Richard W. shared a stream on March 7, 2024
February Hottest Ever

February Was Record Breaking Hot

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 17 seconds

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union, February marked the ninth consecutive month of record-breaking heat, with temperatures 1.56°C  (2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels over the nine months.  Copernicus calculated that February was warmer at 1.77 degrees Celsius (3.19 degrees Fahrenheit) than in the late 19th century. Only last December was above preindustrial levels for February.

Plus Two Degrees Celsius

Plus Two Degrees Celsius

My morning walk began with a chill. However, as Axios reported, 2024 has already started on a record-breaking note, with global temperatures across the surface air and oceans higher than in the previous year, 2023. Global average surface air temperatures have reached or exceeded two °C above preindustrial levels during February, matching spikes first seen in November last year.

Richard W. Brown February 21, 2024

Go back to Stream

1 comment add your comment

Share your thoughts and ideas

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund!

Donate Now!
February Hottest Ever
×
O Beautiful A Novel

Read: March 2023

Get this book

O Beautiful: A Novel

by Jung Yun

O Beautiful: A Novel by Jung Yun, the critically acclaimed author of Shelter, has written an unflinching portrayal of a woman trying to come to terms with the ghosts of her past and the tortured realities of a deeply divided America. With spare and graceful prose, O Beautiful presents an immersive portrait of a community rife with tensions, competing interests, and one woman’s attempts to reconcile her anger with her love of beautiful but troubled land. I highly recommend O Beautiful!

I finished reading O Beautiful on International Women’s Day. It might have been coincidental, but in my humble opinion, it was the perfect book to read on this important day. Ms. Yun has written a novel that touches on the intersectionality of the core issues of our divided land. The misogyny, the racism, and the impact of capitalism out of control are all related and are affecting the quality of life in the early twenty-first century.

Elinor Hanson, the protagonist, is so vividly written that she jumps off the page and becomes someone we know as a family member. When she returned home to write about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota, I felt I had known her all my life. Unfortunately, the novel ended when she finally understood the issues and was in touch with her anger. I wish it would have continued so that the problems might have been addressed. Despite this, I highly recommend this novel.

O Beautiful is the twenty-first book I have read this year! My goal was twenty-three.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Elinor Hanson, a forty-something former model, struggles to reinvent herself as a freelance writer when she receives an unexpected assignment. Her mentor from grad school offers her a chance to write for a prestigious magazine about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota.

Elinor grew up near the Bakken, raised by an overbearing father and a distant Korean mother who met and married when he was stationed overseas. After decades from home, Elinor returns to a landscape she hardly recognizes, overrun by tens of thousands of newcomers.

Surrounded by roughnecks seeking their fortunes in oil and long-time residents worried about their changing community, Elinor experiences a profound sense of alienation and grief. She rages at the unrelenting male gaze, the locals who still see her as a foreigner, and the memories of her family’s estrangement after her mother decided to escape her unhappy marriage, leaving Elinor and her sister behind.

The longer she pursues this potentially career-altering assignment, the more her past intertwines with the story she’s trying to tell, revealing disturbing new realities that will forever change her and how she looks at the world.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×
Nothing but the Truth

Read: December 2024

Get this book

Nothing But The Truth

by Robyn Gigl

Today, I started reading “Nothing But the Truth,” the fourth book in Robyn Gigl‘s Erin McCabe Legal Thriller series. The New York Times has selected it as one of the Best Crime Novels 2024. I have also read “The Hunter” and “Gods of Wood,” which are on the same list. Nothing but the Truth is a gripping and timely thriller exploring murder, prejudice, and police corruption.

One of the reasons I decided to read this novel is that it—and the entire series—takes place mainly in Union County, particularly in Cranford, my hometown! Erin McCabe and her law partner get salads from the Gourmet Deli, and she dines with her husband at the Cranford Hotel. In this installment, Erin McCabe, a transgender attorney from the Garden State, discovers that uncovering the Truth can be deadly.

New Jersey State Trooper Jon Mazer has been charged with killing Black investigative reporter Russell Marshall in a racially charged, headline-making murder. The evidence against criminal defense attorney Erin McCabe’s new client is overwhelming. The gun used is Mazer’s off-duty weapon. Fingerprints and carpet fibers link Mazer to the crime. And Mazer was patrolling Marshall’s neighborhood shortly before the victim took three bullets to the chest. Mazer’s argument? He’s a gay officer being set up to take the fall in an even bigger story.

Mazer swears he was a secret source for Marshall’s exposé about the Lords of Discipline. The covert gang operating within the New Jersey State Police is notorious for enforcing its code of harassing women, framing minorities, and out-powering any troopers who don’t play their rogue and racist games. With everyone from the governor to the county prosecutor on the wrong side of justice, Erin and her partner, Duane Swisher, are prepared to do anything to ensure Mazer doesn’t become another victim.

As Erin deals with an intensely personal issue at home and faces an uphill battle to prove her client’s innocence, she and Duane find themselves mired in a conspiracy of corruption more profound than they imagined—and far more dangerous than they feared.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

×
Such a Fun Age

Read: October 2021

Get this book

Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid. Although many reviewers highly rated this book, I was unsure it was the book for me. However, once I started reading, I could not stop. It is “a striking and surprising debut novel from a compelling new voice. Such a Fun Age is a big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young Black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store’s security guard, seeing a young Black woman out late with a White child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. At 25, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves and each other.

With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Ageexplores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone “family”, and the complicated reality of being a grown-up. It is a searing debut for our times.

When race and privilege are paramount issues, this book is a first step to understanding the intersectionality of the issues and addressing them. I recommend this book with our reservation.

Subscribe

Contact Us

×
Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories

Read: December 2022

Get this book

Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories

by Meng Jin

Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories by Meng Jin was written during the turbulent years of the Trump administration and the first year of the pandemic, these stories explore intimacy and isolation, coming of age, and coming to terms with the repercussions of past mistakes, fraying relationships, and surprising moments of connection. I highly recommend Self-Portrait with Ghost: Short Stories!

Each story speaks so clearly to the loneliness epidemic that confronts our world. I would read one short story and promise to stop and wait until another day to read the next one. Instead

One phrase that will always remain with me is: “The hallucinatory quality of grief.” As a widow, the phrase struck a chord that will forever resonate in my soul.

This is the seventy-third book I have read this year.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Jin turns her considerable talents into short fiction in ten thematically linked stories.

Moving between San Francisco and China, and from unsparing realism to genre-bending delight, Self-Portrait with Ghost considers what it means to live in an age of heightened self-consciousness, seemingly unlimited access to knowledge, and little actual power.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and wholly unique, Self-Portrait with Ghost further establishes Meng Jin as a writer who “reminds us that possible explanations in our universe are as varied as the beings who populate it” (Paris Review).

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×
The Bully Pulpit

Read: October 2019

Get this book

The Bully Pulpit

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin is a history of the first decade of the Progressive era told by focusing on the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Although I had read many books about Theodore Roosevelt, I had limited knowledge about Taft until I read this book. Reading about their friendship and its eventual collapse helped me to understand both of these presidents and the times in which they lived in a way I had not understood previously.

The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S. S. McClure.

Goodwin’s narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before Roosevelt’s death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of both men.

I recommend this book without reservations.

Subscribe

Contact Us

×
A House for Alice: A Novel

Read: September 2023

Get this book

A House for Alice: A Novel

by Diana Evans

I just started reading A House for Alice: A Novel by Diana Evans. The story is set against a complicated political backdrop but is filled with hope, humor, and humanity. A House for Alice explores the scars of grief and betrayal across generations and reveals the secrets we keep from our loved ones.

The novel opens with two tragedies that occur in London. The first is the Grenfell Tower fire, which took many lives. The second is the death of Cornelius Winston Pitt, a family patriarch who dies alone. A House for Alice is a beautiful and poignant story about a family of women shaken by loss and searching for closure.

The family matriarch, Alice, has lived in England for fifty years but longs to spend her remaining years in her homeland, Nigeria. Her three daughters are divided on the matter. The youngest daughter, Melissa, is also struggling with the aftermath of her failed relationship. The family’s foundational pillars of trust, love, and cultural identity begin to weaken as they navigate these difficult times.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

Subscribe

Contact Us

I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

×