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The Bookwatch
Table of Contents
Reviewer's Choice
City Nature
Martha Retallick
Western Sky Communications
www.westernskycommunications.com
9798986857701, $99.95
https://www.amazon.com/City-Nature-Opinionated-Gardening-Tragedies-ebook/dp/B0DNB7F5W4
Martha Retallick has photographed, designed, and written City Nature: Tales of Ornery Plants, Opinionated Birds, Gardening Triumphs and Tragedies, and Capturing It All Through a Lens. This magnificent, oversized volume enlivens the issue of water harvesting and droughts, but this short descriptor doesn't mean the book's simply another conservation advisement.
City Nature is actually a work of art, a mandate for change, a passionate story of transformation, and a celebration of nature and water usage in landscaping. It documents Retallick's personal endeavors to utilize, conserve, and direct water in better ways -- away from a home's foundation and into the garden and nature where it belongs. This was no light feat. Her passive watering focus freed her from reliance on Arizona's municipal water system in an area where 40 percent of water is traditionally used for landscaping.
Introductory insights pair Retallick's personal life experiences, travels, adventures, and challenges with accounts of how she honed many values and goals from her journeying. These ultimately translated to near-revolutionary thinking about landscapes and conservation. The oversized presentation's top-quality full-page images does justice to such close-ups as her backyard fig tree, "The Mighty Figster," and her ironwood tree's flowers, which are captured in light and dark from her front yard display.
Botanists and gardeners will relish the fruits of labors, brought to life both by art and by Retallick's creative written appreciation of the plants that fill her landscapes and life. The pairing of intimate relationships with plants, photography, and landscape choices makes for a thoroughly engrossing, artistic celebration of plants and nature.
City Nature is very highly recommended for a wide range of library collections, from arts and photography schools to libraries interested in botany, landscaping and gardening, and the intersection of art and nature appreciation. Perhaps nowhere else is this bond so thoroughly explored (and so compelling) as in City Nature, where every large-size, high-quality color image is displayed in a captivating manner that captures the abundance and life in a landscape that does not require a high infusion of city water to prove abundant and successful.
City Nature stands in a high-quality arena of its own. It is highly recommended for libraries interested in top-notch artistry, conservation issues, discussions of Arizona nature, water, and landscape challenges, and botany.
The World History Shelf
Frequencies of Deceit
Margaret Elizabeth Peacock
University of California Press
www.ucpress.edu
9780520409736, $95.00, HC, 326pp
https://www.amazon.com/Frequencies-Deceit-Global-Propaganda-Shaped/dp/0520409736
Synopsis: On June 8, 1967, Egypt's most famous radio broadcaster, Ahmed Said, reported that Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces had defeated the Israeli army in the Sinai, had hobbled their British and US allies, and were liberating Palestine.
It was a lie.
For the rest of his life, populations in the Middle East vilified Said for his duplicity. However, the truth was that, by 1967, all the world's major broadcasters to the Middle East were dissimulating on the air. For two decades, British, Soviet, American, and Egyptian radio voices created an audio world characterized by deceit and betrayal.
"Frequencies of Deceit: How Global Propaganda Wars Shaped the Middle East" is important and timely study with which Professor Margaret Peacock traces the history of deception and propaganda in Middle Eastern international radio. Professor Peacock makes the compelling argument that this betrayal contributed to the loss of faith in Western and secular state-led political solutions for many in the Arab world, laying the groundwork for the rise of political Islam.
Critique: It is an old saying -- The first casualty in war is the Truth. "Frequencies of Deceit: How Global Propaganda Wars Shaped the Middle East" is exceptionally well written, impressively informative, and thoroughly 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation. A substantial and original work of meticulous and detailed scholarship, "Frequencies of Deceit' is informatively enhanced for the reader's benefit with the inclusion of a sixteen page Bibliography, fifty-two pages of Notes, and a twenty-two page Index. While especially and unreservedly recommended for community and college/university library Middle East Studies and Radio Communications History collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists, it should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that this hardcover edition of "Frequencies of Deceit" from the California University Press is also readily available in paperback (9780520409743, $29.95) and in a digital book format (Kindle, $24.45, Amazon).
Editorial Note: Margaret Peacock is Professor of History at the University of Alabama. She is author of Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War and coauthor of A Deeper Sickness: Journal of America in the Pandemic Year. (https://history.ua.edu/people/margaret-peacock)
The Philosophy Shelf
Pokemon and Philosophy
Nicolas Michaud, editor
Carus Books
www.carusbooks.com
9781637700730, $26.95, PB, 238pp
https://www.amazon.com/Pokemon-Philosophy-Trainers-Toughest-Questions/dp/1637700733
Pokemon and Philosophy: A Trainer's Guide to the Toughest Questions is the fifth addition to the Pop Culture and Philosophy series, linking elements of the popular game to bigger-picture thinking. This requires familiarity with Pokemon: "Before commenting on the significance of Pokemon's challenging our values regarding the supernatural and the monstrous, we have to understand exactly how Pokemon reframes commonly frightening phenomena. And in order to do that, it is helpful to better understand the nature of fear." Many of the contributors to this survey have years of experience playing Pokemon which results in unusual depth in their analysis of the game and its philosophical conundrums. Readers of philosophy, gaming, and Pokemon especially will appreciate the wealth of insights embedded in these discussions.
The Fantasy/SciFi Shelf
Rhymer: Hel
Gregory Frost
Baen Books
www.baen.com
9781668072608, $28.00
https://www.amazon.com/Rhymer-Hel-3-Gregory-Frost/dp/1668072602
Rhymer: Hel joins others in the Rhymer series that follow the exploits of Thomas the Rhymer, an immortal shape-changing foe of the Elf Queen and her minions. When Thomas learns of an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth, he gains some perhaps-unwelcome attention from her spymaster, Francis Walsingham, who blackmails Thomas into joining his intelligence network. English history, faerie struggles, and extraordinary literary forces coalesce in a struggle that impacts Rhymer's personal life and objectives in this taunt blend of fantasy, revised history, and engrossing confrontations between very different forces.
Baen Books
www.baen.com
https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Tide-Make-Darkness-Light/dp/1668072637
S.M. Stirling's To Turn the Tide (9781668072639, $18.00) is a time travel story that blends Stirling's talents for creating end-of-days scenarios with a different take on the use of time travel. What if a scientist created a time travel machine not to prevent nuclear holocaust, but survive it? A team of American grad students sent back to the late Roman Empire receive an extraordinary education in survival, ethics, and history as they navigate a vastly revised world-changing event in this different kind of disaster/time travel meld which excels in nonstop action and thought-provoking challenges.
https://www.amazon.com/Magelight-Kacey-Ezell/dp/1668072610
Kacey Ezell's Magelight (9781668072615, $28.00) tells of Aelys of Brionne, a noble daughter who dreams of joining the Battlemage Crops despite her weakness. This just seems to destroy her relationships, and so there is only one way out: to run from her dreams and leave her protected life behind. Her counter with three strangers who help her survive makes for an engrossing story of connection, a revised life vision, and new experiences which force Aelys to not only accept her limitations, but use them to create a new future.
Both of these new Baen Books science fiction and fantasy titles are thoroughly engrossing stories.
James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief
Diane C. Donovan, Editor
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