Just finished reading: Mad Honey

I just finished reading Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan. It was supposed to last through some downtime I had coming up, but I accidentally finished it in two days.

Based on the topic, I didn’t expect any history tie-in. There were so many presidential/Founding Father references, I thought that’s why my friend recommended this book. Nope. She hadn’t even noticed them.

All of these guys were mentioned in some way:

• Franklin Pierce

• George Washington

• Benjamin Franklin

• John F. Kennedy

• Sam Adams (the beer, not the Founding Father. It still counts, since the beer is named for the Founding Father)

• Bill Clinton

• Richard Nixon

• Thomas Jefferson

Even with the presidential tie-ins, I wasn’t going to pull together a blog post for this. But when Venn diagrams popped up twice, my sketchbook brand was mentioned by name, and a few random examples of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurred?

I really had no choice.

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A few things I flagged while reading…

Bivouac

A mere 13 page into the book I came across “bivouac” which I’d just posted about a couple of weeks ago. In this book, “the bivouac stage” relates to bees and “the temporary site before they fly off to wherever they’ve decided should be their new home.”

Doodle inspired by Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest by K. Jack Bauer

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Natick, Massachusetts

I swear I’ve never heard of Natick… until this past weekend, when I decided to learn about Ulysses S. Grant’s vice president, Henry Wilson. I stumbled on a whole podcast series about him, pulled together by a guy from the same hometown as him — Natick. The very next day, Natick came up in Mad Honey.

Fun fact: Henry Wilson was born Jeremiah Jones Colbath. He changed his name once he escaped indentured servitude.

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Silent Spring

I’m sure I must have, but I don’t remember ever hearing about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring before reading Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, by Julia Sweig. It coincidentally popped up recently in an episode of The Last Archive that I randomly selected without reading the summary. And then again in Mad Honey. That’s weird, right?

Mark Twain had cameos in Mad Honey and the book about Lady Bird, too.

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Grouse

I only know that grouse are birds from reading about William Henry Harrison’s fortress home, Grouseland.

Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation, by Peter Stark

You’ve got to see how these guys mate. It’s bananas. Go on. You know you want to:

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