an exam room to take blood from a very large, muscular crime suspect.  It didn't take long for me to figure out that the ER was not the place for me.  I was much happier as a plain old medical-surgical floor nurse.  I also enjoyed my rotations in OB-GYN.  When the author comments on the stress of being in any part of emergency medicine, I am in total empathy with him.  Been there, done that, had a punching bag in my garage so I could unload my stress before being with my family.  It was highly therapeutic!

Author Booth uses two people in the emergency department he served as carriers of his stories.  One, a female doctor, has to deal with the unfortunate lack of trust many patients have, based not always on the skill, technique, personality, bedside manner -- or gender -- of the doctor, but rather in their own non-compliance with their doctors' instructions for medication, exercise, and/or diet once they return home.  This all to often brings the patients back to the ER, many times in worse shape than in their original visit.  The other cast member in these stories is a rather cynical technician who makes acerbic observations on medicine as it is practiced, on the particular circumstances of the emergency department, and on the patients whose behavior is not conducive to good relations.  

The description of some cases may be too much for some readers.  On the front lines as first responders, paramedics come into contact with some truly heartbreaking and often unpleasant incidents.  Emergency rooms are often places of desperation, suffering, and sadness.  I can heartily recommend this book to readers who are in or who have been in the medical profession, especially those with emergency-room experience.  Reader discretion is advised.

 

Sunday Salon: Bleeding Minnesota

It's time for Sunday Salon.  Usually this is space to talk about what we're reading.  This time, my post is related to something I have had college courses in, and have read more than once: The Constitution of the United States.  Most especially, this relates to some of the best words ever written in any document establishing a government:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

These rights are being threatened in the United States as they have seldom been threatened before, most recently by incidents in Minnesota, the shooting of American citizens in American streets by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) troops.  I want to call ICE "brown shirts," after Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA), but Cezary Jan Strusiewicz says ICE is not like the SA.  

"And when ICE agents aren’t wearing their vest-and-hat starter kit, they dress up as civilians. They’ve been known to pretend to be utility workers (electric company, gas, even delivery drivers) to trick people into letting them into their houses. Do you think the Brownshirts ever bothered with ruses? Hell no. They were proud of being fascists." 

So with these tricks and ruses, maybe ICE is more like the KGB. 

 Anne at My Head is Full of Books wrote this Sunday on the recent incidents in Minnesota.  She charges each of us:  

Now I urge you: to find out what your church, synagogue, temple, mosque, or other community centers are doing to end the trouble with ICE and how you can send financial or physical support. Figure it out and publish your actions on your blog. It is time for us behind the scenes book-bloggers to get activated! We can't sit this one out.

She describes the latest pronouncement on the incident by her denomination, the Presbyterian Church.  Though I am off my feed about organized religion as an old woman, I was raised Episcopalian and am proud to say so with their stands on a number of issues in our nation today.  Here's what Episcopal leadership has to say: 

In an evening letter to the church, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe referenced Matthew 4:12-23, the Jan. 25 Gospel reading, saying Jesus understood the divisions sewn “when earthly powers persuade human beings to fear one another, regard one another as strangers, and believe that there is not enough to go around.”

“In our time, the deadly power of those divisions is on display on the streets of Minneapolis, in other places across the United States, and in other countries around the world,” he said. “As has too often been the case throughout history, the most vulnerable among us are bearing the burden, shouldering the greatest share of risk and loss, and enduring the violation of their very humanity.”

And not unlike vulnerable communities, Episcopalians can no longer expect to practice their faith without risk; the Constitutional right to peaceful protest comes with deadly risk, he continued.

“In the coming years, our church will continue to be tested in every conceivable way as we insist that death and despair do not have the last word, and as we stand with immigrants and the most vulnerable among us who reside at the heart of God. We will be required to hold fast to God’s promise to make all things new, because our call to follow God’s law surpasses any earthly power or principality that might seek to silence our witness.”

I have communicated my horror and disgust at these incidents in Minnesota to my senators and representative, to the governor and legislature of my state.  This is no time for "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot."  These are indeed "times that try men's souls," and women's souls, too.

I served my country in the United States Coast Guard, in which I took an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."  I hold myself still bound by that oath. 

RESIST! 

A New Challenge: Mount TBR

 I have decided to participate in the Mount TBR challenge -- I'll commit to reading a certain number of books from my TBR or my TBRR (To Be Re-Read) piles.  The challenge is hosted by Bev Hankins at  My Reader's Block.  As I am new to this, and am doing other challenges as well, I'm going to sign up for the lowest level, Pike's Peak, to read 12 books off my TBR or TBRR lists.  If I feel I can do 12 more, I can switch to the next level, Mont Blanc.

I'm going to read

From my TBR pile: 

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.

The Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War by Nathaniel Philbrick.

All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes by Sue Black.

A Feminist's Guide to ADHD: How Women Can Thrive and Find Focus in a World Built for Men by Dr. Janina Maschke.

Being Mortal:  Medicine and What Counts in the End by Atul Gawande.

The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman. 

The Lost Family:  How DNA Testing is Upending Who We Are, by Libby Copeland.

The Finest Hours: The True Story of the U.S. Coast Guard's Most Daring Sea Rescue by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman.

 Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell.

 From my TBRR pile:

The Green-Sky Trilogy (separately published), by Zilpha Keatley Snyder:

    Below the Root (1975)

    And All Between (1976)

    Until the Celebration (1977)

 

Sunday Salon: My Favorite Little-known Series, the Green-Sky Trilogy

                                 

In the mid-1980s, when our daughters were in middle school, we came upon an enchanting computer game called "Below the Root."  Little did we know at the time that it was based on a children's trilogy known collectively as The Green-Sky Trilogy.  We loved the game, all four of us.  Take two children and two adults who could be child-like, add a charming game, and there's a sale for someone!

Learning about the game's basis in a three-book series, I sought that series out and finally found all three in paperback.  We all read it, and I still have it, as I treasure the books I enjoy most.  I read to my grandson from this series when he was a wee one, as a way of getting him used to the rhythm of stories and as a way of letting him bond with me through my voice.  He became an avid reader.

The story involves the Kindar, an ethereal people who live in the high boughs of a forest, a place called Green-Sky.  The key to the story is their relationship to the Erdlings, underground dwellers who live below the root of a holy tree that has great spiritual significance to the Kindar.  It was the Kindar who imprisoned the Erdlings.  Difficulties begin when the Kindar discover that their Holy Root is withering, threatening their existence.  Then an Erdling child who flees when she is told her pet rabbit must be sacrificed to feed her people finds her way onto the surface, and then into Green-Sky.  She develops a friendship with a Kindar child, and the Erdlings are released.  However, there exists a high level of distrust between the Kindar and the Erdlings.  

The author, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, was a schoolteacher.  During her writing career, spanning from 1964 to 2011, she wrote some 46 books, three of which were Newbery Honors books, meaning that they fell short of being awarded a Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in children's literature, but qualified for the recognition of Newbery Honors.

 The first pages of the first book in the series, Below the Root, introduce Raamo, the young male protagonist of the series.  He has, to his great surprise, been appointed to the temple of the Ol-Zhaan, the spiritual leaders of Green-Sky.  And thus, the reader is drawn into the story.  Beyond that, I found it hard to put down, and read it through in a short time.  It is time for me to re-read this trilogy.  I just wish we still had the game and a computer that would play it.

Recommended for middle-school-age children, and for adults who haven't totally forgotten how good children's literature can be. 

#Sunday Salon