Since I really enjoy trying to figure out the mystery of Pretty Little Liars on Netflix it only seemed normal that the books would be fun too. Unfortunately, the TV series cleans up the books, and I would not consider the books appropriate for young adults. See this site review on the book series. So I will continue to enjoy the television series but will not take time for another of the books in the series. I also would not be comfortable if I had a teenager having them read this book. And if an adult male liked the books I would think he had a problem. I do not recommend these YA novels. I rarely give a bad review but this book is full of sexual innuendoes and endorsement of problem behavior for an age group that could use more positive goals placed before them. I tried to find a video to post about the series but could only find appropriate ones about the tv show not the books so therefore there will not be any video with this book review blog.
Mystery books are not my normal genre but sometimes after a few heavier type reads a mystery is more of a light hearted easy read for me to intersperse between my normal historical fiction. I was ready for a mystery so I selected A Duty To The Dead by Charles Todd because the main character is a nurse. Bess Crawford serves as an army nurse for Britain during WWI. When the book opens she is on a sinking hospital ship which caught my interest from the first page. After she survives the wreckage she goes home to recover. It is during her leave that she becomes involved in the family skeletons of a former patient. The reason I usually give for not being a big mystery reader is that I generally have the end figured out long before I get there. I have to say that I did not guess the ending to this book. While this novel is not in the ranks of great classical literature, it is an easy and enjoyable read that I would recommend as a good escape. I will read more of Charles Todd's books. Please be sure and click on the book title and author's name above to follow the links to more information. And enjoy the video that follows.
This morning I finished up Raquela by Ruth Gruber on my kindle and I can't say enough good about this biography. It is the life story of a nurse midwife in Israel and begins in 1905 and ends in the late 1970s. The various wars that were fought over this time period are explained and an historical perspective is obtained of where things are in the Middle East today from the Israeli perspective when reading this book. Certainly there are two sides to every story but it is important to see this side of the issues too. The book also clarifies the position of the United States of being supportive of Israel. So far 2015 has been filled with good books that I have enjoyed and I know I have said this close to if not more than ten times but I really will be surprised if Raquela by Ruth Gruber does not make it to my top ten list this year. I encourage every one to read this book. Please be sure and click on the book title and author's name above to learn more. The video that follows is about the author of Raquela - Ruth Gruber.
Unbroken is a novel published in 2010 that has not only been on the best seller list ever since but was released as a movie this past Christmas. Written by Laura Hillenbrand, it is a well researched and well written biography of Louis Zamperini. It is a book that is important in that it covers our veterans experiences in WWII. That being said, I chose to listen to the book on audio and I almost stopped listening several times. There was so much violence and suffering in it that it was hard to keep listening. I can't really recommend the book to others. The first part of the book covers Louie's childhood and goes into his experiences as an Olympic runner. The second part covers the beginning of his service career and his time spent on a life raft in the pacific. The third part describes the time Louie spent as a POW in Japan. And finally he gets home and the last part talks about what a mess he was. Then he goes to see Billy Graham and that solves everything. Which made me roll my eyes. The rest of the book is about reconciliation for not only Louie but the entire country working through the aftermath of WWII and many painful experiences. This book might be a book men would enjoy but it certainly is not chick lit. It might be a good way to teach about WWII at the college level. It will not make my top ten list this year. Feel free to click on the author's name and book title above to follow the links to more information. And enjoy the trailer to the movie that follows.
"A wise man once said that a farmer has two particularly important decisions to make if he wants to succeed in his life as a farmer. The first decision must be made when he chooses the land which he proposes to farm. The second decision, even more important, comes when he chooses a wife. ~ The Farmer's Wife April 1927 ('Do You Know A Master Farm Homemaker?')"
Every once in a while I fall into a whole new world. Those of you who know me are aware that one of my passions is family history. While I am not an educated and professional genealogist, I do enjoy spending lots of time doing genealogy. I compare the time I spend on my hobby to working a very large jig saw puzzle. Most of the time I am sitting quietly trying to fit in pieces of a puzzle. But occasionally I find something that just makes me wiggle. This past week provided such an event. And it wasn't even in a direct line to back to my ancestors. I should explain. Most genealogist chase paternal lines. It is just easier. There are land records and wills and all sorts of avenues to find men in history. But I never seem to follow the easy path. My interests lie in women's history. Women didn't used to own property or have many rights that qualified them as being persons. Often the men's livestock were better counted and recorded than his wives and daughters were. It can be very frustrating but sometimes I work with someone on a line. The internet is a good resource to meet people working on a same line and working together is always more fun. The emails whirl back and forth and links and files are shared and it makes for a lot of enjoyment. The pieces to the puzzle increase in number and some areas are filled in of the entire picture. To get to the point, since last August I have been chasing the mother of a woman in my ancestry named Elizabeth Sheafor. Elizabeth had a brother named Jacob. One of Jacob's descendants is named Rebecca and Rebecca and I have been working together for a couple of months now via email. Well Jacob had several children and Rebecca is down from one son but another one of Jacob's son's migrated to Wisconsin. His name was Squire Sheafor. And one of Squire's grandson's married a woman named Cora. To my delight the periodical Farmer's Wife magazine featured her in the February 1930 edition! It can be found on page ten HERE. To have a female even remotely connected to me recorded to that degree was wonderful news. As it turns out the Farmer's Wife magazine was quite a popular thing back in the early 1900s. There are about eight cookbooks that grew out of its publication and can be found HERE. One of my passions is historical cookbooks and I will have to see if I can find space to add a few more! And there is a quilt which can be found HERE. I am not sure I will ever attempt a quilt but find them interesting. Please click on the links through out this blog to find our more information about this fascinating publication and enjoy the video that follows.
A couple of weeks ago I broke down and ordered a cookbook that has been on my wish list at Amazon for quite some time. The Settlement Cookbook was originally published in 1901 but I chose to purchase the most recent version which was published in 1976. If you click on the the title above there are two different links (one on each line of the title) to sites online where the 1901 book is available at no charge. The Settlement Cookbook is unique in that it was created in a settlement house in Wisconsin. At the turn of the century from the 1800s to the 1900s in the United States there was an influx of immigration. Many of the new immigrants flocked into inner cities and had the task of learning about the way of life in their new home. Settlement houses sprang up in many cities to meet the need of helping the new immigrants in their assimilation desires. These houses not only taught English, but they were a place of social events such as speeches and dances for the immigrants to attend. In addition, there were many classes taught at these houses. One class often included was in cooking and nutrition. The woman who taught the cooking classes in the Wisconsin Settlement house that this cookbook came out of was Lizzie Black Kander (click on her name to follow the link for more information) about her and the creation of The Settlement Cookbook. The edition I purchased not only has the recipes that the teachers were teaching the immigrants but it has the recipes that the immigrants brought with them from the old country. I really like this cookbook. It is not a low calorie book but small portions of the recipes found within are within the scope of my restrictions. The following video explains more about the settlement houses around the United States at the time this cookbook was published. I highly recommend this cookbook.
I have cause to celebrate this week. After all these years I am now signing RN behind my name! I sat for my RN state board exam on Monday afternoon and I passed the exam. Now as promised to the peeps on the FB support prep pages for NCLEX here is a blog about what I used to study for my NCLEX-RN exam.
Fist I should mention that LPN school for me was something I graduated from and passed those boards in 1977. And if you have not read about my CPNE experience, I used the Excelsior LPN RN bridge program to get my ASN. I took forever to finish it. In fact so long that I obtained a six month extension to be able to finish the program. Which I did finish. But it was almost 8 years from the time I started reading my first module for A&P and the time I was preparing to write my state board exam. So I had some big time content review I needed to do.
In 1977 when I studied for my LPN boards I used Saunders Review Book. It worked. Although life was very different there. We went to Indianapolis as a class and stayed at a down town fancy hotel the night before. We drank too much and slept little. Then we all got up and went to the fair grounds and all sat at long tables with pencils and papers. That was boards. Today we all go one at a time and sit at a computer for a test that we have to use palm prints and all kinds of IDs to get into and be watched by cameras and monitors.
Excelsior College provided ATI to study for the test. I attempted to use the site but it did not like my MAC computer. I am sure it was partly operator error but I could not get into using the ATI site. The information was not organized in a way that matched up with my brain and the amount of information available is overwhelming. I think a lot of nursing programs use ATI along with the courses and it would be a good asset that way. But to use it at the end to review was not working for me. So I reverted back to my tried and true Saunders Review Book with a few new twists.
I put the following onto my kindle fire:
This worked good for me because I can bring my kindle fire anywhere and it is easy to throw in a suitcase, my work bag or my purse. It is over 11,000 pages long. I purchased it in February and finished it up mid May. It is a good over view of content. But the thing with the kindle fire edition that I did not like was that the tables were not easy for me to see and there was no way to make them big enough to view easily. Luckily another nurse at work had her old copy of the review work book which has the tables and she let me borrow it. It was a bigger book than I wanted to lug around but if there was a table I wanted to get a better look at it was in there also. It looked like this:
The other thing I used was the Saunders Review App on my smart phone. I put it on my iPhone which allowed me to also have it on my IPod touch. I do not have an iPad. If I had it do over I would have purchased the droid app on my kindle fire. The iPhone and iPad are too small for me to read the small print on the app and I had very tired eyes from using it. I completed only a hundred questions a week the first several weeks I had it. Some weeks I only completed 50 questions. But the week prior to testing, after I had finished up reading the 11,000 page book, I completed 200 questions a day for the that final week. Well, my goal was 200 questions a day. I only did 100 one day but 200 all the other days that week. The one thing I suggest with the app question review is be sure and read not only the rationale for each question - even if you got the question right - but read the strategy too. The Saunders app has some bad reviews because it does not save the questions. But it scrambles them and sends them out to you different all the time. I guess I wasn't score or result oriented enough to worry about the thing saving what I was doing. It looked like this:
The other thing I did involved using my iPod in the car. I read out loud note cards I had made from the Saunders Review book onto the voice memo utility and I also read out loud study sheets I found on the face book support review pages under files along some cool stuff I found on Pinterest. I made seven audio files to listen to during my commute to work. It was a big help for lab values and that sort of wrote memory stuff that I am not good at.
On my commute home from work I listened to a book I got off my audible account. It was a book that went so fast I had to slow it down from 100% to 75% on the speed setting. And I still couldn't keep up. But I was amazed when I got to the questions on the Saunders app how much of the audio book info was in my brain. Also it is a book that was published just before the big changes on the NCLES exam in 2003 so although the content is of course correct as the facts don't change the stuff about the test itself I took with a grain of salt. It helped me a lot more than I thought when I started listening to it. It looks like this:
There were two videos that were suggested on the Facebook NCLEX-RN review support pages that really helped me. I really was struggling with pH and also with EKG strips. The following two videos cleared a lot up.
I have one final word about the test. Although we are not allowed to give out test questions or details about the test and it is well known that different people get different questions any way because the computer recalculates based on your answers what it is going to ask, I think the following statement would be allowed for me to make. I can't really say that anything I studied per say was on the test I took. It was all nursing judgement and reasoning from a knowledge base. My test shut off after 75 questions and I thought I had failed it. So when my husband brought up my active RN license on the my State Board of Nursing web site the next afternoon I said thought he had photo shopped the screen. What I took was a very hard test. Enough said.
I wish anyone that takes the NCLEX-RN success and right now my biggest challenge seems to be remembering to write that RN instead of LPN when I sign my name at work. After almost 40 years it is so automatic that the LPN sort of flows off my pen. But it is a challenge I am glad to be achieving!!
