Karma was officially launched on Sunday, January 24 with a book signing at the home of Liz Harris and Ed Dugger in Boston. It was a great group of people from fields ranging from medicine to art. It is heartening to feel the support from readers who are interested in seeing the subject of sex trafficking exposed but also are ready to dig into a psychological thriller.
The youngest attendee was the nine-year old author, Emma, who is pictured here as I shook her hand. 
Tomorrow night is another event at the Morson Collection in Boston. You can listen to the two radio interviews I gave last night and this morning here.
January 2010 has been declared by President Obama as 
This is an email from a friend, Bob, who owns and operates Fiddlehead Farms in West Tisbury the Island of Martha’s Vineyard. This is a photo of Bob. I had asked him for some mint to put in my veggie drinks and he had just come in from picking it from his garden.
I’m finally back on the island after several weeks of schlepping to CA to visit family then D.C. to see a friend. Now I am in a mad dash to prepare to leave for Nicaragua on Thurs., hopefully for the next four months. I spent several days in Los Angeles visiting my older brother. He is 57 and an unhapppily retired vascular surgeon who has type 2 diabetes. To his credit he lost thirty lbs. and is controlling his blood sugars reasonably well but I was stunned with how little he knows. His exercise regimen consists of walking the dog around the block twice a day and he subsists on Lean Cuisine! I asked him about what an optimal diet consists of for a diabetic. He said he is limiting his intake of bread, starches, etc. After a few days in his house it occurred to me that I never ate so much bread in my life! I guess it’s all relative.
I suggested he read 
I also saw the local supermarket (Von’s) and was pretty disappointed considering it was in a fairly affluent area. The produce was minimal and organic choices were more abundant (by far) at the Edgartown Stop & Shop. This really surprised me. Lot’s of premade foods that looked sort of tired and dry around the edges.
Well, soon I will be shopping daily in a thriving, bustling third world market with stalls piled high with all sorts of things, freshly slaughtered meat, smoky tortilla griddles and sacks of rice, beans and God knows what else. 
I’m never surprised anymore by the stories of doctors and other intelligent, educated people flushing their health down the drain. I remember once hearing Michael Moore say that he only had a high school education and he’s figured things out about corporations. If you read my bio you’ll see that my formal education is even more spotty, but I’ve managed to figure things out about food and health.
g to change people’s minds about food. Now I just want to be healthy myself and write my novels. The recalcitrance of the American people is one reason why I am changing careers. It started to feel like I was the food police and I really hated that! I’ve given up thinking creatively about changing people’s minds and it’s liberating because now I’m thinking about characters in my fiction and that’s more fun! I’m still going to write health blogs because I’m interested in the subject but as I have pointed out many times there is a division of the classes occurring in this country and people have the free will to decide which side they are going to be on, eating poison and taking handfuls of pharmaceutical drugs, and being tethered to tubes and medical appliances and procedures, or eating natural food and being healthy. It’s a choice and the fact that people pretend that it’s too confusing or make up excuses is their choice. People are smart enough to figure it out, they are simply making the choice to be ignorant.
My blog is dedicated to my Life Mission: Living a happy and fulfilled life, caring about my body and spirit, women’s issues, and the planet. I hope you come back and read how you can define, explore, and live your Life Mission.
HALF BROKE HORSES: A TRUE LIFE NOVEL
Nancy’s Non-Fiction Book Ratings
• Gripped from first page, an absolute must read
• Not exactly a page turner but interesting enough to read cover to cover
• Moderately informative, but dry and academic, so I skimmed for salient points
• Left on my nightstand forever but never reached for it like I don’t want to reach for the Manolo Blahnik boots that hurt. Boring, academic writing/dry as a bone
The Glass Castle was such a fascinating read because of the tremendous hardship that was imposed on the Wall children by their genius/mentally ill parents, Rosemary an unhinged childishly oblivious artist, and Rex an alcoholic con man, but that Walls wrote of those experiences so dispassionately without a shred of self pity, and with great tenderness and understanding for her parents. Jeanette Walls ended up striking out alone as a very young woman with no financial support and went to college and carved out a life for herself in New York, which is no small feat. She looks like a blue blood and has the sophistication and intellect of someone with boarding school/finishing school background. So her self-madeness is inspiring. Meanwhile, after all of the Wall children left home, her parents Rosemary and Rex end up spirally further into mental illness, choosing finally to give it all up and live on the streets where they make a living digging through dumpsters and squatting in abandoned buildings. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls comes to terms with all of this and has the courage to write about it for all to see.
My reservation about Half Broke Horses was that it would be a repeat of The Glass Castle. It took me over 50 pages to become engaged with the book. Horses is written in the voice of Jeannette’s material grandmother (Rosemary’s mother), Lily Casey Smith. She was born in 1901 in the Southwest and that was interesting to me as my grandmother was born in 1903 (albeit in Poland). Life was so wild back then with fewer restrictions, and I recall outlandish stories from my own grandmother. Lily Casey Smith was raised on a dirt poor West Texas farm where she learns to break wild horses and give cowboys orders by the time she’s 12, becomes a gun toting Arizona school itinerate teacher during WWI. She lived in Chicago making a living as a domestic servant where she married her first “crum bum” husband, a bigamist who gave her a Sears and Roebuck fake diamond ring. She left Chicago, and returned to Arizona where she cut her sister down after she hung herself, remarried an older cowboy and had a couple of children while taming a 100,000 acre cattle ranch, and surviving the great depression.
The story at face value is interesting—just like my grandma’s stories, but my problem with this book was that it possessed no soul. What I found admirable in The Glass Castle (the lack of self pity) I found dispassionate in this book. I didn’t particularly fall in love with Lily because for one I found her “voice” to be exactly the same as the voice in The Glass Castle. She wasn’t original to this book. The dialogue wasn’t the only flat aspect of the book. There was simply no passion. One thing I find very odd about Wall’s books is that sex is glossed over completely. For someone who writes about scorpions falling on heads and the little sister hanging herself because she got pregnant, you would think that she would explore HOW she ended up getting pregnant. None of this will matter to a lot of readers and hasn’t as I see on the Amazon reader reviews.
Nancy’s Fiction Book Rating for The Glass Castle: Gripped from first page, an absolute must read.
Nancy’s Book Rating for Half Broke Horses: Was moderately entertaining but didn’t really care about the main character.