This descriptive review came from Peter A. Gail, PhD, author of numerous books and articles on creative living and edible wild plants, and founder of Goosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living in Cleveland, Ohio. He gives lectures and runs seminars and workshops, and produces and distributes a coffee substitute made from dandelions. It’s called Dandy Blend. I tried this healthy beverage myself. It has a very pleasant taste. There are more benefits with this coffee:it is 100% natural and doesn’t contain caffeine. So, you can drink it hot in the morning and in the evening too.

Dr. Peter Gail’s  blog is called Doc Weed’s Doin’s. It is an account of the continuing adventures of Dr. Peter Gail as he goes around the country sharing what he has learned over the years about how various cultures use backyard weeds for food and medicine. His blog address is http://goosefootacres.blogspot.com

We hope Dr. Peter Gail review will help you to make an informed decision in buying Mama’s Home Remedies for your home library.

by Peter A. Gail, PhD

 To me there is nothing more fun and satisfying than reading a well-written and entertaining how-to-do-it autobiography — you know, the kind where the author takes you through her life story and, when she comes to a favorite recipe or a skill, stops and takes time to walk you through how-to-do-it that you can do it too.

When the author is a good story teller and can make her stories come to life, especially if they are stories from another culture so you can get a glimpse of how these people lived and though as well, it is even better still.

And, finally, it approaches greatness when she weaves lots of other facts, folklore, fairy tales and information, from a deep, diverse and rich academic and personal background, spanning Old and Modern worlds, into it as well.

That’s what you get in Mama’s Home Remedies, a keeper of a book that may just end up on your bookshelf next to your computer, like it has on mine, so that you can reach it quickly when you need a quick diversion from the daily regimen, or answers to specific health questions.

This is one book you will go back to time after time as a “comfort book” (like comfort food!)–one that will variously provide information, stimulate your thinking, give you peace, and entertain you. It is, for example.

  • a great cure for stress. Turn to any page and be taken out of your life and transported into the fables and stories of life in the Russian culture, many of which emphasize an oneness with the natural world around you.

  • a great healthy living reference, with a twist!If you have a health problem or want to know what a particular plant is good for, just go to the index. As you search for answers you will be transported into a world where common foods become effective medicines. Vegetables such as beets, potatoes, onions, grapes and radishes are used to whisk away ills, and plants we call “weeds” such as nettles, dandelions, burdock and coltsfoot, rather than synthetic medicines off Wal-Mart shelves, play an everyday role in the healthy stable life of normal families.

  • an excellent source of natural history insights and lore with practical examples about how animals fit into their environment, including a great story about how a badger instinctively knew to bury its burned nose into a moldy tree trunk to alleviate the pain and heal the problem.

  • a reminder of the value of our elders–our grandmothers and grandfathers–as founts of valuable knowledge and wisdom that should be lovingly mined lest it become lost.

After reading the prefatory and introductory chapters which set the stage, you can pick up the book and start reading just about from anywhere. For example, if you want to know how to make stress a positive force in your life, you can turn to Chapter 10 and find 18 pages of ideas. Or if allergies are a problem, check out Chapters 5 and 6 for over 42 pages of helpful insight and suggestions. A favorite of mine — Chapter 2: “Even the Badger Knows”–reminds us that our body really knows how to heal itself and will direct us to the cures, if we will listen to it and follow where it leads. But we can’t really do this very well without exposure to the natural world from whence most of the healing balms will come. As parents it is our opportunity to take our children into nature and expose them to her treasures. If we don’t already know them, it is great opportunity to learn them together.

 Of all nature, Svetlana seems most enamored with trees. Her treatise, titled “dialogue with the Trees of Strength and Everlasting Life” (Chapter 12-32 pages) makes up the longest chapter in the book. It may be the one chapter that best exhibits her personality, and her belief, in agreement with the Druids, that trees transfer vital energy to us and a close association with them is crucial for a healthy life.

The book itself is a work of art. The design and layout is hugely attractive and makes the various components of each chapter easy to find. The first thing you notice is the richly detailed black and white line drawings illustrating chapter headings, scattered among the pages, and bordering the boxes.

The next thing that registers in your mind is the boxes. Just about everything is contained in illustrated boxes–fairy tales, folk stories, warnings, cautions, numbered listings of potential remedies for the particular concern, pertinent quotes–they all jump out at you as you peruse the pages, making it easy to choose smething to read. And when you are trying to find it again, you don’t have to try remember what page it is on, and where on the page. You have visual references in your mind. If you know what chapter it was in, you can go to the chapter and just flip the pages till you find it.

You can tell by the intelligence and care that went into crafting the text and designing this book that it wasn’t done by an inexperienced amateur. Ms. Konnikova knew from a very early age that she wanted to be a journalist. She grew up in Moldova, a wine-producing region of Southeastern Europe adjacent to the Black sea, and was nurtured through her youth by an extended family of winemakers, naturalists, healers and academics. Grandfather was a vintner, grandmother an accomplished naturalist, gardener, folk healer and practical philosopher, and her mother an academically-trained medical professional. Father and mother had an extensive library that intellectually curious Svetlana consumed voraciously from her teens onward. A rich mine of information for this book also came from quietly documenting, from age 12 omward, the medical experiences shared in regular Friday afternoon teas her mother hosted for her female medical collegues over a number of years.

After college, where she earned a master’s degree in Journalism and an Associate degree in Nursing, she went to become a writer, broadcaster and educator in Russia, but never forgot her roots, employing her knowledge of healing in treating her husband and two sons and gradually gathering together the wealth of material and lifetime of memories that has ended up as Mama’s Home Remedies.

The bottom line is that Svetlana created far more than just a home remedy book in Mama’s Home Remedies. It is a look at an entire culture from a perspective we seldom see. It is a rich diversity of stories, recollections, practical philosophy and advice, and lots of ways of making life better using the common wild things growing all around us, and even more common foodstuffs found in our cupboards every day–things Europeans do every day as a matte of habit, but which have been lost to the American family for the last 60 years. Here they are all brought together in one place.

Mama’s Home Remedies is never boring. Every page you turn brings another rich surprise to delight your senses.

It is important to remember, however, that this book is a collection of folk remedies which may or may not work in every case. There is always a place for professional health care. Money spent on diagnosis is never misspent. It is nice to know that you are treating for the right thing.

With Mama’s Home Remedies, you end up with much more than a folk remedy reference book. You end up with a damn good read!

Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.