A Nice Little Place on the North Side by George Will

I was disappointed.  George Will is a strong baseball fan and some of his writing is excellent, but this is low on the list.  As he says at the end he is gushing, but more than anything this story of Wrigley Field went in so many directions that it lost the most important direction - a narrative from beginning to end.

We learn about psychological and sociological studies, the text includes Shakespeare, Goethe, and quotes from Great Expectations and William Butler Yeats.

There are baseball references - a trivia distributed throughout text - which is fun, but too short to satisfy the baseball fan who wants to wallow in the suffering of cubs fans.

It is short and part of it are really enjoyable, but overall it is for those in love with the stadium.

River-Horse by William Least Heat-Moon.

Because I have walked around Lake Superior and taken the entire Mississippi River I really looked forward to this book. I did enjoy it, but I wanted more of the places, the scenery, the rivers and the lakes. 

It was a personal adventure and perhaps a quest so it focused on the passengers and the problems. It was fun and there were some real challenges that they surmounted.

All adventurers can relate to a crazy dream like this and the effort it took to boat from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Imagine - he went up the Erie Canal, he boated the length of the Ohio and the Missouri rivers and came out where Lewis and Clark met the Pacific Ocean.  It is quite a feat. 

For light enjoyable reading I recommend it.

The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle by Russell Miller

I have always been a fan of Sherlock and I knew of the antipathy of the author towards his star creation, so, of course, I have been curious about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and this book answered all the questions.

Unfortunately, it answered much more than I really wanted to know. It is exhaustive and exhausting.  Still it is a biography I am glad I read.  Doyle is a fascinating tragic figure.

He tries to live the adventurous life and has grandiose dreams.  Here is a man who creates Challenger in the Lost World, Sherlock in a grand series of mystery stories and yet he loves his creation Sir Nigel and assesses almost forgotten novels as his prize creation.

He travels to South Africa where he is Watson in the Boer War and throughout his life he travels the world.

In the end, this man who can create the intellectual detective - Holmes - who possesses no patience with the frills of mysticism, finds himself the world's foremost advocate of spiritualism.

He is deceived in a way that will mark the final decades of his life, ruin friendship, and lose him both money and respect.  He dies happy and rich so it does not destroy him, but he cannot see through the trickery.  This pits him against Houdini, the great magician, who wants to expose the fraud and from friendship they grow to competitive opposites like Holmes and Moriarity.

Animal Wise by Virginia Morell

For too long humans have sought to reinforce our egotistical place as elite among life. We have insisted only we can make and use tools, but now we find many species, genera, and families of life can use tools.

We thought only we had feelings, thoughts, language, but as the scientists in this book discover, all animals have thought and many have abilities that actually exceed ours.

To those who like the old ladder of life with us on the top rung it is time to change. It is time to acknowledge that life of all forms and shapes has the values and abilities that make them special.

True, we have a language that allows writing and preservation of facts and knowledge, but that is where our genetic development has accomplished the most.

The issue is that when we respect the fact that animals can speak, learn, communicate, feel emotions, feel pain we develop an empathy for them. Most important we develop a respect. And then we know that their loss is a loss for the planet and for us. 

Human treatment, like cleaning the air and the water is not a burden, it is what we should expect if we as a species have the highest order of thought - ethics. 

Each chapter is a different thread, each story from ants to fish to birds to apes to dogs is insightful, entertaining and educational.