Joining Kat and friends. Go see what the others are up to.

Knitting.

I generally begin these Wednesday posts over the weekend and add the knitting section on Tuesday so that the photos of WIPS are as current as possible. But sometime, like the last weeks, Tuesday gets away from me and there are no knitting photos to post. But I will get this post done! With Photos!

On the left, the Windschief hat for BIL. On the right, a charity hat I made when I was frustrated with DIL’s hat. It will go to the local warm clothing drive.

Reading.

The Daughter of Auschwitz by Tova Friedman and Malcolm Brabant. The author was born in 1938 in Poland and spent the first seven years of her life variously in the ghetto, different concentration camps, and finally running through the woods with her mother to escape the forced march from Auschwitz to Germany. She and her mother miraculously stayed together through the whole thing; children were typically separated and taken directly to the gas chamber because they were considered to be worthless as slave labor. Ms. Friedman felt compelled to write this book when she discovered that a significant percentage of schoolchildren and even adults had little or no knowledge of the Holocaust. Digression: I just learned yesterday that Wisconsin has a law requiring that the Holocaust be taught at least once in middle school and once more in high school. Pretty sure it was not the current legislature that passed that law. /digression 5★

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by y Quammen. OMG. This is the best book — and the scariest — I have read all year. Published in 2012, it traces the history of many of the known zoonotic diseases, like rabies, influenza, including the Spanish Flu, Ebola, SARS, and HIV. The author is not a scientist but a science writer, which means the book is readable by lay people like you and I. The book was mentioned in a NYT review of the author’s latest book, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus, about COVID-19. Being anal about reading an author’s books in order, I requested Spillover to read before Breathless. Things I learned: A, most of the zoonotic diseases seem to arise in China, equatorial Africa, and Indonesia; 2, every one of them has a reservoir, a population of animals that carry the bacterium or virus but are not affected by it. At some point, the germ is transferred to a host, i.e., Victim 1, either by blood-to-blood contact, sexual contact, direct touch, or by breathing in the respirations of a reservoir animal. Or maybe other ways that I don’t remember or haven’t been discovered yet; IV, HIV was introduced to humans in roughly 1908 in Cameroon, which was then a German territory. It was taken to what was then Leopoldville in the then-Belgian Congo, where it spread but not pandemically. People died of many diseases in poor countries in those days; AIDS was just one of many unidentified killers. It was exported first to Haiti, after the Belgian Congo became an independent nation and many Haitians were recruited to take managerial and professional jobs formerly held by Belgians; both Haitians and Congolese spoke French, so it was a logical solution to a problem. Those expats brought it back to Haiti when they were no longer needed in Zaire. Eventually it came to the United States, where Gaëtan Dugas, a Canadian flight attendant became labeled — erroneously — as Patient Zero. 5★ (I would give it more stars if I could.)

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Family Money by Chad Zunker. After finishing Spillover, I needed something lighter and found this one in among my Amazon Kindle freebies. It was a decent thriller. 3★

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The Widow / Kaira Rouda.

Still needing something brainless after finishing Spillover, I found this one in among my Amazon Kindle freebies. It was another decent thriller, this time set in the intrigue of Washington DC. 3★

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My Evil Mother / Margaret Atwood. This short story tells of a mother who is (probaby) a witch and a granddaughter who might be. 4★

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City Dark / Roger Canaff. I am still not ready for reading anything that demands thought; these Amazon Kindle freebies are the perfect thing for that state of mind. 3★ so far.

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Watching.

Harry and Meghan: Becoming Royal on Netflix. Interesting. I have only watched the first three episodes and probably won’t watch the rest until the New Year — busy, busy, busy. I was impressed by their humanity and apparent sincerity. 4★

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Three Pines on Amazon Prime. I have read several of these Louise Penny books, but didn’t like them well enough to read the entire series. (Heresy, I know.) But the Prime series is well done, and I am enjoying it. 4★

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Listening.

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The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. A blend of fact and fiction about the current Israeli prime minister and his sojourns in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. He does not come across as a good person by any measure. 3★ so far, but it may change.