The Lives of Amish Women by Karen M.Johnson-Weiner

 The Lives of Amish Women

by Karen M.Johnson-Weiner is a new book published by Johns Hopkins University Press and explores the condition of Amish women, what they do, which role they play in their communities.

I don't know you, but a village of Amish to my point of view is a relaxing and dreaming place. 

Most of these communities, in fact, the most conservatives ones, as you will see other ones are open to modern items and facilies, are still living as in the pre-industrial era, so without electricity, washing machine, iron, and all the modern facilities that we discover everyday. They don't use tractors for working in the fields, they use carriots for going everywhere.

Yes: it is true. 

Amish haven't never accepted modernity in large part but they continue to be great farmers, with an existence much more lazy and less frenetic than the one of the outside world.

The story of Amish people is absolutely stunning. The birth of this "movement" when there was the scission of Martin Luther, from the catholic church so in 1520 circa, and then an elaboration of what they wanted to become. Women were persecuted because of their strong role in the society and because they were not passive but active people in grade to make the difference.

If emigration in the USA under many ways, changed the cards on the table, Amish tried to find, in particular the most conservative ones, places where to stay and where to continue to be who they were in the Old World. So, great and open lands where they could cultivate, growing a functional and beautiful farm. 

Women in the social tissue of American Amish is necessary and taken in great consideration. 

In general a woman in a family is completely responsible of the house. If the man is under many ways a little patriarch, the woman is devoted to the rest of all the activities at home.

A big role is played by couples and children. A new married couple means to the Amish community new members soon. Children are the new people of the community and their education becomes, because of this reason, incredibly important. Treasure of the community, and in particular of their family, their parents will grow them with responsibility. Children must observe what their parent say to them. Creating obedient children means also not breaking rules or create disorder in the family.

In general Amish prefer to giving birth at home avoiding the hospitals, because home means from the beginning community and a social tissue known where the newly baby can be immediately accepted and cuddle; the hospital can be read as a cold place.

Of course it is not said: there are also communities that prefer the hospital at the home for that important moment.

The newborn baby is immediately active part of the Amish community. After several weeks he will be brought at church; he will sleep in the bed of his parents, and during the day he will stay in the kitchen, sleeping, while the rest of the family talks; what their parents and the community will tend to do is to create a new great member of the Amish community; toddlers are more mature than non-amish children and they are in grade thanks to their maturity of taking care of other people in need if their parents absents. 

Girls once in the puberty starts to wear adult clothes, and they help their parents during the summer-time, accepting work during other periods of the years also thanks to other families.

Menstruation will create a differentiation of works, and during the monthly period girls are treated with respect and most of the heaviest works will be limited at lightest one.

School: children attends Amish schools where in general there is an unmarried girl teaching lessons while fathers repairs the school when necessary; more opened Amish communities choose public schools, where Amish children attends also all that technological lessons and labs avoided by the Amish philosophy of life.

In general schools in an Amish reality is long till at the eighth grade.

Once this moment is over, the Amish teenagers will start to be introduced at the heaviest chores of the house, helping neighbors but also watching and learning from the oldest members of the community.

Of course young boys will help in the farm, while for the girl is a story of cooking,cleaning, childcare, sewing.

A teenager can take care of many little siblings with normality while her parents are away.

More or less at 18-20, young boys and girls decide to be baptized. It's an important moment in their existence and the affirmation of their being Amish.

It's a tragedy when, at the opposite, an Amish boy decides to leave the community: in general males are more numerous because more free than not girls. Maybe because the mantra is the one of honoring parents; maybe because the structure is pretty closed, no one would want to lose pieces; so this terrible moment is lived like a shame and a violation of the commandment.

In these cases there are several institution put under the lenses of the community: what was wrong? Where the community or the family committed errors? 

A structure like the Amish one bless marriages, although for certain people too particular and different from the Amish ideas will be more difficult if not impossible to settle down with someone of the same community. Sometimes people who will become couple are distant relatives. 

In Amishs courtship a friend is the mediator between the boy who would want to go out with the girl taken in consideration, and the same girl.

Amish girls must have clear ide about who they want to date, because probably that one will become their husband.

There is maximun secrecy in this phase; no one tell to other memembers of the family that it is dating another person; there are anyway amish communities admitting bed courtship. The couple must arrive home when the family is to bed and the boy must leave the home before that the rest of the girls' family is awaken.

Once the story is mature enough there are the wedding publications. All the community in that moment know that soon there will be a newly wed couple.

Times are changed and in general weddings are more big than in the past in these communities; it is indispensible so a variation of menus, differentiated and more modern in comparison to the one of the past; various cooks will prepare the luncheon, with the help of children.

As you will see an important moment for Amish women is church. A church service can lasts three-four hours and everyone including children must stay there. At the end there is a communal meals.

Butchering is a great activity celebrated during the winter-season; killing pigs and cow is an event of big proportion for the work that creates and at the same time for the good meat donated by the animals; in the good seasons women work for the creation of delicious fruit sauces and in fall for potato chips. 

Funerals are another aspect of Amish life. When a member of the community dies, in particular if elderly, a lot of people will participate; if it's a newborn baby or a toddler, not too many; just the family.

At the home of the deceased, people will love to see the dead one, talking of the old times, remembering the man or woman passed away; in some community the body is never left alone; during the funeral there are no singing; children participate to the funeral from the beginning to the end in the cemetery.

In the education of children there is the good habit for reading. If books are in a house they must be read by everyone and Amish parents and communities keep a special eyes at all the books introduced in a house, because that books will be read by all the family.

But...Which are the most beloved authors of Amish communities?

Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott (Little Women) Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables) but also Little House in the Prairie, when they also discovered this author.

There is also to say that Amish Literature so tales, novels, short stories, cookbooks inspired by Amish real life have a big success in the USA and sometimes they become real bestsellers.

One the the first and most successful writer is Wanda Brunstetter. I personally read and reviewed some of her books and they are simply enchanting; books, cookbooks also, created for warming the hearts of readers. I personally can tell you that these books relaxes me a lot and let me think at a simple world still plenty of values.

The book takes also in considerations magazines like Keepers at Home and Little Red Hen News. The first one is a magazine for all that women who wants to read pieces about motherhood, or ladies sometimes discomforted because they don't see God close to them; the second magazine is for hardworking ladies, and it is very conservative.

More to discover in a book that will let you breath the real atmosphere of an Amish Community and the daily life of Amish women and their realization; this book is the best evasion that you can ask for, from the real world.

Highly recommended!

I thank Johns Hopkins University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

 

Kokoschka The Ultimate Modernist by Rudiger Gorner,

 Kokoschka

The Ultimate Modernist by Rudiger Gorner, published by Haus Publishing, offers to the readers an important point of view regarding the brilliant, eccentric character that Oskar Kokoschka was. 

The author remembers that once he fell in love for his paintings but that later collected also press cuttings: it was true that Gorner remained bewitched by the extraordinary artist when at the Tate Gallery of New York was organized in 1986 an art exhibit of the artist. 

You must know that before to being the biographer of Kokoschka, Gorner wrote several other biographies, including the ones of Rilke and Trakl meeting in many ways Kokoschka in his writings. 

But who was mainly this genius? 

At first we can classify him as the biggest portraitist of the XX century. 

His paintings can be compared at Freud's couch, writes Gorner. 

Reading this book you'll understand that it is true. Kokoschka donated all himself because he was pervaded by strong feelings and sentiments and his pulsions, his romanticism, his visions of the existence was never connected just with the mere reality but with the big or little dramas of the moment.

Every experiences he lived, let's talk now of his experience as soldier during the First World War had a strong and intense internal resonance. 

Kokoschka was injured two times and once to the head; he returned home, but then he desired to return to fight in the battlefields; in the letters it is remarked this oscillation of thoughts; it depended maybe by the person he had in front of him,   the  blank page of a letter for his mother, or just the thoughts of the moment.

He was an artist of his time, Espressionist and Modernist, and lived all the big contradictions of a world in mutation. He was so original that once Einstein defined him: "A complicated talent." 

He was a genius. He could pass in fact through several mediums; writings, with his plays and essays, poems, but also paintings, and portraits who paid his bills when very young or that starved him a lot when people didn't like the way he had portrayed them and didn't want that paintings anymore without, of course, paying and leaving the painter penniless.

The existence of Kokoschka hasn't always been successful.

But... He loved to express himself giving with all his soul the reflection of his existence. He was "en route" as maybe was Rilke under other aspects, for all his existence. Kokoschka lived in many cities, for the most diversified reasons, but every city he lived in, his encounters, the atmosphere discovered in that environments created differentiations, new discoveries and a multiformity of richness that at least, paid a lot.

His last name: you will be curious of it: it means the cuckoo. He was born in 1886 in Pochlarn on the south bank of the Danube. 

Although he stayed there just a year he will idealized, as later he did with all the women of his existence, his birthplace. His father was from Prague where later Oskar will return several times for various years during his existence. His father was a travelling clock salesman for a local jewellery. 

When the family moved in Vienna where there were more opportunities of work there was a tragedy in the Kokoschka existence because the biggest brother of Oskar, died. 

Anyway the little Oskar loved the new atmosphere of Vienna. He was lucky enough of growing in a fertile environment meeting two teachers who believed in him and his biggest capacities. 

Kokoschka understood that years also the Japanese art of woodcutting, bewitched by this art. 

Although Vienna had given to him a lot later he didn't find anymore a good humus and decided to change air going to Berlin. Berlin meant to him a frenetic city and the possibility of enlarge the requests for portraits and new, important, collaborations. 

Although he later decided to return to Vienna, Berlin remains to him the best synthesis of his learning.

Speaking about his love, a big one was for Lilith. No one knew if Kokoschka was attracted by her or her Madonna-like face, or her skirt, or the red colors. It was an abrupt end; also pretty nasty, because  someone didn't speak too well of the genial Kokoschka at Lilith. The girl so, preferred to move on marrying someone else.

Alma Mahler will be his biggest love during the young adult existence. He will settle down seriously only in his maturity. Alma Mahler represented after Lilith the answers to all his desires. He imagined her as a an ideal feminine model. 

Lost for her, he inundated her of long and intense love-letters, poems, absolutely beautiful and sophisticated.

He wanted to elevate her relationship with Alma into the sacred . This love as writes the author was "about life and death". Alma was never in love with anyone, there is to precise it, so substantially she didn't never fall in love for Oskar, but of course she was intruigued by his court and under many ways, she appreciated him. 

A moon couple, Alma hided to everyone in Vienna her relationship with him;  they spent beautiful moments in Italy.

It was another tribulated relationship that ended leaving masterpieces in paintings like The Bride of the Wind, great homage to Alma. 

During the following years Oskar travelled a lot, and when he returned home in Vienna, he had again to leave the city because of an escalation of German power and the annexion of the city; he went to Prague but then it was necessary to leave Prague  we are in 1938 because of the same problems experienced in Vienna; from Prague he had to decide where to go. 

He didn't trust France, and Switzerland kept him perplexed. At the end he picked up London. 

In these years Kokoschka speaks of the absurd logic of inhumanity of the politic of power.

It wasn't a joke at first living in London; but then he was involved in various activities and created the painting dedicated to Prague called Nostalgia.

He preferred to travel when in UK for discovering Scotland and Cornwall, marrying also her latest love Olga Palkovskà on may 15th 1941. In the while Oskar continued his activity as activist. Not only: he was obsessed by the conditions lived by many children; it's important "to create a better world for children" wrote in a letter.

After the war in 1953 Oskar and his wife will start to live in Switzerland. He loved to be surrounded by creatives like musicians and in his house in Villeneuve, called Villa Delphin loved to organize private concerts.Kokoschka appreciated since his youth musicians and opera and he was a fanatic of Wagner and other important composers and sometimes  they influenced his paintings. 

Oskar's ideas about main thematics once the war over was a bit contradictory: a thematic he loved to spread was the sexualisation of culture seen negatively when some of his paintings demostrated erotic stimulation.

The last World War Conflict once over left of course many big fears: the end of the world with a third world war, Holocaust meant a wound that could not be healed; we can only remember and remember thanks to memory and direct witnesses. What happened in the mind of the creative? This strong impact meant a new research: faces but also mythological world. 

What motivated Oskar was a perception: the one that values were gone like also traditions. 

Kokoschka said once that he had four infatuations: "with people, with the work, with composition, with life." He thought at the option of the suicide but these four infatuations helped him to resist at that thoughts. 

Kokoschka decided to open at the Salzburg summer academy a "School of Seeing" a center for all the senses.

He was helped in this sense by Friederich Welz, inspirator and secretary of the academy.

Yes, this man Welz was part of the Nazi system during the war. It is still unclear if Oskar knew it or just removed these informations and accepted the new state of things.

We knew that there was a previous meetings between the two in 1934 because of an art gallery exhibit.

If Oskar didn't mind, surely Salzburg didn't want to have anything to do with this heavy past background. In a way or in another it was given the permissiona at the genius of organizing courses during the summer-time. The Committe of the Salzburg Summer Academy wanted to give their final words regarding teachers; Kokoschka as well so there were frequent frictions.

This school precised Oskar was indispensible because of the fruits producted by Nazists. So the motto of the school could be: OPEN YOUR OWN EYES!!!

In a letter he wrote: "Learning Seeing  and Insight was always at the beginning. All controversy, discord, all fracturing, in the history of Europe came about when they came with theories, not wishing to see what is there under the sun, which is the same regardless of its rising in the East and setting in the West."

Kokoschka classified him as a "seer" in an interview released in Austria once the second world war was over.

The world is seen as a sort of "a dirty nebula in the universe;" after two world wars, a pandemic flu, the spanish one  with 100 million lost souls.

Which is the legacy left by Kokoscjka who disappeared in 1980?

He is with his art everywhere: Venice, Boston, London, Vienna. Very loved and estimated in Italy he is studied in particular in Florence, Venice, and Rome.

Kokoschka is the alternative Picasso. He considered the spanish painter pretty superficial.  Picasso in first person tried thanks to a common mutual friend of sending him a postcard with a dove for making peace; Oskar didn't change his mind: in the while new generations are following his steps and what he has left behind.

I found this biography articulated, magnificient, beautiful and captivating. 

You must read it! You'll love it.

I thank Haus Paublishing for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Elle Venait de Marioupol written by Natascha Wodin

 It's important, where not indispensible to understand our origins, maybe just for going on in peace in this world.

I felt a strong attraction for this book, Elle Venait de Marioupol written by

Natascha Wodin, published by Métailié. 

That sweet and melancholic picture in the cover intrigued me a lot. There were the premises for a beautiful story. And I was right. This one is a genealogical research, started by Natascha, after years and years of temptatives without any kind of results and successes about the past of her mother. 

The net sometimes does miracles and one day Wodin discovered where her mother was born in. She didn't know where her mother was from, but the search engine "told" her that her mother was born in Marioupol, Ukraine. 

Wodin wouldn't never ever believed it. Wodin was born in Germany, in fact, and she currently lives in Berlin: her mother was deported for working in camps. Stories of Jewish, deported from their countries for concentration camps are known and largely treated; there are also other people as write Wodin who were constricted at abandoning their lands for that horrible camps. Her mother is one of these cases.

Attracted by an endless research, she discovers that Mariopoul was a wonderful place where living in; after all weather was good, seasons not too rigid and when her mother, Eugenia, Iakovlena Ivachtchenko lived there, the place was a fertile one where afforded people from all over the world. There were many jews, but also folk from the rest of Europe. There was expansionism, but also poverty and various temible infections. 

With the help of several important and crucial connections, Wodin also discovers who the father of her mother was: a rich italian merchant: he had had six children! So, Wodin understands immediately that the family is potentially very large, searching for other connections! 

She will discover also that one of her ancestrors was a famous relative, a singer of opera pretty appreciated and once deported in Siberia.

In their family unfortunately several cases of suicides funested the harmony of the entire family; all of them, maybe caused by a genethical illness, but, as also remarks the author, it was probable, also because of the big depression that Communism brought with it; many cases of suicides were registered during the Communism because, simply, it was impossible to develop any talent. Her mother killed herself, but also other members, all women! of their family; in a case the two girls decided to take poison the same day and hour, but then, one killed herself, the second one preferred to give another chance at the existence, living with the remorse of what planned with her relative.

Natascha will reconnect in this book her personal life-story, at first she writes that she had just three pictures of her mother and few other objects; she lived in an hangar the first years of her existences, with changes of school, sad stories of abuses, and she will also tell us the straining moment of the disappearance, forever, of her mother. A mother loved, appreciated. The book is written with splendid words, in grade of capturing the imagination of readers; I think at the description of places, photographs; Wodin is a real artist of the words and she offers to the reader very detailed description so that you are there, imagining protagonists town, cities.

Precious! You have the sensation that to her every person, every place, is a great discovery treated with respect, admiration and surprise.

Highly recommended.

Merci beacoup Editions Métailié pour le livre.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death by Harold Bloom

 Harold Bloom has been one of the most beloved literary critic, essayist, of our age. 

In this final book Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles The Power of the Reader's Mind Over a Universe of Death published by Yale Press

and completed some days before his departure in 2019, Bloom leaves a message for every reader: read! And keep alive the power of deep reading that in our society is disappearing.

No one of the old and loved poets taken in consideration by the writer, could prolong his existence, admits Bloom, but reading is researching, reading means new discoveries everyday and when you arrive at 90 years and you have spent your entire life or the most of it, and maybe you don't sleep well at night, at dawn, "read something that matters as soon as you can."

But read. Bloom affirms that "The great poems, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress."

A man he admired a lot in grade of devouring wagons of books as did with meat was Samuel Johnson and thinking at Johnson Bloom confesses that everytime he receives a book he devours it instantly if he can; when he was little, confesses, he didn't have a lot of books and he couldn't buy them; now he is "fighting" with his wife because everday receives new books and their house is overwhelmed.

I love this passage: "What you read and how deeply read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy and workship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading."

Scared of death? Well  Epicurus once wrote these words "...Death is nothing to us, since as long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist."

Appreciating poems is important: Emersone wrote once in The Poet that "The Poet are thus liberating gods." They are free and they make free.

Bloom loved to reread or recite Shakespeare day and night. "He gives me voices lost and found. His generous abundance is the perpetual harvest of voice."

While literal immortality appears to Bloom like a horror, he writes that he was born as an ortodox Jewish and so there weren't perspectives of immortality or resurrection. One day one of his cardiologists told him that his brain "...Could live on and keeps it's memory after I have gone into the Great Perhaps. I gently said him: no thanks."

At 90, attracted more powerfully than before by Homer and Shakespeare because free, they can't keep him completely free.

He is a poet I personally love a lot because the poet of the optimism: Walt Whitman. "I never stop learning from Whitman" confesses Bloom, remarking the beauty of the poem written by Whitman for the assassination of Linclon, in which lilacs play the gentle role of the situation. Ageing, meant to Bloom starting the appreciation of flowers, in particular roses; but there was that gentle bush of lilac in the house of the neighbor that sometimes moved his soul much more.

An essay this one that will explore Whitman but also Homer and Shakespeare, Milton and William Blake, Wordsworth, Shelly, Gordon and Lord Byron, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Yeats and D.H.Lawrence, Hart Crande, Robert Browning, ending with Dante 

An important  book for all the passionate of poets, poems and the meaning of life, and our existence passing through creative minds of all ages whispering to us their messages of hope  love, and friendship.

Highly recommended.

I thank Yale University Press for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Narciso La Passione dello Sguardo by Sonia Macrì

Narciso La Passione dello Sguardo by Sonia Macrì

reports, thanks to the words of writers and poets like Ovid, Filostrato, La Fontaine, Val[ry, Rilke, Williams, Garcìa Lorca, Borges, Ritsos,Pasolini, Walcott, one of the most felt and intense myths of the antichity: the one of Narciso. The story was this one: Narciso once in a river looked at the imagine reflected in the water, falling in love for it and after that, dying because of it. One day, in fact while looking at the reflection of his face on the river fell in the water and lost his existence.

Paradoxically in the antichity a lot of people described  "impossible" love, represented, when the object of desire not close to them with statues, paintings, writings in grade to keep alive the memory of the lost person for the most diversified reasons. I remember that I read in London by Peter Ackroyd of a person who lost both his wives keeping their bodies, I guess and hope, embalmed, in his house.

An eccentric way for not losing our dear loved ones.

There are, in these stories a constant: all these people love other ones; not themselves. They are projected emotionally outside, although for a reason or another they can't have close to them the loved one and so they recreate "virtually" (we discover that virtuality after all is pretty old) the girlfriend of their dreams.

The myth of Narciso under many ways is completely different, because in this case there is not love for another human being; all the opposite. There is a big, immense love for himself or, where not recognized that the imagine reflected represents the same self, for what seen in the surface of a river or in a mirror, ignoring that the face the same one of the person who is looking in the surface of the river. An impossible, dangerous love.

Mirror...Umberto Eco wrote once that he could have looked per hours in the mirror, but if he would have sent that mirror as a gift to someone else for let them see himself, the mirror would have reflected just the receiver of the gift.

Mirrors are seen like doors and reflections of what has been or will be. 

Spells are possible for seeing imagines in a mirror. 

Do you remember in Harry Potter the mirror where Harry could see reflected the old imagines of his parents, becoming bewitched by that old imagines? They were his parents, he didn't know them and at the same time he loved them so badly.

He would have risked of losing his mind if Doumbledor wouldn't have removed the mirror somewhere else.

Good: mirrors can also be doors for discovering the end of a person or his most remote past. 

A mirror is magical, but some people repeat that if you look too much at yourself in a mirror, you can risk to lose your own identity not knowing anymore who you are.

Back to Narciso...There are several stories of the unlucky, after all, guy.

The first one the most known; Narciso falls in love for his imagine, a reflection of a beautiful wonderful person he searches compulsively and then one day he falls into the river, dying. He didn't know how to swim. Unlucky boy.

There is a second one where a girl falls in love for Narciso, but Narciso loves just himself, presenting to that girl a knife, with which she will lose the existence killing herself. Now, this new element, pretty intriguing will devastate Narciso, because, after all, he didn't want that the girl would have dead because of him. The end is the same one.

In other writings it is reported that also in the other world, Narciso continued to look at his face in the river; a river this time with horrible, dirty waters; but, maybe because the character after all was not so negative, but made a certain tenderness, he returned to the Earth under the shapes of narcissus, a beloved spring flower. 

What "complicate" the story of Narciso is his behavior: he is in love with himself and so he won't never love another person. His desire is not to see another person reflected in the water, but just his imagine and thanks to that one he falls in love for himself. Can a person love and desire just himself? Of course no. It would be a sick element; the character of a dual person bring at severe psychiatric illnesses.

In our times a Narciso is commonly defined as someone all taken by himself and not taking in consideration other people. He is just the most wonderful person on Earth and all the rest of people can't be taken in consideration but must be ignored by someone stunning as he is.

Enjoy this book! It's wonderful, fresh and absolutely interesting!

The final part is dedicated to the various writers and poets, mentioned before.

Highly recommended.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Atlante dei Batteri by Ludwig Wess

 In this new book by Marsilio Atlante dei Batteri

Un Mondo di Bellezza Contagiosa by Ludwig Wess a fascinating topic: bacteria, their role in the world with a little introduction and explanation of some of the most important bacteria presents on Earth. 

Wess starts to reveal to his reader that he became a bacteria addicted when very young. He was fascinated by this world that we can't see but that it is all around us. 

On our surfaces, in the sea water, in hostile places like very hot water, or in the North and South Poles! wherever you can think at, there are millions of bacteria. 

Although we know 140.000 bacteria, just 1400 more or less bring illness to man. 

For the rest, most of them are incredibly helpful for keeping our environment in good health.

When bacteria have been discovered? It happened surely 350 years ago, in 1632, and thanks to another passionate of the so-called micro-micro-cosm. Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a merchant but he felt attraction for the invisible world and observed with the microscope every thing that could be seen; doing that he discovered the first bacteria, analyzing several animals and also...his tongue! when fell ill. He compared what he discovered in his tongue with what he found in a vase with pepper not in great state.

Comparing what he saw in the microscope and what he saw in his tongue he discovered bacteria, these little invisible animals. His studies were long, he made wagons of experiments that at the moment as remarks Wess are not anymore done, pity, sending everything at the Royal Society of London. Pasteur, later thanks to several experiments understood the importance of bacteria for our existence in every state. 

With Koch there was the birth of the modern bacteriology that would have brought at important discoveries and a different approach with bacteria. 

Bacteria's names in general are put by the first man who discovered it; so we find also modern and hilarious names, like the one put by Andrea Campisano at a new bacterium discovered in a vine, Proponibacterium acnes zappae. The scientist told to everyone that when he discovered the bacterium was listening a CD by Zappa called Sheik Yerbouti.

Bacteria have always been with us and they are very old creatures if I can use this expression. Bacteria and who lived before them, were the first citizens of the world. Rocks can tell us much more about bacteria and the role played by them for example; thank to them the birth of different and more complex unicellulars shapes of life; and then...all the rest that we know. 

But...In the other planets of our Solar System are there bacteria? This one is an interesting question considering also the composition of some of our Planets and the fact that when an asteroid destroyed the existence of Dinosaurus on Earth certainly some portion of that big Asteroid reached also planets close to us. You musn't never imagine that it was a gentle explosion. The universe was in formation and mutation.

So, probably, yes! these organisms are also in other planets . Waiting for discovering much better them and their role in their Planets, enjoy this book that will guide you at the discovery of several kind of bacteria that live in the most diversified places. 

We will discover the bacterium that caused the plague or the one of anthracis, but also the one who lives in the intestine; the one that enjoys the profoundity of the Ocean, the one in love for some food; the one found in the vineyard, the bacterium that causes legionella, a serious, sometimes fatal illness of the lungs.

A bacterium reduces sulphur; another one is in love for other bacteria and simply "eat" them;  a bacterium is resistant at the nuclear radiations!

Oh, read it, it's an illuminating, fascinating book that you will absolutely love to explore. It is the perfect gift for your children or someone in love for the topic! or science.

Highly recommended.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori 

Cadeaux de Noel by Colette

 Cadeaux de Noel by

Colette is a book published by L'Editions de l'Herne about the writings of the beloved french writer and journalist regarding her Christmases, but also the New Years.

Colette collaborated mainly with magazines for women, like Marie Claire, Elle. 

In these writings we see the author analyzing several aspects, all pretty different of her past Christmases, what happened during that special moment of the year with reflections about the current events and remembering what it was. Sometimes critical with her little village where she was born in, Colette's memories of that old times will follow and mark her existence. The church, was seen for example during a difficult year like the 1915, during the first World War, when the village of course lost a lot of its sparkle, still alive and lived by people. There were ruins everywhere, the town was destroyed  also the little library and everything after all was improvised for giving anyway a feast in the school room.

The children during the war had lost everything in particular if poor; dolls, chocolate, oranges received in general during every Christmas years: that moment of conviviality under many ways was special, peaceful. Everyone rediscovered the meaning of Christmas, while outside there was hell.

There are other descriptions of more relaxing Christmases when Colette notices the sky plenty of stars while the church was devoted at its rites: she remembers the good smell of warm bread.

Colette in another writing reveals that someone suggested her of writing some books for children, but she doesn't want to do that. She still remembers, she adds, the children's literature with which she grew up; most of them are famous books and they are still in the market! but she doesn't know if this market would be for her; would Colette be in grade to do that? Simply, she doesn't want to write it. She doesn't know also how could be received in the market a children's book written by her.

Colette wasn't born in a rich family, and her mother Sido, one of the central characters of her writings didn't believe at all at the existence of God. Anyway Colette was baptized and she attended the masses during the Christmas Time.

She lived in a small town called Saint-Sauver-en-Puisaye. Her childhood wasn't at all rich but pretty poor; with her mother loved to enjoy their garden and flowers during the winter-time. A bouquet of roses blooming in Christmas was always central on their table, like  the arrival of snow, fresh weather, but also changes of society as Colette remarked, pretty upset in her writing of 1920. War was over like also the pandemic flu in great measure (virus circulated till 1923) and society changed. Again. She was severe with children, because they were asking for too expensive toys, and were not happy for what they had, complaining and remarking that, when she was little, her Christmases were more modest but not for this reasons less felt and that this change couldn't bring anything good at all. 

Also New Years are lived by Colette with intensity: in her village the new year was lived not just with curiosity but with attendance that it is plenty of mistery. All the world wait the new year for something different, isn't it true? and each person has great expectations and is plenty of wishes and desires that would want to realize.

Colette oberves also that the magical event, plenty of expectations and that keep all the humanity like suspended for a day of wishes, and prayers and expectations, passes after all, if it wouldn't be the first day of the year like a common one. But no: the first of the year is magical. Colette was fascinated by the circularity of the time: with the arrival of the new year the time re-starts its inner circularity, with four seasons, in spring geranium are in bloom, in fall a wonderful absolutely stunning fragrance, in winter plenty of snow reflected magically in the sun. 

Wars, both of them brought not just unhappiness but also a suspension of what it means a big and good, and happy celebration of Christmases and New Year. It is pretty understandable, it happened this year to all of us because of the pandemic flu.

With the time, Colette developed this healthy attitude with the arrival of the New Year, that can be a good advice for all of us: re-start, not repeat! Recommencer et non repétér. 

Colette found in his childhood the strenght, for every regeneration and re-birth thanks to her Christmases and New Years. 

Once she wrote that to her point of view there is not a moment where we can't discover something new but that everyday is a new discovery. The world is new, she said, everyday she got up, and she would have always preserved a positive, open and happy attitude till at the moment of her departure. 

Beautiful and inspiring book, highly recommended.

And may all your days be new beginnings.

I thank L'Editions de L'Herne for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori