Last year, as the world was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, there was considerable interest in the stories of the 400,000 people behind-the-scenes that made that historic event possible. Unlike the Moonwalkers, they weren’t all white American men. It was around that time I first watched the Hidden Figures film, which explores the critical contributions that three Black women (Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan) made at NASA as mathematicians, engineers and computer programmers.
The film is fun to watch and explores the racism and sexism that these women had to overcome. They entered a segregated workplace, where they had to use separate toilets and eat at different tables in the cafeteria. There’s some justifiable criticism that the film includes fictional scenes in which a fictional ‘white saviour‘ fights on behalf of the women, to give them their due. However, you could argue that without those scenes, the film wouldn’t appeal to the white audience that needs to absorb these stories and the lessons on the importance of equality they deliver.
The film is loosely based on the end of a book with the same name+, written by Black author Margot Lee Shetterly. In the book’s final few chapters, we see the three girly swots come into their own, a vital part of America’s 1960s effort to put a man on the Moon.
But the huge benefit of reading the book rather than watching the film is the earlier chapters. Margot Lee Shetterly’s father was a research scientist at NASA. He worked alongside some of the book’s characters, and Margot grew up in that community. As she explains in the Prologue, in a visit home to Hampton, Virginia in 2010, she was able to spend time talking to Kathleen Land. Shetterly
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A lot of new gardening and plant books have landed on my mat this spring, and I need to up my book reviewing game! I like to do them justice, and spend some time reading them before I write a review, so that does create a bit of a backlog. Right at the time when the garden is demanding my attention. Anyway, the book that has found itself at the top of the list is one that really encompasses the gardening zeitgeist – The Community Gardening Handbook, by Ben Raskin. I looked him up, and he has impeccable credentials. He’s currently Head of Horticulture for the Soil Association; prior experiences include working for Garden Organic, running a walled garden and being a Horticultural Advisor for the Community Farm near Bristol.
As 2016 draws to a close, my garden looks a lot different than it did last year. For starters, it has 12 raised beds now, instead of 6. There’s a small shed for storage, and a log store. There are gardener’s paths, an improved fence with fruit-training wires and small raised beds in the extra garden strip. I would not have got this far without Ryan’s endless energy and enthusiasm, his practical skills. And his dad. Whilst I am Head Gardener, Ryan is the garden’s Chief Engineer.
Ever since we watched Away, Ryan and I have a new toast: “To Mars”. Unlike that fictional crew, we have no hope of ever reaching the red planet. But there are an increasing number of days when I think it would be nice to leave humanity’s mess behind and start afresh on a new world. But the prospect of forming a colony elsewhere in the solar system is a long way off, and when people talk about life on Mars they’re usually referring to alien life.
I love books about weeds and wild plants – they generally contains little gems of fascinating information about useful and edible plants, tidbits you don’t find in gardening manuals. It’s been a while since I had the chance to sit down and peruse a good book, so it was great to be offered a review copy of Wonderful Weeds by Madeleine Harley, which has the subtitle “an extensive and fully illustrated guide from seedlings to fruit.”
With my bookshelf groaning under the weight of unread review books, I have declared an emergency Reading Week. Reading Week at university is a bit like half term – the lecturers get a week off teaching, and the students are supposed to use it to catch up on their reading list. When I went back to uni to do my Masters I dreamed of spending a lot of time reading, with the wealth of the university library on hand. The reality was there was never any time to ready anything that wasn’t immediately essay-related, which was a shame.
I have been sent two very different books on healing plants to review this spring. The first is ‘The Herbal Apothecary’. It’s written by JJ Pursell, an American “board-certified naturopathic physician and licensed acupuncturist”, and published by Timber Press.
The latest edition of Joy Larkcom’s classic, The Salad Garden, has been sitting on my ‘to review’ pile for some weeks now. It’s not that I didn’t want to read it – I did read it. It’s just that it’s extremely dense, in the sense that it contains a lot of useful information about a lot of useful plants. It’s not a book you can read quickly, digest, and move on from. It’s a reference manual that will be part of your collection for years. Forever, probably.
Brain loves books. It loves libraries, it loves bookshops, and it likes looking through other people’s bookshelves. Sometimes it seems as though it likes having books more than it does reading them. Certainly, that’s what the ever-growing Unread ShelfPile (there’s a shelf, and it overflows onto the floor and then some) seems to be saying.
If there is one thing I am truly grateful for during this extraordinary time, it’s my garden. Not only is it producing harvests for us and reducing our reliance on our over-stressed food system, but it’s somewhere we can step outside and be surrounded by nature, without having to worry about social distancing.
I grew up understanding the phrase “a bit Heath Robinson” as meaning something that had been cobbled together, but I wasn’t really aware of the fact that Heath Robinson was a real person. Born in 1872, he was an English cartoonist and illustrator, and he became famous for drawings of convoluted contraptions – ridiculously complicated machines that achieved things you don’t need a machine for. It was in this capacity that ‘Heath Robinson’ entered the dictionary in 1912; he became more synonymous with cobbling things together during the ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign of the Second World War. In fact, one of the automated analysis machines at Bletchley Park – a forerunner of the codebreaking Colossus – was named Heath Robinson in his honour.
I haven’t been feeling well this week, so in lieu of eating food, I have been reading about it. A while ago, whilst I was pondering what a resilient UK garden would look like, blog reader Audrey asked me if I had read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is somewhat of a classic in the local good genre. I hadn’t, so I bought a secondhand copy and started reading.
There’s a certainly delicious irony in the fact that my copy of Flattened Fauna: A field guide to common animals of roads, streets, and highways has become resolutely three-dimensional whilst I have been reading it. I couldn’t get it to flatten down for a photoshoot, even though “…in becoming part of the road fauna celebrated in this book, an animal loses not only its life but also its third dimension.”