The Big White Farmhouse

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Joining in with Top Ten Tuesday with the perfect prompt for sharing the books I received for Christmas (and a few I bought myself)!  I chose many of these with my goal of reading more nonfiction in mind.  Lots of interesting topics are below:

1 // The Radioactive Boy Scout: The Frightening True Story of a Whiz Kid and His Homemade Nuclear Reactor by Ken Silverstein
This book is an example that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction!  Listen to this: “David Hahn…plunged into a new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his backyard garden shed.  Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the US government and from industry experts.  Following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation.  His wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an environmental emergency that put his town’s forty thousand residents at risk, and the EPA ended up burying David’s lab at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah.”

2 // Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
This book is about James Garfield, who I admittedly know very little about!

3 // The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman
“After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages.”  This is apparently a true story and sounds really interesting.

4 // A Day Like This by Kelley McNeil
I first heard about this one from a Goodreads giveaway.  (I didn’t win the giveaway, so purchased it on my own.)  The novel is about a woman who has everything – the house, the loving husband, the sweet daughter – who one day wakes up after a car accident.  From the description: “When she asks for her daughter, confused doctors tell Annie that Hannah never existed.  In fact, nothing after waking from the crash is the same as Annie remembers.  Five happy years of her life apparently never happened.”  Sounds intriguing!

5 // Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees
This historical novel is about a woman recruited as a spy and tasked with the job to hunt down a war criminal.  From the description: “Edith heads to the Continent armed with a convincing cover: an unassuming schoolteacher who collects recipes…recipes she fills with coded intelligence and send back to her handlers in London.”  Sounds so good!

6 // Eighty Days to Elsewhere by KC Dyer
This fun-sounding book has been described as The Amazing Race meets Around the World in Eighty Days.  I’m there!

7 // The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
This one tells the story of the darkest years of the Depression when the dust storms plagued the High Plains.  I believe there are stories included from survivors (people now in their 80s and 90s), which should be fascinating.

8 // Escape from Camp 14:One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden
After reading The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee back in 2020, I’ve been interested in learning more about the country.  This book a courageous young man sounds so good: “North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps.  These camps are clearly visible in satellite photos, yet North Korea’s government denies they exist.  No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped.  No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk.”

9 // “I Have Nothing to Hide”And 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy by Heidi Boghosian
I bought this on a whim from Book Outlet when I was ordering everyone’s Epiphany books.  I know I’m going to learn a lot from this one.

10 // Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown
I listened to an interview with Gabe Brown and immediately needed his book!  I’m so interested in regenerative agriculture, especially as we move chickens and pigs on pasture, and can’t wait to incorporate his wisdom into our little homestead.