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.”
Still, you can’t help but feel sorry for him as he falls flat on his face and tries to turn his life around. His memoir continues with a new career as a Hollywood screenwriter in The Sound of No Hands Clapping.
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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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Posted by Denise
