Everything Books: 2-17-17

Travel book club plans meeting

Travel book club plans meeting

Kona Stories hosts a travel book club discussing “Black Dragon River: A Journey down the Amur River between Russia and China” by Dominic Ziegler on Tuesday.

The group meets at 6:30 p.m. at the bookstore. Book groups are free if books are purchased at Kona Stories, or a $5 donation is requested.

“Black Dragon River” is a personal journey down one of Asia’s great rivers that reveals the region’s essential history and culture. The world’s ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe’s only borderland with East Asia. He follows a journey from the river’s top to bottom, and weaves the history, ecology and peoples to show a region obsessed with the past and to show how this region holds a key to the complex and critical relationship between Russia and China today.

Info: Brenda or Joy, 324-0350, www.konastories.com.

FOLK Book Club meets Tuesday

Note: West Hawaii Today is republishing this brief because it incorrectly ran in the Feb. 10 edition of the Big Island Entertainment Scene. The FOLK Book Club meets this Tuesday.

Friends of the Libraries, Kona Book Club meets at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 21, on the Kailua-Kona Public Library lanai. This month’s selection is “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “The Sympathizer” is a gripping espionage novel and a powerful story of love and friendship narrated by a communist double agent, a half-French, half-Vietnamese, army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his Communist superiors in Vietnam.

The club next meets in March to discuss “Euphoria” by Lily King.

‘Growing Hawaii’s Native Plants’ back in print

As public awareness has grown of Hawaii’s unique and threatened botanical heritage, interest in helping these species to thrive by planting them in backyards and landscaping projects has blossomed. But native plants are different from exotics. They propagate, bloom, and fruit in accordance with Hawaii’s natural climate and on their own schedules. The knowledge of how to grow and care for these special plants has been hard to come by, passed on mostly by word of mouth, one plant at a time.

“Growing Hawaii’s Native Plants,” by Kerin Lilleeng-Rosenberger, is the consolidated resource that provides all the information needed to identify and propagate native Hawaiian plants. Much of the knowledge found here, gathered from more than a decade of research, can be found nowhere else.

Using a clear, easy-to-read format, “Growing Hawaii’s Native Plants” contains an extensive, thoroughly researched entry for each of the 1,386 true existing native Hawaiian species. For each entry there is a species description, information on provenance, growing methods, germination rates, pest and disease control, and most importantly, directions for outplanting.

Included are more than 500 high-quality color images and a foreword by renowned botanist Sir Ghillean Prance, former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and scientific director of the Eden Project.

Lilleeng-Rosenberger immediately recognized the special nature of Hawaii when she arrived in Hilo in 1968. Her knowledge of native plants grew as she worked at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, the Hawaii Plant Conservation Center, and held the position of horticultural specialist with the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii.

Info: www.mutualpublishing.com.