The Philosophy Book - Will Buckingham

   2011; 774 pages.  Full Title: The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained.   New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Philosophy; Biographies; Non-Fiction; Reference.  Overall Rating: 9*/10.

 

    Quick, what exactly is the definition of the word “Philosophy”?  My best try would be something like “Trying to know the Unknowable”, which is both oxymoronic and pretty useless.

 

    The Philosophy Book, by Will Buckingham has a better answer, and it comes in both a long and a short version.  The long one is:

 

    “Any sustained rational reflection about general principles that has the aim of achieving a deeper understanding.”  That’s not much better than mine.  The short one is:

 

    “The love of wisdom.”

 

    I like that one much better.

 

What’s To Like...

    The subtitle of The Philosophy Book is worth noting: Big Ideas Simply Explained.  At 774 pages, this book introduces the reader to an incredible array of philosophers and philosophies from all parts of the world (not just Western civilization) and down through the ages (from 750 BCE to the present).  Altogether, 107 philosophers are examined, and in a roughly chronological order.

 

After an introductory overview, the book is divided into six sections:

    01. The Ancient World  (700 BCE – 250 CE)

    02. The Medieval World  (250 – 1500)

    03. Renaissance and the Age of Reason  (1500 – 1750)

    04. The Age of Revolution  (1750 – 1900)

    05. The Modern World  (1900 – 1950)

    06. Contemporary Philosophy  (1950 – present)

 

    The template for presenting each philosopher is:

First Page

    Catchy Aphorism

    Philosopher’s Name, Year Born, Year Died

Second Page

    Branch of Philosophy

    Approach

    Those “Before” who influenced the philosopher

    Those "After" who were influenced by the philosopher

Text

    Introduction to the philosopher

    Flow Charts (usually)

    Quotations (occasionally)

    Discussion of philosopher’s main tenets

    Biography

    Key Works

    “See Also”

    Pictures (usually)

 

    Additional sections in the back include a Directory (great for looking up any philosopher, famous or obscure), a Glossary (great for looking up any of the -isms, -ologies, and other technical terms coined in the book), and Contributors, which lists all those who helped Will Buckingham write this book.  All of the writers are English, so you occasionally run across spellings like: sceptical, judgement, defence, furore, no-one, artefact, and fulfil.  But curiously, some effort seems to have been made to Americanize the text, with spellings such as judgment and color.

 

    I liked that the book didn’t limit itself to European and American philosophers; there were a sizable number of Arab, Eastern Asian, and African philosophers included.  Ditto for Women and Black philosophers, at least when we got to modern times.

 

    “Felicific Calculus” made me chuckle; it’s an algorithm by which you can supposedly calculate happiness.  I loved reading about Rumi and Sufism with the “Whirling Dervishes”.  Mozi was new to me, but his thoughts resonated with me.  I enjoyed getting reacquainted with the mystic Moses Maimonides, whose works I read way back in my Metaphysical Days.  And I was amazed to read that the first Atomic Theory was developed strictly through reasoning and put forth in the fifth century BCE!

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 3,237 ratings and 583 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.17/5 based on 4,779 ratings and 364 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    We may think it is not “good” to make a fool of ourselves in public, and so resist the urge to dance joyfully in the street.  We may believe that the desires of the flesh are sinful, and so punish ourselves when they arise.  We may stay in mind-numbing jobs, not because we need to, but because we feel it is our duty to do so.  Nietzsche wants to put an end to such life-denying philosophies, so that humankind can see itself in a different way.  (loc. 4270)

 

    In the introduction to The Second Sex de Beauvoir notes society’s awareness of this fluidity: “We are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women.  It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman.”  She later states the position explicitly: “One is not born but becomes a woman.”

    De Beauvoir says that women must free themselves both from the idea that they must be like men, and from the passivity that society has induced in them.  Living a truly authentic existence carries more risk than accepting a role handed down by society, but it is the only path to equality and freedom.  (loc. 5626)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Philosophy Book sells for $8.99 at Amazon right now.  Will Buckingham has at least 10 other e-books available, in a wide variety of subjects, including Philosophy, Self-Help, and Children's Tales, ranging in price from $3.99 to $46.50.

 

“When one thinks like a mountain, one thinks also like the black bear, so that honey dribbles down your fur as you catch the bus to work.”  (loc. 5763)

    It’s hard to find things to nitpick about in The Philosophy Book.  Some reviewers groused about the lack of depth in the book, but hey, if you’re going to cover 2,700 years and 100+ philosophers in the book, I am happy the text limited itself to just the basics.

 

    The flow charts and pictures added a nice touch to the book, but that came at the cost of a huge file size.  Amazon lists it as being 192,824 kilobytes.  Think twice about downloading this if your Kindle is almost full, maybe opting for the paperback version which right now is only a couple dollars more than the e-book.

 

    My last nit to pick is a personal one.  How come Martin Buber wasn’t included in the 107 philosophers selected??  His magnum opus, “Ich und Du” (“I and Thou” in English) was required reading in a Sociology class I took in college, and the professor’s favorite reference book.  To be fair, Buber does get mentioned in The Philosophy Book, but only in passing.

 

    Enough quibbling.  The Philosophy Book is a fantastic reference source for anyone who wants to learn more about what all those thinkers have been thinking about for the past 27 centuries, but who don’t want to have to wade through their voluminous tomes.  That was me, and I am totally glad I read this.

 

    9 Stars.  We’ll close with an excerpt that, in a way, illustrates why I don’t read a lot of books about philosophy.  We’re quoting directly from the Glossary of The Philosophy Book.

 

 Metaphilosophy: The branch of philosophy that looks at the nature and methods of philosophy itself.

 

    How perplexingly tautological.

Cover to Cover: What First-Time Authors Need to Know about Editing - Sandra Wendel

   2021; 215 pages.  Full Title: Cover to Cover: What First-Time Authors Need to Know About Editing - Insider Secrets Nobody Ever Tells You.   New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Editing Reference; Writing Reference; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    You’ve just finished putting the final touches on your first book!  You knew you had a story inside you, itching to get out, and now there it is!  On the paper right in front of you!

 

    You know the manuscript is perfect because you've read it a second time, and didn’t find anything mistakes – not even small ones like punctuation and grammar.

 

    But your Creative Writing teacher says the next step is Editing.  And you’ve never met anyone who goes around calling themselves an editor.

 

    Maybe your mom can edit it.  She’s one of your most enthusiastic beta-readers and says she thinks your manuscript is perfect as is, and that you should shop it around for someone to make it into a movie.

 

    Or maybe you should pick up Sandra Wendel’s latest book, Cover to Cover: What First-Time Authors Need to Know About Editing.

 

What’s To Like...

    Cover to Cover is divided into 3 parts, consisting of 15 chapters plus bonus stuff.  It’s a relatively short book, just 215 pages, but packed with vital information for any indie author.  The three parts are: I Just Wrote a Book: Now What?, I’m Ready for my Close-up, Mt. DeMille, and After the Edit: What Now?, but in a nutshell, they're witty labels for:

    What Editing entails

    What to do to get your book ready for editing

    What to do after your book's been edited.

 

    Of the fifteen chapters, my favorites were:

05. The Levels of Writing and Editing Explained Once and For All

09. Pet Peeves, Tigers, and Bugbears, Oh, My!

10. Beta Readers – Who They Are They Can Help You Make Your Book Better

14. Don’t Be That Author – A Short Course on Author/Editor Etiquette

Checklist for Authors to Fine-Tune a Manuscript Before Editing Begins.

 

    Some of the chapters are brief, but they all have depth.  For example, here's what the author calls "The Seven Levels of Writing and Editing", given in Chapter 5, listed from most intensive to least, all of which are fully explained:

    A. Book Coaching

    B. Collaborative Writing

    C. Developmental Editing (aka Content Editing)

    D. Editorial Evaluation or Assessment

    E. Line Editing

    F. Copy Editing

    G. Proofreading

 

    I enjoyed learning about the concept of “Book Coaching”; that was new to me.  I liked the tip about developing a ten-question list for Beta Readers, none of which is in the simple yes/no format.  It was sobering to learn that the average indie-published author sells about 300 copies of his work.  That’s all.    

 

    Along with all the helpful information, Sandra Wendel also weaves in just enough humor, to make the reading an easy task.  One example: What does the “N” on the University of Nebraska football helmets stand for?  Answer at the bottom of this review.

 

    Finally, like every other reader of Cover to Cover, I kept a sharp eye out for mistakes.  Can anything be more satisfying than finding typos in a book written by a professional editor?  I spotted four, then realized they had been deliberately placed by the author to make a point.  Outside of those, the book was error-free.  Bummer.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 81 ratings and 47 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.26/5 based on 35 ratings and 16 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    This book is not about self-editing.  I don’t think you can edit your book yourself.  I don’t even edit my own books.  My mentor is my editor, and she’s tough.  She finds the inelegant phrasing and fixes my twisted logic and pushes me to say what I want to say simply.  She finds missing words, commas, misplaced modifiers, wrong words, and punctuation faux pas that authors don’t have to pay attention to when writing and then completely miss when we revise and revise again.  (loc. 222)

 

    Here is our editorial take on Karen authors: You hired a professional editor to perform a professional service.  Why not let us do what we do best and that’s to make you look fabulous, to help you create a commercial-quality book that can compete in a crowded marketplace?

    That said, I always tell authors this: You will win every disagreement we have.  Your opinion counts more than mine.  You can do whatever you wish with your book.  You decide the fate of your book.  (loc. 2162)

 

Kindle Details…

    Right now, Cover to Cover sells for $2.99 at Amazon.  Sandra Wendel has three other e-books available at Amazon; all of them are non-fiction, and all of them also priced $2.99.  Two of them are medical reference books, and have a co-author.  The third is a Kosher cookbook.

 

How do you know if your writing is effective?  Simple.  Readers understand what you have written.  (loc. 1457)

    Despite not being able to find any typos, there were a couple nits to pick.

    There were seven instances of cussing in the first half of the book.  That’s not excessive, and they didn’t offend me, but that’s still more than I’d expect in a non-fiction reference book.

 

    Also, the “Time Left in Chapter” function in the Kindle version was thoroughly skewed and therefore completely useless.  “1 Minute Left” could mean another half-hour remained in the chapter, but just as easily mean you’d be done as soon as you swiped to the next page.  Fortunately, I rarely rely on that Kindle estimate.

 

    A more serious gripe is with Chapter 4, “What Does Editing Cost?”  First-time indie authors will inevitably have no idea what a typical fee for editing will be, and this will probably be the first chapter they turn to.  Sandra Wendel correctly points out that it varies based on things like the number of pages, the depth of the editing, and the professional level of the editor.  But come on, there’s not even a rough estimate or a range given.

 

    I am not the target audience.  I am not a writer, nor do I have any aspirations to ever be one.  But I do some editing on the side, and I found Cover to Cover to be a treasure trove of information.  First-time authors may not know what to expect from someone editing their work, but that’s also true for part-time editors.  I highly recommend this book to any author, and any editor, who just wants to know what how the Author/Editor relationship works and what is entailed in self-publishing a book.

 

    9½ Stars.  Answer to the riddle: The “N” stands for “Knowledge”.  Full disclosure: the author is from the Midwest, so she is entitled to tell this joke.

The Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson

   1990; 245 pages.  Full Title: The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Linguistics; Reference; English Language - History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 10*/10.

 

   When you get right down to it, English is a poor choice for a global language.  Oh, there are worse ones, such as Mandarin Chinese which has thousands upon thousands of ideographs that you pretty much have to just memorize.  Or Basque, which has almost no words in common with any other tongue.

 

    There’s also well-intended things like Esperanto, foremost amongst about a half dozen artificial languages that were created with the intent of convincing the whole world (literally) to use them as a global tongue.  The problem is that they have zero native speakers, so you’re basically asking every person on Earth to learn a second language.

 

    So maybe English is not such a bad choice, despite the British and the Americans having different words for the same thing, different ways to spell words we have in common, different accents, and a different set of idioms to contend with, including the unfathomable Cockney rhyming.

 

    Perhaps it would behoove us to study up on the English language: learn its history, its subtleties, its variances, and its abundant inconsistencies.

 

    In other words, let’s read Bill Bryson’s fantastic book, The Mother Tongue.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Mother Tongue is divided into 16 chapters, namely:

01. The World’s Language

    An overview.  English’s strengths and weaknesses.

02. The Dawn of Language

    Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.  Pidgins and Creoles.

03. Global Language

    Various “Endangered” Languages.

04. The First Thousand Years

    From 450 AD to Shakespeare.

05. Where Words Come From

    Five different ways that words come into being.

06. Pronunciation

    It changes over time.

07. Varieties of English

    Dialects.

08. Spelling

    Weird spellings in English.  Spelling reform movements.

09. Good English and Bad

    How “proper” grammar is constantly changing.

10. Order Out of Chaos

    The history of dictionaries.

11. Old World, New World

    American vs. British English.  Cross-pollination.

12. English as a World Language

    Global mangling of English.  Esperanto.

13. Names

    Nobles, Streets, Pubs, Surnames, and Places.

14. Swearing

    Including euphemisms and etymology.

15. Wordplay

    Crossword puzzles, and other linguistic pastimes.

16. The Future of English

    Featuring the “English only” movement.

 

    I usually mark my favorite chapters in pink, but here, I loved them all.  Chapters 1-7 are the history of the English language, Chapters 8-10 focus on how grammar evolved, and Chapters 11-16 are an assortment of “fun” linguistic aspects of English.

 

    I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country, so I loved seeing that dialect getting some ink, ditto for the nearby town named “Intercourse”.  The section on the Basque language also resonated with me, since I read a Mark Kurlansky book about them earlier this year.  The review is here.

 

    The book is chock full of trivia and obscure facts.  The oldest sentence we have that was written in (early) English is “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman” and it's anatomically accurate to say you are capable of speaking because you can choke on food.  Interestingly, the traffic term “roundabout” was coined by an American living in Britain and replaced the clunkier phrase “gyratory circus.”

 

    The grammar sections were fascinating.  The esoteric and unintended word “Dord” was mentioned, and it was fun to see verb options such as dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, strived/strove, and wove/weaved are still a “whichever you want to use” sort of thing.

 

    The “fun” chapters were . . . well . . . lots of fun!  The full gamut of topics there is: crossword puzzles, Scrabble, palindromes, anagrams, lipograms (huh?), acrostics, rebuses, holorimes (what?), clerihews (say again?), spoonerisms, amphibology (oh, come on, now), and Cockney rhyming.

 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 3,299 ratings and 1,372 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.91/5 based on 39,484 ratings and 3,026 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    There is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon.  At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”  That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.  (pg. 19)

 

    The combination “ng,” for example, is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in bring and sing.  But in fact we make two sounds with it—employing a soft “g” with singer and a hard “g” with finger.  We also tend to vary its duration, giving it fractionally more resonance in descriptive and onomatopoeic words like zing and bong and rather less in mundane words like something and rang.  We make another unconscious distinction between the hard “th” of those and the soft one of thought.  (pg. 87)

 

Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball on ice skates.  (pg. 16)

    Frankly, I can’t find anything to grouse about in The Mother Tongue.  There are some cusswords, but that’s a given since there’s a whole chapter devoted to swearing, and it was enlightening to learn that the F-bomb is not an acronym of “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”.

 

    It was therefore somewhat surprising to see its relatively low rating at Goodreads (3.91/5).  Most of the criticism there was about perceived inaccuracies detected about some of the non-English languages Bryson mentions.

 

    For instance, one reviewer was upset by Bryson’s assertion that the Finnish language contains no swear words, and gave several examples to disprove this.  Admittedly, my knowledge of Finnish is zilch, I suspect Bryson’s is close to that level also, so he was most likely relying on some Finnish-speaking expert's “facts”.  But let's get real now; this book isn’t about the Finnish tongue.  The low rating given by this reviewer is unmerited, and, to misquote Hamlet, “methinks he doth protest too much”.

 

    For me, The Mother Tongue was a thoroughly enlightening and educational read.  This was my eighth Bill Bryson book, but others were all either in the Historical or Travel genres.  It’s great to discover he’s just as skilled when it comes to writing a book about Linguistics.

 

    10 Stars.  We’ll close with an old children’s riddle which Bill Bryson says comes close to being an example of a holorime: “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?”

      The answer is posted in the comments.

Actually, the Comma Goes Here - Lucy Cripps

    2020; 160 pages.  Full Title: Actually, the Comma Goes Here: A Practical Guide to Punctuation.   New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Editing Reference; Punctuation Reference; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Punctuation.  Those pesky dots and squiggles, in all sorts of combinations, and straight lines of various sizes, either sloping or horizontal.  They’re the bane of writers, editors, and proofreaders and are worse than misspelled words, because the latter can be checked easily enough.

 

    Researching punctuation on the internet often just makes things more confusing.  Where one source demands that a comma be used, another source forbids it.  Heck, they can’t even agree as to whether you should put one space or two after the end of a sentence.

 

    I suppose we could let the British make the rules; after all, it is called “English”, not “American”.  But they put single quotation marks around direct speech, and us Yanks all know quotation marks come in pairs.  And for goodness sake, they call a single dot that closes out a sentence a “full stop”, everyone knows it’s called a “period”.

 

    There are a number of punctuation books out there, but they mostly seem to take themselves too seriously, adopting “it’s my way or the highway” stance.   If only someone would write a punctuation book that addresses all the various official “styles”, and lets us know when some bit of punctuation is optional, and what our options in that case.

 

    After all, fellow readers, writers, and editors, overusing punctuation marks, you know, is worse, I’m sure, than, underusing, them. 

 

What’s To Like...

    Actually, The Comma Goes Here is divided into 15 chapters plus an introduction, with each one, for the most part, focusing on a different punctuation mark.  The chapters are:

    00. Introduction                08. The Exclamation Mark

    01. The Period                  09. The Hyphen

    02. The Comma                10. The Em and En Dash

    03. The Apostrophe          11. The Parenthesis and the Bracket

    04. The Question Mark    12. The Ellipsis

    05. The Colon                  13. The Slash     

    06. The Semicolon           14. Unusual Characters

    07. The Quotation Mark  15. The “Not Punctuation Points”

 

    The chapters usually have the structure of:

        Introduction,

        Uses (and occasionally “Not-Uses”),

        History Lesson,

        How To Beat the Snobs, and once or twice:

        Memory Tips

 

    The chapters are concise (the book is only 160 pages long), but I found them extremely helpful.  Frankly, 99% of the time I consult a Punctuation website, it’s due to some “gray area” of grammar, which is what this book focuses on.

 

    My favorite chapters are given above in pink, and by far my favorite part of the chapters was How To Beat the Snobs.  There’s also an extremely helpful chart in the back comparing the various “House Styles” and how they differ.  The Introduction and History sections are a Trivia buff’s delight.  I learned that Kurt Vonnegut hated semicolons and Winston Churchill hated Hyphens; why we call that “at sign” an Ampersand, that “sic” is Latin for “sic erat scriptum”, and that although an ellipse is three dots (not two dots, five dots, or ten dots), yet sometimes it's grammatically correct to have four dots in a row.

 

    The tone of the book is lighthearted, but don’t be misled: the text is packed with oodles of useful punctuation information.  If you’re trying to figure out which grammar system to use, Lucy Cripps recommends the Chicago Manual of Style for most of us (the others being for specialized areas such as legal, scientific, and journalism areas), then further customizing that to our own tastes and for the sake of clarity, and calling it our “House Style”.  Her only caveat: BE CONSISTENT!!

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 483 ratings and 90 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.38/5 based on 118 ratings and 53 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Noughties (n., British) : the decade from 2000 to 2009.

Others: Diple (n.).

 

 

Excerpts...

    Fiction and nonfiction authors rely on the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), often with an additional, possibly contradictory, house style sheet.

    So when someone comes at you with their “you’ve missed a comma, here” or “you’ve missed the hyphen in nonfiction,” you can respond with divine calm that you are using a house style.  For combatting snobbery, punctuation styles give us excellent breathing space.  (loc. 82)

 

    When “email” was just coming out of diapers, I insisted on using “e-mail,” as in “electronic-mail”.  But others used Email, E-mail, email.  Chaos.  By my reasoning that e- had to stay.  What would happen when eentertainment, eevent, eedition, eeducation, eemployee came along?  Just ridiculous.  But, it seems, that is where we are heading.  The hyphen after e is no more.  Maybe we, too, must eevolve and eembrace it.  (loc. 1029)

 

Kindle Details…

    Actually, the Comma Goes Here currently sells for $8.99 at Amazon.  This is apparently the only e-book authored by Lucy Cripps that's offered on Amazon.  Here’s hoping she’s working on a sequel, maybe one on grammar and/or spelling variations.

 

“What happened to the semicolon that broke the grammar laws?”  “It was given two consecutive sentences.”  (loc. 758, and LOL)

    There’s not much to quibble about in Actually, the Comma Goes Here.  Some reviewers were turned off by the book’s “folksy” tone, but I thought it made the reading a more fun.

 

    As you’d expect, the text is remarkably clean, with just a single “hell” as far as cusswords go. And. although it's really nitpicky, I wish someday I find a grammar book which includes a “Quiz” section so you can see how well you’ve comprehended the language rules.

 

    But I quibble.  I’m doing some copy-editing on the side right now, and Actually, the Comma Goes Here was exactly the refresher course I was hoping for.  I intend to use it as my primary editing reference, especially when it comes to those pesky commas.

 

    9 Stars.  We'll close with a couple of teasers: You might think the use of periods is pretty simple, but are national acronyms supposed to have them (U.S.A. and U.K.) or not (USA and UK)?  Regarding the apostrophe, do two-digit decades require two apostrophes (‘70’s), one apostrophe (70’s or ‘70s), or none (70s)?  You'll find the Actually, the Comma Goes Here.

Wicked Plants - Amy Stewart

   2009; 256 pages.  Full Title: Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Plants; Non-Fiction; Medical Reference.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Hey, let’s get in touch with our hunter-gatherer side by going on a hike in the woods!

 

    It’ll be fun to commune with Mother Nature.  If we spot any berries on bushes along the way, we can give them a taste.  I hear the bright red ones are the best.  And wild berries can’t be harmful, since the bushes produce them to attract insects.  And the berries will pair well with any mushrooms we come across.

 

    We can take Fido and Rover along; they can chase sticks we throw and chew on them.  We can brew our own tea too.  I don’t know what a sassafras tree looks like, so we can just boil the leaves of any old tree and see what kind of taste develops.

 

    It would be really neat if we find some cactus plants as well.  I doubt they will turn out to be peyote, but we can always hope for some kind of hallucinatory plant that no one else has discovered yet.

 

    And just to be safe, I’ve brought along a handy reference book: Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart.  It’ll help us identify all the potentially-edible plants we come across, even though she seems to have one-word answer for all of our proposed tastings.

 

    DON’T!

 

What’s To Like...

    Wicked Plants is first and foremost a reference book, so (most of) the entries are listed in alphabetical order.  Amy Stewart gives 63 “things to be avoided” in the book.  A majority of them are individual plants, but there are also some “group” listings, with catchy titles such as “This Houseplant Could Be Your Last”, “Deadly Dinner”, and “Weeds of Mass Destruction”.

 

    The entries fall into one of seven categories, namely: Deadly, Illegal, Intoxicating, Dangerous, Painful, Destructive, and Offensive.  The “Deadly” category is by far the biggest.  Some of my favorite entries were: Deadly Nightshade, Coca, Marijuana, The Devil’s Bartender, Jimson Weed, and Killer Algae.

 

    I liked the format Amy Stewart uses:

Category

Plant Name (English)

Plant Name (Latin)

Introduction

Family, Habitat, Native To, Common Names

Main Text, including things like Usage Information, Chemistry, After-Effects

“Meet the Relatives”

 

    The book is laden with trivia.  I learned why you shouldn’t use potatoes if their skin has turned green (see below); and all how cyanobacteria spreads (aka “Blue-Green Algae”), which just happens to be a major plot thread in the next book I’m reading.  I enjoyed the section on the Venus Fly Trap (we had these in the hills where I grew up) and was surprised to learn that Bermuda Grass is highly allergenic.

 

    I found the “Illegal” and “Intoxicating” categories fascinating.  We get to read about Sigmund Freud’s delight after trying Cocaine; how Jimson Weed got its name; the mind-altering properties of Psylocybin (aka “magic mushroom, and yes, spellchecker spells it "psilocybin", but the author doesn't), and the properties of Khat, an important word to know in Scrabble because of its alternate spelling “qat”.  Sadly, the druggy-sounding “Cannabis Vodka” turned out to be rather disappointing.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 1,704 ratings and 514 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.80/5 based on 9,061 ratings and 1,235 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    POTATO.  Solanum tuberosum.  This member of the dreaded nightshade family contains a poison called solanine, which can bring on burning and gastrointestinal symptoms and even coma and death in rare cases.  Cooking a potato will kill most of the solanine in it, but if a potato has been exposed to the light long enough for its skin to turn green, that may be a sign of increased levels of solanine.  (loc. 512)

 

    British soldiers arrived to quell one of the first uprisings at the fledgling [Jamestown] colony, and the settlers remembered the toxic plant and slipped datura leaves into the soldiers’ food.

    The British soldiers did not die, but they did go crazy for eleven days, temporarily giving the colonists the upper hand.  According to an early historian, “One would blow a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows [grimaces] at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions.”  (loc. 770)

 

Kindle Details…

    Wicked Plants sells for $9.04 at Amazon.  The other two books in this set, The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Bugs, are priced at $10.82 and $9.99, respectively.  Amy Stewart has also penned a 7-book mystery series called “A Kopp Sisters Novel”; they go for $9.99 apiece.

 

The best advice for avoiding the nettle family is to resist the temptation to stroke an unfamiliar fuzzy or hairy leaf.  (loc. 821)

    It’s hard to nitpick about anything in Wicked Plants.  I only noted one typo (“southe stern” instead of “south eastern”), and I’m pretty sure that’s the printer’s fault.  There's a “screen expand” link for each entry, but the only thing it expands is the name of the plant.  I have a feeling it was meant to do more.

 

    Pliny the Elder is credited with claiming that “strains of henbane ‘trouble the braine’”, but I doubt he chose the old English spelling since he was writing in Latin.  But probably the source of this quote, which isn’t listed, was a medieval scribe.

 

    Really, my only disappointment is that “Hawaiian Baby Woodrose Seeds” are not included in the book.  I had an experience with them many decades ago, and they certainly qualify for the “Intoxicating” or “Painful” category, although in checking Wikipedia, they apparently haven't been declared “Illegal”.

 

    9 Stars.  The subtitle (“The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother”) refers to something called “White Snakeroot”, which, since it begins with the letter “w”, occurs late in the book, and really did kill Nancy Hanks Lincoln.