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books read
Mar. 31st, 2005 11:59 amJanet Golden, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (CUP 1996). This reads like what it is, a revised dissertation, but interesting and meaty if not as polished or racy a read as a book intended for the layman would be. A good resource for writers of historical novels, as much in the series (Cambridge History of Medicine) would be. Topics like medicalization of child rearing and breastfeeding, moral and religious attitudes towards nursing one's own children (it's animal! only low people do it! it's Christian and virtuous! only lazy rich women don't do it! etc!), class, ethnic and racial prejeudice. Did you know a major cause of premature birth in the 19th century was veneral disease? Did you know syphillis could be transmitted to an infant though a wet nurse's milk?
I was reading along and was surprised to come across a discussion of my grandfather's cousins - a family in Pittburgh who hired a wet nurse for their twins in 1896. The second oldest daughter in the family, Ethel Spencer, wrote a family memoir which was eventually published by an academic press as The Spencers of Amberson Avenue and which is very interesting for the light it sheds on upper-middle class life, child rearing, servant-hiring, etc. at the turn of the century. (My grandfather, significantly younger than his cousins, does not make an appearance, although his parents' wedding does - all the cousins get new clothes, an unusual occurrance in a household of 5 girls who wore a lot of hand-me-downs).
Sara Stein, Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of our Own Back Yards (Houghton Mifflin, 1993). This was pretty thought-provoking for me. Framed as a memoir of her own gardening experience and gradually developing awareness of the ways in which traditional gardening practices damage the environment, this is a subtle treatise. What I don't think the author fully addressed is that every environment that humans inhabit and use is going to be aletered by their presence, and that includes even a "restored" "natural" ecosystem. Her definition of "natural" for example, is the ecosystem in place in the pre- or early European contact era in New England (though she also plants a midwestern praire) - a time when native peoples were actively managing the land through selective burning, as she herself describes. Still, even this ersatz natural is a lot more natural than the landscapes we were driving through in the eastern Cleveland suburbs the weekend I was reading - flat flat flat lawn with occasional trees or very small shrub plantings. Will this book change my gardening practices? I think some. I already mulch, even vegetable garden beds, and compost, and don't sweep up my lawn mowings, and am sparing with chemical fertilizers. But now that I know that clover fixes nitrogen I'll be less aggressive at keeping out out of my garden beds, and I'll look for more native plants. Still, I live on a small plot in an urban environment - it will never be a prairie, and I like tulips and iris and I eat the vegetables I grow. So I won't go all wild all the time.
I was reading along and was surprised to come across a discussion of my grandfather's cousins - a family in Pittburgh who hired a wet nurse for their twins in 1896. The second oldest daughter in the family, Ethel Spencer, wrote a family memoir which was eventually published by an academic press as The Spencers of Amberson Avenue and which is very interesting for the light it sheds on upper-middle class life, child rearing, servant-hiring, etc. at the turn of the century. (My grandfather, significantly younger than his cousins, does not make an appearance, although his parents' wedding does - all the cousins get new clothes, an unusual occurrance in a household of 5 girls who wore a lot of hand-me-downs).
Sara Stein, Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of our Own Back Yards (Houghton Mifflin, 1993). This was pretty thought-provoking for me. Framed as a memoir of her own gardening experience and gradually developing awareness of the ways in which traditional gardening practices damage the environment, this is a subtle treatise. What I don't think the author fully addressed is that every environment that humans inhabit and use is going to be aletered by their presence, and that includes even a "restored" "natural" ecosystem. Her definition of "natural" for example, is the ecosystem in place in the pre- or early European contact era in New England (though she also plants a midwestern praire) - a time when native peoples were actively managing the land through selective burning, as she herself describes. Still, even this ersatz natural is a lot more natural than the landscapes we were driving through in the eastern Cleveland suburbs the weekend I was reading - flat flat flat lawn with occasional trees or very small shrub plantings. Will this book change my gardening practices? I think some. I already mulch, even vegetable garden beds, and compost, and don't sweep up my lawn mowings, and am sparing with chemical fertilizers. But now that I know that clover fixes nitrogen I'll be less aggressive at keeping out out of my garden beds, and I'll look for more native plants. Still, I live on a small plot in an urban environment - it will never be a prairie, and I like tulips and iris and I eat the vegetables I grow. So I won't go all wild all the time.