wednesday january 27
Are the days seeming nasty, brutish, and short? Winter in Cincinnati can have that effect. Enjoy some virtual sunshine with The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness.
This volume is a collection of essays from Greater Good Magazine, a publication of the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, which publishes interdisciplinary pieces on the biological and evolutionary sources of altruism. The aim is to discover whether goodness is as biologically determined as generations have assumed that violence, aggression, and selfishness are.
Continue Reading…
monday january 11
Some of my daughter's latest witticisms:
"Daddy, I didn't want to tell you this, but when I grow up, I'm going to have a boyfriend" (apparently this hypothetical future boyfriend is not a certain dashing young man in her preschool class that we have been told repeatedly that she is going to marry--a fact which I am sure will crush him when he finds out).
When one of her brothers was aggravating her: "since you won't stop bothering me, when I turn five, I'm moving out of the house" (when asked where she was moving to, she said she was relocating to our neighbor's across the street).
I'll preface this last one by saying that I recently gave birth for the fourth time. Getting ready for a shower last week, my daughter (observing me as always, as I am never allowed to enter a room unaccompanied by a small person), remarked that I would need more soap on my sponge to "wash my tummy". When I asked her why, she replied, "mommy, your tummy has gotten a little smaller, but it's still pretty big." Nothing like a preschooler to boost your postpartum self-confidence.
Trying to find out how to handle this, um, precociousness, I turned to some of the library's latest books on raising girls. Here are a few good ones.
Continue Reading…
tuesday january 05
The Library has a great collection of college guidebooks, but these two in particular have caught my eye:
Peterson's publishes the College Guide for Performing Arts Majors and the College Guide for Visual Arts Majors.
I imagine that these books could be of enormous help to anyone who is considering a major in the arts, either at our own CCM, DAAP, or elsewhere.
tuesday december 29
“Nonfiction lovers know that the truth isn’t just stranger than fiction—it can be a whole lot scarier as well,” writes Michelle Kerns in her examiner.com article, “50 Best True Crime Books.” As an avid reader of nonfiction and a fan of true crime stories, I couldn’t agree more.
Below are my Top 5 favorite true crime books of all time. Feel free to comment on my blog by posting your own favorites, and don’t forget to check out or subscribe to our frequently updated list of new true crime books!
1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)
2. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (2003)
3. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson (2003)
4. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (1994)
5. Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss (1983)
wednesday november 25
Have you discovered Playaways? They’re new to our collection this week. Playaways are digitial audio players pre-loaded with books. No downloading required—all you need is your own headphones and a AAA battery, and you’re all set.
Everything from brand new bestsellers to classics is available. You can listen to the latest Alex Cross novel by James Patterson, or carry around the whole 63 hours of Atlas Shrugged on a 3 3/8 by 2 1/8” device. (You're on your own, though, finding the 63 hours to listen to it!)
Only some of the branches have them, so far—the Popular Library at Main, Anderson, Clifton, Harrison, Madeira, and Monfort Heights—as this is a test project. But they are searchable in the catalog (just choose “playaway” as the media type on the search screen), and you can put holds on them to bring them to your branch. The circulation rules are the same as for other audiobooks, with a limit of 3 for now.
You can use them in your car with a portable speaker, mp3 jack, FM receiver, or cassette adapter. You can wear them around your neck on a lanyard. Like the old cassette player, they re-start wherever you stop.
Let us know what you think!
wednesday november 18
It's that time of year again! I'm not talking jolly old elves or Dick Clark on Times Square. It's time for the annual "best of" lists.
I can't get enough of these lists, though I often violently disagree with them. I have only read a handful of the fiction titles on Publisher's Weekly's Best Books of 2009 list, and I thought one of them was terrible. (I'm not telling which one unless you confess likewise!) On the other hand, my absolute favorite novel of the entire year is Amazon's number one pick.
Anyway, if you're a list addict like me, take a look at Early Word, which is a book buzz blog for librarians. Along the right side of the page, they keep track of best lists from a variety of sources.
What was your best book of the year so far?
wednesday november 04
This was my latest car book, The New Age of Adventure: Ten Years of Great Writing, a collection of pieces from National Geographic’s Adventure magazine.
Essays by Sebastian Junger, Tim Cahill, Peter Matthiessen, and other greats of travel, adventure, and nature writing are collected here. Plus a creepy look at the man-eating lions of Tsavo by Philip Caputo; the account of a stay with the last of the traditional reindeer herders in the far reaches of Russia by Gretel Ehrlich; and a horrifying account of an ebola epidemic by Tom Clynes.
This volume is a little different from earlier collections, as it includes some political writing and war correspondence. But it’s still a look at life on the outer edges by very talented people, and it’s a great read straight through or dipped into at coffee stops.
wednesday september 30
Whether you’re a baker or someone who reads cookbooks the way armchair travelers read travel guides, Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Rose’s Heavenly Cakes will transport you somewhere sweet.
Beranbaum is the author of The Cake Bible, one of the standard texts for bakers. That classic is filled with scientific detail (for those who want it) on how baking works, and filled with yummy recipes and pictures (and who doesn’t want those?) to demonstrate all of the wonderful things that cake baking science can achieve.
Rose’s Heavenly Cakes offers more of the same, beautifully precise and delicious recipes for a wide variety of cakes, cheesecakes, cupcakes, wedding cakes, and more. Some are simple and some are showstoppers that require multiple days in preparation.
Feast your eyes or feast your family! (And don’t miss Beranbaum’s wonderful cookie book, Rose’s Christmas Cookies, either.)
wednesday august 19
It’s too bad Steven Johnson’s name is so generic. I just read his 2004 Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life from cover to cover before realizing that he is the same author who wrote two other recent favorites of mine.
You can look back at my entry on The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, which was a marvelous work of science history and big-picture thought. (Do you remember that old TV series, Connections, and how it tied together wide-ranging theories to explain the sweep of history? You’ll love The Ghost Map.)
The other book I didn’t post about, but I recommend it, too—in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Johnson argues persuasively that videogames and other much-maligned forms of popular culture are far more cognitively challenging than we credit.
In Mind Wide Open, he reviews the science of how our brains work.
Continue Reading…
wednesday august 05
I’m again enjoying some books recommended to me by other librarians. You can’t get a group of book people together without an exchange like that.
So it seems amusingly appropriate that one of the books recommended to me is about another group of single-minded eccentrics—The Mummy Congress, by Heather Pringle.
Pringle is a popular science journalist who writes about archeology. She heard of a scientific conference being held in a remote town in Chile: mummy experts gather every three years for an international convention. They all know each other and represent an astonishing collection of subspecialties, enthusiasms, and factions. Pringle attended and became obsessed with their obsession, and this book is the result.
It’s a somewhat meandering work, ranging from the controversy over medical dissection (the book’s creepiest section), the history of European fascination with Egyptian mummies, and the modern preservation of bodies like Lenin’s. Bog bodies, ice mummies, the find of Caucasian bodies in Chinese tombs, the sanctification of incorruptible saints’ bodies—there’s a little bit of everything here. It won’t be enough to satisfy your curiosity if the subject intrigues you, but it’s certainly a glimpse into a strange world few of us know much about.
friday july 31
It seems my goal of finishing a book by week’s end pales in comparison to the substantial ambition of author Julie Powell. The book is
Julie and Julia 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen. The goal implicated in this title is astronomical yet entirely doable. Sometimes we need the astronomical to make us feel alive, or make us hungry at the very least.
Continue Reading…
thursday july 30
As a new parent, I find myself in situations so foreign I might as well be the first human on Mars. The sheer volume of things we must do (baby swim class?) and not do (don't even get me started here...) is nearly incomprehensible.
In American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland, author Sam Apple documents his own journey into parenthood.
Apple is full of questions, and no theory is left unexplored: Is the Lamaze Method a Stalinist Plot? (Yes). Are newborns really fetuses that are born too soon (Sort of.) Is there a universal theory that can explain the origins of circumcision in geographically diverse cultures? (Maybe.) Does it sting when you pour baby shampoo into your own eyes? (Big time!)
Continue Reading…
wednesday july 15
Norman Ollestad’s father was larger than life. He’d surf the wildest waves, ski the steepest slopes, race away from the federales and charm suspicious locals with guitar serenades—and take his little son with him.
Norman grew up in his mom’s beach house in Topanga Beach, California, loving and hating how his father swept him away. He’d miss birthday parties for terrifying, exhilarating adventures. He surfed as soon as he could stand and was in training as an Olympic skier. His father called him "Boy Wonder," but he was secretly ashamed of his fear.
On February 19, 1979, when he was eleven, they climbed into a rented airplane to get to a ski championship. Half an hour later, it crashed into an 8,600 foot mountain in the middle of a snowstorm.
Only Norman got down the mountain alive.
Crazy for the Storm is his memoir of that feat of survival and the story of his complicated relationship with his father, who put him into danger and taught him the skills to get out of it.
Continue Reading…
monday june 22
Remember a few weeks ago, when I posted about how you can find people who love books, music, and movies as much as you do, here at the library?
Now I'm hoping you're out there, too.
We just heard on Saturday that the governor's proposed budget, which will be finalized by June 30, will cut state library funding by 50%.
Just to clarify: this is entirely separate from the issue of a local library levy proposed for this November's ballot.
Since almost all of our library's funding currently comes from the state, you can imagine how catastrophic this change would be.
So, book lovers, library lovers, we're hoping for your support. We're asking that people contact their legislators before June 30 to make their concern known about the proposed cut.
For more information, take a look at the Call to Action posted on our homepage.
Meanwhile, I hope you're all enjoying the good reads you find in this blog. I felt triumphant last week when so many of you requested The Gone-Away World. Do you like it?
friday june 05
Summer Reading Programs have become a mainstay for public library systems everywhere. Kids love to go to their local library during the summer to check out books and earn prizes for reading.
But why should kids have all the fun? The Library's summer reading program for 2009 includes adults (ages 18 and up), and the entry forms are available online as well as at any branch library. Audio books count too! The program runs from June 1 to July 31.
Our good friends at Joseph Beth Booksellers will be hosting the adult summer reading kickoff party - a "Beach Blanket Book Bash" - on Saturday June 13. To assist in your book selections, we've put together a deliciously diverse list of titles to consider for lazy summer reading. Enjoy!
friday may 29
I can trace my adult interest in spelling bees to my less-than-stellar performance at my sixth grade spelling bee circa 1983. I can’t remember how many rounds I lasted (probably 1) or what word I misspelled (probably something not too difficult), but the perfectionist in me remembers I should have studied harder. For 13-year-old Kavya Shivashanker, however, the word “Laodicean” earned her the title of 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion.
For the rest of us, there’s always next year, so let the library give you a head start with these great books, recordings, and DVDs!
Continue Reading…
friday may 22
Jay Parini is mainly known as a poet and novelist, but in Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America he veers into non-fiction. Thirteen books chosen from hundreds that shaped our national identity, Parini's list offers an inciteful and thoughtful view of the significance of books on our culture. Whether inciting the nation to war in Uncle Tom's Cabin, introducing the modern American novel in Huck Finn, or launching the women's movement with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, books maintain an enduring power to change minds and hearts.
Parini appends a list of the hundred books he didn't select for his discussion and his annotations are equally as thoughtful as the analysis of his baker's dozen in the body of the book. A perfect catalyst for a new look at American history, literature and culture.
wednesday april 29
Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map is a few years old now, but considering the recent swine flu outbreak, it’s timely.
In the mid-nineteenth century, London was a city of more than 2 million people with an infrastructure cobbled together in less urban centuries. The number of Victorian terms for occupations related to garbage picking gives a clue to how inadequate waste management was in the city, as should the incident known as the "Great Stink," brought on by a heat wave over the polluted Thames.
In the summer of 1854, in this densely populated, filthy city, a cholera epidemic began to sweep through the crowded neighborhood of Golden Square, Soho. Medical theory held that it was spread by smell, so measures were taken to deal with that. Of course, that had little effect on the propagation of the deadly disease.
Johnson sees that summer as a make-or-break moment in the history of cities, a time when the entire urban experiment in the history of humanity could have fallen through. But the persistence of a medical doctor, John Snow, and a neighborhood curate, Henry Whitehead, traced the epidemic to a single contaminated water pump, and they finally persuaded authorities to shut it down.
Continue Reading…
monday april 06
Saturday, 7:00 am: My daughter bonks her head on her bedroom wall while getting out of bed. This causes a 10-minute crying fit. Saturday, 7:15 am: She pokes herself in the eye. Another crying fit. Saturday, 7:30 a.m.: She drops her English muffin, butter side down, on her favorite Disney Princess nightgown. Major crying fit.
You can see where I'm going with this. The day didn't get any better. In my infinite wisdom, I decide to take everyone to the mall for lunch. My husband supposedly put the double stroller in the car, but when we got there, guess what? No stroller. Not keen on carrying/dragging three small children through the mall, we head back home. This brings on more whining. A short sample: "I'm hungry. I wanted to see the Easter Bunny. Can I wear my Cinderella dress when we get home? I'm hungry. Why can't we just leave the boys at home? Why do they always have to come with us? I'm hungry. Can I have some Chicken McNuggets?"
The terrible two's get all the press, but let me tell you: we've had less than a month of the terrible four's in our house and I'm already not liking them so much. Luckily, the library has quite a few books on dealing with my daughter's whining, crying and temper tantrums. Check out:
wednesday february 18
Numbers rule. Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot are the court jesters.
Their little book, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, is very amusing, an enjoyable evening’s read. But it has a serious purpose: to demystify the numbers that fill the daily news, dictate public policy, and determine our lifestyles.
How can the ordinary non-mathematicians among us make sense of the statistics, studies, and stupefying data thrown around by media and government? Blastland and Dilnot would say that even a child can tell whether the emperor is wearing clothes. They offer half a dozen simple ways to put public numbers to the test.
Eating that latest health food halves your chance of developing brain cancer. (Halves it from 1 in 4 or from 1 in 4 million?) The average person will save $1000 with the latest tax law change. (But what will most people save? After all, almost all of us have more than the “average” number of feet.) The crime rate is going down after a big push by local law enforcement. (Would it have gone down anyway?)
Considering the staggering numbers we’re all being asked to understand these days, this entertaining and informative book couldn’t be more timely.
wednesday february 11
It was a difficult transition for me, going from one girl to one girl and two boys. Hard enough having twins to begin with, but two boys? What did I know about raising boys? This is what I have learned so far: boys are messy. Food is not for eating but throwing on the floor, and sippy cups are used as weapons of mass destruction.
They also like to roughhouse. We have one of those play kitchens that comes equipped with various items of plastic food and kitchenware. The other day I caught one of my boys whacking his brother over the head with the frying pan. His brother usually retaliates by knocking him over deliberately when he's standing or walking (the younger one can't walk yet).
My boys also do not like to be changed--I'm talking clothes and diapers here. Whenever I put them on the changing table I have to prepare myself for a wrestling match. To make matters worse, one of them has recently decided that he likes taking his pants off. As in, I go to get him up from his nap and he's standing in his crib without any pants on. This is the same one who likes to take his diaper off (I am not sure what this means about his future career choices, but it can't be good).
What else have I learned? Boys are sweet: they like to give kisses and be held. And they really, really love their mommies.
Want some professional advice on raising boys? Then check out some of the following books.
Continue Reading…
wednesday january 14
What should I read next? That’s often the dilemma we face after we finish a book. Well, fear no more, because on January 1st, the library kicked off our new year-long Featured Book of the Month program, designed to introduce readers to books they might otherwise have overlooked.
Our January selection is The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, humorist and travel writer Bill Bryson’s hilarious and delightful memoir about growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s.
The Thunderbolt Kid was born when six-year-old Bryson found a scratchy green jersey with a golden thunderbolt across the chest in the basement of his parents’ house. The sweater bestowed extraordinary super powers: the ability to zap teachers and babysitters and deflect unwanted kisses from old people.
Bryson fondly recalls his boyhood, his zany family, and his beloved hometown, while at the same time shedding light on all aspects of life in America during the 1950s. And, whether you grew up in that decade or not, we think you’ll be happy with our choice.
Continue Reading…
friday january 09
Take one mildly obsessive food writer who grew up in New Jersey surrounded by sacred mountains of Italian food, especially "the Christmas Ravioli", which requires hours and hours to make by hand. Author Laura Schenone explores her family's past to find the exact recipe, no small feat since certain members of the family have not been on speaking terms with other members of the family for a couple of decades. The desire to connect with her culinary heritage is so strong that Schenone travels to the Italian region of Liguria where her great-grandparents were born so that she might learn how to create that ancestral pasta, eloquently described as 'gossamer' when it hits the palate. The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family (2008) not only provides a good read, but a heartfelt look at a small coastal section of Italy and those treasured family recipes as well.
In addition to her travels, Ms. Schenone did some intensive research on the authentic cuisine of northern Italy. These related titles, which are included in Schenone's bibliography, are available in the Library's collection:
Continue Reading…
wednesday december 31
Every once in awhile, a book comes along when you need it most. For me, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death In Order was that book.
A 2008 National Book Award finalist, author Joan Wickersham poetically tries to make sense of the death of her beloved father by a self-inflicted gunshot wound on a cold February day in 1991. Using the index format found in the back of nonfiction books as chapter titles (Suicide: act of, Suicide: anger about, Suicide: attitude toward), Wickersham attempts to impose order on an intensely chaotic, personal experience.
Julia Glass, author of The Whole World Over, says it best:
“The Suicide Index is just astonishing. Having endured the suicide of a close family member, I opened this book with dread and longing; fearful of revisiting so much pain yet keenly wanting, as I always will, to understand why. No one can ever fully answer the devastating question that suicide remains for those left behind, yet here, in Joan Wickersham’s exquisitely straightforward story, I found surprising consolation.”
wednesday december 17
It seems like a good time of year for feel-good books about dogs. Hollywood thinks so, anyway, since the movie version of Marley and Me, John Grogan’s bestselling memoir of life with his very unusual Labrador, premieres on Christmas. Here are a couple more to try.
I just finished listening to the audio version of The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein’s popular novel. Enzo, its narrator, is another irresistible canine. He’s a rather more philosophical creature than Marley. From a TV documentary about Mongolia, he has learned of a belief that dogs are reincarnated as humans, and he feels that he is ready for this step—certainly the ability to speak is something he looks forward to. The inability to communicate to and for his beloved master, racecar driver Denny Swift, is a frustration to him. Denny’s life is going through some terrible turns, with the illness of his wife and the potential loss of his daughter.
Continue Reading…
friday november 21
F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorite authors, and The Great Gatsby is one of my all-time favorite books. The book itself is dedicated to his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, in honor of their often tumultuous love. I was intrigued to read the story behind this dedication in the book Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature’s Most Intriguing Dedications by Marlene Wagman-Geller.
Arranged chronologically, she reveals the fascinating, tragic, and often romantic stories behind the dedications in fifty classic books, including a few that I’ve read and enjoyed:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
Dedicated to
Anna Grigorevna Dostoevsky
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
TO
J.R.M.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Dedication
For Mr. Lee and Alice
in consideration of Love & Affection
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)
FOR Jack Dunphy AND Harper Lee
WITH MY LOVE AND GRATITUDE
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989)
To my mother
And the memory of her mother
You asked me once
what I would remember.
This, and much more.
monday november 10
"I'm not ready for my first child to fade into history," writes National Book Award finalist (for The Giant's House) McCracken in this searing account of the loss of her firstborn child. She "wants people to know" that she gave birth to a stillborn son, but "doesn't want to say it aloud."
The author and her husband were living in rural France at the time of their son's (playfully nicknamed "Pudding" by his parents) death. Past due, McCracken noticed that "Pudding" was moving less than usual. Her midwife reassured her that the baby was fine. Hours later, it was too late, and McCracken gave birth to her son an agonizing two days after his death.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is both beautiful and wrenching, both unbearably sad and surprisingly uplifting. McCracken calls her memoir "the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending". After reading it, you'll know why.
For other books dealing with the loss of a child, check out Ann Hood's Comfort and Darci Klein's To Full Term.
wednesday october 29
When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives in New York or Florida would pinch his cheeks and begin to cry. Daniel, it seemed, looked uncannily like his great-uncle Shmiel (Sam) Jaeger, who, along with his wife and daughters, died in the Holocaust.
Mendelsohn’s grandfather and most of his grandfather’s siblings were safe in America, having emigrated long before the war. Only one estranged brother stayed behind in Bolechow, Poland, with his family.
But to Mendelsohn, his grandfather’s mesmerizing tales of life in the old country made Bolechow almost a legend, and the family likeness between himself and his long-vanished great-uncle haunted him. Years after his beloved grandfather’s death, he decided to trace the clues to his uncle’s family’s fate.
The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million is the deeply moving account of how Mendelsohn worked from a few snapshots and letters, a few half-rumored family stories, to discover the fate of his uncle, his aunt, and their four daughters.
Continue Reading…
wednesday october 22
As a Kansas high school student, Matthew Polly used to make lists of all the things that were wrong with him. “Ignorant” topped the list, and after he took care of that by getting himself into Princeton, he decided to work on the “cowardly” and “spiritually confused” items.
His plan for that? Leave college and travel to China, where he would find the legendary Shaolin Temple and study at the feet of the fabled Buddhist kung fu masters he knew from his religious studies readings, Chinese language classes, and countless martial arts movies.
With considerable charm and self-deprecation, this gawky, geeky laowai (white foreigner) takes us along on that surprising journey in American Shaolin : Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch: An Odyssey in the New China.
Continue Reading…
wednesday october 15
There have recently been so many fascinating books set at the intersection of psychology, neurology, sociology, and evolutionary biology to explain why people act the way they do. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink was probably one of the first to hit the bestseller lists. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others, and This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession are a few that I’ve blogged.
Add to those Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says about Us) and Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—And Put Ourselves in Greater Danger.
Technology writer Vanderbilt explains in the prologue to Traffic that one of his inspirations for writing his book was the firestorm of reaction he got when he posted to a question-and-answer website: is it better to be an early merger, getting over cooperatively as soon as the road signs tell you your lane is going to end ahead, or a late merger, making as long as possible a use of the emptier lane and tucking into traffic at the last second?
Continue Reading…
friday september 26
You may remember the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, which resulted from high-level meetings in Dayton, Ohio and which led to the end of war in the Balkans? Since that time, the Dayton Peace Prize has been created, and in 2006, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize was inaugurated, "the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the written word to promote peace." Awards are granted for both fiction and non-fiction books that were published in English during the previous year. This year's list of nominated titles includes Robert Olmstead's Coal Black Horse, which was one of the titles for our On The Same Page Cincinnati community reading program during March 2008. The Library holds copies of all of the titles on the list; the honors will be awarded at a banquet in Dayton on September 28.
wednesday september 03
Englishmen in July 1860 opened their newspapers to accounts of a shocking crime: in a respectable Wiltshire country house, a child had been abducted from his bed, murdered, and flung into the privy just outside the stable yard.
Who could have committed the murder? To the horror of the nation, it soon became apparent that it must have been one of the household. The Victorian home was supposed to be a private sanctum, the “castle” of proverb.
The local police and public opinion quickly fastened suspicion on one of the live-in servants, the nursemaid who slept unusually near her employer’s bedroom. But the case went nowhere.
Enter Jack Whicher, one of the first professional detectives of Scotland Yard, summoned from London. His investigation focuses on an even more shocking villainess: the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house, the child’s half sister.
Uproar. The rushed case is dismissed, the detective is disgraced, and wild speculation ruins the lives and reputations of almost everyone involved.
So who really did it?
Continue Reading…
monday august 18
In the autobiographical Running With Scissors, we were fascinated and amazed at Augusten Burroughs' life with his family. His largely absent brother, John Elder Robison, wrote the absorbing Look Me In The Eye, which tinted the view through Asperger's Syndrome.
In Wolf at the Table, Burroughs talks about his young life with his parents, starting with a protective run to Mexico where his mother took him to hide from his father. As his story unwinds, we discover that his mother suffered from depression and paranoia, and his father suffered from alcoholism and painful skin disease.
While this sounds like a very grim book, somehow it left me feeling hopeful. This wonderful successful man, this literate and well-spoken man, this man with so much compassion for his older brother, emerged from that dysfunctional and even scary home.
Continue Reading…
wednesday august 13
The subtitle of Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein’s Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar is Understanding Philosophy through Jokes. If you’ve ever regretted skipping (or taking!) Philosophy 101, this little book’s for you.
Cathcart and Klein explain the whole history of western philosophy in ten mini chapters and a hundred or so illustrative jokes. Not exactly clean and politically correct (neither the philosophy nor the jokes, be forewarned), but admirably clear and concise.
From essentialism to elephant jokes, from Karl Marx to Groucho Marx, you’ll be surprised at how much fun philosophy can be. So if life has been seeming unusually nasty, brutish, and short to you lately, pick up this short book.
thursday august 07
In 2004, British travel writer
John Gimlette enticed Putnam Flint, an 85-year-old American veteran of World War II to return to Europe and retrace the journey of his Tank Destroyer unit (nicknamed The Panthers) sixty years earlier. The result is
Panther Soup: Travels through Europe in War and Peace, a fascinating book that considers lingering effects of the great conflict on the land, the people, and cultures of Europe, as much as it does the war itself.
The author remarks on how the combatants, especially the Germans, so often named their killing machines after large cats: “It’s odd to think of the European chaos as the work of cats, a sort of feline stew, a
Panthersuppe.” And thus, he discovers his title.
Continue Reading…
wednesday august 06
This one’s irresistible. Look at the cover of Karen Tack and Alan Richardson’s Hello Cupcake! and you’ll see how adorable their ideas are for decorating cupcakes for all kinds of festive occasions.
Cupcake corn on the cob decorated with yellow jelly beans, fruit-chew “melted butter pats,” sugar crystal “salt and pepper” and real corncob holders. Chocolate donut and donut-hole penguins. Twinkie sharks with bright red fruit-leather grins. These are easy and utterly captivating ideas, all made from cupcakes, candy, and colored frosting.
So celebrate the dog days of summer with the charming terriers on the cover or the dozen other doggie breeds Tack and Richardson create with these easy ingredients. Equal time for cupcake kitties, too.
Sweet.
monday august 04
I am a little girl again...it is Saturday evening...and I hear the wooden steamboat whistle and the long-awaited announcement, "Welcome to the Grand Ole Opry!!" I actually teared up when I saw the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville for the first time a couple of years ago. You just never forget!
I have found a book that makes me happy: Around the Opry Table: A Feast of Recipes and Stories from the Grand Ole Opry, by Kay West (2007). This book is full of stories of original and modern Opry stars, including favorite recipes of the musicians and a few induction party menus.
There are a lot of books on Opry history, but a couple that I have enjoyed are A Good-Natured Riot: The Birth of the Grand Ole Opry (1999) by Charles K. Wolfe, about the origins and savvy business decisions that established the radio show; and Saturday Nights With Daddy at the Opry (2003) by Libby Leverett-Crew, a fascinating memoir about being the take-along daughter of the Opry photographer (lots of photos in this one!).
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wednesday july 09
I have a new car book.
Don’t worry, I don’t read while I drive. That would be taking this whole reading thing just a little bit too far.
My car book is for doctors’ offices, for impromptu coffee stops, or for waiting for late friends. Why read year-old magazines or pawed-through newspapers or check your watch two dozen times when you can carry around something great to fill the time?
I just picked up The New Kings of Nonfiction, a terrific collection of journalism pieces selected by Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life host Ira Glass.
So far it’s fulfilling all the requirements of a car book: able to be read in short, random chunks of time but absorbing enough to fill those waiting minutes completely. The only problem is that the pieces I have read so far are so interesting that I’m tempted to take it home and finish it.
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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 june 18
I got a nap yesterday. This might not sound like a big deal to most of you, but for me it was a momentous occasion. I don't get much sleep these days. My three-year-old daughter and six-month-old twin boys don't think it's a good idea, apparently. So when I managed to get all three of them down at the same time I ran to my bedroom and burrowed under the covers.
Of course, I was "rewarded" an hour and a half later when I went to get the boys out of their cribs and discovered that one of them had spit up and, well, let's just say had a "diaper leakage" problem all over his sheets. My daughter came in, took one look at her brother, and pronounced that he smelled disgusting and "needed to start going in the potty" like she does. Yeah, I'll get right on that.
Apparently, unlike yours truly, author Stefanie Wilder-Taylor uses her daughter's naptimes for more adult pursuits. In Naptime Is the New Happy Hour: And Other Ways Toddlers Turn Your Life Upside Down, Wilder-Taylor discusses not only imbibing alcohol while your child(-ren) are sleeping, but also how to survive playdates, temper tantrums, and moms who swear their children never watch tv.
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Amanda Ripley, a writer for Time magazine has written a fascinating exploration of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why.
This isn’t a Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, although Ripley certainly advocates planning ahead to meet the disasters you’re most likely to face in your life, since in a catastrophic situation you may not be able to rely on emergency response teams.
It’s more about the reaction process people go through as they face sudden disaster and how each individual’s combination of instinct and experience and training can be lifesaving or fatal in the circumstances.
Through interviews with experts and with survivors of well-known disasters—9/11, the 2006 tsunami, Katrina, the Columbine shootings, and even the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire—Ripley tries to trace the common factors in people’s reactions to catastrophe.
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I picked up Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others thinking it was going to be about the phenomenon that TV documentaries sometimes cover, that people who interest each other subconsciously mimic each other’s gestures and even synchronize their breathing and heartbeats.
Well, neuroscientist Marco Ioacoboni’s fascinating book touches on that topic, but it turns out to be about much more.
He describes the discovery, led by a team of Italian scientists, of “mirror neurons,” motor nerves that appear to play a basic role in the ability of people (and other animals) to recognize each other’s intentions, anticipate each other’s actions, feel empathy for the emotions of someone other than themselves, develop language, and participate in the whole complex process of social cognition.
Pretty cool, huh?
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friday may 02
A young newspaper reporter who lives in New York City is given an old diary that was found in a dumpster. The young reporter is intrigued and tracks down the diarist, who is now in her nineties. Together they embark on a life-changing journey. Sounds like fiction, but it's a true story, as described in this marvelous new book. The Red Leather Diary is a real treasure.
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monday april 07
I'm pretty sure I have "momnesia". Example one: I put our dog (a notorious fence jumper) outside, meaning to watch over him to make sure he didn't escape. I then went back inside and forgot to go back out again. Hours later my neighbor showed up at the door with the dog, who, of course, had jumped the fence and was roaming happily throughout our neighborhood. Example two: Not long after my twins were born, I went to vacuum our carpet only to discover that the vacuum cleaner wouldn't work. When my husband came home from work, the vacuum cleaner worked fine for him. It was only then that I realized--I had turned the vacuum cleaner on, but had completely forgotten to plug it in. Example three: well, you get the picture.
According to Dr. Louann Brizendine, my "condition" has a name--"momnesia". Brizendine, author of the book The Female Brain, says that "momnesia" is "a state of the female brain that is a bit forgetful after a woman has had a baby". It's influenced by "the wildly fluctuating flood of hormones that accompanies pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding".
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wednesday april 02
I'm passing this along to all of you who enjoy a nice, quirky memoir. Another librarian recommended Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table to me. It's not a new book, but that just means there are two sequels, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires to put on your list, too, if like me you didn't read them when they came out.
Reichl is a food writer, the editor of Gourmet magazine, a one-time chef, and most famously a former restaurant critic for the New York Times. Tender at the Bone is the story of her childhood and youth.
How she ever became a foodie is something of a mystery, given the stories she tells about her manic-depressive mother's odd ways of dealing with food, particularly her blithe habit of scraping the blue layer off of leftovers and declaring, "It's only mold."
But a long line of mentors and fellow enthusiasts helped Reichl to some memorable meals, and she lovingly remembers every friend and every bite. How a boarding school friend's French father introduced her to fois gras, how two courtly locals fed her couscous in Tunis on a college trip, the time she asked a lower Manhattan matron to teach her to make gefilte fish, to the days when she whipped up the daily specials at a Berkeley collective restaurant--Reichl fills her pages with warm and delicious stories.
And she includes recipes.
friday february 15
The writers' strike is finally over, so the 80th Annual Academy Awards are still set to air on Sunday, February 24th at 8:00 p.m. on ABC. In honor of all things Hollywood, I decided to write about Toby Young’s gossipy memoir, How To Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Young is a British journalist obsessed with American celebrity. He leaves London to accept a job as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, but after years of inappropriate office pranks, drinking too much, desperately trying to crash Oscar parties, and offending celebrities like Nathan Lane and Mel Gibson, he is fired. As the New York Times wrote, “Young has an instinct for annoying the rich and famous that crosses over into the self-destructive.”
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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 january 30
I’m partly through this new book and I just noticed that it has two front covers, two editors, two tables of contents, two introductions, and two sub-subtitles. On one side, it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Arctic, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert. On the other side it’s called The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic: The Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford.
Okay, so the publishers will be disappointed that I missed the clever upside-down, half-and-half presentation, but they should be pleased how much I’m enjoying the first inside half.
I started with the Antarctic, since as you may remember I’m a big fan of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys.
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wednesday january 16
I have to confess that I have become completely addicted to our new New Arrivals service. If you don't know, it's a part of our website that lists every new title we receive. You can look at it whenever you're in the mood for something new, or you can subscribe to all or parts of it as an RSS feed so that you can make sure you never miss a thing in the categories you're interested in. Still better, you can put holds on anything that tempts your fancy. Some of the entries include reviews, and some of them include cover images.
That's of course why I put a hold on this book, Ellen Highsmith Silver's Floorquilts! Fabric Decoupaged Floorcloths--No-Sew Fun. The cover is gorgeous, showing a floor covering that looks like a quilt. Silver describes the process with which she treats artist's canvas and decoupages fabric onto it, using traditional quilt fabrics and design principles, for colorful and durable floorcloths. It seems like a very do-able project, though time-consuming.
Now, will I ever actually make one of these? Maybe not. (Well, to be more accurate, very, very probably not.) But I love the fact that I know this book is in our collection and that if I ever get inspired to get out the fabric scraps, I know exactly where to find my inspiration.
monday january 07
The other day I saw a commercial where a family was in search of the father’s New Year’s resolution list. The fifth goal on the list was write a novel. I snickered. Who doesn’t think they have at least one good book in them?
Writer Walter Mosley thinks you do, too, and in his book, This Year You Write Your Novel, he gives you the tools and the motivation to get started.
A slender book with easy to follow instructions,
Mosley helps the beginning writer muddle through one year of constant writing, then re-writing. He encourages budding authors to write a thousand words a day without fail, finishing the first draft in three months then rewriting for the next nine months. He doesn’t promise the “Great American Novel” but hopes that in honing the craft every writer can accomplish their end goal: a completed book.
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wednesday january 02
Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, aka the Ghost Hunters from SciFi channel, have written a book about investigating the paranormal. Ghost Hunting: True Stories of Unexplained Phenomena from The Atlantic Paranormal Society (2007) covers many of the series' investigations, but they are fleshed out with photos, more action, and fascinating behind the scenes information.
Another terrific book of true hauntings is David Domine's Phantoms of Old Louisville: Ghostly Tales from America's Most Haunted Neighborhood (2006). I have met and talked with people whose stories are in the book, and these intelligent down-to-earth people are absolutely convinced of their hauntings. I have no reason to doubt them, and every reason to believe them. David's tireless research and endless patience have resulted in a wonderful collection of stories exemplifying the beautiful old neighborhood.
I would love to see the Ghost Hunters go to Old Louisville, the nation's largest preserved Victorian neighborhood, with 50 square blocks of original restored Victorian houses. It is also reputedly the most haunted neighborhood in the country. Well, no wonder. It's so gorgeous, who wouldn't want to hang around?
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wednesday december 26
I recently noticed on the library's book discussion group calendar that the Miami Township Branch Library book club will be discussing Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer on Tuesday, January 8th at 10:00 a.m.
I read the book this past summer and was blown away. I found myself wanting to talk about it with anyone who would listen--much to the annoyance of my husband and coworkers, I’m sure. But Krakauer’s book is that good. He grabs your attention and doesn’t let go.
Under the Banner of Heaven tells the true story of Mormon fundamentalists Dan and Ron Lafferty, who murdered the wife and infant daughter of their younger brother Allen in 1984 but claimed they were acting on direct orders from God.
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Steve Martin, noted actor and comedian, will be among the honorees at the 30th Annual Kennedy Center Awards this evening.
He has written a book about his own life, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (2007), which I enjoyed as an audio book. Martin tells affectionately about his life so far and his road to fame. He originally wanted to be a magician, and for years he had magic (and poetry reading!) as part of his act.
Martin has a fascinating and very smart mind, but really I don't know why this should be a surprise. His comedy and acting are clever and easily accessed by almost everyone but especially people around my age, baby boomers who weirdly have things like flower power and air raid drills in our common history. He seems to sum us up, somehow.
It's not a long book. It is succinct. I loved it. And if I have gotten to know Steve Martin at all, I think he is probably a bit bemused by his prestigious honor this evening.
thursday december 13
After the unwrapping of gifts en masse in the basement of my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve, there wasn’t much left to do. So I spent the evening in the big red armchair by the fake fireplace reading things in their magazine rack. The Peanuts comic strip books were my favorites. I read the same ones year after year.
Little did I know it then, but Peanuts will always be associated with my childhood. Through Charles Schulz’s strips, I have fond memories of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts gang. But how much do I actually know about Schulz himself?
Author David Michaelis has just written a new book called Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography that traces Schulz’s life from his modest beginnings as the son of a Midwestern barber to an icon of American popular culture. He realized his dream of creating a newspaper comic strip, yet was lonely and never fully understood by the people who adored him.
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friday november 30
Neurologist Oliver Sacks is back after a five-year writing absence with a new book currently on the New York Times Best Sellers List called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. I’ve just picked up my library copy and am excited to read it. In the meantime, I thought I’d write about one of his earlier books.
In An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Sacks discusses seven medical cases that challenge our understanding of the brain and how it works. Here are a few:
- An artist loses all color vision after a car accident and now sees and paints only in black and white
- A young man has a brain tumor that leaves him with no memory of events past 1970
- A surgeon experiences the compulsive tics of Tourette syndrome except while operating
- An autistic boy named Stephen Wiltshire uses his extraordinary drawing skills to communicate with the world
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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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thursday november 15
Here are the rest of the titles I previewed last week.
The political love story is Letter to Lorenzo, by Amanda Prantera. Julia, the English wife of a wealthy young Roman, is devastated when she is told that he has been killed by a car bomb. Her agonizing grief for her husband is complicated by her bewilderment: why would Red Brigade terrorists kill her husband when the two of them were known for their own socialist convictions? It must be a neo-fascist plot to discredit him. But careful, relentless interrogation by the investigating magistrate reveals that the police think her husband was a terrorist transporting the bomb himself. Julia’s world is turned upside down again. Her grief is powerfully portrayed, and her painfully honest attempts to understand her marriage and her politics are utterly persuasive, as is the subtle characterization of the magistrate who forces her into this possible reconsideration of everything she believed.
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wednesday november 14
Last week I dug through my piles and files of books and reviews to post about some titles I thought you might have missed.
I got a little bit of response, including a few emails, from people who were curious about what the titles might be (no guesses, though!). No one commented about what kind of books they'd like to see more of in these posts, though, so I just want to repeat--don't be shy if there's something you're looking for. There's always more where these came from!
Anyway, read on if you were curious about any of the little blurbs and what the titles were. Did any of you recognize these titles?
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wednesday november 07
I knew a regular library user who carried a tiny notebook in his jacket pocket. It was the latest in a long line of notebooks he had kept over the years, stretching back to when he lived in Shanghai in 1945, neatly recording all of the books he had read since then.
I was always somewhat awestruck by this, but I couldn’t help but feel it was Too Late for me to follow his example, even if I weren’t Too Lazy to keep it up.
The wonderful LibraryThing, a website that lets you catalog your library and share it, is the modern equivalent (and much more!) of those notebooks, but even that strikes me as Too Exhausting when I look around at all of the books I’d love to add to it.
Still, looking around at all of those books does make me want to share them with you.
So here’s my question. What kind of books would you most like me to post about?
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friday october 26
Last year I wrote about some stunning pop-up books that adults might enjoy. There have been some new releases that you really shouldn't miss, especially if you are a fan of paper-engineered books.
Matthew Reinhart has come out with Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy (2007), an unbelievable treasure depicting the original 3 movies.
David A. Carter has followed up his terrific One Red Dot (2005) with Blue 2 (2006) and 600 Black Spots (2007), both as much fun as the first.
Alive: The Living, Breathing Human Body Book (2007) from Dorling Kindersley, engineered by Iain Smyth, is a fascinating look at the human body.
This year Robert Sabuda gave us Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Mega-Beasts (2007), a wonderful study in ancient animals. And you shouldn't miss How Many? (2007) by Ron Van Der Meer, an intriguing study in shapes and paper sculpture. The mechanics and complexity of the book make us see things in new ways.
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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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wednesday october 17
I haven’t read Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, about the voyage of self-discovery she undertook after her marriage fell apart. (I’m in line behind many of you!)
But seeing her name in reviews brings back fond memories of her 2000 debut novel, Stern Men, a memorable coming of age story set in the islands off the coast of Maine.
Its heroine is young Ruth Thomas, born and bred on Fort Niles, one of two neighboring islands that survive on the lobster industry. (The island’s other main industry is suspicion of outsiders, including those from the other island.) Ruth is the daughter of a lobsterman and an outsider.
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thursday october 11
I am privileged in my work to serve the population of special needs children in our county. While I enjoy all of them, there is a special spot in my affections for the Autistic and Asperger's kids.
John Elder Robison's look me in the eye: my life with asperger's (2007) is the memoir of a life with Asperger's syndrome. Undiagnosed as a child, his unusual family did not really help this brilliant man on the road to normalcy (whatever that may be), and his younger brother Augusten Burroughs wrote his own memoir about that, Running with Scissors (2002).
Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day (2007) also relates what it is like to grow up with Asperger's. This incredibly creative man, who recited Pi to over 22,000 digits, also has savant syndrome capabilities and synesthesia; but he has grown up to fit in to his everyday world and excel in it, developing a language-tutoring website for learners of new languages.
In their own words, these books describe how these incredible men grew up. I admire them.
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wednesday october 03
I don’t like football. I understand the rules, but not the fascination with the game. As strange as it may seem, I enjoy watching the television show Friday Night Lights, starring Kyle Chandler and the Dillon Panthers, the high school football team of small town Dillon, Texas. Season two kicks off this Friday, October 5th.
The television series (and the 2004 movie) is based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger. Originally published in 1990 (around the time yours truly was graduating from high school), Bissinger follows the 1988 Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas into the locker room and onto the field, from preseason to playoffs.
The Panthers keep the hopes and dreams of this oil town alive, so Odessa takes its championship team seriously. The Permian High School stadium seats 19,000 and has artificial turf. Women carry black leather purses that look like footballs. One man has attended every game since the school opened in 1959 (except when he had heart bypass surgery). And angry fans, upset over a loss, place “For Sale” signs in the coach’s front yard.
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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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tuesday september 25
This past weekend, I was looking at my mom’s September/October issue of The Bark magazine and saw a dog on the front cover that looked quite similar to our late family dog, Daisy. This dog had the same cute black-and-white face and was also a mix of Beagle and Border Collie, a fact I soon discovered as I turned the page and read the Editor’s Note.
The dog’s name was Nellie, and the owners are the founders of The Bark. Nellie sadly died of cancer this summer, but pictures of her can be seen in this issue and on the front cover of Dog is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World’s Oldest Friendship, a touching anthology of dog writing compiled by the editors of The Bark magazine.
When our dog Daisy died of cancer, a good friend made a Pet Memorial Fund donation to the library, which was used to purchase a dog book to remember her. And if your child is grieving the loss of a four-legged friend, I highly recommend the tender children’s book Dog Heaven by Cynthia Rylant.
wednesday september 19
“On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City. I often doubted if I should be there at all. At the end I wondered how I lasted that long.”
So begins Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s final memoir in his trilogy that starts with Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes and continues in ‘Tis.
In the classroom, McCourt tells stories of his childhood spent in poverty in Limerick, Ireland. He instructs one class to compose homework excuse notes (“A man died in the bathtub upstairs and it overflowed and messed up all of my homework"). He makes another read cooking recipes to music.
His lessons may be unconventional, but his students discover the beauty of the English language and learn to always think for themselves.
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tuesday september 18
Yes, I know, it is on the verge of being overdone, this pirate thing. But, really, people do need to have fun, and dressing up like a Buccaneer or a Scurvy Wench only on Halloween is not enough for some. So, now is the time get ready for Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19. Hide the treasure chests! Protect the women and children! Annoy your co-workers!
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Do you recall where you were on January 28, 1986 at about 11:40 a.m.? I do. I was watching the space shuttle Challenger takeoff. If you remember that date and time, then you remember the Challenger Disaster and the seven astronauts who died on it. The explosion occurred seventy-three seconds into the flight as a result of a leak in one of two solid rocket boosters that ignited the main liquid fuel tank. Then about seventeen years later on February 1, 2003, ten astronauts were orbiting the earth and seven were headed back on the space shuttle, Columbia. The seven never made it and the three men left behind found themselves Too Far From Home by Chris Jones. This was originally an award-winning article for Esquire, where Jones is a contributing editor. This is the story of those three men-two American astronauts, Donald Pettit and Kenneth Bowersox and a Russian flight engineer, Nikolai Budarin and how they lived daily life and survived on the International Space Station. This book captures the dangerous realities of space travel. Find out how long they lived in space and if they made it back to earth.
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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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 september 04
It's back to school time for all but a few lucky kids. What a great time for us "old people" to look back and remember our own school days. For instance, remember filmstrips?
Change Your Underwear Twice a Week brought it all back to me. Suddenly I recalled the filmstrips in their little plastic tubes, always wound backwards and requiring a quick rewind while the class waited. Then there were the old filmstrip projectors, made out of heavy metal and sitting on someone's tiny desk like a World War II battleship. I spent more than a little time sitting in a classroom with the shades drawn while the teacher, (or some
very lucky teacher's pet) waited for the "ding" that would signal them to turn the little dial and advance one frame.
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Anyone who has watched Bravo-TV's Project Runway knows that the name Tim Gunn is synonymous with tasteful criticism and witty critique. So many times I enjoyed his choice of words and delivery, giving aspiring designers the exactly right dose of "Make it work" encouragement...or was that a challenge?
Joy of joys, Tim has written a book for us, A Guide to Quality, Taste, and Style (2007). In it, he expounds on fashion and how to find the right look for each of us. In his learned, cultured, yet approachable and unpretentious way, he forces a look at who we really are and enables us to dress ourselves in a flattering yet totally honest way.
And, happily, Tim Gunn's new television show, Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, will premier on Bravo this Thursday evening.
Fashion is evidently important to the public at large. The fashion magazines are enormous this month! Vogue ("840 pages of fearless fashion!"), Elle (592 pages), and InStyle (618 pages) magazines are thicker and heavier than ever. Unfortunately, so am I. Oh, well! Glorious browsing!
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tuesday august 14
Gordon Ramsay certainly speaks his mind. But you know, he is almost always right! What I have discovered, however, is that this talented and volatile chef is a very nice man underneath all that bravado, and an excellent teacher as well.
Besides being a television personality on popular shows in Britain (Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares) and the US (reality series Hell's Kitchen and the soon-to-be-aired Kitchen Nightmares), Chef Ramsay has published lots of cookbooks and a couple of autobiographical books that read like novels. He has also opened and run a number of restaurants, earning lots of Michelin ratings.
Anthony Bourdain, another TV chef, has a fascinatingly cynical view of life and the world of food. His documentary-style series on the Travel Channel, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, follows Bourdain around the world in pursuit of flavor. He, too, has lots of books to his name, including novels, cookbooks, and memoirs such as the fascinating Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. He cooks at the Brassiere Les Halles in New York City.
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tuesday august 07
Several years ago, my friend and I went on a weekend bus trip to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee. On the way, I listened to Elvis: 30 #1 Hits and watched his movies Jailhouse Rock and King Creole. By the time we arrived on the front porch of Graceland, I was ready to meet the King.
Ever since that trip, I’ve enjoyed reading about his fascinating life. As the 30th anniversary of his death approaches on August 16th, I decided to read Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Considered the definitive biography of Elvis, Peter Guralnick recounts Presley’s early life and music before the rhinestone jumpsuits and peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
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thursday august 02
Although I'm not really focused on knitting as much during the summer, I just had to blog about Fitted Knits. I like this book! One of the first things that caught my eye was that it uses yarns in a variety of price ranges. What kept me interested were several hip-looking patterns designed to be knit in one piece from the top down. Yay! No sewing seams!
Fitted Knits is a great resource for beginning and intermediate knitters interested in patterns with a little more shaping. One of the great features in the book is that not only are the patterns sized to specific measurements, they're also broken down into separate design parts. This makes adapting the patterns to one's own proportions much easier.
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wednesday august 01
The Discovery Channel is in the midst of their annual Shark Week celebration. From July 29th-August 4th, Discovery is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Shark Week. Tonight's episode, "Perfect Predators", airs at 9 pm. The Newport Aquarium is also getting in on the fun with Shark Fest. Receive free giveaways, pet sharks, and see sharks fed daily. For those of you obsessed with shark attacks (and I know you're out there), check out the International Shark Attack File. It might surprise some of you to learn that Florida, not Australia, leads the world in shark attacks. Since 1990, Florida has seen 365 attacks, compared to Australia's 94.
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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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friday july 20
After turning the last page of a particularly breathtaking book, have you ever said to yourself, “Hmmm, I wonder where the inspiration for that came from?” You aren’t alone. Driven by the need to “tear down the invisible wall between us readers and them writers and see what’s really going on behind the page,” Dan Crowe and Philip Oltermann took an unusual approach to exploring the creative writing process. Instead of relying on the standard Q&A exchange, they asked the writers to “…think for a minute about which object, picture, or document in your study reveals most about the relationship between living and writing, and then send it to us.” The resulting essays and photographs, collected together in How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors are surprisingly fascinating!
Some excerpts:
Jay McInery: “This is an Acheulian hand axe, approximately half a million years old, crafted by Homo Erectus, which was given to me by my friend Hamilton Russell…I like to heft it and hold it between paragraphs. It fits the palm beautifully. It reminds me of a friend and a beautiful landscape; sometimes I try to imagine its maker and his world.
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wednesday july 18
Potty humor is big in the world of popular children’s literature—from best-sellers like Captain Underpants to Walter the Farting Dog, who now boasts a fabulous plush representation, complete with sound effects. Some are referring to the genre as “poop fiction.”
"You've got to give kids something they want to read," says Glenn Murray, co-author of the Walter the Farting Dog books, who firmly believes that his smelly, but well-meaning protagonist has become an ambassador for literacy.
It would seem that kids agree, since the genre's books regularly appear on children's best-seller lists.
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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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tuesday june 26
Joyce Maynard is only five years older than I, but unlike me she's published a whole lot of good books, starting with the memoir she wrote when she was 18, Looking Back; A Chronicle of Growing Up Old in the Sixties. Later she wrote a memoir of her affair with J. D. Salinger; the darkly funny Baby Love, about three teenaged mothers, a deranged escaped killer, and an equally deranged though less violent grandmother. Before they divorced, she wrote children's books with her ex-husband, and a syndicated column about the joys of family life. She probably portrayed family life as more joyful than it was in her case, and it's clear in Internal Combustion that she has still not completely moved on from that divorce.
Later she wrote the engrossing To Die For, a novelization of the Pamela Smart case. Finally, she's crossed the line into serious True Crime, with Internal Combustion: The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City.
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sunday june 17
Cynthia Kaplan went to summer camp and school dances, had a crush on Jamie Karlan, got dumped by boyfriends, struggled with her career, sought the approval of her parents, cared for her ill grandmother, got married, became a mother, and tried to live her life the best she knew how.
If you see yourself in any of these scenarios, then you understand the happiness and heartache of being a woman.
But if you think Why I'm Like This: True Stories is going to be an overly sentimental book, think again. Often compared to David Sedaris, Kaplan's personal essays are funny and sad yet refreshingly frank, as if she is examining her life under a microscope.
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thursday june 14
Some of my happiest times have been spent in the company of chickens. Their unabashed presence can turn a day from gloomy to whimsical.
If you are interested in trying out a little flock of chickens, here are two very enjoyable titles on the subject:
Keeping Pet Chickens (2005) by Johannes Paul tells us how to "bring your backyard to life and enjoy the bounty of fresh eggs from your own small flock of happy hens". Well illustrated, but lighter on the information than the following selection.
Keep Chickens: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces (2003) by Barbara Kilarski is a cleverly written, enthusiastic book of instructions for those interested in fresh eggs and gardening help from a little flock of hens. She understands and explains very well the quirks and personalities of chickens.
Two more excellent resources:
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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 june 06
If you’ve driven north of Cincinnati on I-75 all the way up to Monroe, you may have noticed a grain silo topped by a little red horse on the side of the highway. Written very plainly on the side of this silo is the Bible reference, “John 3:3.” A photograph of this simple expression of faith is one of many beautiful and thought-provoking photographs in the new book, Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape.
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Hurray! TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society), my favorite crew of ghost-hunting plumbers, is back on the air, and starting June 6 there will be new episodes of Ghost Hunters on SciFi with new investigations! These Ghost Hunters take their investigations very seriously, coming at it from the point of view of disproving it. Sometimes they can't...
Along those lines, I have a little stack of books on my desk about proving and debunking paranormal events.
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wednesday may 30
I don't mean to brag, but one of my uncles might have invented chocolate syrup. I think I heard a family member mention this once. Amino acids are involved. Uncle Jim is in his 80s, so when I see him this summer, I'll have to discuss this with him. I don't know though if I can spin a whole book out of my memories of Uncle Jim, especially if it turns out he actually didn't invent chocolate syrup.
In the stacks I found My Uncle Joseph Stalin, by Budu Svanidze. Here was someone who didn't have to read up on amino acids, the "building blocks of protein," to make an interesting famous-relative-exploitation book! Budu was a loyal communist, but he fell in love with a Hungarian woman who refused to live behind the Iron Curtain, so they snuck out to Paris and perhaps also South America under assumed names. The idea is that Budu wrote this and several other memoirs because he needed the money--and he was successful, as his several volumes of memoirs were translated into English and other languages. He even sold an article on Joseph Stalin's three wives to McCalls.
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friday may 25
Good things about being pregnant: Cute clothes (for you and the baby). Ultrasound pictures. Feeling the baby kick. People letting you go first in the bathroom line because they're afraid you might go into labor. Bad things about being pregnant: Nausea. Exhaustion. People who insist you're having twins because "nobody could be that big and not be having twins" (thanks, that makes me feel tons better). Not being able to shave your legs because you lost sight of them months ago. Complete strangers asking if they can rub your belly for good luck (answer: what do I look like, an oversized rabbit's foot?).
If all this sounds familiar to you (or you're just dying to know how you, too, can skip to the front of the restroom line), then read Jenny McCarthy's very funny and very frank Belly Laughs: The Naked Truth About Pregnancy and Childbirth. It's an informative and often sidesplitting look at the wacky, weird, wonderful world of pregnancy.
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If you have never heard of Lord Buckley before, it's kind of hard to describe what he did and who he was in any succinct way. Fortunately for me, Oliver Trager, author of
Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley has done just that in the opening pages of his biography. Here is his summarized take on Mr. Buckley: "Lord Buckley: the white, six-and-a-half-foot-tall, ex-lumberjack cat who invoked both the manners of the English aristocracy and the street language of black America...Lord Buckley: the picaresque pill-popping darling of Al Capone...Lord Buckley the jazz philosopher who jammed with Charlie Parker...Lord Buckley: the original viper, the Hall of Fame Hipster, the baddest Beatnik, the first flower child, the premier rapper...best known for his 'hipsemantic' retellings of Bible stories, Shakespeare soliloquies, and modern poetry in the 1950s." So, while not exactly a comedian (as he's often described), he could better be described as a performance artist who experimented with language and storytelling for comic effect.
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I spent the morning wondering if I should bail an acquaintance out of jail. I haven't seen her in a few years, and if jails do provide rehabilitation of any kind, she would certainly benefit. Still, I was dressed neatly in time to drive to her arraignment. Then I checked the Hamilton County Clerk of Courts site again: her case had been put on hold, and she'd been released on her own recognizance.
Why the obsession with somone I barely know? Partly because of my obsession with the British TV series Bad Girls, a jail drama that ran for 8 years that I just found out about. You can watch YouTube clips and see if it's for you. Only the first season is available on DVDs playable by regular U.S. DVD players. There are Alternate Ways of getting hold of the other 100+ episodes, but they could land you in prison.
The Education and Religion Department is the place to go for serious information on incarcerated women. The first book I chose was 13 Women: Parables From Prison, edited by Karlene Faith, a prisoners' rights advocate for 40 years.
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wednesday may 23
Are you a cruciverbalist at heart? Do you have a secret ritual regarding the daily crossword puzzles in the newspaper? Myself, I like to fold the paper in a certain way, then do the cryptogram first, the 'basic' crossword, and then the 'advanced' crossword, in that order. And, I use ink - erasers are for the timid. Sudoku? Sorry, I am clueless.
There are of course millions of crossword puzzle junkies in the world at large, and several have been profiled in a surprisingly fascinating documentary, Wordplay, which comes with the tagline, "50 million people do it every week".
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wednesday may 16
The dreaded first year of parenthood. Your parents, friends, co-workers and people on the street have probably all warned you about it. Sleepless nights. Hours-long crying episodes. Diaper explosions. Colic. And on and on and on. Now that I've scared off everyone in the "planning for a baby" stage, erase those images from your mind and picture...The first time your baby smiles at you. The first time they fall asleep on your chest. The first time they grab your hand or pat your cheek.
If you need more convincing (and could use a good laugh), then read Stefanie Wilder-Taylor's Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, and Other Things I Had to Learn as a New Mom, in which the L.A.-based comedienne discusses sharing parenting duties, the trials and tribulations of breastfeeding, and bonding (or not) with other new moms.
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My husband and I went camping this past weekend. Much to my dismay, the campground facilities were “primitive”--no electricity, flush toilets, or showers. And while this was not really “roughing it” by any stretch of the imagination (bug spray, grilling supplies, and cans of beef stew could easily be picked up at the corner campground store), it was nice to commune with nature if only for a few days.
The book I read around the campfire was a bit somber, so my thoughts turned instead to Bill Bryson’s hilarious misadventure, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. Bryson decides to tramp the “AT”—the 2,100-mile trail connecting Georgia to Maine--and brings along his notoriously out-of-shape, Little Debbie-eating, childhood sidekick Stephen Katz. What ensues is a hike to remember, not only for the beauty of their surroundings, but the people they encounter (an annoying hiker named Mary Ellen) and the things they hope not to encounter (bears).
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thursday may 10
Several years ago I read an amazing novel titled Water Music by T.C. Boyle. It's a rich, darkly comic story which focuses on a character named Mungo Park and his expedition of the Niger River during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . The novel is full of energetic, hilarious, and often bawdy prose. I was about halfway through the book when I learned (somehow or another) that Mungo Park was an actual historical figure.
Since then, I've been interested in finding a more factual account of Mungo Park and his exploits in Africa. So, I was happy to find the book The Cruelest Journey: 600 miles to Timbuktu by Kira Salak. On this solo journey, the author traversed the Niger by kayak and modeled her course after Mungo Park's own journey there over 200 years ago.
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wednesday may 09
Right now my toddler has a cold and is pretty miserable. Which means I'm pretty miserable. She doesn't care to blow her nose, instead preferring her sleeve. She also doesn't care to take her medicine, instead preferring to spit it back out (usually on me). Getting a two-year-old out of the house on a good day takes forever. When she doesn't feel well, and insists on carting her teddy, two blankets, Elmo, Tigger, and several dolls into the car with her---well, you might as well give it up.
It's on days like this that I'm reminded of Kate Reddy, heroine of Allison Pearson's ode to working moms, I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother.
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tuesday may 08
In 1962, when author Sebastian Junger was almost one year old, his parents hired two carpenters to build a studio addition behind their house in Belmont, Massachusetts.
One of those carpenters was Albert DeSalvo.
Bessie Goldberg was found strangled at her home in Belmont on March 11, 1963. The killing fit the pattern of the Boston Strangler, who had been terrorizing the women of that city since the previous summer. Roy Smith, a black man cleaning the Goldberg home that day, was convicted of the crime and sent to jail.
The killings continued.
Albert DeSalvo was also working that day—at the Junger home a little over a mile away. He later confessed that he was the Boston Strangler and admitted killing 13 women, but insisted Bessie Goldberg was not one of them. Sebastian Junger, bestselling author of The Perfect Storm and Fire, writes about this encounter--and a possible case of legal injustice--in
A Death in Belmont.
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friday may 04
I visited my parents in South Carolina with the agenda that they might like to fund some of my son's college tuition. Instead, my mother let me ransack the abandoned WalMart that was being used to store books for her library's book sale. She said I could take whatever I wanted. These were reject books that had already been picked through during two used-book sales this year. Many, I noticed with annoyance, were my own books, which I'd left at my parents' house in the '70s. I ended up with about 6 boxes, including books and other interesting stuff I stole took from the pharmacy, which has also been abandoned since 1989.
When I got back to Cincinnati, I realized that no eBay person would ever buy about a third of the books I'd taken; another third, I kind of wanted to keep for myself. East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick, published in 1992, falls into this category.
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thursday may 03
Today, I’m kicking off my monthlong tribute to mothers by looking at the often tempestuous, never boring mother-daughter relationship. One of my favorite novels about this subject is Wendy French’s sMothering (check out the great cover!) In it, 23-year-old Claire McLeod, who lives in Portland, Oregon, is astonished (and frightened) when her domineering mother arrives on her doorstep. Refusing to say why she’s left Claire’s dad, her mother immediately sets about reorganizing her apartment, interfering in her love life, and generally making Claire’s life a living hell. It’s a hilarious and often poignant send-up of the complicated love that exists between mother and daughter.
Looking for other great reads? Then check out Kris Radish’s The Sunday List of Dreams, Dani Shapiro’s Black & White, Jo-Ann Mapson’s The Owl & Moon Café, and Kelly Braffet’s Last Seen Leaving.
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thursday april 26
You're not imagining things if you've been seeing Imperial Stormtroopers at the library.
In conjunction with the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, we're launching GalaxyCon, an out-of-this-world celebration of all things science fiction.
It hasn't even started yet, and already it's a blast. I've had some great conversations with fans of all ages and families who plan to join us for the stellar events we have planned.
Science fiction is such a part of our culture, in fiction, film, and TV. Were you one of the wide-eyed kids who watched Flash Gordon serials on Saturday mornings, or did you stand in line for Spiderman and its sequels? Did you get your kicks from superhero comics or have your consciousness raised by the sociological sf of Sheri S. Tepper or Margaret Atwood? Are you hooked on Heroes or daffy for Dr. Who?
Even if you're not a techie, a Trekker, or a towel-carrying hitchhiker through the galaxy, how can you resist? (Resistance is futile, you know!)
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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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Every time I take a walk on my lunch hour, I pass by a florist’s shop. I try to peek inside the open door and catch a glimpse or a whiff of the beautiful roses, lilies, tulips, and gerbera daisies for sale. Sometimes I see a customer leave with a parcel of flowers or a bouquet in a vase and I happily imagine them sitting on my desk.
Author Amy Stewart loves flowers too. In her new book,
Flower Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers, she travels around the world and behind the scenes to catch her own glimpse of the cut flower industry. And what an interesting glimpse it is!
Stewart visits California, Miami, Holland, and Latin America to see firsthand how flowers are bred, grown, shipped, and sold. Along the way, she tells intriguing stories, such as the quest for the elusive blue rose or the eccentric breeder of the popular 'Stargazer' lily.
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thursday april 19
When I was ten years old, our family visited Washington, DC. The thing I really remember about that trip is how on the last day, my brother wandered off on his own at the Smithsonian, and almost made us miss our flight home. Luckily for him, my parents’ relief at finding he was safe made them forget to worry about the possibility of being out the price of those plane tickets.
With Spring having arrived (finally!), now seems like a great time to see Washington once more. And while there are plenty of excellent, traditional travel guides to the city, there’s another option for people who enjoy a bit of satire mixed in with their sightseeing prospects.
Washington Schlepped Here: Walking in the Nation’s Capital, by Christopher Buckley, fits the bill perfectly. Buckley’s book is a travel guide/ comic history lesson about the city on the Potomac.
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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.
friday april 13
As a kid I loved Kung Fu movies. So, naturally I was drawn to a book titled Lost in Place: Growing up Absurd in Suburbia by Mark Salzman. This memoir, through many hilarious scenes, evokes all of those wild ambitions most of us had as teenagers and our obsession to do whatever it took to make them a reality. Salzman recounts his adolescent fascination with Kung Fu and his quest to become a Zen master.
He quickly sought out the only Kung Fu school in his town and formally enrolled in a class. Only 14 years old at the time, he managed to convince the martial arts instructor to allow him to study and practice with the adult class. Not only was this a little dangerous, but the instructor was a bit of a loose cannon, leading his pupils through a series of reckless and ill-advised exercises. Needless to say, he got a little banged up during these weekly sessions and in the process was introduced to the adult world in a pretty skewed way.
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tuesday april 10
Like betting on horses and selling worthless junk on eBay, computer hacking and its precurser, phone phreaking, are a lot harder to do now than they used to be. The coolness of knowing that you can make free phone calls by calling an 800 number, blowing your Captain Crunch whistle into the receiver before anyone picks up, and then "dialing" the person you really wanted to call, has become much less cool now that
- Long-distance phone calls are now pretty much free if you have a cell phone (even free-er if you borrow someone else's phone); and
- Now that everything's digital, the Captain Crunch trick doesn't work anymore.
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friday april 06
If you’re a Grey’s Anatomy fan like me, you know all about Meredith Grey, McDreamy, McSteamy, and the rest of the surgical staff at Seattle Grace Hospital. But you might not know about a heart-pounding book called Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande.
In this collection of essays--a National Book Award finalist—Gawande candidly admits that doctors make mistakes because medicine is a human endeavor, and humans make mistakes. We follow Gawande making his rounds as a surgical resident at a Boston hospital: fumbling a central line or an emergency tracheostomy; missing a deadly aortic aneurysm. His own missteps and those of others illustrate his central theme--that medicine is not a perfect science but one full of uncertainty, guesswork, intuition, and oftentimes, mystery.
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friday march 30
Life with a young child can be pretty amusing. Case in point: my two-year-old likes to put her doll in timeouts for "biting" and loves to wrap our labrador retriever up in her blanket for "night-night" (she also likes to blow his nose for him--don't ask). My husband and I find her antics hilarious. If you're looking for more hilarity in your own life, check out the library's collection of comedy books and cd's. They're guaranteed to tickle your funny bone. Here's a small selection:
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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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monday march 19
The 16th annual Cincinnati International Wine Festival will be held this coming weekend, with the Grand Tastings scheduled for March 22 and 23. These recently published books in the Library’s collection will advance your knowledge and enhance your appreciation of the vino aging in your cellar.
The Oxford Companion to Wine
Updated in 2006, this authoritative compendium contains almost 4000 entries on every conceivable aspect of wine and wine making.
Wine: the 8,000-Year-Old Story of the Wine Trade by Thomas Pellechi
Pellechi presents a fascinating overview of the commercial impact of the wine industry throughout history.
The Way to Make Wine: How to Craft Superb Table Wines at Home by Sheridan F. Warrick
Red and white varietals; pressing equipment; techniques of the craft: this is a complete guide for novices and experienced winemakers
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The Vernal Equinox comes every year in the Northern Hemisphere around March 20. Spring arrives! Day and night, for one 24-hour period, are equal.
I find that springtime light brings a lifting of moods and a deep contentment that never fails to brighten my spirits. I have dug up a variety of books from a variety of subject areas, all about spring:
Chasing Spring: an American Journey Through a Changing Season Bruce Stutz writes about following spring from the Gulf of Mexico to the Alaskan arctic, experiencing renewal and joy at the beauty of the awakening season.
Boys of Spring: Timeless Portraits from the Grapefruit League, 1947-2005 Ozzie Sweet is a renowned photographer, and this book of baseball photographs will get you in the mood for a game.
Everything for Spring: A Complete Activity Book for Teachers of Young Children: Activities for March, April, and May Spring fever is especially rampant in classrooms. These activities will help keep our youngest students busy.
The beautiful symphonic works of Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring and The Tender Land cannot fail to move you; available on CD or cassette.
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tuesday march 13
A friend of mine confessed--it seemed like a confession--that he was relieved when Theodore Kaczynski turned out to be the Unabomber, because a friend of his pretty much fit the profile.
I understood perfectly, having spent some time in high school trying to track down Patricia Hearst (really impossible from rural South Carolina before the Internet). I just finished reading Robert Graysmith's 2003 Amerithrax: the Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, and the most interesting part isn't about anthrax at all: it's the report of an interview between Mohammad Atta and Johnelle Bryant, manager of the Homestead, Florida, office of the U.S. Departure of Agriculture.
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friday march 09
It is, alas, time to set the clocks forward an hour to ostensibly "save" an hour of daylight every day. This coming Saturday night/Sunday morning at 2 AM it will suddenly become 3 AM.
According to Michael Downing in his 2005 book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, normal everyday people do not really understand why we change our clocks. As he says, however, quoting a friend, "Time is quantifiable, but that doesn't mean time is a quantity." Um, I still don't understand.
In Seize the Daylight by David Prerau, we learn that the idea of Daylight Saving Time goes back to Benjamin Franklin, but it was put into practice in Europe and the US during World War I. Don't blame the farmers, it wasn't their fault. It was war, manufacturing, and the government that did it.
The time change is a hot topic of conversation. Everyone has an opinion, probably because it affects everyone. David Prerau says, "It seems like such a simple gesture. Spring forward, fall back. Does anyone know what we're doing?"
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tuesday february 13
Hockey is by far my favorite sport. I love the slap shot, the body check, the zamboni, and the fights. I sit and cheer and wish for skates as those "little boys" fight it out to get the tiny puck in the elusive net. And when they do, boy oh boy!
In 1980 something wonderful happened. Our young, green little boys duked it out with the big, seasoned Russian hockey team in the Olympics, and they won!
Wayne Coffey's 2005 book The Boys of Winter tells their story, which is even more fascinating than you think. The coaching was unconventional, and by using tactics that were unpredictable and new the Boys outsmarted the Men. They simply played better hockey, newer hockey, and their devotion and grit paid off in a gold medal.
Something wonderful happened in 1998 too: The US Women won Olympic Gold in hockey! Read about it in Crashing the Net by Mary Turco.
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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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monday february 05
I recently picked up a new book: My Secret Life on the McJob, written by Jerry Newman, a business management professor who took a year off to work at seven fast food burger joints. The book purports to be another "management advice book" and each chapter begins with a management lesson that one might presumably glean from the following chapter. I liked the book even more as an outsider's undercover glimpse of what working fast food was like.
There's something very appealing in books about this kind of cross-cultural spying. The classic of the genre is Black like me, written by a white man with darkened skin making his way through the segregated south of the 1950's. A close second in terms of name recognition is probably Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, in which the middle-class Ehrenreich explores what it really means to take the sort of low-wage work on which the working poor rely.
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tuesday january 30
I am not one of those crafty hobbyist people. But in the last year or so, I have found a hobby that is fun, rewarding, and serves both the creative, right-brain person and the left-brain, analytical science guy within. I am talking about brewing beer. Though not an alkie or a weekend warrior, I do enjoy beer. Good beer, that is, as I am a serious beer snob. Enough about me, though, let's talk about brewing. It is simpler than you might imagine. Just hop (pun intended) in the car, drive down to
Listermann's, buy the gear and a kit, bring ‘em home, and brew it up right in your very own kitchen. Three weeks in the fermenter (a five-gallon bucket with a lid), three more weeks conditioning in the bottle, and you have two cases of yumminess to imbibe. Time for a party!
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monday january 29
Olympus Fashion Week in New York City is looming, when all the designers showcase their new looks for Fall 2007. Couture Week is in full swing, and the collections vary all the way from Jean Paul Gaultier's beautiful sleek monochromatic lines to Elie Saab's diaphanous fanciful frills.
Not everyone owns a couture gown, but everyone owns a pair of jeans. In Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2006) by James Sullivan you can find out why.
Designer and fashion expert Randolph Duke helps us all dress well in his book, The Look: A Guide to Dressing from the Inside Out. In a very comfortable way, he helps us look at our figures and work toward expressing our own personal style.
Truth is, high fashion really does trickle down to our department store sales racks and into our closets. Fashion Week shows set trends, highlight colors, and establish the general mood for the clothing we will be wearing. My question is, Will there be any blue jeans on the runway?
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saturday january 27
Selling junk from around the house on eBay is fun, but driving to the post office is kind of a drag. When I saw Julian Dibbell's Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot, I thought I might be onto something I'd enjoy. For one thing, when my daughter got sick of Neopets, I took over her account, and I'm glad to report that our oldest pet, Jenifrlopez, is now 1,298 days old. (My daughter's gotten into Runescape: she's the girl with a chef's cap who goes around butchering virtual zoo animals.) Right now on eBay, someone is trying to sell a Runescape virtual Santa Hat for $100. Some virtual items have sold for hundreds of real dollars, presumably to game players who don't want to spend the hours it can take to earn rare items.
There is no market for virtual Neopets stuff on eBay, and my daughter refuses to sell her Runescape items. Neopets is not exactly a MMORPG ("massively multiplayer online role-playing game), and Runescape is not one of the more popular ones. Check the MMORPG Web site or similar ones for an update.
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friday january 26
I occasionally enjoy the TV show Numb3rs, both for the sexy TV-geeky* guys and the not-so-subtle attempt to make math seem a little more exciting and attractive. Geek Logik is a new book that also proposes to make math useful and a little more attractive.
OK, that last sentence was a little tongue in cheek; it's actually a humor book. The subtitle of the book is "Easier Living through Mathematics", and the premise is geeky in the extreme. The book provides algebraic equations to answer such pressing questions as: "Should I call in sick?" and "Do I have a snowball's chance in hell with her?" It's a very amusing book, especially if you have a grasp of the math involved. However, even if you don't remember your high school algebra there's a refresher page in front so you too can find out if you "deserve a personal assistant".
*TV-geeky: A word I've coined with a similar meaning to TV ugly
For example: "Ryan Phillippe in Antitrust" geeky rather than young Bill Gates geeky.
wednesday january 24
I picked up Michael Perry's Population, 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and Truck: A Love Story because I saw a good review of the second volume and couldn't resist its title.
Perry grew up in New Auburn (“Nobbern”), Wisconsin, a tiny rural town that the interstate bypassed in 1974. It still has some agriculture, “a gas station, two cafes, a couple of bars,” and an almost moribund plastics factory.
After a decade away from town, earning a nursing degree, traveling, and establishing a career as a writer, Perry has come back. He bought a house on Main Street and joined the local volunteer fire department.
He doesn’t exactly fit right in. (He believes that he is the only local firefighter ever to miss a meeting for a poetry reading.) But his love of the landscape and his admiration for those 484 other citizens—hard-working, stoic, stubborn, and colorful folks—gradually draw him back into the life of his hometown.
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sunday january 21
The worst part of getting divorced is that you become poorer. Fortunately, the Government & Business Department has many good books with advice for debtors, and after you've taken their advice and are not coming home to turned-off electricity anymore, you can move an aisle over to the investment-tips section.
I particularly liked Deal With Your Debt, by Lee Pulliam Weston (2006). The tone was nonjudgmental, and there was plenty of retrenching advice I could use. I could ask for a temporary forbearance on my student loan. I could get my house designated a historical monument, get a low-interest loan to have it fixed up, and then move to a smaller place.
The bad part is that all of the books insist that you constantly make lists of your expenditures, which could bring facts to light that you'd just as soon not realize. Also, Weston urges you to find out your credit rating, which you might not want to know.
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wednesday january 17
Who are are all these great big people in my house, and where did my cute little toddlers go?
I have a few questions for parents everywhere: Which is more stressful, potty training or teaching your child to drive? Or, would you rather feed strained peas to a baby or a crisp fresh salad to a 13-year-old? Or how about watching your 1-year-old take his first steps toward you, then realizing, as you watch your 18-year-old walk away, that those first steps just weren't that long ago?
Jim Borgman and Jerry Scott have uncanny insight into parenting a teenager and an incredible talent for putting it onto paper. They co-author Zits, a daily comic strip about family life with a teenaged son. There are several collections available in book form.
We are expecting a new Zits sketchbook soon, Are We Out of the Driveway Yet? In the meantime, there are other Zits books in our collection with fabulous titles such as Pimp My Lunch and Growth Spurt.
Where did my toddlers go? The bigger mystery right now is, with all these teenagers around, where did all the food go?
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friday january 12
There has been a popular folk music movement brewing for several years known as “Freak Folk”, consisting of people such as Devendra Banhart, Vetiver, Faun Fables, Joanna Newsom, Espers, Josephine Foster, Six Organs of Admittance, Animal Collective, Akron/Family, and others. Freak Folk will more than likely be the subject of a future blog. Why then bring it up now?
Because FF simply could not exist without the creative fusion of styles that occurred in the UK in the 1960’s and 1970’s, described in mouth-watering detail by ethnomusicologist Britta Sweers in her Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music. I would strongly recommend this wonderful book to anyone interested in folk, folk rock, or the music of the British Isles, and for those curious about the lesser-known, more traditional musical/cultural revolution of the 60’s that was (among other things) a reaction against the pop music of the day. Sweers wrestles with the problematic definitions and history, paints a vivid sociocultural portrait of the scene, discusses the main players therein, elaborates on the many ongoing musical revivals, and speculates about future fusions of traditional and “new”.
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I like new things--especially technological toys. I was one of those people who ran out and got a digital camera when 2 megapixels was top-of-the-line and cost what 10 megapixels cost today. I snagged a combination cellphone/MP3 player/internet device all of about 2 months before they were suddenly advertising them on TV everywhere. I love my Web 2.0. On the occasions when I can afford it, I'm what they call an early adopter.
What that translates to, according to Flavor of the month: why smart people fall for fads, is that I'm an enthusiastic embracer of technological fads and innovations. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in certain cases it costs me money and time. People who hold off buying that digital camera get a better deal; people who pause a bit before buying that Segway mostly never end up purchasing it at all. The secret is to know what innovation to adopt and when. One interesting point along these lines that the book mentions is that, in the 1930s, some people thought wristwatches were just a fad. Then again, who really wants a Pet Rock?
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tuesday january 09
Okay, you survived the holidays and life is starting to return to normal. (Right?) So as the evenings close in and the weather gets chilly (right??), this is the perfect time to curl up with a good book.
Or an interesting new magazine, a movie, or a CD. Teen titles, too, and some great children's books. There's so much wonderful stuff out there, it can be hard to know where to start.
Well, you know us--we'll always have some suggestions. If you'd like a few unusual ideas, take a look at the Librarians' Choice list for 2006.
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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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My goal was to make $50 a week selling useless junk on eBay, and for about a month I did just that. Then, unfortunately, I began running out of useless junk that anyone else would want, and I'm at $52 for the entire last 30 days.
Kenneth Walton, author of Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay, did much better. In about 1998 he was able to quit his job as a lawyer and sell the art he bought at garage sales and thrift shops for thousands of dollars a week. He spent $200 on Davenport's Art Reference & Price Guide and began to recognize the work of minor but collectible American artists. At one point he and his Army-buddy partner found a painting by Oscar Berninghaus at Goodwill, which they sold for $18,700.
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tuesday december 26
Need a reading suggestion for that special oddball in your life? I may have a perfectly esoteric recommendation. If the person has an interest in the 1960's, the occult, eccentric people, and strange tales, Gary Lachman's intriguing Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius might be just the ticket (to ride). This fast-paced and highly entertaining reader of otherworldly and sometimes sordid activities alleges connections between many colorful figures such as: L. Ron Hubbard and Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and the Beach Boys, Jayne Mansfield and Anton LaVey (founder of The Church of Satan), and other strange bedfellows too numerous to mention here.
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saturday december 23
I've got to admit that I got the recommendation for Hit by a Farm by Catherine Friend from another library blog. And I'll also admit that "lesbian examines ram testicles" is an awfully good first chapter hook. However, although this book has a lot of the standard "city slicker encounters the country life" episodes, it's so much more than that.
Hit by a Farm expertly describes what an all-consuming force a small family farm can be, and many scenes made me glad to be a generation removed from it. It also covers the author's struggle to write and maintain a sense of her own identity when confronted with endless lamb births, digging holes for miles of fencing, and the day-to-day hard work that left her tumbling exhaused into bed instead of writing (though obviously not forever since this is her book).
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thursday december 21
Looking for the best teen books of 2006? Maybe you're searching for last minute gift ideas, or you're looking for a good read over holiday break. Whatever your reason and whatever your age, check out the following lists for some excellent recommendations.
Teenreads.com Best Books of 2006
2006 Teens' Top 10 - American Library Association
2007 Nominations Best Books for Young Adults - American Library Association
tuesday december 12
I recently posted a Turning the Page entry about the Charles Dickens book A Christmas Carol. It was published in 1843, 163 years ago.
Looking at these dates gave me pause. My great-grandfather George Peet, who was my mother's father's father, was born in 1844, the year after A Christmas Carol was published.
This same great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, lost his leg at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, spent time in the dreaded Libby Prison, and came home to tell about it. Thank goodness, since consequently here I am. He was a member of the 5th Ohio Volunteers, based out of Camp Dennison, Ohio, which is just a little bit east of Cincinnati.
It's fascinating to me how literature can span time and unify us like it does. And it also shows yet again how there really is nothing new under the sun.
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friday december 08
A book with an introduction that details how the author spiked his own pint of ice cream with salt to deter a thieving roommate promises a certain amount of vicarious retribution. Life's Little Annoyances delivers on its promise. Not all of us are the sort of person that will plant embarassing items in a person's cart at the supermarket jut because they left it in the middle of the aisle. But I think many of us can appreciate the small frustrations in this book and the creativity with which they are met.
This book isn't exactly a model of the high points of mature behavior. Some of the stories border on being cruel, and some of the pranks have consequences the pranksters have not fully thought out. For instance, the person who deals with cars parked in handicapped spots with a note that says "I'm sorry I ran into your car", along with the phone number for an organization that advocates for the disabled, probably hasn't thought in terms of how annoying these calls might be to the organization. I'm also not entirely sure of the environmental consequences involved in painting dog poop with gold spray paint. However, for adults that can use it as a safety valve rather than a manual, there are enough funny but not too harmful occasions of vengence in this book that one will certainly find something one can appreciate.
monday december 04
When did Jack the Ripper commit his crimes? 1608? 1749? 1888? 1922? Why do we all sort of know who he was? Until I started looking him (or them) up, I hadn't a clue. In fact, the killer (or killers) commited the crimes in 1888-1981, almost sort of within living memory of those people in the 118-year-old age range who remember their babyhoods well.
After reading Patricia Cornwell's Case Closed, I had no doubt in my mind that artist Walter Sickert was the guilty one. And then I read that Sickert is not in fact even one of the more seriously considered suspects by Ripperites. Wikipedia says Sickert was in France during the time of a lot of the murders.
A Wikipedia writer ominously comments that it is actually hard to tell which murder victims are Jack the Ripper's work, since there were many brutal and horrific murders of women during this period of time.
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wednesday november 29
One of my favorite parts of my job is talking to people about what they’re reading. Watching people light up when they tell me about something really, really good, and listening to their voices become urgent when they tell me “you’ve just got to try this”—I find that absolutely irresistible.
And of course, if it’s something I’ve read, we get to do that “isn’t he an amazing writer” and “wasn’t it wonderful when” and even “ooh, if you liked that, you have to read.”
I love writing for this blog, because of course I get to do the “you’ve just got to.” (You can probably tell from some of my much-too-long entries how enthused I can get.)
But it’s not one-way. It just occurred to me that everything I have out on my card right now and everything I currently have on hold was recommended to me personally by a library user or another librarian.
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wednesday november 22
It's the day before Thanksgiving, which is the quintessential American family holiday, and I have the peculiar nature of the family on the brain. Families are funny. No, let's face it, most of our families are quirky, odd, downright weird.
Because of all the shared history involved, it can be hard to tell a family story correctly and succinctly. Some things translate, and some don't work at all. For instance, although I can explain to strangers why nearly every gift my aunt Dar gets has a goose on it somewhere (she had a fundamentally bad experience with a goose when all my aunts were children), I'm not nearly as capable of elucidating why another of my aunts has an entire photo album full of pig posteriers.
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tuesday november 21
Not that anybody could have missed it, but TomKat got married over the weekend. One of the guests at the wedding was Brooke Shields, with whom Tom had a very public spat last year. Tom, as you might recall, criticized Brooke's use of antidepressants to help treat her severe postpartum depression. Brooke responded with an op-ed piece in the New York Times that denounced Cruise's "ridiculous rant" and suggested that perhaps Mr. Cruise should keep silent on the issue, since he had "never suffered from postpartum depression." As indicated by her presence at his wedding, the two have since made up.
Cruise and Shields's war of words began shortly after the release of Brooke's memoir Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. After enduring two years of unsuccessful IVF attempts and a miscarriage, Brooke gave birth to daughter Rowan in 2003.
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wednesday november 15
Seven paintings, including a Cézanne masterwork, were stolen from art collector Michael Bakwin’s home in 1978. Bakwin recovered the Cézanne, Bouilloire et Fruits, more than 20 years later, when a corporation offered it for sale and a suspicious Lloyd’s of London underwriter called the Art Loss Register. But soon after, Bakwin was forced to sell Bouilloire et Fruits – for more than $30 million – simply because he could never maintain enough security to prevent another theft. He eventually regained four more of his paintings, but two remain missing.
This story from Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft illustrates both the good and the bad news about the current situation. The good news is the Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that maintains a database of stolen works. Since its creation in 1991, the Art Loss Register has done much to compensate for light trade regulation, inadequate governmental resources, and low motivation to identify or report suspect provenance.
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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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friday november 10
I love lighthouses. This past weekend I stood in awe of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse at night, resplendent in the light of the full moon and sending out its reassuring beam across nearly 20 miles of ocean.
Dawson Carr's 2002 chronicle Cape Hatteras Lighthouse: Sentinel of the Shoals tells the history of the beautiful lighthouse, including the monumental 1999 3-week move of the structure to a safer spot further from the edge of the ocean. It was moved inland from the encroaching surf by lifting the entire building and hydraulically pushing it forward very slowly along a track to its new location 2900 feet away.
An interesting book about lighthouses that were not as lucky as Hatteras is Lost Lighthouses, full of true stories such as my favorite about Deer Island Lighthouse in the harbor near Boston, where one of the keepers had a cat who would dive from the platform, catch a fish, and climb back up the ladder with it.
For anyone who loves lighthouses and loves cats, it doesn't get any better than that!
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tuesday october 24
One of my high-school teachers got off topic and repeated her personal anecdotes a lot. I've forgotten Latin, but I remember the anecdotes. One was about a big, strong husky boy who nevertheless didn't try out for the football team because he was "yellow." Some other boys beat him up, and the Latin teacher was glad. Then again, she thought, he probably had dementia praecox (or else he would have been on the team), so his "yellowness" wasn't exactly his own fault.
Dementia praecox, I knew, had not been a diagnosis since the 1950s, when we became enlightened and started using good drugs (Thorazine) instead of bad surgeries (lobotomy), and the word "schizophrenia" replaced "dementia praecox." Then things got even better in the '90s, when atypical antipsychotic medicines with fewer side effects were created.
According to Robert Whitaker's 2002 Mad In America, though, I've been completely wrong.
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monday october 16
For his first three years in high school, my son took what we used to call "business math" and made C's. Now, through a scheduling snafu, he is taking AP calculus. He is still making C's, but they are a much higher level of C's, presumably.
I'm not sure about the connection between this little anecdote (which admittedly would be more inspirational if he were now making A's) and Joe Miller's wonderful Cross-X, a book about a high school debating team at an inner-city school in Kansas City, Missouri, where almost everyone, including the debators, has academic deficiencies. Nevertheless, the debating team is consistently ranked one of the top high-school teams in the country. I think the connection is that if expectations are high, people will rise to them.
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friday october 13
Did you know that a study in the British Medical Journal found there was an increased risk of being injured in an accident on Friday the 13th? Were you aware of the superstition that if 13 people sit down to dinner one will die within the year? The full story of the above, and other facts and folklore surrounding the number 13 can be found in Jonathan Cott's Thirteen: A journey into the number.
Thirteen is Cott's 13th book, and the story of its beginning makes an interesting introduction. Spurred to write by his own trepidation about the number (despite labeling himself a generally unsuperstitious person), Cott begins with a meeting of the Philadelphia Friday the 13th club, travels through calendars and horoscopes based on the number 13, and also touches on music, art and poetry inspired by the number.
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thursday october 05
The Bluegrass music tradition is well represented with masters of the genre at Tall Stacks this year: my favorite Del McCoury Band, Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, Cherryholmes family, Ralph Stanley, and so many more fantastic musicians. This is heaven on earth!
Many of these groups are award winners, and all of them have played on the stage of The Grand Ole Opry!
We have music here at the Library by these extraordinary musicians, as well as books to read about the Bluegrass heritage.
The Bluegrass Reader (2004), edited by Thomas Goldsmith, is an entertaining collection of articles about the Bluegrass music scene.
From Every Stage: Images of America's Roots Music (2005) by Stephanie P. Ledgin is a fascinating look at the development of bluegrass among other types of music that originated in the Americas.
Bluegrass might be something that is unfamiliar to you. Give it a chance; get to know it. It is original American Music that expresses the heart of all of us.
wednesday october 04
I haven't been knitting much lately, but now that it's getting cooler out I'm starting to get the urge again. This has mostly manifested itself in looking at cool new knitting books rather than actually knitting anything, but hey, I'm working up to it! I've found two books I was very impressed with this week. The first, Big Girl Knits is the first knitting book I've found where my size was on the bottom of the sizing chart! This book fills a great need for nice looking knit patterns for larger women. The informational section at the front, as well as pattern indications for recommended body types is also very useful. Plus, the little wrap sweater on page 66 is divine!
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monday october 02
Okay, LonelyGirl15 turned out to be a scam. Apparently this has proven a near tragedy to young male "geeks" who were attracted to a beautiful actress who also seemed to share their interest in science.
If you just get a plot summary of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! you'll want to slap him around. As a child Feynmann fixed adults' radios. He distinguished himself at MIT, was one of the first arivees at Los Alamos. He caught the notice of the higher-level scientists and solved important nuclear-related problems. He learned to pick locks. He distinguished himself at Princeton and got teaching jobs at Cornell and CalTech.
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I don't read
Glamour magazine very much these days, but when I do pick up an issue, I immediately flip to the back page and dive into the
notorious Dos and Don'ts. Truth be told, I tend to skim through the dos. It’s the don’ts, the hapless fashion offendors, caught by Glamour’s photographers, who hold my interest. Sure, there’s a kind of horrified fascination in seeing the fashion faux pas (Denin leg warmers?! Ankle boots, thigh highs, AND a mini skirt?!) committed by others, but mostly I’m just hoping to learn from their mistakes. Apparently, there are plenty of other women out there just like me because the magazine editors recently expanded their column into a book:
Glamour’s Big Book of Dos & Don’ts: Fashion Help for Every Woman.
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monday september 25
“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.” Erica Jong
I'm not very interested in current-day self-help books, but I love old ones. There is nothing like immersing yourself in the aphorisms and advice of the first half of the twentieth century to give yourself a feeling of the utter strangeness of a familiar culture.
We recently got a book that sent me down that road again. How to be Popular is a collection of short excerpts from self-help books and articles for teens on the subject of popularity. These are drawn from books and magazines, mostly from the 1960's and 70's, with art from the same time period. A classic quote from this title is "Take a good look at those who are popular. Where do they go? What do they do? Try to be like them."
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monday september 18
Brian De Palma's new feature film, The Black Dahlia, is based on James Ellroy’s 1988 novel of the same title. The book is a lurid treatment, in the noir tradition, of a notorious unsolved Los Angeles murder. In January of 1947, a woman walking her young daughter to school discovered the body of woman, hacked in half, lying in a vacant lot.
In Ellroy’s story, ex-boxer and cop Bucky Bleichert becomes so involved in the investigation of the murder of Elizabeth Short -- aka the Black Dahlia -- that he loses his career and the woman he loves, compromises his principles time and again, and sees his life go down the proverbial tube.
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I found Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs more than ten years ago, when it first came out. Yesterday I found a scrap of paper with a quote from it stuck to my refrigerator door (which I clearly don’t clean often enough), and it reminded me how much I adored this little volume.
Editors Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard claim that the collection came about after a drunken campfire verse-making session, when their fishing buddy, Bob Shacochis, composed this one-line poem, “Wind,” in the voice of his Irish setter, Frank:
Leaves—I thought they were birds.
It inspired them to solicit poems from famous writers, all the poems written as though from the dogs’ point of view.
The result is irresistible, a charming, surprisingly varied collection of poems in all genres, on all kinds of doggish subjects.
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saturday september 16
Now that I've finally cleared enough work from around my computer that I can blog without laying eyes on some urgent task that needs to be done immediately, I thought I could mention that I'm back from my vacation. And what a vacation it was! I started out with the idea of just finishing off a few projects and ended knowing that I was going to have to remove most of the tin ceiling downstairs. In between that, there was the flood...
If you're looking for a book on plumbing, I can heartily recommend Plumbing: basic, intermediate, and advanced projects, with the caveat that, unless you live in a house less than 20 years old, your plumbing will never be as clean, modern, or in as convenient a place as "book plumbing". However, at this point I'm really looking for a distraction from thoughts of plumbing so I thought I'd step sideways, yet continue the general "too much water and associated disasters" theme with a quick look at Brian Keene's The Conqueror Worms.
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thursday september 14
I'm still weirded out by finding an apparently homeless guy sleeping on my futon. Not so much that, but my reaction, which was, when he asked me for a drink, to say I had milk and grape juice and feel guilty that I didn't have more juice varieties. (His response was, "No, man, I mean something to drink.") Am I just a compassionate person, or foolish and insane?
Two of the books I read suggest the term "houselessness" rather than "homelessness" because of the connotations of "home." Under the Overpass, by college student Michael Yankoski, tells the story of the five months he and his friend Sam spent on the streets of five large cities, as a religiously inspired experiment. In format, the book is a lot like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. Michael and Sam sleep in shelters, eat in soup kitchens, and make small amounts of money playing "worship songs" on their guitars.
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tuesday september 12
Shortly before the turn of the 20th century there was a group that formed with the goal of investigating and either proving or not the existence of ghosts. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Proof of Life After Death (2006) by Deborah Blum recounts the efforts this group put forth to prove the paranormal in a time when science and religion were at odds. It is fascinating.
Interestingly, William James was one of the founders of the American Psychological Association and brother of writer Henry James.
I'm always ready for a good ghost story. Brad Steiger's Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places (2004) is a book full of documented cases and oral histories of hauntings and paranormal occurrences. It is refreshingly grounded, offering a bibliography, a list of good ghost movies, and a listing of haunted cities. Cincinnati is there, citing among others a ghost lion at the Zoo.
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friday september 08
Some scientists have the gift of writing so clearly that it’s like being taken backstage by a magician and shown all the tricks—oh, that’s how it’s done. I heard Daniel J. Levitin on the Diane Rehm Show a few weeks ago and was impressed by how well he described his new book, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, and when I picked up a copy, I was delighted to find that he writes just as lucidly and humorously as he talks.
Levitin is a cognitive neuroscientist (“the field that is the intersection of psychology and neurology”) and musician who studies how and why the human brain makes and appreciates music.
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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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tuesday august 22
I didn't set out to write about plane disasters involving athletes, but I just sort of happened upon two new books on the subject this week.
The first is Nando Parrado's Miracle in the Andes. Nando Parrado, of course, is the hero of Piers Paul Read's 1974 Alive! which you've certainly read or heard about unless you are too young. Parrado was one of two Uruguayan rugby players who crossed some of the highest peaks of the Andes, 62 days after the team's small plane crashed. They hoped to reach rescuers in Chile, which they believed to be much closer to the crash site than it was. Of the 45 passengers and crew members, 15 survived.
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As noted on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, a new biography of James Triptree, Jr. written by Julie Phillips (James Tiptree, Jr. The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon) has been published. Writing under the Tiptree Jr. pseudonym, Alice B. Sheldon started publishing science fiction short stories and novellas in the late 1960s. By that time, she had led a busy and interesting life, serving as a WAC in the Second World War, working for the CIA, and earning a PhD. in experimental psychology.
As a science fiction writer, Sheldon carefully guarded her identity as a woman, until the editor of a fanzine ferreted out her cover in 1976. With Kate Wilhem and Joanna Russ, Alice B. Sheldon is counted among the preeminent women science fiction writers of her day.
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saturday august 19
The circus is coming to town for a three-week-plus run from August 24 to September 17. Cirque du Soleil (“Circus of the Sun”) will premiere here with 33 performances of Quidam, its flagship touring show, inside a 78-foot-tall blue and yellow Grand Chapiteau (Big Top) on the riverfront.
The Montreal-based company’s sophisticated transformation of the circus even delights the post-Dumbo generations. (Seinfeld’s Kramer isn’t the only baby boomer afraid of clowns.) Cirque du Soleil combines the best traditions – acrobatics and, uh, clowns, but no animals or freaks! – with acting, singing, and dancing. The hallmarks of their spectacles are edgy creativity and impeccable professionalism.
If (if?!) you like what you see under the Chapiteau, or prefer watching death-defying feats from the couch, the Library has many Cirque du Soleil videorecordings, as well as books and CDs (list below), with more on the way. Traditionalists should also explore our collection of Strobridge & Co. circus posters and two-volume set of photographs of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Strobridge collection. The Cincinnati-based company, an international leader in lithography, created these posters from around 1890 to 1920 for many troupes, including Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers, and W.W. Cole.
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wednesday august 16
I noticed in the newspaper the other day, the Gee's Bend quilts are going to be on display in Indianapolis starting in October of this year. The Gee's Bend exhibition has brought a spotlight onto African American quilting in the United States like never before. These beautiful abstract quilts have been traveling the country for almost four years now, garnering critical acclaim and generating amazing public discussion. The book, The Quilts of Gee's Bend, is a gorgeous view of the quilts and their makers.
I have a particular respect for African American quilting because it was an African American quilter's work that really got me interested in quilts as art. Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold was a major inspiration to me. It's a children's book, but I was already halfway grown when it came out. Still, the idea of telling a story through a quilt snagged me. Ringgold's work is so visually rich, it's hard not to be captivated. For a more adult take on her, as well as a lot more examples of her work, try Dancing at the Louvre.
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friday august 11
My Bad: 25 years of public apologies and the apalling behavior that inspired them is an entertaining collection of actual apologies by people in the public eye. Samples include high profile faux pas like Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction to lesser known transgressions. The absurdity of these "earnest" statements when read one after the next is striking. Is saying "sorry" really enough? And why does our culture demand that people apologize for some of these things? Breathe a sigh of relief after this one - at least you don't have to explain your questionable behavior to the American public (but you might want to prepare something just in case)!
monday august 07
Quilts for Change, an international juried quilt show will be opening on Thursday August 10th at the Cintas Center. In honor of the show, here are a few books to broaden your appreciation of traditional quilts as well as those that venture into the fine arts.
Wild by Design, a beautiful overview of American quilting, is an illustrated catalog of some of the finest quilts from the collections of the International Quilt Study Center. One of the more interesting facets of this book is the conversational format, which offers several perspectives on the same quilt. This book is a good snapshot of the progression of the American quilt through the years and ends with several modern art quilts.
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friday august 04
The ballet season in Cincinnati is about to kick off, beginning on August 12 with the annual Gala of International Ballet Stars, produced by ballet tech ohio performing arts association. Then Cincinnati Ballet launches its series of six performances with the New Works Festival on September 28.
The keynote is dazzling variety! Ballet lovers in the tri-state will be able to discover the work of many brilliant choreographers through programs of short pieces, and we'll see a mix of classics and newer compositions, including modern dance.
The Fifth Annual Gala of International Ballet Stars will showcase 18 dancers from 10 major companies representing 11 nations. These companies include Russia’s legendary Kirov Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem, The National Ballet of Canada, and the Royal Swedish Ballet.
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A friend told me to read Dog World: and the Humans Who Live There and I promptly forgot the name of the book until I stumbled over it at work one day. I took it home and started howling (I was getting in touch with my canine side) as I read how author Alfred Gingold succumbed to the charms of his first dog, George, and became a member of the dog world, that crazed brotherhood of fellow dog owners.
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wednesday august 02
Lucy Grealy was diagnosed at age 9 with Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that led to multiple surgeries and resulted in the loss of a third of her jaw. Surviving childhood taunts and exposure to endless doctors and hospitals, Grealy went on to become a writer of poetry, essays and her own story, Autobiography of a Face. Grealy's writing is straightforward, lyrical and compulsively readable.
Ann Patchett, renowned author and graduate school roommate of Grealy's, wrote the afterword to the paperback edition of Autobiography of a Face. Patchett states that Grealy's book "can certainly be read as an account of a child's cancer and disfigurement (a word Lucy despised), but it can also be read as it was written: as a piece of literature." Sadly, Grealy died in 2002 at age 39, and the world suffers in not having more of her writing.
A great companion piece to Grealy's book is Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett's memoir of the friendship she had with Grealy, and a beautiful tribute to Grealy's life.
Did 'Sex and the City' leave you craving designer labels? Did you realize that you can't afford to dress like Carrie and the girls? Or do you like to shop for the designer labels and have no clue what a budget even is? Do you have no idea what a fashonista even is? Read Kathryn Finney’s delightful book How to Be a Budget Fashionista and you'll be good to go!
Ms. Finney packs this slim volume (only 222 pgs) with enough fashion and budget knowledge to turn anyone living on a budget or anyone who doesn't know what one is into a fashionista. She explains what a budget fashionista is, walks the reader through budgeting (charts and all), and launches you into the world of looking like a million bucks for less. This book really should have been called
Fashion Shopping for Dummies. The author has packed this book with fashion-related websites galore: sites for figuring out what the current trends are, if like me, you have no clue what’s in or what’s out; sites for “cheap” makeup and sites devoted to managing money and teaching you how to budget and most importantly, take care of your all important fashion purchases after you’ve brought them home! The author also has a
website so that you can get even more current information. This book is highly recommended.
friday july 28
It's the end of July, and it seems like all the folks from the office have headed off on vacation, or are planning one. Trips to Florida, the Smoky Mountains, and all the old favorites...do they make you yawn? Looking for something different? Something to spice up the water-cooler confab? Something to make your co-workers stand up and say "huh?" Look no farther than America Bizarro: A guide to freaky festivals, groovy gatherings, kooky contests, and other strange happenings across the U.S.A.
Even if you're not ready to hop in the car in search of strange American folk culture, America Bizarro is a great read. Catch an entry here or there while you're waiting for the bus, or for an appointment and imagine a mini-vacation to International Tuba Day, the National Hobo Convention, or the World Championship Punkin' Chunkin Contest.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning role in Capote sparked renewed interest in Capote's In Cold Blood. With help from research assistant and friend Harper Lee, Capote composed this true crime classic which made the Modern Library's list of 100 Best Nonfiction Works published after 1900. In it, he details the 1959 murders of the Clutter family by ex-convicts Richard Hickock and Perry Smith.
All the attention brought to Capote's work has made me think about other classic murder cases, and the books written about them. The library has many, including:
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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State Fair by Arthur Grace (2006) captures in black-and-white photos an amazingly accurate feeling of The Fair. Look deep: next to the slightly strange is the touchingly wholesome; these are lovely images of innocence and accomplishment that I recognize and lived through with my own family.
Fairs have always been big, important parts of our summers. We are regulars at the Hamilton County Fair. In years past we have been exhibitors, showing 4-H cattle, dogs, chickens, and rabbits. One of my daughters was even the Hamilton County Fair Queen! My other daughter was, however, Grand Champion Poultry Showman, an accomplishment that should not be underestimated.
Our Hamilton County Fair is not the biggest or grandest, but it is a 151-year tradition that will hopefully survive its current monetary hard times. It definitely has its share of faithful fans.
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monday july 24
I recently read Two Cats and the Woman They Own or Lessons I Learned from My Cats by Patti Davis.
Ward Schumaker's sensitive illustrations lift this small book out of the ordinary.
Cat lovers will recognize several universal kitty moments. Each chapter has a Life Lesson attached to it. Life Lesson 2 says, "There is an art to properly receiving gifts. Even if you don't like the gift, you should cherish the giver and praise her generosity." The gift in this case was a large dead rat.
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I'm in the middle of several remodeling projects. I live in an old house, so this is pretty much standard procedure. I finish one project, and a new one claims my attention. I am beginning to have an inkling that I may be in the middle of several remodeling projects for the rest of my life.
The library has been an integral part of this remodeling odyssey. You'll often find me in the Science department, poking through the books on plumbing, or carpentry, or masonry. One of the things that was missing from all these how-to books was an idea of just how a house, especially an old house like mine, works. David Owen's book, The Walls Around Us, started me on an answer to that question.
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Project Runway, a fashion design reality show on Bravo! every Wednesday night, is one of my favorite television shows of all. "Who will be the next big fashion designer?," asks hostess Heidi Klum. It is fun to watch, and also it is inspiring!
In the spirit of the design competition, our catalog offers a variety of books and magazines on women's style and fashion design.
Style and fashion design tips:
Fashion Magazines, all of which are available in the Library collection:
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Does clutter rule your life? You can't have anyone over because your house is in utter chaos? That pile of junk on the kitchen counter looms like Everest? If you answer yes to any of the above, then you need Sink Reflections to set you straight.
Let Maria Cilley aka The Fly Lady (she's into fly fishing) and her simple steps to decluttering release the inner neatnik that lurks within you.
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saturday july 22
Having taught English comp for 18 years, I've seen plenty of plagiarism, and more so since the Internet. In the old days, you'd have to go to the library and find the journal or book the student used--often tedious work (see The Mark Twain Murders, by Edith Skom). Catching plagiarists is pretty easy now.
It's easy to see why comp students steal their papers (although it's still not considered best practice). Other cases are less understandable, and the library has two good books that discuss plagiarism's mysteries. In Words for the Taking: the Hunt for a Plagiarist, Neal Bowers, Iowa State poet and English professor, discovered during the '90s that someone was stealing his poems, changing the titles and first few lines, and then submitting them to literary journals. Bowers hired a not-terribly-useful lawyer and very good private investigator to track down the perpetrator. Eventually Bowers discovered that plagiarism was the least of David Jones's crimes.
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thursday july 20
Thirty-seven years ago, on July 20, 1969, millions of people around the world huddled around their television sets to watch Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the surface of the moon. Despite the subsequent public accolades and honors, Armstrong—a quiet and intensely private man--has always been somewhat of an enigma. Until 2005, that is, when First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, the only biography to be authorized by the legendary astronaut was published. “Brimming with groundbreaking research, fresh anecdotes, and fair-minded analysis” (New York Times Book Review), James Hansen’s book is a fascinating examination of the life and career of a remarkable man.
Since that day, ten other astronauts have walked on the moon (and there will probably be more to come), but few of us wil forget Neil Armstrong, who had the honor of being first.
The June sale of Gustav Klimt's ravishing 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese society lady, brought a record-breaking price of (reportedly) $135 million, primarily from Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics magnate, philanthropist, and art collector. Lauder acquired Adele Bloch-Bauer I for the Neue Galerie New York, a small museum he co-founded in 2001 to exhibit early 20th century German and Austrian art. The Neue Galerie unveiled the painting on July 13 along with four other Klimt works on loan from the Bloch-Bauer heirs, including the second portrait of Adele from 1912.
The sale also brought long-delayed justice for the Bloch-Bauer family. Led by Adele’s 90-year-old niece, Maria Altmann, they won back the paintings just this year from the Austrian government. Austria had refused to return the property that the Nazi regime confiscated after Adele’s widower, Ferdinand, fled in 1938 to escape the fate of six million other European Jews.
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wednesday july 19
A little bit like Elmer Fudd "huntin' wabbits", here we go on the trail of phantom phenomena.
Get the basics on ghost hunting in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ghosts and Hauntings (2004) by Tom Ogden, a surprisingly entertaining collection of ghost stories, evidence, and instruction on tracking down supernatural phenomena. You can also consult Joshua P. Warren's How To Hunt Ghosts (2003), listing what to look for and the equipment you need to find it and prove it.
Maybe you are having trouble finding a ghost. There are guides to haunts, such as Ghosthunting Ohio (2004) by John B. Kachuba that takes you around the state to visit documented ghostly places. Haunted Hoosier Trails (Wanda Lou Willis, 2002) is a similar guide to Indiana. William Linwood Montell's Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky (2001) is a collection of stories and folk history from our neighboring Commonwealth to the south.
Happy Hunting! ...or should that be "Happy Haunting"??
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tuesday july 18
Julia Child's life is an open book, or at least the years she spent in France before the publication of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Finished after her death in 2004
, My Life in France is co-authored by her great-nephew, Alex Prud’homme. It is an amusing account of how she fell in love with Paul Child, France and good food and leads up to her success in the 1960's as public television's beloved French Chef who converted America to a new appreciation of food.
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This morning a juvenile sharp-shinned hawk perched on the edge of my deck. As I watched the bird with his striped front turn his head watching for small bird prey I thought about the amazing book To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession by Dan Koeppel. I listened to the audio book version during the chill autumn days last year.
In addition to examining the complex relationship between Koeppel and his father, Koeppel discusses the rules of the science/sport, obsession. Bird-witched! How Birds Can Change a Life by Marjorie Valentine Adams is a complementary bird-watching book. This collection of articles by a major contributor to birding in America helps the beginner understand how and why the rules of the American Birding Association work.
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monday july 17
The recent death of Jane Jacobs finally prompted my reading of her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Originally published in 1961, it has become a classic account of what makes a city work. Local planning (or the lack there of) in our community makes this required reading for anyone passionate about urban life and how to successfully sustain it.
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friday july 14
Happy Bastille Day, I guess.
Louis the Sixteenth was the King of France in 1789.
He was worse than Louis the Fifteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Fourteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Thirteenth.
He was the worst since Louis the First.
-- Alan Sherman
If You've seen La Nuit de Varennes, one of my three favorite movies (the other two being Nashville and Best in Show), or if you have an interest in the French Revolution, you're going to want to read Les Nuits de Paris; or, the Nocturnal Spectator, in which Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne recounts--and probably sometimes invents--the events of his hundreds of nights spent meandering the streets of Paris betwen 1789 and 1793, and his general disapproval of the greed and crime in Paris during the days leading up to and following the Revolution.
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saturday july 08
Emily Carr was an artist of renown in the early 20th century. Born in British Columbia, she went into the forests of Canada at a time when women did not routinely travel alone. Her paintings and writings portray the wilderness of Canada with love and reverence, especially the Native American Indians of her area.
A book of her memoirs, The Book Of Small (2004), is a reissued volume of anecdotes from Emily's childhood. The adult Carr wrote the memoirs in a wide-eyed, loving manner, giving us a picture of childhood in a place that was just a breath past "frontier", a place that gave "Small" a grand chance to accumulate her early life experiences where her world was wide open and slightly wild.
Books of Emily Carr's paintings evoke the beauty of the western Canadian forest and the noble local culture. Emily Carr at the Edge of the World (2003) is a perfect introduction.
Susan Vreeland has written a novel about Emily Carr, The Forest Lover (2004), which is loosely based on her life.
Get to know Emily Carr. She will inspire you.
friday july 07
I have just traveled to India between the covers of this stunning book: India, by Oliver Follmi (2005). The photography in this book is amazing, displaying the beauty and diversity of this enormous country.
I love cities, and The Cities Book: A Journey Through the Best Cities in the World (2006) published by Lonely Planet takes us to 200+ cities of all sizes around the world. This is a follow-up book to The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World (2005) that covers 230 different countries.
Closer to home, enjoy the view in Panoramic Parks: An Appreciation of Cincinnati's Parks (2005), by Thomas R. Schiff, or go to each of Ohio's 88 counties to see Ohio's Bicentennial Barns (Beth Gorczyca, 2003).
You could go out west and explore with Bart Smith Along the Pacific Crest Trail (1998), or take off on a train trip in Great American Rail Journeys (2000).
Travel in library books: it's free, there are no timetables, and you don't need to worry about learning how to get by in another language. Have a great trip!
saturday june 24
You don't have to care about Agatha Christie to love The 8:55 to Baghdad: from London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie, which I read about three times in three days before returning to the shelves. Andrew Eames's goal is to follow the path of Agatha Christie as she traveled from an upscale suburb of London to Iraq, following a depressing divorce. She had been planning a Caribbean cruise but changed her mind after hearing recent returnees enthuse about the country. She took the Orient Express (later of course celebrated in Murder on the Orient Express), which now ends in Venice.
Vacationing in Iraq in 1928 wasn't as weird an idea for Agatha Christie as it is for Andrew Eames. After leaving Venice, his path continues--on increasingly neglected rolling stock--through Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Syria, and finally into Iraq. He meets a lot of people (the drunken British beach bums in Bulgaria are particularly amusing) and reports some fascinating dialogue.
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friday june 23
The title of this entry may seem like an oxymoron, and it is. The good news is that if you haven't had to write a research paper since 1985, you may not know that you can permanently delete "ibid." from your vocabulary.
The library and the Net have a lot of good resources. We've got the brand new Concise Rules of APA Style and the 5th edition (the most recent) of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. If your instructor asks for the Turabian/Chicago style of citation, your best bet would be to drop the course, but if that's not an option, you can get pre-electronic guidelines from A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.
Almost every university has its own citation Web site. One of the most respected is Purdue University's OWL. While some of the resources are available only to Purdue students, the APA and MLA guidelines are free to everyone. OWL is especially appealing because of up-to-date rules for documenting electronic sites, such as Web sites and journals accessed online. Up-to-date instructions for the Turabian/Chicago style of citation can be found at this University of Wisconsin at Madison site.
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wednesday june 21
Tonight at nine p.m. the first part of the documentary film A Lion in the House will air on CET. It follows five families from cancer diagnosis though treatment, with footage covering six years. The film was shot at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center with many local families. This is a great project, and I am so happy that we at the library are one of CET's outreach partners in presenting this valuable and thought-provoking work to our community.
The film is part of the PBS series Independent Lens and was created by Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar. The companion book, also called A Lion in the House, includes thoughts from the parents, siblings, medical team and filmmakers in their own words. These moving stories touch on the choices and realities of cancer in each family. The book is also interesting for getting a perspective on how the film was made. Filmmakers' notes on each family, and a longer section at the back of the book emphasize the struggle not to be intrusive while filming and to portray the families with honesty and sensitivity.
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In 2004, Frank Warren began an art project which involved leaving postcards in public places- restaurants, libraries, bus terminals- and asking people to mail them in with a secret of theirs written on the postcard. The project is ongoing, and Warren recently published some of the postcards in this fabulous collection which is at turns hilarious and devastating. Included within are secrets from ordinary people about obsessive habits, dreams never realized, undisclosed memories of abuse or confessions of furtive acts. The collection is compulsively readable, and you may be inspired to send Frank your own secret- many participants have attested to feeling unburdened after doing so...
By the way, if you enjoy this kind of voyeuristic look into the secret lives of others, you would appreciate the Found books and magazines put out by Davy Rothbart.
monday june 19
Artists aren’t generally known for business savvy, but if you’re serious about getting your work out there and taking it as far as you can, then marketing, accounting, and the law will have a big impact on your otherwise creative life.
Several staff members at the Library – themselves artists and artisans – have developed the Artist Resource Guide: Books and Web Resources for the Working Artist to help budding Vincents become their own Theos. The Guide collects a wide range of titles and links on one convenient web page, which will be updated periodically.
Here are just a few of the books you'll find:
Living the Artist's Life: A Guide to Growing, Persevering, and Succeeding in the Art World by Paul Dorrell
How to Survive and Prosper As an Artist: Selling Yourself Without Selling Your Soul by Caroll Michels
Crafters' Internet Handbook: Research, Connect and Sell Your Work Online by Genevieve Crabe
Opportunities in Commercial Art and Graphic Design Careers by Barbara Gordon
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saturday june 17
As I was searching the web for ideas to blog about, I ran across a great article on USA TODAY's website that reccomended four great books about the father/child relationship. All four books focus on the lessons that each father taught the author and how each child/author enjoyed spending time with their father.
This got me thinking (which is very dangerous) about things that I learned from my dad when my brother and I would spend our Saturdays at my father's hobby shop. Looking back now, I realize I learned a lot of my work ethic and customer service skills from those Saturdays spent watching him interact with his customers and just how much it meant to get to spend that time with him.
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After my last post, I wanted to know more about ghost towns. I found several cool things, including a series of books on Ohio ghost towns, lots of ghost town and urban exploration sites, and an online photo gallery of many ghost towns in the southwest. I also found Ghosts in the Wilderness: Abandoned America.
Ghosts in the Wilderness is a big format art photography book, so it will take some effort to carry it home. It's worth it! The photographs are a nice blend of color, black and white, sepia and hand tinted. The subject matter is evocative: vacant main streets, flaking interiors, abandoned buildings and rusted out trucks under an endlessly variable Great Plains sky. Pretty pictures of entropy and decay make for an interesting "armchair travel" experience that encapsulates the essence of so many miles of the American West.
friday june 16
The press of bodies, the clamor of the hunters, the excitement of the find. Throngs of people traveled downtown to the Main Library to the Friends' Annual Book Sale for a chance to find and purchase books, movies, and music for just a few dollars.
People performed versions of the shuffle dance to navigate the various areas where materials were stacked and I heard the call "Look what I found!" from every direction. Hunters came with trolleys and shopping carts to lug their trophies home. By end of day, the tired but jublilant hunters departed with promises to continue the pursuit next year.
Many of the treasures at the book sale are also in our collection. Here are a few of the diverse trophies I captured during my hunt
There are always treasures at the Library, don't wait for the book sales to discover this gold mine of entertainment.
thursday june 15
Remember being a little kid and spending delightful hours with your Cinderella or Winnie-the-Pooh pop-up book? Pop-up books have changed! Pop-up artists -- or rather Paper Engineers -- are producing beautiful books worthy of being call works of art.
Robert Sabuda is arguably the best popup artist around. His latest creation, Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Sharks and Other Sea Monsters (with Matthew Reinhart, 2006) is a fascinating, fabulous exploration of sharks, dinosaurs, whales, and mollusks from ancient times to today. For a patriotic boost, look over his America the Beautiful (2004), or enjoy the beauty of snow in Winter's Tale (2005) with illustrations that will leave you speechless.
Also noteworthy, David A. Carter's One Red Dot (2005) has delighted and surprised every audience I have presented it to, of every age.
Of course after seeing these books you will be inspired to make one. The Elements of Pop-Up: A Pop-Up Book for Aspiring Paper Engineers by David A. Carter will show you how.
Paper Engineering for Adults? Of course -- but I prefer "Pop-Ups for Grown-Ups"!
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wednesday june 14
If you are an admirer of edgy, captivating book covers then chances are you have probably eyed books designed by Chip Kidd. Chip Kidd is a graphic designer with Knopf publishers and is regarded by many as the best in the business. He recently put out Volume 1 of a collection of some of his most memorable and provocative covers. Not only are the covers of Chip Kidd's books a visual treat, the inside content is usually pretty interesting- at a recent signing at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, I had the opportunity to ask Chip Kidd whether he reads any of the books whose covers he designs. He replied that he tries to read all of them. Generally, the covers Kidd designs are for books worth reading. Here are a few to try:
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Seek My Face by John Updike
Naked by David Sedaris
and of course, Kidd's own semi-autobiographical novel The Cheese Monkeys
saturday june 10
In the house where I grew up, I could sit on the weathered wooden fence and look across the valley at an apple orchard. That is, I could until about the age of five. After that, the heavy machinery moved in, cut roads, and quick as flowers sprouting, there was a new subdivision. The gnarled apple trees, the brambles, the old stone foundation of a house were all bulldozed under. It was the first time I'd ever lost a place.
In this spirit, I picked up Melissa Holbrook Pierson's The Place You Love is Gone. The book is divided into three sections: her childhood home in Akron, Ohio, her first apartment in New Jersey, and the third part of the book, a history of the towns drowned by New York City's reservoirs. Almost like a book length poem, this isn't a writing style for everyone; it can seem fragmented and hard to follow. It works, however, as meditative blank verse and as the pained whisper of those of us who feel lost, confused and irritated, staring at the subdivision where the orchard used to be.
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friday june 09
If you're getting married this month, or just know someone who is, you're not alone. June is still the most popular month for weddings, although the autumn months are gaining in popularity. Need advice on budgets, dresses, flowers and more? Check out theknot.com, one of the premier bridal sites on the web. The library also has some great resources, including Jo Gartin's Weddings by Jo Gartin, Emily Post's Wedding Etiquette by Peggy Post, and The Complete Wedding Planner by Marjabelle Stewart.
Are you having bizarre dreams about your wedding, in which your entire bridal party dances up the aisle to Rocky Top Tennessee and then has a water pistol fight on the altar? (Unfortunately I did not make this one up--I had this dream four years ago before my own wedding and still can't figure out what it means.) This might mean it's time to put away that mammoth planner that you've been dragging around everywhere and check out these fun reads: Toss the Bride by Jennifer Manske Fenske, Every Boy's Got One by Meg Cabot, Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? by Melissa Senate, and Always the Bridesmaid by Whitney Lyles.
If murder and mayhem are more on your mind (and what bride-to-be hasn't thought of them?) then try these wedding-themed mysteries: Hitched by Carol Higgins Clark, Rituals of the Season by Margaret Maron, The Flaming Luau of Death by Jerrilyn Farmer, and 'Til Death Do Us Part by Kate White.
thursday june 08
I love a book that sneaks up on you. Leafing through the pages of Cass Turnbull's Guide to Pruning I noticed chapter 3 on water sprouts and suckers. Maybe this expert can explain the difference between the two terms.
She did. The good news is that now I know the difference. The bad news is that my pear trees will take a while to recover. I read another chapter and another. A reference to PlantAmnesty made me realize that it might be a good idea to read the Introduction. And the Foreward. And so forth. I did skip the part about pruning escallonia. She lives in Seattle. I live in Cincinnati. Escallonia is not an option for Cincinnati.
Her humor works for me, too. Turnbull has headings like Justifiable Arboricide and quotes the Indian chief in the movie Little Big Man. "It's a good day to die." The line drawn illustrations are perfect. Figure 6.4 shows three uses for retired pruning holsters: a piercing object, Chia Pet, Lunch box. Cute but not over the top.
Turnbull wrote each article for PlantAmnesty's newletter. She digs down to get to the root of pruning problems. She cautions that it sometimes feels counter-intuitve to prune the right way. More importantly, she explains why shearing isn't the best solution and that even pruning won't keep a shrub from growing to its ultimate size.
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The Cincinnati Opera's 2006 Summer Festival begins June 15, and aficionados are checking out books, librettos, and scores to enhance their enjoyment of this year's performances. If you haven't explored the Library's extensive collection, here's a list of titles for the 2006 season.
Tosca by Giacomo Puccini
Puccini: A Biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz
Puccini Without Excuses: A Refreshing Reassessment of the World's Most Popular Composer by William Berger
Tosca's Rome: The Play and the Opera in Historical Perspective by Susan Vandiver Nicassio
Giacomo Puccini, Tosca by Mosco Carner
Tosca: Opera in Three Acts (libretto)
Tosca: Melodramma in Tre Atti (full score)
Tosca: Opera in Three Acts (after the Play by Victorien Sardou) (vocal score)
Tosca: Melodramma in 3 Atti (miniature score)
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wednesday june 07
Caitlin Flanagan is the current feminist whipping girl for her acerbic take on modern day parenting and exploitation of immigrant workers as cheap nannies for upper-middle class households. A collection of articles she has produced over the past few years for The Atlantic and The New Yorker, To Hell With All That celebrates housewives (Erma Bombeck is her inspiration) and stay at home moms.
Flanagan is a contradiction. While idolizing women who give up their careers to be with their small children, she herself has always had help. Even now, with a full time writing gig for national magazines and book publishers, she calls herself a housewife. She scoffs at Martha Stewart's quest for perfection yet succumbs to the allure of a personal organizer. And her own beloved mother fled full time domesticity and found a job when Flanagan was in junior high.
Despite it all, Flanagan's book packs zingers that will resonate with anyone wrestling with modern issues of marriage, family and relationships.
tuesday june 06
Metal clay is a wonderful option for jewelry makers who love silver and gold, but not metalsmithing techniques. If you work with beads or wire, you can use this relatively new medium to design and create your own metal beads, pendants, and other components, instead of having to use whatever is available on the market. And of course you can also produce rings, brooches, decorative objects, and any other items traditionally made by metalsmiths.
Introduced in the 1990s, metal clay consists of silver or gold particles, an organic binding material, and water. When the piece is fired, the binder and water disappear, leaving a solid metal form -- .999 fine silver or 22k to 24k gold. The two product lines, Precious Metal Clay and Art Clay, offer a variety of forms (lump, paste, syringe, “paper” sheets) and several formulas for firing at different temperatures with a kiln, torch, “hot pot,” or even the kitchen stove.
We recently built up our collection of metal clay instruction books, and more are on the way. These books are beautiful as well as helpful, showcasing many gorgeous designs – not always the case, alas, with even the best jewelry-making guides. The titles include:
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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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friday june 02
Every so often I end up with a library receipt on my desk at home with a title circled, spotted with exclamation points and the annotation "Buy This Book!" The Yarn Girls' Guide to Simple Knits by Julie Carles is the most recent of these. I am a relatively new knitter, my first attempt to knit (at age nine, on slippery metal needles with yucky acrylic yarn) having been an abject failure. Now, armed with bamboo needles and much better yarn, I'm a knitting fiend. I have been scouring the knitting books, trying to find a basic book with patterns that straddle the happy medium between "grandma made you this nice cardigan (with intarsia ducks!)" and You Knit What?!
For a beginner like me, one of the great things about this book is the simplicity of the patterns. However, in addition to easy, the projects are also nice-looking. Simple, classic sweater patterns in bulkier yarns that don't look "too bulky" on a solid frame like mine were the initial draw. The thing that sealed the deal was the warm wool cap with earflaps; the top is round not peaked, and it's so cute. I can't wait to knit one for next winter!
Raise your hand if you're gearing up for the World Cup matches in Germany. Thirty-five hundred English fans have been banned from attending because of past bad behavior at previous football (we call it soccer) matches.
Bill Buford was editor of Granta and fiction editor for The New Yorker, and then he gave it all up to study cooking seriously. His book about the learning experience, Heat, got such a good New York Times review that I wanted to read something else he'd written and discovered his 1992 bestseller, Among the Thugs.
Buford had lived in England for fifteen years and never seen a football match. Intrigued by the sight of soccer fans systematically destroying a train, Buford took a package tour to Turin, Italy, with a group of historically violent Manchester United supporters and was carried away by the rioting and looting that followed the game.
Buford's original thought was that the rioters were disenfranchised outsiders who used soccer violence as a way of venting their understandable rage against society. Surprisingly, he found that many of the supporters had high-paying jobs, and he had to find new theories to explain the violence that football engenders around the world. Part of the blame seems to go to the nature of football itself.
Do you remember where you were when the tornado of April 9, 1999 struck southwestern Ohio, causing four deaths and over $25 million in damage? Were you alive during the April 1974 super outbreak of tornadoes, when tornadoes touched down in 13 states, killing 330 people, including 41 in Ohio? If you're fascinated with the science behind tornado formation, or just want some tornado safety tips, visit Tornado FAQ, an informative website designed by the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center.
If you secretly yearn to be a stormchaser, you might want to pick up Mark Svenvold's Big Weather: Chasing Tornadoes in the Heart of America (2005). Or check out Tornado Intercept (2006), a National Geographic DVD that showcases the violent ferocity of these powerful storms. Is fiction more your thing? Then try my personal favorite, Alice Blanchard's The Breathtaker (2003). Here, a smalltown police chief teams up with a scientist to find a serial killer who only strikes during, you guessed it, tornadoes.
By the way, Ohio's peak tornado season runs from April through July, with June being the most active month--so we're not out of the woods yet!
Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen, by Roger Green. Definitely some gems in here, because Green lived in a house that overlooked the singer Leonard Cohen's garden. Also, Green speaks Greek and was able to do translations between Cohen's longtime housekeepers and the very beautiful artist Suzanne Elrod.
The Suzanne from the song, by the way, is a different person from Suzanne Elrod, the mother of Leonard's children, Adam and Lorca, and she still lives part-time on Hydra.
Roger Green befriends Cohen's tenants and gets to sit in Cohen's house a lot. Unfortunately for readers who are primarily Leonard Cohen stalkers or fans, Green is as interested in bananas, and the depiction of bananas in poetry, as he is in Leonard Cohen. Leonard's bananas aren't doing that well. Roger Green is an educated person with an extraordinary opportunity (access to Leonard’s house) rather than a huge writing talent. But if you care about Leonard Cohen you should probably read this book.
thursday may 18
Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden. Neither inspires the personal interest that Kim Jong Il, North Korea's evil "Dear Leader" does.
Some think he's crazy, but this may be an act. It could just be his haircut. It makes sense to appear crazy if you have nuclear weapons, because no sane world leader would actually detonate one.
Here are some books in the library that discuss Kim Jong Il, and what may happen after the 65-year-old leader meets his maker:
Rogue Regime : Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, by Jasper Becker. Jay Freeman of Booklist describes this as a "frightening and depressing account of both the domestic and foreign policies of a society and government." Other books in the library's collection include:
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