In December of 2015, torrential rains caused parts of the St. Louis area to be evacuated. Bill and I were on vacation and saw it on TV. “We made the national news,” I exclaimed. I was dismayed when we arrived home. A great swath of the wall-to-wall carpeting in our basement had been soaked in that […]
Wildfires! Floods! Hurricanes! Heat waves! Droughts! And each catastrophe a record-breaker! Weather news these days sends me into a tailspin of despair and anxiety. And guilt. What is my duty? Do I have to give up air-conditioning to keep the planet from self-destructing? Would I? Reading science journalist Madeline Ostrander’s 2022 book At Home on an Unruly […]
Willa Cather’s novel about pioneer life in Nebraska — My Antonia — was published a century ago in 1918. This book casts a nostalgic look at the Midwestern prairie at the time it was being turned into farmlands and towns. Men and women from America and from Europe, primarily Eastern Europe, struggled to make a […]
Dr. Bookworm