Fresh Words Daily

New Zealand exports about $81 million worth of honey each year.  Something I didn’t know about and would’nt have bothered to know until I read this book.

Hannah Norhaus travelled with some of the major beekeepers in the USA looking and listeneing to them as they talk about their methods and also in some cases she worked along side them.  She has been stung and learned the hard way that curly hair and bees don’t mix – very hard to get them out of the curls once they decide to be there. 

This book mixes history and bee information in a most readable way. It talks aboutwht it takes to be a beekeeper and they tend to be pretty solitary people in direct contrast to the social activity of their hives.

In te USA they truck and transport thousands of hives across states to find the best fields for bees to collect pollin. The fields are a part of the business and are rented out to the beekeepers for the period of the flowering.  Honey production is a variable business and there are a variety of things that can halt the production.  Pesticides affect bees.  A study was done on bees who apparently died for no reason. A residue of DDT was found in the bee even though DDT hadn’t been used in the USA for 25 years.  Just shows how much the plant retains of such a chemical.

All beekeepers know about the Varroa mite.  It affected bees across the world, and actually there are 4 entirely different species and it has 18 regional genotypes so it is a wiley adversary because it can mutate.  You can see that I picked up a huge amount of knowledge from this very readable book.

I learned that neatly mown lawns are a beekeepers anathema.  Give them fields of flowering clover or daisies.  Posh gardens with designer plants are another malediction for beekeeprs (and people like me too). Go back to the old days of cottage gardens filled with old fashioned flowers which bloomed heartily and encouraged the bees to come to them.

I love this portion of the book where she talks about honey.

“Honey is the distilled nectar of blooming flowers. It is collected by bees, lots and lots of bees.  To make a pound of it the 50,000 to 80,000 bees who live together in a hive at the height of summer will travel a collective fifty-five thousand miles and visit more than two million flowers.  A hive can collect more than thirty pounds in a single day when the stars align and the nectar gushes.

This is a book filled with interest written with quirkiness and good humour.  I never before thought I would be so caught up in the whole business of bees butnow I am determined to make sure my garden is filled with flowers.  And I am probably going to be an absolute dinner party bore.

This is not a book you will read in a day.  In fact it took me about a month to read it but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable.  There was just so much to absorb to think about and to understand.  Isn’t that just the best sort of book.  It is the biography of Jerusalem.  This seems to be a common thread in recent times – to write about a city. Dublin, London, New York by Edward Rutherford are some that come to mind. They pale though in comparison with Jerusalem.  We start right at the beginning with pre biblical times – material garnered from archeological sites.  What comes through is what a bloody history this wonderful city has had.  Perhaps that is what is in its stones now as the blood let  continues.  Montefiore writes so well.  Historical books can be dry and deadly but this isn’t.  His footnotes add to the narrative too and there is dry humour and amusement and also the continuing foolishness of mankind.  Horror too at what we do  to one another. 

I am very pleased to have something tidied up for me.  I always was very dubious about the story of David and Goliath.  I had a vision of his slingshot something like the things my brothers used to make out of forked sticks and bits of old bicycle inner tube.  They would fire them off at my mother’s hens once getting into terrible trouble when they hit a hen sitting on the gate and broke her leg.  She had to be dispatched to the pot. 

 What David had was a slingshot which is a much larger thing.  There were battalions of ‘slingers’ and very smart they were.  They could swing the sling around and let a stone fly which could travel at over 100 kilometers.  A corps to be considered I see now.

What is the future for the glorious city? Amos Oz a writer who now lives in the Negev suggested that what should happen is that every stone of every building should be taken and shipped to Scandanavia for 100 years until the people in Jerusalem learned to get along with one another.  Not really a viable solution but it shows how difficult the interaction will always be. 

 In the epilogue Montefiore gives us a picture of the Muslim, the Jew, and the Christian going to their prayers on a particular day.  At some stage of each of the praying they use the word ‘peace’.  A pity it cannot be brought to the forefront of everyone’s ideal for that city.

Jerusalem is the best book I have read this year.  Yes it took a while to read, but what jewels it contained.  It also gave me a better perspective of the history of the area and the glory of that desired city.

Sometimes books take over.  It seems that recently books about Africa have leapt from the library shelves and from the bookshop counter into my hands.  Once again I have been reading about Zimbabwe in a book by Douglas Rogers which is sub-titled ‘a Zimbabwe memoir’.  A journalist writing about his parent’s life in Zimbabwe shows the incredible resourcefulness that they show when electricity connections are minimal, when no tourists are coming to their backpackers lodge, and no one turns up to their famous pizza nights.  The story is full of humour and sheer grit.  Mugabe will never overcome and become the dictator he wants to be when there are both black and white people who can find a way to make a living – sometimes not always legal but always with great humour.  The parents grow marijuana, they let out the chalets for ilicit  assignations.  It all helps to pay their way and they turn a blind eye to it all. 

Of course there is fear and anxiety, but Mr and Mrs Douglas conduct themselves with such honour that they should have a medal struck.  When they are asked why don’t they leave, they reply they are Zimbabweans.  Surely, surely, one day that beautiful country will come back to some form of democaratic government, some form of civilised behaviour and people can live together, farming and working in the commercial and business sector without having to resort to semi-illegal activities to survive.

Zimbabwe beautiful country deserves better and so do the people black and white.

One of the good things about a wet summer holiday is that you can lounge about and read.  I have had a range of books given me over the Christmas period ranging from Judi Dench’s autobiography to a book about a man who read the Oxford English Dictionary.  Certainly a breadth there.  But the book I have been caught up with is Peter Godwin’s memoir about Africa in particular Zimbabwe.  The book begins in 1996 when on an assignment for the National Geographic Peter gets the news of his father’s illness.  He is gravely ill and not expected to live.  The news is given him when he is sitting with Prince Galenja Biyela a Zulu prince who is recounting the story of when twenty-five thousand zulu warriors took on the British regiments.  We are cast immediately into the depths of Africa and when there is ‘the screaming in the pocket’ which  translated from zulu and means the cell phone  is ringing and we are given a reprieve and taken on the path to Zimbabwe to his father’s sickbed.  The story then centres around life in Zimbabwe and how this beautiful country which was once wealthy and well stocked with food and produce has become filthy, war-ridden, and poverty stricken.  All because of one man the dictator Mugabe.  This is such a well told story not just about the country but also about a family who finds their true ancestry.  Peter Godwin writes so well – and so he should he has been a journalist for many years – but being a good journalist doesn’t always translate into writing a good well crafted book..  What has come out of this book for me a thirst to know more about Zimbabwe – hard to find as writers are not welcome in Zimbabwe and could end in prison if they do not declare their occupation.  And could still end in prison – as Peter Godwin has said in an interview.  No one wants to spend any time in a Zimbabwean prison not for five minutes.  This is a book well worth reading. Oh sad sad Africa.

Three diverse women who become connected. The novel is set in Cape Cod and London. Iris is the postmaster in a small town in Cape Cod.  She loves her job as the postmaster and believes that if everything was as ordered as her post office with her letters neatly filed and the American flag flying from the flagpole everyday, life would be much better for everyone.

Francie is a tall leggy blonde who is a journalist in Londona and who comes to America via the radio. She tells of the bombings and disasters of London in 1940.

Emma is the frail doctor’s wife who is left pregnant when her husband decides that he must go to England and work amongst the suvivors of the blitz. He comes to this decision partly through the talks he hears from Francie, but also when he botches a baby delivery and the mother dies. He feels reponsible.

This is an uneven book.  Both Iris and Francie are believable characters but Emma is just a little cardboard cutout – she isn’t meant to be forthright, but her inclusion in the story doesn’t add much excitement. More she is ‘everywoman’ the woman who sits at home  waiting for the mail, while her man goes to war.

For me the best part of the book was the middle section. Francie has left London and begins catching trains across France linking up with refugees on their way to Spain. As an American she can still travel freely in the occupied country.  She takes with her a recording device to gather the words from the people on the trains. This is to be real radio part of her programme being beamed back to the USA. Many of the voices are Jewish, many voices appear only for a few minutes there is a poignancy about this diaspora of disenfranchised people, children, old people mothers.

The book moves back and forth between America and England and Europe and the Postmaster continues sorting the mail and the little wife continues waiting for her husband. Harry a local who is in love with Iris coninues to look through his telescope out across the bay. He believes we will be the first person to spot a German submarine if it comes.

Although the book is called The Postmistress Iris is always insistent that in America the job is kown as that of Postmaster so I wondered about this terminology – and yes it is resolved in a subtle way. I think the end of the book is a bit of a let-down but that may be because the central portion is so strong.  Often life is like that – huge activity, great danger, and then anticlimax.

There is a quote from Martha Gellhorn a war correspondent at the beginning of the book: “War happens to people, one by one. That is all I have to say, and it seems to me I have been saying it forever.”

Perhaps that is something we forget when we are overfilled with images of troops, technology and machiner. War is people.

Publisher: Viking/Penguin  Price: $NZ39.00

It is a rare day that I cannot finish a book.  Like a good child told to eat up its vegetables before desert I usually persevere and hope that at the end the book will have been worthwhile.  This is not the case with this book.  I couldn’t finish it.  I was seduced into buying it by the luscious Scottish accent of the author who was interviewed on Radio NZ Nine to Noon programme.  I bought the book.  It is a first novel written by a Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago.  He loves writing you can tell that because he continually describes everything.  When his character Gerry Conway arrives in Belfast he doesn’t just drive his car of the ferry we get full detailing.

“I bumped up the ramp onto solid ground. I felt that lightening, that release that always comes on disembarking, as if you’d been detained against your will and have somehow made good your escape.”  etc etc etc. 

Man oh man this book needed a wiley eyed editor with a red pen.  For goodness sake just get the car off the damn boat – the description adds nothing to the impetus of the story.  So I am sorry author with the lovely scottish accent this book has not been finished.  I couldn’t even believe there would be goodies at the end to entice me on.  So I dropped it and picked up the fascinating book by Alex Von Tunzelmann called Indian Summer which has kept me enthralled as she reveals the background to partition in India.  Well written sparse description and I now have a greater understanding of India and Pakistan.

The story is set in Arles from 1888-1890.  In these two years Vincent Van Gogh painted some of his most startling pieces and broke out of the traditional style into wild colourful work.  It is during this time that he is supposed to have met a prostitute who became his lover yet managed to continue with her calling as well as being his mistress.  Although the reference to the art is true and very well researched the relationship between the artist and the young woman form the brothel is pure imagination on the part of the author.    You know when the story opens that there will not be a happy outcome and that doom sits on the shoulder of Vincent and Rachel. The historical parts of the book are well researched and the author has used much from the correspondence between Vincent and his brother Theo.  It has become somewhat of a fashion to take an artist and create a life around them.  Tracy Chevalier did it with Vermeer very successfully.  I don’t think Bundrick is quite so successful.  The relationship between Van Gogh and Rachel is not as well drawn as the narrative about the art. The picture of the brothel as a happy home for hookers is a bit hard to accept. It is interesting to look at Van Gogh’s paintings at this period of time at Arles.  The book makes the point that Van Gogh was madly creative but not madly insane and that he probably suffered from epilepsy.