The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food / Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt, has that folksy quality that harkens back to the gentility of a bygone age. Maybe it’s growing up in rural Georgia, as she did, that defines her character to such a degree, and comes through so well on the written page. In any case, her musings and her thoughtful prose are always a joy to read.

In this book she takes on a topic that resonated with me—saving seeds to plant for next year’s crop. Why is this so important? Well, with hybridization and genetically modified crops, farmers (and more and more, home gardeners) no longer are able to keep and replant seeds the following season. In fact, in the case of farmers, in most instances it’s illegal for them to do so. Remember that prize tomato that grandpa grew when you were young? Chances are that variety is not in any seed catalogs any more. This diminishes plant diversity and makes agriculture beholden to the big multinationals like Monsanto, where the mantra still is “better living through science,” a sensibility that many thought went out of fashion after the 1950s, at least where our food supply is concerned. The Seed Underground reads a little like Michael Pollan meets Barbara Kingsolver. It is a not a textbook for seed savers per se, but a book of interviews, ideas, and a call to arms to save seed diversity for this generation and ones to come.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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