The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

I picked up Kim Michele Richardson's The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek because I had heard of the blue people of Kentucky, whose skin was blue as the result of a rare genetic condition (methemoglobinemia, as I learned in this book). I was intrigued that Richardson's protagonist had this disorder, and was not disappointed.

So. 

Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her (blue) people, widely feared and ostracized, though accepted for her role of carrying books to the isolated homesteads that dot the hills of Kentucky. She is a librarian with the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, one of FDR's New Deal programs. Through her route, she comes to know her patrons - fire watchers, coal miners, moonshiners, the teacher of a one-room school, a chicken thief, and a mysterious stranger recently returned from building the Hoover Dam. All share a similar hardscrabble existence, scratching out a living, some literally, from the deep coal pits, where bosses have less regard for men than for mules (there are definitely echoes of The Devil Is Here in These Hills). 

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is incredibly well-researched, well-written, and beautifully constructed. Richardson captures the essence of Appalachia and the Great Depression; perhaps more impressively, in Cussy, she captures the loneliness and fear of being the last of her kind and creates a main character who the reader can't help but root for as she carries her books and hope into the hollows.

Five stars.

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old brain scientist when she experienced a massive stroke to her left hemisphere in 1996. Remarkably, after years of intensive rehab, she fully recovered, and has written My Stroke of Insight to provide, well, insight, into the experience of both the stroke itself as well as the recovery.

The opening pages are slow going; even after a half-dozen neuroscience reads, I still find the detailing of neural activity centers dense and often dry. However, once Taylor transitions from the science to the memoir (i.e., what it felt like to have the stroke and how she recovered), my reading enjoyment rapidly increased. There was not much here that I found terribly new (a signal to me that perhaps I'm free to lay off the neuroscience, at least until the next big breakthrough in the understanding of the brain), but Taylor did reinforce that the traditionally-held limits on brain plasticity are only that - traditionally-held limits, and that her own brain plasticity far exceeded what she might have expected...and as a 37-year-old.

I also appreciated her articulation of the types of tasks that came more easily versus those that were a sapped her strength and energy. The closing chapters focused primarily on aspects of mindfulness, and I admit to skimming those in the same way that I skimmed the opening neuroscience. This is not a bad book by any means, but it is one that a personal interest in the subject matter is, IMHO, crucial to fully appreciating.

Three-and-a-half stars.