Weekend Edition Saturday

In some neighborhoods, the drone of lawnmowers is the soundtrack of summer. Sean Hurley hears them bright and early in his New Hampshire town, and in this essay, he says he tries to make the best of the serenade.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, host:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. Im Scott Simon.

Heres a conversation opener: You ever thought about keeping a swarm of bees in your backyard? Bill Turnbull hadnt. Hes a well-known presence in Britain, where he hosts a morning TV talk show, "BBC Breakfast," and interviews cabinet ministers, authors, footballers, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson.

There are a couple of ways to approach summer reading. You can think of the long, hot days as the perfect time to kick back with an exciting plot-driven thriller by Stieg Larsson. Or you might feel that summer's leisurely pace gives you the space you need to take on a more challenging material.

In summer of 1897, a group of New York kids found a headless torso floating in the East River. At first, the police thought it was a prank being played by medical students, who were known to leave cadaver fingers and limbs lying around just for laughs. But the next day, the lower torso and hips of that beheaded half-corpse washed up along the Harlem River, and it became clear that the wounds were the work of a malicious amateur.

Who cracked the case? Who scrambled facts, myth and suspicion through that boiling New York summer?

In 1964, "The Girl From Ipanema" put bossa nova on the charts in the U.S. The song was composed by the godfather of the bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and features the languid, lush, lovely saxophone stylings of Stan Getz. The hit was one of many collaborations between Jobim and Getz that would bring the intoxicating sounds of the bossa nova across borders — and into the life of a young Spanish singer named Carmen Cuesta.