'U' are preaching to the choir here...

I'm certainly not in favor of indiscriminate spraying, nor of questionable and harmful practices that may have been used in the past, but I think that I would actually read the book before I claimed to know all about it. Sheep don't die and dogs and cats don't sicken now? Under what circumstances and conditions did 90% of barn cats supposedly die, and in what area? It has always been my understanding that the toxicity of DDT was not the problem, but rather it's cumulative effects in the food chain, ending with weakened egg shells in top raptor predators. You can cry that the sky is falling, and look for things to worry about, but I also see that the bald eagle is soon to be delisted, the whooping crane is making some good progress, and coyotes are increasing in numbers and range, and moving into uban areas. I don't like japanese beetles either. Maybe if you collect them and put them all on your Kudzu, you'll at least solve one of your invasives problems.

Another Sort of Learning (James V. Schall) 1988 In this book with the unorthodox subtitle, "Selected Contrary Essays on the Completion of Our Knowing or How to Finally Acquire an Education While Still in College, or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found", Father Schall has written a delightful collection of essays for people like me who made it all the way through college without managing to get a truly liberal education. The book talks about gathering books on diverse subjects for a personal library. There are essays on reading, education, teaching, philosophy, sports, politics, history, and prayer. After each essay there is a short list of the books such as, "SchallÂs Unlikely List of Books to Keep Sane By", "Books You Will Never Be Assigned", "Eight Collections of Essays and Letters Not To Be Missed", "Ten Books on Grace and Thought", and "Five Books Addressed to the Heart of Things". True bibliophiles will love the lists. Schall states in the book: "Education, philosophy, science, politics, history, revelation - these are the themes that I have considered here in various ways. I have often talked of Plato and Aristotle, of Augustine and Aquinas, of Chesterton, Pieper, and C.S. Lewis. I have done this to underscore their importance. And I have repeated favorite book titles worth emphasizing in different contexts. I wanted to suggest that anyone with some diligence and some good fortune can find his way to the highest things even if such higher level concerns are not formally or systematically treated in the schools, even if they are in fact denied there or by our own friends or culture. Indeed, I would suspect that there is a certain basic loneliness in our relationships to the highest things. I am not a skeptic here, but we should not expect too much from our formal educational institutions in this regard. "Throughout these pages, I have talked of 'another sort of learning.' I have talked about why we should read, what we should read, books we should keep. In a sense, we can tell a lot about anyone by looking at what books, if any, he reads, at what books are on his shelvesÂ."

KSWL, I bought the book yesterday and finished it today. While I don't think I would read another of the author's books, I have to say the story of "Still Alice" was compelling, and while some of the writing was decidedly amateurish it is not awful. I think, though, that the main draw is that the subject of the book and the protagonist is something a lot of readers will identify with. As for the movie, I won't be seeing that for a few weeks, but the NY'er and NYTimes reviews also said the film sort of flinched rather than being as authentic as it could be. Funny aside, I learned the word "anomia' reading the (2009) book today. It means when you cannot find a word. I recently taught my kids the word "aphasia" and now they tease me that I have aphasia all the time. Anyway, i learned the related word "anomia", and mentioned it to DH over lunch. Then at 5:17pm my DD1 gets her "word of the day" email from Dictionary.com. And the word is ... anomia! Bizarre.