What a horrible winter we had. It took toll on our Giant Arbovitae trees which were frostbitten due to the unusually low temperatures this year. I hope they recover from it. We only planted them last year and I should have known better and burlap them. I will definitely do it this year, just in case.
In the meantime I have pulled the book I bought last year off the shelf. It is American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants & Flowers. I decided to get it because there are quite differences and less choice in what I can plant in my garden here in Midwest to what I am used to from Europe, but I am not giving up. Gardening is one of my passions.
Since I have been living abroad people have been asking about my mother tongue: "Is Czech difficult to learn?", "How does it sound?" etc.
At first it was hard for me to judge, I am Czech, it is easy for me but after learning other languages, I was getting the idea, it is probably pretty difficult for some people. If you are an English speaking person, I am guessing it will be a nightmare for you. To demonstrate, I am going to borrow a paragraph from the book "Me, Myself & Prague" written by Rachael Weiss, an Australian woman who was once living in Prague in search of her Bohemian roots.
" I'd tried valiantly to teach myself Czech with my guidebooks but I was struggling. The language seemed to be nothing but difficult consonants -ž's, j's and rolled r's -strung together. Ordinary everyday words were incredibly long and complex. The word for 'of course' is samozřejmě. It's pronounced samozrrrrrzzhayemnye - a truckload of consonants and tongue rolling for a word that in essence means 'yes'. It took me three weeks of practice to get that one word right. Knowing the words, though, wasn't enough. The words change completely depending on where they are placed in a sentence, which is why I hadn't been able to find anything in the dictionary when I was shopping or trying to make conversation. Every noun is either feminine, masculine inanimate, masculine animate or neuter. There are four different forms of feminine, four of neuter and two each of masculine animate and inanimate, and each form has a different ending, depending on its declension: twelve different noun types, each declined seven different ways. That's eighty-four altogether, and double that number because that's only singular and every noun is either singular or plural. So there are one hundred and sixty-eight forms a noun can take. All the adjectives have to have different endings too, because they have to agree with the nouns. Verbs take different endings depending on who you're speaking about or to, and how you're speaking to them. There are twelve different endings for verbs just for speaking in the ordinary way, and then another set of endings if you're ordering someone about. In short, the whole business is a nightmare.
Teaching myself Czech had got me as far as, ' His bicycle is clean but her car is dirty'; as useful as that might be in certain circumstances, it hadn't featured heavily in any of my conversations with the locals...."
_______________________________________________________________________________
Czech Alphabet
And there is more.
There are many words that do not have vowels: zmrzl (frozen solid), ztvrdl (hardened), scvrkl (shrunk), čtvrthrst (quarter-handful), blb (dimwit), vlk (wolf), or smrt (death).
My husband shakes his head when he hears these words.
The consonants l and r can be the nucleus (nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable) of a syllable in Czech. For examples we use these tongue-twisters to practice: strč prst skrz krk (stick a finger down your throat) and smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh (morel full of spots was dampened by fogs).
And then there is the consonant ř. It is unique to the Czech language, and I have no idea how to describe it. One thing is for sure, it is very difficult to pronounce.
I will stop here, yes there is much more! For now, have fun watching this video. ALEX is perfect with his -ř- . Well done!
Czech Tongue Twisters By American Diplomats in Prague
One of my favourite stores is Barnes & Noble. Today it is the largest book retailer chain here in the US, since the closing of Borders in 2011. Borders was and international bookseller based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Unfortunately, they applied for bankruptcy protection, and because they were not able to find an acceptable buyer they closed in September 2011. Their competitor Barnes & Noble acquired Borders' trademarks and also customer list, so when you log onto Borders' former website today you are redirected to Barnes & Noble's site.
What is making me nervous now is the information that I found last year. Barnes & Noble Inc. plans to close 30% of its stores, which is about 20 stores a year, over the next decade! The list of the stores that would be closed wasn't provided. The company has 689 retail stores and 674 college stores.
Do I have to worry now about my local Barnes & Noble?! It is so sad. Don't people read books anymore? OK, I admit I am the owner of the Amazon Kindlee-book reader as well, but I somehow still prefer books. I love books!
I sometimes visit the store in Naperville, but prefer to go to the one in Bolingbrook at The Promenade. I will write about The Promenade later.
Barnes & Noble in Bolingbrook
Barnes & Noble in Naperville
I visit often. They also have a Barnes & Noble Café where they offer the Starbucks beverages and a selection of the pastries and cakes. To be honest, there are no other real coffee shops, how you find them in Europe, in the suburbs. Unless you came across a Starbucks or a Caribou Coffee, you would be looking for another one for a long time.
This option is actually a perfect combination. You can have a cup of tea or coffee or whatever else
you fancy while you read a book or a magazine, and you can stay as long as you want. It is how my husband and I spend our time on a rainy day or other days quite often. And when he joins me, we almost always have a chocolate cupcake - we share it as I can't eat the whole thing. It is quite sweet, so after a few mouthfuls it doesn't taste so good anymore, plus it has 440 calories!! Otherwise I really enjoy it :-)
I have just updated my new page MY BOOKS. I can't believe that I didn't list so many, but because of my 13 moves..., many were simply buried in boxes for some time.
I will definitely talk about some of them in detail, there are many "favourites" :-)
I decided to create a new page MY BOOKS which is a list of some of the books I have read - in English, German or French (not my native language), mainly since moving abroad. I will keep adding new ones and occasionally write more about some of them in my posts.
I have just ordered a new book by Malcolm Gladwell: "DAVID & GOLIATH - Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants"
DAVID & GOLIATH
"We all know that underdogs can win-that's what the David versus Goliath legend tells us, and we've seen it with our own eyes. Or have we? In DAVID AND GOLIATH, Malcolm Gladwell, with his unparalleled ability to grasp connections others miss, uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty, the powerful and the dispossessed. Gladwell examines the battlefields of Northern Ireland and Vietnam, takes us into the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, and digs into the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms-all in an attempt to demonstrate how fundamentally we misunderstand the true meaning of advantages and disadvantages. When is a traumatic childhood a good thing? When does a disability leave someone better off? Do you really want your child to go to the best school he or she can get into? Why are the childhoods of people at the top of one profession after another marked by deprivation and struggle?
Drawing upon psychology, history, science, business, and politics, DAVID AND GOLIATH is a beautifully written book about the mighty leverage of the unconventional. Millions of readers have been waiting for the next Malcolm Gladwell book. That wait is over." - B&N
I didn't hesitate because I have already read and enjoyed his other books:
THE TIPPING POINT
"The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas." -B&N
BLINK
"In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others? In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables." - B&N
WHAT THE DOG SAW
"What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century?
In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point; Blink; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw, he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from The New Yorker over the same period.
Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the "dog whisperer" who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and "hindsight bias" and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate.
"Good writing," Gladwell says in his preface, "does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head." What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary." - B&N
OUTLIERS
"In this stunning book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate." - B&N
When I lived in Germany, one day I was watching an interesting interview with Sabine Kuegler and learnt about the book she wrote "Dschungelkind".
I read it in German, but as I was trying to search for it on the internet now to find out if there is an English version, I also learnt about a German film adaptation directed by Roland Suso Richter in 2011. I will see if I can find it here in the US.
It is about her very different childhood as she lived from age 7 to age 17 with her parents and two siblings in the jungle of West Papua with the newly discovered Fayu tribe.
I read the book in two days. Amazing true story! I wonder how is the English version.
"In 1980 seven-year-old Sabine
Kuegler and her family went to live in a remote jungle area of West Papua among
the recently discovered Fayu - a tribe untouched by modern civilisation. Her
childhood was spent hunting, shooting poisonous spiders with arrows and chewing
on pieces of bat-wing in place of gum. She also learns how brutal nature can be
- and sees the effect of war and hatred on tribal peoples. After the death of
her Fayu-brother, Ohri, Sabine decides to leave the jungle and, aged seventeen,
she goes to a boarding school in Switzerland - a traumatic change for a girl
who acts and feels like one of the Fayu. 'Fear is something I learnt here' she
says. 'In the Lost Valley, with a lost tribe, I was happy. In the rest of the
world it was I who was lost.' Here is Sabine Kuegler's remarkable true story of
a childhood lived out in the Indonesian jungle, and the struggle to conform to
European society that followed" - Amazon.co.uk
I was looking for a book about European Union mainly because I felt I needed to learn the right vocabulary as I was struggling to find the words when talking about the EU. My country wasn't part of the EU when I started to learn English, later on when it joined the EU, I was living in Germany..., and here in the US you don't hear that much about the EU, so I was happy when I found this book. It is also very informative.
" The European Union Explained provides a concise overview of the structure, history, and policies of the European Union. Drawing on many years of teaching and consulting, Andreas Staab offers basic terms and interpretive frameworks for understanding the evolution of the EU; the overall structure, purpose, and mandate of its main constituent divisions; and key policy areas, such as market unification."
I already mentioned one book regarding this topic in my other post under the label Books and this is the second one. I find both books incredibly interesting.
"The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph
from the Frontiers of Brain Science" by Norman Doidge, M.D.
Book Description
An astonishing new science called "neuroplasticity" is
overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. In
this revolutionary look at the brain, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman
Doidge, M.D., provides an introduction to both the brilliant scientists
championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they've transformed.
From stroke patients learning to speak again to the remarkable case of a woman
born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, The Brain That Changes Itself
will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human
potential.
Editorial
Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
For
years the doctrine of neuroscientists has been that the brain is a machine:
break a part and you lose that function permanently. But more and more evidence
is turning up to show that the brain can rewire itself, even in the face of
catastrophic trauma: essentially, the functions of the brain can be
strengthened just like a weak muscle. Scientists have taught a woman with
damaged inner ears, who for five years had had "a sense of perpetual
falling," to regain her sense of balance with a sensor on her tongue, and
a stroke victim to recover the ability to walk although 97% of the nerves from
the cerebral cortex to the spine were destroyed. With detailed case studies
reminiscent of Oliver Sachs, combined with extensive interviews with lead
researchers, Doidge, a research psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at Columbia and
the University of Toronto, slowly turns everything we thought we knew about the
brain upside down. He is, perhaps, overenthusiastic about the possibilities,
believing that this new science can fix every neurological problem, from
learning disabilities to blindness. But Doidge writes interestingly and engagingly
about some of the least understood marvels of the brain.
"Mind-bending, miracle-making,
reality-busting stuff with implications for all human beings."
-The New York Times
"A remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the
human brain."
-Oliver Sacks
"The power of positive thinking finally gains scientific
credibility."
-The New York Times
I loved reading this book as it covers one of my big interests - human brain/mind (there is another book I read on that topic - see Label Books). Here is what it is about.
"My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey" by Jill
Bolte Taylor Ph.D.
Book
Description
The
astonishing New York Times bestseller that chronicles how a brain
scientist's own stroke led to enlightenment
On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left side of her brain. A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, all within the space of four brief hours. As the damaged left side of her brain--the rational, grounded, detail- and time-oriented side--swung in and out of function, Taylor alternated between two distinct and opposite realties: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace; and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized Jill was having a stroke, and enabled her to seek help before she was lost completely.For Taylor, her stroke was a blessing and a revelation. It taught her that by
"stepping to the right" of our left brains, we can uncover feelings
of well-being that are often sidelined by "brain chatter." Reaching
wide audiences through her talk at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED)
conference and her appearance on Oprah's online Soul Series, Taylor
provides a valuable recovery guide for those touched by brain injury and an
inspiring testimony that inner peace is accessible to anyone.
Editorial
Reviews
A brain scientist's journey from a
debilitating stroke to full recovery becomes an inspiring exploration of human
consciousness and its possibilities
In My Stroke of Insight, Taylor shares her unique perspective on the
brain and its capacity for recovery, and the sense of omniscient understanding
she gained from this unusual and inspiring voyage out of the abyss of a wounded
brain. It would take eight years for Taylor to heal completely. Because of her
knowledge of how the brain works, her respect for the cells composing her human
form, and most of all an amazing mother, Taylor completely repaired her mind
and recalibrated her understanding of the world according to the insights
gained from her right brain that morning of December 10th.
Today Taylor is convinced that the stroke was the best thing that could have
happened to her. It has taught her that the feeling of nirvana is never more
than a mere thought away. By stepping to the right of our left brains,
we can all uncover the feelings of well-being and peace that are so often
sidelined by our own brain chatter. A fascinating journey into the mechanics of
the human mind.
I have just finished a book by Robert D. Kaplan "The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About
Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate"
It was such an interesting read. I have lived in several countries and I am very interested in foreign cultures and history, so this book caught my attention. I am so glad it did. I don't think that I will look at the world with the same eyes from now on.
