#b#‘Dandelion Hunter’#/b#
Rebecca Lerner, a graduate of West Windsor-Plainsboro High School, Class of 2000, is the author of a new nonfiction book, “Dandelion Hunter: Foraging the Urban Wilderness” through Globe Pequot Press. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Lerner received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Rutgers, a master’s degree in creative nonfiction writing from Goucher College, and studied wilderness survival at Primitive Pursuits in Ithaca, New York. She is currently a student in Michael Tierra’s East West Herb School for herbalists.
Her website, firstways.com, includes an answer to the question “Do you eat wild food all the time?”
“In the spring, I eat tons of stinging nettle. Nettle pesto, nettle quiche, nettle smoothies, nettle soup, nettle everything. In the summer, I love to pick berries and makes jams and syrups. In the fall, I like making chestnut flour. I enjoy wild edibles as a special ingredient. I also like harvesting wild plants for herbal medicines I make myself. It is very empowering to know that I can take care of common ailments at home for myself and my dog, from the flu to strep throat.
“That said, wild plants are supplemental to my diet, rather than a staple, for many reasons. Full-time urban foragers are actually quite rare, even among professional educators. One reason is seasonality — the most nutritious and caloric plant parts are fruits and nuts, which are available only a few months per year — and another is the scarcity of bulk sources of wild plants in the city. A third and probably most important issue is the time required to gather and process wild food, which is an issue for anyone with obligations other than being a full-time hunter-gatherer.”
#b#WW II ‘Mail Call’#/b#
Terri Halbreich David, a longtime psychologist at Community Middle School, has written a book about letters her parents wrote to each other while separated during World War II. The book, “Mail Call: The Wartime Correspondence of an American Couple, 1943-1945,” is divided into chapters based on topics in the letters.
The description on Amazon.com reads “Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, a dental student and a college coed were married in Brooklyn. As the groom was also in the naval reserves, Japan’s attack was to have a profound effect on the lives of these newlyweds, as it would for so many who served and for their loved ones left behind. This young couple wrote almost daily to each other for the eighteen months that the war kept them apart, and the letters that Lester and Shirley Halbreich exchanged were both beautiful and poignant.”
Halbreich David was raised in Queens, New York, and graduated from the University of New York, Stony Brook. She received her Ph.D in psychology from New York University. She lives in Princeton with her husband, Michael, also a psychologist.
“The book came about after unexpectedly coming into possession of the almost 600 letters of the collection and realizing how extraordinary they were,” she says. “I wanted to find a way to share these letters with others who would also appreciate what the letters have to offer, such as the sense of history, the sense of time and place, and, most important, the sense of these two particular individuals.”
The book also includes photos of the author and her family. Her first booksigning event is at Cornell University on Saturday, June 8. “It is the alma mater of my father and older brother, the infant in the book,” she says.
