tuesday june 24
I'll be the first to admit that Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States sounds like a REALLY boring book. But as the Fourth of July approaches, humorist Bill Bryson aims to find out--with little known facts and stories--why American English is the way it is. For instance, he reveals why Yankee Doodle went to town riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.
Bryson also explores American words and phrases such as firecracker, fit as a fiddle, and fly off the handle and ponders place names like Rabbit Hash, Kentucky and Two Egg, Florida.
It’s quite clear that Bryson is fascinated by the English language, just as I am. You might also want to read the prequel to Made in America called The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way or consult Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words as well as his latest book, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors.
wednesday february 13
Here’s one for all of you art history buffs, lovers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, and even readers of what are now popularly being called microhistories, those fascinating social histories that look at how a single insignificant object or place or event changed or reflected the course of world events.
In Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Timothy Brook uses the objects glimpsed in Vermeer’s paintings to explore how economy and culture became globalized in the seventeenth century.
The broad-brimmed hat of the dashing officer in Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl becomes an emblem to explore the American fur trade and the search for the fabled Northwest Passage. A porcelain dish of fruit in the foreground of Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window leads to a discussion of the Chinese porcelain trade, and so on.
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wednesday february 06
First, watch and listen to this audio file. If you’re at work, depending on your office, you’ll either want to stick in the earbuds or crank it up really loud. If you’re reading this while waiting for the security guys to escort you to the bus stop, set it up as a loop. (Email me, if you have time before they find your cube, and I’ll tell you how to make the loop hard to stop.)
For all these years, I’ve thought about Gertrude Stein’s comparison between Napoleon and Picasso as having to do with a physical resemblance and with the nagging question of whether the experimental ideas of Picasso, like the Napoleonic empire, might someday come crumbling down. Then I read Anton Neumayr’s 1995 Dictators In the Mirror of Medicine, which purports to be a psychological and physical portrait of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.
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friday december 28
With a great story, big stars, a legendary director, and a very capable screenwriter, Charlie Wilson's War has opened in theaters accompanied by rave reviews and Golden Globe nominations. Containing elements of espionage, wealth, glamour, and political intrigue, this film is based on a true story of the days when Texans took the law into their own hands, not in the 1880's, but actually, the 1980's. Directed by Mike Nichols, Aaron Sorkin (who created NBC's West Wing) adapted the screenplay from a 2003 book by George Crile, a former producer at CBS news who came into notoriety following the Vietnam War when he took on the US Department of Defense in the form of Gen. William Westmoreland.
George Crile died in 2006, but the real Charlie Wilson is still around, residing in Lufkin, Texas, where he is commonly known as "Good Time Charlie". Tom Hanks and his production company, Playtone, have created a film of substance that entertains and provides some backstory to the current issues in the Middle East. The Library offers Crile's book in regular print, large print, and Downloadable Audiobook formats.
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wednesday december 19
Everything after the first chapter of The Great Starvation Experiment is anticlimactic, because it's here that Todd Tucker describes Hitler's 1941-1943 siege of Leningrad. A million Russians may have starved during the 872 days before the Red Army broke through the blockade. After the zoo animals, people killed their pets. They ate wallpaper paste and shoe leather. During the second year, they began breaking more basic taboos.
Thirty-six American conscientious objectors, chosen among other reasons for their sound mental health, volunteered for an experiment whose goal was to study starvation's physiological and psychological effects, and to discover the most effective way to conclude a period of starvation. The Americans' goal was both humanitarian and military: the government assumed that Russians who had been weakened by famine would be physically and mentally unable to resist Stalin's armies at war's end.
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tuesday november 27
Alan Weisman's provocative and deeply depressing book The World Without Us does offer a few optimistic scenarios. The good news (1) Look at the New England forests. Early settlers chopped them down but later abandoned their farms, and now the trees are all grown up again. In a few more generations the forests will look pretty much like they did before the European settlers came. Already, three coyotes have made their way across bridges from New Jersey and into Manhattan.
The other good news (2) In the long run, global warming isn't that big of a deal, because in 5 billion years the sun is going to expand and suck in all the planets, anyway. Also, given the wobble of the earth and its slightly erratic orbit, unless we've really screwed things up, another ice age is inevitable no matter what we do, and it certainly would be more convenient to have one in 14,000 years rather than in 1,000 years. Think of New York City and England as tundra, for example.
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monday october 29
I had a whole year of South Carolina history in eighth grade, but the fact that rice was once grown there escaped me. Well, it was, from the end of the 17th century up through the end of slavery times. The eight counties that William Dusinberre calls "the Low Country" in his book Them Dark Days were in fact major producers.
The reason, of course, that the rice business did not continue long after the Civil War was because the labor involved in growing the rice was so difficult, and the conditions (malaria, again) so unhealthy in the South Carolina swamps that it was impossible to find paid workers to do the job. The swamps are now swamps again; one major plantation has become a wildlife refuge.
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wednesday october 24
One of the more interesting aspects of getting a bit older is watching the fashions and pop culture of your youth come back into style again—what decade are we updating now, the 1980s? (Another of the interesting aspects of getting older is that it’s okay to admit you don’t know exactly where the cutting edge finds itself these days.)
Anyway, once you’ve been around once, you recognize how cyclical pop culture is. Read Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz, and you’ll be amused at how familiar it all seems in our Paris Hilton–jaded, media-dominated age.
Zeitz’s book is a social history of that cultural icon whom Zeitz calls “part reality, part invention,” the post–World War I modern girl whose racy lifestyle dismayed her parents and fueled a national craze.
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saturday september 29
Ken Burns’ new series, The War, which debuted on PBS last week, has generated an enormous amount of buzz in the media the past few weeks. And why not? Not only is Ken Burns responsible for a number of absolutely terrific award-winning documentaries but World War II remains the most important event of the last century.
Despite this, I bet there’s more than a handful of folks out there who, like me, have only a sketchy understanding of the war that changed the world. Lucky for us, quite literally hundreds of books on the subject have been published. On the other hand…the sheer volume of titles can be bewildering. With that in mind, here are a few titles—some old, some new—to get you started.
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An acquaintance* was facing legal difficulties. She didn't know what to do. Finally a solution came to her: she would write to John Grisham and ask for advice and money. I felt sorry for my acquaintance's desperation and ineptitude. But apparently writing to a public figure when in bad straits, or just for the heck of it, is not uncommon.
I was surprised to learn just how much time Eleanor Roosevelt spent corresponding with non-famous Americans. The book I have before me, If You Ask Me (1946), is a collection of letters from regular people along with Mrs. Roosevelt's responses. Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962, and other editors have compiled collections of her letters since then, including Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (1998) and Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters to Eleanor Roosevelt Through Depression and War (2004).
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monday september 17
Just when I'd become okay with the idea, gathered from my college history text, The Middle Ages, 395-1500, that the western part of the Roman Empire fell because the upper-class Romans who ruled it all moved out to the country and lost interest in even having an empire, let alone paying taxes to support it, a new book, The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians comes out and says no, it really was the barbarians after all. My own ancestors were among the worst barbarians, but you can't blame them because at the time they were too barbaric even to think about attacking anyone. Later, when they did, The Middle Ages, 395-1500 scornfully says they mistook some small Italian hamlet for Rome. The Middle Ages, 395-1500 authors hated my ancestors.
Still, I'm sorry about the Dark Ages, what with being the beneficiary of many centuries of Western culture, as well as other cultures.
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friday september 14
I learned just a few years ago that you can't drive your car all the way from Alaska to the bottom of South America, and I found this unsettling in the same way I found it unsettling as a child to learn that Baja, California, is actually a part of Mexico.
The problem is the Darien Gap, an area of about 30,000 square acres of swampy, mountainous, and otherwise difficult geological features between Colombia and Panama, that has been breaking hearts and ruining lives for centuries, even before Colombian paramilitary groups got into the act. The Gap now refers to the uncompleted stretch of the Pan-American Highway. Centuries earlier, the Gap referred to a possible break in the mountains, sort of like the Cumberland Gap, that would allow the building of a canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. An Englishman named Dr. Edward Cullen claimed to have found just such a gap.
Well, we all know what happened with that idea.
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wednesday september 05
It’s hurricane season once again, with the recent anniversary of Hurricane Katrina serving as a grim reminder. On September 8, 1900, an even deadlier hurricane swept the coast of Galveston, Texas, killing as many as 10,000 people and changing the city forever.
Erik Larson, bestselling author of The Devil in the White City, tells the story of this hurricane and its impact on Isaac Cline, the meteorologist who believed no storm could ever seriously damage Galveston.
Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History combines the science of weather with personal accounts of survivors to track the hurricane from beginning to devastating end. At the eye of the storm are Isaac Cline, the rivalry with his fellow weatherman (and younger brother) Joseph, and the overconfidence of the age, when turn-of-the-century meteorology (and the newly formed United States Weather Bureau) could not prepare the residents of Galveston for a hurricane of this magnitude. By the time they realized evacuation was necessary, it was too late.
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tuesday july 24
In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War is the sequel to This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff’s classic coming-of-age memoir about growing up with an abusive stepfather in the 1950s.
A National Book Award finalist, In Pharaoh’s Army chronicles Wolff’s decision to join the Army and ultimately, the Vietnam War. Wolff’s voice is painfully honest, rendering the horrors of war and its casualties (including his good friend Hugh Pierce) with both sensitivity and shattered illusions. He is equally hard on himself, examining his own close calls and survival amidst the loss of so many others.
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thursday july 12
My alternate title for this entry was "It's A Wonder Anyone's Alive at All."
The total casualty rate during World War I was far higher than the American Civil War's. However, huge medical advances occurred between the 1860s and 1914. You may ask yourself which would be worse--to be wounded in the Civil War or in World War I.
I have to say that being wounded in the Civil War in most situations, especially early on, would be much worse. Ira M. Rutkow's Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine is a sobering reminder of how awful medicine was before the development of asepsis and antiseptics. It's also the story of how personality conflicts and inter-agency political battles can get in the way of what everyone agrees is a good thing--in this case, proper care for the war's wounded soldiers.
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monday june 11
1958 was an interesting time to be born, because World War II, though long past, was still a part of everyone's collective memory, and the Cold War was really gearing up. Most of my friends and teachers believed Hitler had been a communist, and our games of Russian Interrogation and Nazi Interrogation were identical:
"Vhat iss your name?"
"Laurie"
(Facial slap) "You lie. Vhat iss your name?"
"Laurie"
(Slap) "You lie."
Those were simpler times when children played healthy outdoor games like this rather than evil videogames.
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wednesday april 25
The Secret of Priest's Grotto is a fascinating and unique story of Holocaust survival. A small group of Jews attempts to outwit the Nazis by hiding in a vast network of horizontal Gypsum caves beneath the western Ukrainian countryside. The challenge facing the Jews is twofold. They must avoid capture by the Nazis and their allies, and they must also survive the cold, dark, and damp underground conditions of the caves. As the authors point out, the survivors of Priest’s Grotto hold the unofficial world record for time spent underground—they lived there for almost a year! The story of how they accomplish this amazing feat makes for a dramatic tale, to say the least.
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saturday april 14
April 15th marks the 95th anniversary of the sinking of the steamship RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean on a calm, starry night in 1912. What better way to commemorate the event and honor the 1,523 lives lost than by attending Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, closing May 6th at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
If you’re looking for a good read on the subject, why not try a book published in 1955 that still makes the disaster come alive today: A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. I decided to pick up my copy (after many sad years of gathering dust on my bookshelf) and was surprised by its immediacy.
Lord interviewed Titanic survivors before writing his classic tale and the result is a minute-by-minute account of the ship’s sinking and its aftermath. His narrative “you are there” style is considered groundbreaking and influential, and when combined with a viewing of the Titanic artifacts, you can’t help but be moved.
tuesday march 27
No “Irish History Month” would be complete without a tribute to the Easter Rising, the 1916 rebellion against Great Britain that failed, but sparked the astonishing victory of the War of Independence (1919-1921). William Butler Yeats, a contemporary, was the first writer to make great literature of the story. His poem “Easter, 1916” commemorates the 16 rebel leaders whose executions roused the country to revolution:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Among recent literary accounts are two superb novels by award-winning writers: Jamie O'Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), which follows the story through the revolution and the subsequent civil war. The approaches of these native Dubliners couldn’t be less similar.
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saturday march 24
In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use," a mother and her two daughters view the cultural importance of some beautiful inherited quilts in different ways. The plan is for the uneducated daughter to get the quilts when she marries, and when the quilts wear out, the uneducated daughter knows how to quilt and will make some more.
The educated but mean daughter, who doesn't know how to quilt, is appalled that a piece of history will be lost when the quilts wear out. She wants to preserve the quilts and hang them on her wall. Our sympathies are meant to be with the uneducated mother and daughter--but the mean daughter does have a point. The quilts will wear out, and a piece of the characters' family and ethnic heritage will be gone.
It's sort of the same with books.
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thursday march 15
I’ll be after the wearin’ o’ the green in this space during March, which makes a fine Irish History Month. It’s not just the St. Patrick’s Day that’s in it; rain and spring air recall the Emerald Isle, so fertile that the Sassenach (English, or “Saxons”) kept it “the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.” Bad as it could be to have a thriving neighbor, it was even worse for Protestant England to have Catholic harbors next door from which other Papist countries could (and did) try to launch invasions.
“They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay.” My ancestors came to America over the past 300 years of increasing crisis in the homeland. The most fortunate ones were 18th-century refugees from the anti-Catholic penal laws. The Meade family and Stephen Moylan (first president of The Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick) fought alongside George Washington. Thomas Riley, one of the “wild geese” who found work as mercenaries, arrived in Lafayette’s Irish regiment to whack the Sassenach over here.
At the other extreme were my Toohey great-great-grandparents, who disembarked dead in New Orleans from a "coffin ship" during the Famine of the mid-19th century. In True History of the Kelly Gang, a Man Booker Prize-winning novel about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, Peter Carey makes a beautiful immigrant song out of the lives of the luckless exiles, especially in a passage that intones the names of convict ships like Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad.
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saturday march 10
“One hundred nations descend upon us. The armies of all Asia. Funneled into this narrow corridor, their numbers count for nothing. They shatter with each advance.”
300, the film based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae (“hot gates”), opened this week here and across the country. Typically for Miller, whose talents and concepts are equally extreme, the movie has drawn praise for its power, but also diatribes against its historical and (perceived) political content, as well as Miller’s trademark violence.
The book is certainly a fine example of Miller’s potent, “artful” storytelling, and the story itself can’t be told often enough. Stationing themselves in a narrow mountain pass, 300 Spartans faced certain death to hold the gigantic army of the Persian Empire at bay, enabling the Greek city-states to marshal their forces and eventually rebuff the invaders.
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thursday february 08
The next lecture in the Library’s weekly Black History Month series will be “Cincinnati’s Black Community in the Pre-Civil War Era,” presented by Nikki Marie Taylor (Saturday, February 10, 2:00 in the Huenefeld Tower Room). Professor Taylor, who recently joined the University of Cincinnati Department of History, is the author of Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community, 1802-1868.
Frontiers of Freedom is a study of the determination, resourcefulness, and resilience of African American settlers in this Mason-Dixon border town, as notorious for racism – often violent – as it was distinguished by the work of abolitionists and Underground Railroad conductors, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Levi Coffin.
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friday january 05
In the first part of the 20th century, as many as a quarter of all patients at mental institutions suffered from late-stage syphilis, which inevitably led to dementia and death. There were no effective treatments until the Viennese psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg noticed that syphilitic patients who also suffered from malaria sometimes recovered their faculties. Wagner-Juaregg had the idea of purposely infecting syphilitic patients with malaria. His hope was that the high fever produced by malaria would kill the spirochetes responsible for what was then called "general paresis."
It wasn't a perfect solution, obviously, but many times--apparently somewhere in the 30 percent range--it actually worked. Wagner-Juaregg won a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1927. After WWII, thank goodness, we got to have antibiotics.
Wagner-Juaregg seems to have influenced psychiatrist Dr. Henry Cotton in his quest for a cure for mental illness. The results, of course, were horrible.
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friday december 29
After the April 2003 fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces, the world was horrified to learn that the Iraq Museum had been looted. The museum housed an enormous collection of Mesopotamian artifacts, and therefore the most ancient creations of human civilization. I remember a friend crying over the presumed loss of the wide-eyed worshipper (votive) figures , the Golden Lyre of Ur, and the pair of exquisite Ram in the Thicket statues, fabricated of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, copper, shell, and red limestone.
These are among the oldest Mesopotamian treasures, the 5,000-year-old legacy of the Sumerians, who gave us writing. Among the writings feared missing were the Code of Hammurabi, the best preserved among early bodies of law, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the first surviving works of literature and still a great read.
A News Hour interview in July with reserves Marine Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, who had been charged with recovering the treasures, seemed to offer some hope, simply because Bogdanos made such a powerful impression. An assistant district attorney with a master’s degree in Classics, he himself seemed to exemplify civilization through a remarkable combination of idealism and resolution. Toward the end of the interview, Bogdanos was asked about his prospects for success. He replied with an almost laconic serenity:
“I'm a Marine. I expect to recover these items, no matter how long it takes…. To those who have taken the items, I urge them to listen to their conscience and their sense of duty in returning those items. And to those who need to be guided by emotions other than those, my message is simple: We will find you, no matter how long it takes and no matter where you are, we will find you, and we will recover this property.”
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wednesday november 15
A friend of mine just attended her 25th college reunion and discovered that the old who’s-dating-whom fascination hadn’t entirely died down after two and a half decades.
Well, it’s almost three centuries since Louis XIV of France died, and the love life of the most famous monarch of his age still fascinates.
Antonia Fraser, acclaimed biographer of many royals (including
Marie Antoinette—her book was the basis for the recent Sofia Coppola
movie) has written a wonderfully detailed social
history of the period focusing on the lives of the women Louis XIV loved. But it’s more than sex and scandal—politics and piety play a large part in the story. So, of course, in the age of the supreme cult of personality, does the personality of Louis himself, a tirelessly courteous and gallant but selfish man who adored women.
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tuesday september 12
Most of the leading comics professionals created moving tributes to the events of September 11, 2001. Their work is collected in three anthologies – 9-11: The World’s Finest Comic Book Artists and Writers Tell Stories to Remember, 9-11: Artists Respond, and 9-11 Emergency Relief. In addition, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón will be at the Library very soon.
But the most cogent and intimate graphic treatment, In the Shadow of No Towers, comes from Art Spiegelman -- appropriately, since Spiegelman is the author of another powerful study of the human spirit grappling with ultimate darkness. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale uses the cat-and-mouse cartoon tradition to tell the story of his parents’ sufferings and heroism during the Holocaust.
An equally significant credential is the fact that In the Shadow of No Towers is also a survivor’s tale: Spiegelman and his family witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center from their Lower Manhattan neighborhood, and were among the crowds fleeing its collapse.
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saturday september 02
Much of the discussion focused on Monday’s celebration is likely to address the decline of “the folks who brought you the weekend” – the labor movement. Two 2001 books called Three Strikes make appropriate Labor Day reading, since one recalls the heyday of the movement and the other its current crisis in the face of globalization, deregulation, and corporate consolidation. But both books “look backward to look forward.”
Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century is a “critical tribute to labor’s past,” recounting three struggles from the first half of the twentieth century, in part “to see if there are any lessons” for today’s workers. The diversity of the movement is emphasized: Howard Zinn relates the Colorado coal strike of 1913-1914; Dana Frank details the Woolworth’s salesgirls’1937 sit-down at Detroit’s largest store; and Robin Kelley explores the American Federation of Musicians’ response to technological replacement in the 1930s.
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friday july 28
The conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and now Lebanon has accelerated with terrible speed since June 10, when Hamas ended the current truce after blasts allegedly from Israeli artillery killed and injured Palestinian families on a Gaza beach. Hamas retaliated with the June 25 killing of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third. In a surprise move of solidarity, Hezbollah followed suit on July 12, crossing the border from Lebanon to kill three Israeli soldiers and capture two others.
Hezbollah’s entry into the conflict prompted Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz to threaten that the Israeli military would “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” if the soldiers were not returned. In addition to the daily news reports, a vision of what that would mean can be gained through Robert Fisk’s 1990 bestseller, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon.
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monday june 05
The current tv-movie-of-the-week hysteria about bird flu made me think about a book called Eyewitness to History, which I read several years ago. It's a collection of I-was-there accounts about all kinds of historical events, including several epidemics. I thought I was remembering one about the Black Death, but it turns out it was a description of plague in ancient Greece that was sticking in my mind. It was written by the historian Thucydides, who survived the disease himself. (More from him below.)
Browse around in this book and you'll find something that will stick in your mind, too. The editor, John Carey, has collected dozens of eyewitness accounts about all kinds of events. Memories of famous catastrophies (like the sinking of the Titanic), meetings with memorable people (how about dinner with Atilla the Hun?), and man-on-the-street reports of major historical events (an anonymous German private's account of the D-Day assault) are captured in vivid excerpts. The book is long (706 pages), and it's a little heavy on British historical events, but it's easy to dip into randomly.
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