It is well known that Mondays are not our best days of the week. Mondays are known as difficult days: corporate meetings, a beginning of another working week, pressure of deadlines, fatigue after  active weekends, etc. This Monday was a great day for me! I opened www.amazon.com and found there a wonderful review for my book Mama’s Home Remedies posted by Peter A. Gail, PhD. Dr. Gail is an ethnobotanist, a founder of Goosefoot Acres Center for Resourceful Living and an author of numerous books and articles on creative living and edible wild plants. USA Today dubbed him “The King of Dandelions.” Here is an excerpt from Dr. Gail’s review:

“It is snowing outside right now and I am writing a book review for a wonderful volume that I can highly recommend. It is called Mama’s Home Remedies, and is written by Svetlana Konnikova, formerly a journalist in the Soviet Union.

It in many ways is like Plain and Happy Living, in that it is a How-to-Autobiography that recounts not only a wide variety of natural remedies, but how they were learned at the feet of her mother and grandmother, with a wonderful potpourri of folk and fairy tales, and modern and ancient natural science interpersed between.

Most books like this, when something is wrong, you go into them, find the subject in the index, and then look up the suggestions for helping alleviate it. This book does that too, but in addition, when life is stressful and you are looking for relief, you can open this book and escape into the fairy tales, folk stories and life’s adventures of Svetlana and her family, along with fascinating explorations of such things as ancient Druid beliefs about trees or the instincts animals have for healing themselves that we can learn to emulate in our lives as well.

Mama’s Home Remedies is so well organized, with everything arranged in bullitted boxes, numbered lists, (also boxed,)  and boxed sidebars containing the stories, that everything is ridiculously easy to find. Usually you have to dig through a book to find a fact remembered but not bookmarked. Not so here. All you need to do is remember the topic, or chapter. Once there, a quick thumbing through the pages will take you directly to the right box, and there you are. It is a model for the way I am going to lay out my upcoming books.

In the few short weeks I have had the book, it has earned a place on the bookshelf right next to my computer, so that when I need a break, it is right at hand. It is a marvelous vehicle for stress relief. She has a whole chapter on stress, but nowhere does she mention picking up her book and reading a few pages as one of the ways. She should.”

Read the full article.

Thank you Dr. Gail for your thoughtful and descriptive review!