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The current mania for multitasking has contributed to a growing demand for audiobooks at public libraries. In particular, the CD format is popular with commuters, joggers and everyone else who abhors the wastefulness of doing just one thing at a time. Each month I spend about 15 hours on the road, enough time to listen to at least one book on CD. A few weeks ago I happened to get two that I'd been eagerly awaiting: Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. As I listened to one and then the other, comparisons were inevitable. Each book is a collection of humorous autobiographical essays written by a gay man in his 40s. Both authors began their writing careers in New York City, but both have Southern connections: Sedaris grew up in North Carolina, while Burroughs's mother was from the South. Both men write with caustic but affectionate humor about friends and family members. Other shared topics in these collections include apartment cleaners (Sedaris worked as one; Burroughs hired a particularly manipulative one), the drowning of a mouse (in two very different circumstances) and moments in childhood when each realized that he would never be like other boys. While superficially similar, Sedaris and Burroughs differ in some crucial ways. Sedaris grew up in a large, fairly traditional family. He was in his 20s before his father told him to move out; he didn't learn until later that it was because he was gay. When Burroughs was 12, his mother entrusted him to the care of her eccentric psychiatrist. In the disorder and anarchy of the doctor's house, children did as they pleased, rarely attending school. No one interfered when one of the doctor's former patients, a middle-aged man, began sexually abusing Augusten. Burroughs described his adolescence in the darkly comic Running with Scissors (2002), which was followed by his memoir of alcoholism, Dry (2003). His writing reflects a level of angst commensurate with his abnormal upbringing. While Sedaris can be self-deprecating, his writing rarely veers into downright insecurity. Nor is he quite as preoccupied with his own idiosyncrasies, preferring to focus on those of the people around him. When he turned 18, Burroughs legally changed his name, thus obscuring the identities of both his original and adopted families. Sedaris, on the other hand, regularly subjects his family members to public humiliation; they now keep their guard up when he visits, lest their foibles make it into his next book. Burroughs worked in advertising before deciding to write his first book, the novel Sellevision (2000). The title of his latest book comes from his belief that he can achieve anything simply by thinking hard enough about it, whether it be the sale of a manuscript or the death of a former boss. (He also has a fascinating theory about Baby Jesus and a cow.) Sedaris's writing first achieved attention while he still worked as an apartment cleaner. Unlike Burroughs, he has only written essays and stories; previous collections include Barrel Fever and Me Talk Pretty One day. A key component of the audiobook experience is the choice of narrator. While a skilled performer can bring any author's work to life, sometimes there is no substitute for the voice of the author himself, particularly when the material is autobiographical. Both Sedaris and Burroughs are seasoned performers of their own work. Sedaris, who has been reading his essays and stories publicly for many years, has mastered the nuances of spoken humor. Burroughs's interpretation of his own work, while usually entertaining, sometimes comes across as forced. However, both writers excel at imitating the quirky characters in their lives. As a bonus on the last CD of Magical Thinking, Burroughs reads the first draft of a forthcoming essay. The disc also includes a lengthy conversation in which his agent asks him questions and has him respond to word-association cues. These two writers will not appeal to everyone. If you are offended by coarse language or references to homosexual behavior, these are not the books for you. But anyone else who enjoys darkly humorous autobiography would do well to give both these writers a listen.
Being a pedestrian kind of a guy, I don’t know much about film or cinema theory. I’ll leave that kind of “how many producers can dance on the head of a pin” to the experts. I do like movies and watch them to be entertained. If I’m informed or enlightened along the way in a painless manner, that’s fine. Here I’m going to be talking about a movie about books and a book about movies. “Stone Reader” Produced and directed by Mark Moskowitz, 2002. Mark Moskowitz made his living doing film documentaries for corporations and politicians. Besides that, all his life he has been a reading fool, as I am. He’s the kind of man who, if he likes a book, buys multiple inexpensive used copies to give away to his friends. In 1972 when Mr. Moskowitz was 18 he bought a book called “The Stones of Summer” by Dow Mossman, based on a glowing review by the New York Times. It just didn’t catch his interest and he tossed the book aside. Over the next 30 years it was packed and re-packed through move after move. On the shelves and off the shelves from one end of the United States to the other. Then something funny happened. Mark Moskowitz took the book on a trip and became enamored with the story and lost in the prose. Mr. Moskowitz was hungry for more work by this author. He went to the Internet to see what else the man had written and found… nothing. Very little biographical information and no stream of articles or books. Dow Mossman had apparently vanished off the face of the earth. So this is a kind of mystery. What happened to Dow Mossman? Mr. Moskowitz tracks down Mossman’s agent, editor, publisher, mentor and fellow students at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Along the way he looks at how voracious readers are encouraged by schools, libraries and parents. He also looks at other “one shot authors”. Mr. Moskowitz does find Dow Mossman. You will find out what internal and external forces crushed such a promising beginning. In the end, there is a glimmer of a resurrection of a writing career. I recommended this movie to a co-worker and she thanked me and said it made her cry. She cried because she was happy to find that in America there are occasionally second acts. “Best in Show; The Films of Christopher Guest and Company” by John Kenneth Muir. Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2004. This author has written a long list of books on the movies. In this one he looks at the work of Christopher Guest, particularly his films “This is Spinal Tap” (1984), “Waiting for Guffman” (1997), “Best in Show” (2000) and “A Mighty Wind” (2003). The library system has all these films on DVD, VHS or both. Guest’s films are sometimes referred to as “mockumentaries” though that’s a term he doesn’t particularly care for. Guest more agrees with the critics and actors who see his films as “affectionate,” “reality plus one step further,” “very human” or “comedy done in a documentary style.” Actor Bob Balaban observed that the characters are “…somewhat misguided. They are trying to do something that they don’t really know how to do, or they’re doing it in a way that won’t quite get them what they want. But there’s something very endearing about it.” Either through lack of talent or luck, the characters usually fail, but by gosh, they give it their best shot. Guest’s method of working is fascinating. He sits down with a writer having in mind a setting. Rock band, small town community theatre, dog shows or folk singer’s reunion. There’s a very loose story line and a far more detailed back story for all the major characters. Pages and pages of back story. Once he decides on an actor for a particular part he and the actor fill in more back story. A scene is decided upon, the actors assemble and then they improvise. No script. This results in perhaps a hundred hours of film that is winnowed down to 90 minutes. Hence the feeling of immediacy and the amateur edge that are the trademarks of Guest’s films. Mr. Muir's book is slightly disappointing in that very few quotes are attributable directly to Guest. He's a private kind of a guy, but it was also clear that he encouraged his friends to talk about him and his films without restraint. An enthusiastic and affectionate treatment of the films of Christopher Guest. You may be unaware of the Timberland library system’s rich movie collection. The number of classic and current DVDs and videos is truly staggering. I recently ran across a copy of a Lillian Gish in a 1927 silent I had never heard of before. “The Wind.” Cool tornado. Perhaps you’ve dropped by your branch and not seen too much on the shelves. That’s because those in the know (and you want to be in the “know,” don’t you?) place holds on the titles they would like to see. Look in the Timberland catalog under the subject headings “Feature Films” or “DVD Collection.” There they all are. You can either place holds from your home Internet computer by accessing the catalog at www.trlib.org or stop by your local branch and a staff member will be more than happy to show you how to place a hold.
“Feeling the Heat; Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change” edited by Jim Motavalli. Routledge, 2004. I run across these little news items on the Internet: 30,000 nesting pelicans disappear from North Dakota. Greenland’s ice is melting ten times faster than earlier research had indicated. The entire avian ecosystem of Scotland’s Northern Isles has collapsed. I pause and a feeling of unfocused anxiety steals over me. This book gives focus to free-floating disquiet. Feeling the Heat is a collection of ten written essays and one photo essay by different contributors, mainly environmental journalists and researchers who have been published in “E/The Environmental Magazine,” which has won awards for style and content. Each author explores some aspect of climate change in a different part of the world. In the Antarctic, the ice cap is breaking up and floating out to sea. The coral reefs are dying in Florida, Australia and Fiji. Holland and Venice make serious preparation for rising ocean levels while New York City does not, as the United States seems to be the only country in the world still in denial. Along the California coast, parts of the food chain are collapsing as other animals and plants move higher or further north. There is a chapter about the shrinking glaciers right here in our own Pacific Northwest. It’s the glaciers and snow pack that keep us in drinking water during the long summer. Our population is increasing, the glaciers are shrinking and even what snow pack there is has less water content than in previous years. Our lilacs now bloom more than a week earlier than they did back in the 1960’s. At first glance, that doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing, as long as we have the water to keep them alive. This is the thing about climate change. Lilacs bloom earlier, isolated bird populations collapse here and there and a variety of warmth loving butterfly moves into Yakima and Walla Walla from the south. Insignificant seeming things. But how long will it be before the Rattle Snakes of eastern Washington decide to pay us a visit? When the wet side of the mountains is no longer so wet and cold? More books on global climate change “The
Whale and the Supercomputer: On the northern front of climate change” by
Charles Wohlfort, 2004. “Frozen
Earth: The once and future story of ice ages” by J.D. Macdougall, 2004. “The
Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming” by
Davis G. Victor. 2001.
I am fascinated by disasters, real or imagined. Be it earthquake, flood, towering inferno, asteroid hit or impending ice age I’m lining up to read the book or see the movie. Why are we so interested? I think part of it is the more information we have, the more likely we are to survive. And maybe be a touch heroic along the way. Sometimes, great disasters quickly fade from human memory. Why? At the beginning of the 20th century, the ship Gen. Slocum burned to the waterline in New York’s East River killing almost as many people as the Titanic. In the 1940’s in Hartford, Connecticut, there was a circus fire with many lives lost. Timberland Library has books on both of these events. If disasters can be considered a genre, here are two more entries. “The
Sinking of the Eastland, America’s Forgotten Tragedy” by Jay Bonansinga.
(Citadel Press, 2004) and Jay Bonansinga lives in Chicago and is the award-winning author of several novels. “The Sinking of the Eastland, America’s Forgotten Tragedy” is his first venture into non-fiction. He wrote this book with the cooperation and support of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society. On a July day in 1915, over 2,000 employees of Western Electric in Chicago prepared to board boats to take them to an annual company picnic. Just as boarding was completed one of the ships, The Eastland, began to list and in minutes had rolled on it’s side and capsized. 844 people were drowned on a ship that never left the dock. Thousands of horrified onlookers observed the rescue and recovery efforts for those trapped below decks. Mr. Bonansinga provides a fast paced minute-by-minute account drawn from the reminisces of survivors, family members of victims and the rescuers. He also examines why the tragedy was forgotten so soon unlike the Titanic. He speculates that the reasons “…have to do with our national preference for celebrity over substance, our willingness to replace our awareness of one day’s tragedy with the next day’s concerns…” The author also explores the theory that the Titanic contributed to the Eastland’s sinking. The abundance of lifeboats mandated since the Titanic disaster made the Eastland top-heavy. John Nance is a Northwest author who has written several novels with an aeronautical theme. He is also the aviation analyst “talking head” for ABC News. And he is the author of a little known nonfiction work called “On Shaky Ground” that explores the possibility of a great quake in the Pacific Northwest. “Saving Cascadia” is a work of fiction. In 1700 Cascadia Subduction Zone slipped. This triggered an earthquake that toped .8 on the Richter Scale and probably lasted for around 5 minutes. Huge chunks of the Washington coast rose or fell. The resulting tsunami swept away villages in Japan. By studying core samples, scientists have determined that these “great quakes” occur every 300 to 500 years. It has been 305 years since the last one. John Nance has written a fictionalized account of what such a quake would be like if it happened today. There’s a large cast of interesting characters racing to save themselves and others. The story leaps from cliffhanger to cliffhanger as heroes and heroines struggle to head off total disaster. The aviation factor in this novel revolves around medical transport helicopters. The villain is a rich resort owner who refuses to evacuate his staff and guests in the face of impending danger. There was a recent television mini-series that explored the possibility of a great west coast quake. The critics laughed and dismissed the whole thing, as the science was a little faulty. John Nance points out in his Author’s Note that in the interest of fictional tension, the science in his book is also a bit faulty. But Mr. Nance also points out that there really is a Cascadia Subduction Zone that triggers a “great quake” every 300 to 500 years. Having read a great deal of disaster literature, I have come to realize that survivability is pretty much a crapshoot. But sometimes just a bit of knowledge and a little preparation can make the difference between an adventure and a disaster. --L. Hamburg * If you liked The Da Vinci Code, or—What to read while waiting for your copy. Thriller/Mystery Judging from the length of the hold lists at the library, many of us have discovered other books by Dan Brown besides his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. They are well written, have good, can’t-put-it-down plots, somewhat mysterious and interesting subject matter, characters we find real yet fascinating, and they are very well researched. Many events and organizations that you think may have been fabricated for the sake of the book turn out to be real. Brown’s Angels and Demons is also about Robert Langdon, the main character in The Da Vinci Code. Brown makes references in The Da Vinci Code to events in Angels and Demons, so it is something of a sequel. Although the plot is fraught with mysterious groups and individual agendas, somehow Brown brings it together to form a satisfying whole. One of Brown’s strengths is to bring historical mysteries into a modern setting. The Da Vinci Code uses the Priory of Sion; Angels and Demons uses the Illuminati. In Deception Point, it’s current politics and NASA with an object buried deep in the Arctic ice that will prove that extraterrestrial life exists. Brown’s first novel, Digital Fortress, involves computers, the Internet and encryption technology. Those who like the fast paced aspect of The Da Vinci Code will also enjoy his other titles. If your imagination was captured by the mystery of the secret society and speculation about the historical Jesus, Dan Brown has provided a good list of factual explorations on the topic: The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince; The Woman With the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail by Margaret Starbird; The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine by Margaret Starbird, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. (one of Brown’s characters, Leigh Teabing, is an anagram of Leigh and Baigent.) I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail over 15 years ago and still remember it as an exhaustively researched, fascinating exploration of the possible histories of Jesus and clandestine societies such as the Templars, the Masons and others. It should be noted that those who hold strongly with literal biblical interpretation would find much to argue with. Being a history buff, I enjoyed the historical aspects of The Da Vinci Code. It almost seems like an alternate history, or at least a history that didn’t get much play in any book on Western Civilization that I ever read. Other intellectual thrillers with historical underpinnings are The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, and A Case of Curiosities and The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil. Judith Merkle Riley has some interesting historical novels that often have an arcane touch: In Pursuit of the Green Lion, The Oracle Glass, The Serpent Garden, The Master of All Desires, and A Vision of Light. Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book and Lincoln’s Dreams, and Vonda McIntyre’s The Moon and the Sun, both use historical settings to tell cryptic tales. If you want to go a little farther into the realm of fantasy fiction, try The Adept series by Katherine Kurtz and Deborah Turner Harris; The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper; or, an oldie but a goodie, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength). Terry Brooks has a good vs. evil series going with three titles, Running With the Demon, A Knight of the Word and Angel Fire East. In the read-alikes category, Lewis Perdue claims that The Da Vinci Code was stolen from his novel The Da Vinci Legacy but the two are very different, although similar in some ways. Although I found Perdue to be a little formulaic, both his The Da Vinci Legacy and Daughter of God have interesting plots, as does Codex by Lev Grossman. This just came out in 2004 and may have been a bid to capture some of the Dan Brown audience, but it succeeds on its own merits as well. You will also want to check out books by the authors John Case and Daniel Silva. Both are comparable in subject as well as pace. To find other read-alikes of your favorite novels, delve into the library’s online reference resources or ask at your library for suggestions. All of the titles mentioned in this article can be found at the Timberland Regional Library, many of them in audio as well as print editions. --Heather King * Selected adults’ and children’s books about knitting. 746, 746.432, E Book list:
No longer the sole province of moms and grandmas, knitting is enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Twenty-somethings, teens and kids are discovering the pleasurable sound of clicking needles and the satisfaction of completing a project. But if mom, grandma or the neighbors can’t knit, the wannabe knitter can turn to a wide range of books for instruction and inspiration. Stitch n’ Bitch by Debbie Stoller is a great resource for older teens and twenty-somethings. (The title is borrowed from the knitting club Stoller started with friends.) It has solid, step-by-step instructions for casting-on, knitting, purling, increasing and decreasing – the building blocks of any knitted item. But you get more than basics -- she includes directions for more than 20 knitting projects from the easy Go-Go Garter Stitch Scarf to the more difficult Wonder Woman bikini. Stoller also tells how she learned to knit, gives a brief history of knitting and dispenses advice. A particularly good feature is the chapter on the world of knitting, including Internet sites, listservs and blogs. Teens will want to check out Hip to Knit by Judith L. Swartz. It doesn’t teach you to knit, but does have 18 projects. Swartz includes tips on making a project fit – essential since getting knitted items to fit can be tricky. She also discusses some beyond-the-basics techniques like combining yarns and felting (knitting large and shrinking to size). Some of the projects included are: the Bare Necessities Purse, Mismatched Striped Socks and Boyfriend Sweater. Younger kids aren’t left out – two particularly good instruction books are aimed squarely at them. Kids Knitting by Melanie Falick and Kids Can Knit by Carolyn Clewer teach knitting basics with clear writing, drawings of the various techniques and great photographs. Both discuss basic tools and techniques and offer interesting projects to choose from. Falick relates a brief history of knitting and discusses the different kinds of plants and fibers that can become yarn. Carolyn Clewer shows kids how to make their own yarn from old clothing or even plastic bags. “Kids Knitting” gives direction for making a pocket scarf, bath puppets, and a wizard’s cap. If you’ve ever wanted to knit a fried egg, “Kids Can Knit” tells you how – or you can knit up a plaid poncho instead. Both books offer a sweater pattern for the final project. Last, I can’t pass up an opportunity to recommend two terrific picture books that feature knitting. Terri Sloat’s Farmer Brown Shears His Sheep gets us to consider a sheep’s point of view. Once Farmer Brown removes the wool from his sheep, they get cold. They follow him around as he delivers the wool and as it is washed and carded, spun and dyed. All the while, the sheep cry, “Baaa! We want it back!” Eventually, Farmer Brown notices their plight and returns the wool to them – in a slightly different form. This is a fun and funny story with wonderful illustrations. The Red Wolf by Margaret Shannon is a fairy tale that celebrates the power of knitting. Roselupin finds herself locked in a tower by her father, the king. A basket of yarn is provided for her entertainment. She soon knits up a wolf suit (which happens to be magical) and escapes from the tower. While she enjoys an unlimited diet and total freedom, her adventurous paradise eventually unravels. She reverts to human form and is returned, only to be locked up in an even bigger tower. Again, Roselupin knits a magical garment – this time for the king. He gets his comeuppance and Roselupin wins her freedom for good. Anyone can join in the fun of learning to knit – or at the very least, reading a good book about the old craft that is new again. --Linda Conroy * Selected Books for Discussion Groups: “Book Discussion Groups & Their Books.” Fiction & Nonfiction Book groups and clubs abound in America today. They are sponsored by libraries, bookstores, organizations, and television talk show hosts as well as enjoyed among friends and colleagues. The book group as a social and literary entity has been around since before the 18th century, which saw the rise in popularity of European literary salons. In the United States, bestselling books were an outcome of the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, both founded in the late 1920s. These subscription book groups provided affordable reading to millions of Americans alongside the uniquely American free public library system. In 1996, Oprah Winfrey re-energized book groups as a national pastime with “The Oprah Book Club”. If you, dear reader, wish to be in a book group, there is no dearth of opportunity! Currently, the Timberland Regional Library system sponsors 25monthly “PageTurners” book discussion groups in 22 libraries in Thurston, Lewis, Pacific, Mason, and Grays Harbor Counties. The meetings are always open to new participants. (See www.trlib.org/PageTurners.asp) Local bookstores, such as Barnes & Noble and Fireside in Olympia, sponsor numerous book discussion groups. Most groups meet monthly. Private book clubs often combine book discussion with time devoted to social chat and food—especially dessert! Many publishers, such as Random House and Penguin/Putnam have enhanced reading experiences by including reading guides that contain discussion questions, background notes, and author biographies. Book group guides abound on the Internet. Among the most popular are the Timberland library-sponsored subscription reference resource “NoveList” at www.trlib.org (your Timberland library card gets you in) and websites such as www.readinggroupguides.com and www.bookbrowser.com There are numerous books devoted to helping book groups. In one (The Reading Group Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Start Your Own Book Club), author Rachel W. Jacobsohn states: “A good book is a gift to be appreciated by the mind, the body, and the soul”. She even invites her readers to write to her about their groups’ “policies, reading choices, stumbling blocks and…successes.” What makes a good discussion book? Ellen Moore and Kira Stevens, authors of Good Books Lately: the One-Stop Resource for Book Groups and Other Greedy Readers, list the eight most popular book discussion group genres as: the classic literary novel, contemporary literary novels, short story collections, popular paperbacks, the memoir/autobiography, the creative essay/creative nonfiction, and strict nonfiction-historical story. Nancy Pearl (author of Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason and recently-retired Executor Director of the Washington State Center for the Book) says that good discussion books usually have all four of what she calls “the four appeals”: a great story, a remarkable setting, unforgettable characters, and a great writing style. Here is a short list of books that have these appeals and are popular with book groups. There are so many more! Summaries can be found in Timberland’s online library catalog. (www.trlib.org) Fiction
Nonfiction
-- Jean D. Barnett * Selected Cookbooks: Real Food Fast. 641 "Hey, Mom, when’s dinner?" Is this a nightly refrain at your house? With kids, a spouse and a full-time job, it can be difficult to get a healthy, filling dinner on the table quickly before everyone disperses for homework, sports, yard work, and a complicated family social calendar. Not to mention, after another hectic workday, even moms need time to relax. Thanks to a recent spate of "quick" cookbooks, help is on the way. Many of the following authors claim you will have dinner on the table in under an hour and, for the most part, they succeed. Some of these cookbooks rely heavily on packaged or processed foods while others try to stay as close to fresh as possible. What, then, constitutes "quick" cooking? According to the introduction in The Quick Recipe (Boston Common Press, 2003), a new cookbook by the editors of "Cook’s Illustrated Magazine," the definition of a quick recipe is that it’s worth the effort, ready to serve in less than 60 minutes and does not have a laundry list of ingredients. One of their tricks is to pair high quality convenience products, such as canned beans and diced tomatoes, with fresh ingredients. Three successful recipes in this book are Crispy Noodle Cake with Spicy Stir-Fried Chicken and Bok Choy, Toasted Orzo Pilaf with Peas and Parmesan, and Mashed Sweet Potatoes. The ingredients are indeed fresh, the techniques are fairly quick, and the quality of the food is excellent, but these recipes often take up to an hour or more to get on the table, especially if a lot of chopping is necessary. While an hour’s worth of cooking may be fine, some nights are more hurried than others and something a bit faster is necessary. That’s the time to pull out Desperation Dinners (Workman, 1997) and Desperation Entertaining (Workman, 2002). Beverly Mills and Alicia Ross have created these books based on their syndicated column. Mills and Ross "teach you how to use what you have in the kitchen to put a healthy, home-cooked meal on the table in 20 minutes flat" with a limited reliance on processed food. Some of the best recipes include Anti-Stress Antipasto, French Peasant Supper, Mindless Mu-Shu and Pasta with Cabernet Sauce and Sausage, but there are many more excellent choices that really are ready in the time it takes to boil pasta. Another new cookbook to use on these ultra-quick occasions is Betty Crocker’s Quick & Easy Cookbook (Betty Crocker, 2002). While many of the recipes do rely on packaged foods, such as canned soup, there are enough recipes free of ultra-processed food to make this cookbook worthwhile. In addition, nutrition information is included for those with special dietary needs. Some of the better recipes are New England Baked Bean Stew, Antipasto French Bread Pizzas and Angel Hair Pasta with Fresh Basil, Avocado and Tomatoes. Rachael Ray is a new guru of fast and healthy cooking. Her cookbooks 30-Minute Meals (Lake Isle Press, 1999) and Comfort Foods (Lake Isle Press, 2001) are based on her Food Network TV show, "30 Minute Meals." While some of her recipes are available at www.foodtv.com, having the books on a nearby shelf is very convenient for a quick perusal of such family favorites as Meatloaf Patties & Smashed Potatoes with Scallions and Manny's Manly Meat Sauce & Rigatoni. There are, of course, many books that include quick recipes, but don’t have hurry-up cooking as their primary theme. French Food at Home (William Morrow, 2003) is a new cookbook by Laura Calder that has an entire chapter called "Dinner Fairly Fast." These recipes, such as Leek Tart, Bacon Cod and Pickle Chops, rely on a few quality ingredients cooked quickly to produce classical results. The All New Good Housekeeping Cook Book (Hearst Books, 2001) edited by Susan Westmoreland contains an abundance of recipes, many of them fast. Included in this modern all-purpose cookbook are Ham and Grits with Red-Eye Gravy, New Chicken Cordon Bleu and Steak with Red Wine Sauce. Some other unexpected sources of quick cooking rely on breakfast foods. Because eggs, waffles and the like are inherently fast, breakfast-for-dinner can be on the table in record time. Two of the best are Mollie Katzen’s Sunlight Café (Hyperion, 2002) and Marie Simmons’ The Good Egg (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). A sampling of recipes includes Oatmeal Waffles, Spring Frittata and Pumpkin Muffins from Katzen, and Cheddar Scrambled Eggs in Tortillas with Tomato-Avocado Salsa, Bacon, Avocado & Brie Omelette and Eggs Cooked in Savory Toast with Parmesan, Walnuts & Prosciutto from Simmons. On those hurried weeknights when the full meal deal is not possible and the drive-through leaves you cold, these quick cookbooks will help you serve up real food fast. Your family will thank you and you’ll still have time to enjoy the rest of your evening. --Cindi Carey * Selected Travel: Read Your Way Through China. Nonfiction (915) and FictionDo you dream of traveling to exotic destinations? Consider traveling through China in comfort and style: Just pack up some books, hike over to your favorite armchair, and settle in. This article reviews five books on China written from various perspectives and in various eras. The first two are from diaries written three-quarters of a century apart. The other three offer different viewpoints of life on the Yangtze River. Preview of the titles: Vanished Kingdoms by Mabel H. Cabot (2003) begins in 1921. Frederick Wulsin, under the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society, began a five-month exploration and biological specimen gathering venture in the province of Shansi, a journey of 525 miles from Peking. He and his wife, Janet, marched the entire length of the province and camped in 29 different places. A subsequent grant from the Society funded an additional two-year trip into the Kwiechow region of southwest China into the Gobi desert. The extraordinary part is that the book is written from Janet Wulsin’s diaries. As Cabot states, “Women explore differently from men; they often let their instincts guide them following the trail wherever it leads. Janet Wulsin was no exception.” Janet took many of the photographs in an era when travel to Tibet was true exploration. They were allowed to photograph the interiors of many Tibetan lamaseries, including Kumbum, Labrang, and Choni, some no longer in existence. The Wulsin Collection was donated to the Harvard Peabody Museum in the 1950s. It contained more than 1,900 photographs, negatives, and lanternslides, many of which were used in this book. Their photographs are unique because they offer a rare glimpse of a part of China’s visual past that few westerners have experienced. Edited by Janet’s daughter, Mabel. H. Cabot, Vanished Kingdoms tells of a journey made on foot, by camel, mule train, and on rafts outfitted with inflated yak skins, carrying the 1,400 specimens in crates waterproofed with pigs blood. Janet worked along with Frederick in preserving specimens and developing and cataloging photographs on the strenuous trip. Janet’s diaries and letters are as illustrative as the photos themselves. She writes of the festival of Cham-ngyon-wa at a Buddhist lamasery at Choni. Towering panels made of chilled yak butter featuring astrological and mythological deities are illuminated at night by yak butter candles. The heat of the candles rotated a little prayer wheel of the temple, inscribed with the traditional prayer, “oh, lotus flower, Amen.” This book is meant to be savored in small pieces like a fine chocolate, so that you may enjoy all the photographs and delightful narrative from a more slowly paced life than that of the 21st century. Another travel diarist, Paul Theroux, also covered the far corners of China from Tibet to Shanghai, but using a more modern mode of transportation, the railroad. Theroux travels all the major rail lines of China in the late 1980s, after Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Riding the Iron Rooster (published in 1988). He weaves historical background and unusual facts into his tale, delivering a series of unique snapshots of almost every part of the country. From Qindao, the site of a German governor’s residence, modeled after the Kaiser’s palace, to the fact that that the Chinese find it useful to manufacture steam engines, spittoons and quill pens for modern day use, this book is an enticing journey describing many a traveler’s frustration and delight. A good travel journal not only paints a picture of the country, but can also give autobiographical insights into the author’s life. Because, as Theroux states, “Travel is frequently a matter of seizing the moment. It is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. Our accounts of the journeys would be different.” Theroux’s quote exemplifies his travel style, a journey of personal interactions with the Chinese, making it an epic of China itself, not just another travelogue. Indeed, China’s name, The Middle Kingdom, referring to the ancient theory of a flat earth surrounded by inhospitable and unearthly borders, still describes the vastness of Theroux’s present day journey. In the center of the Middle Kingdom is the Yangtze River. The following three titles show the interweaving of the past and present in life on the river. In The River at the Center of the World (1996), author Simon Winchester, the Asia-Pacific editor of Conde Nast Traveler, a geologist by training, and a 10 year resident of Hong Kong, travels up the 3,900 miles of the Yangtze with his Chinese guide, Lily. Winchester writes about everything along the riverbank, narrating historical incidents and tales embedded in the river. He relates the geologist’s view of the formation of the Great Bend (of the river) at Shigu, “…simply the work of tectonics…” But there is also the Chinese legend: the Great Bend is the work of an emperor, Yu the Great, who placed Cloud Mountain at the point of the bend to keep the river from flowing out of China. Traveling to the headwaters of the Yangtze in Tibet, Winchester experiences weather extremes, car breakdowns, the bureaucracy of the Chinese police, and the beauty of the alpine-like peaks of the Tanggula Range; all in the center of the Middle Kingdom. Peter Hessler’s book, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001), depicts life in one place on the Yangtze River, Fuling, an industrial city in Sichuan province. It is a place that has not been visited by waiguoron, or foreigners, for the last 50 years. Hessler, a Peace Corps volunteer, writes a thoughtful and humorous memoir of his experience teaching American and English literature to rural students of the Fuling Teachers College. He writes, “Few passengers embark at Fuling…and so Fuling appears like a break in a dream—the quiet river, the cabins full of travelers drifting off to sleep, the lights of the city rising from the blackness of the Yangtze.” Yet Fuling is a culturally changed town in the aftermath of the death of Deng Xiaopeng, the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, and plans to construct the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze. Many of the residents of Fuling face resettlement from the construction of the dam, originally proposed by Sun Yat-Sen in 1919. Known to the local townspeople as Ho Wei, Hessler gradually overcomes the local resistance to waiguron, eating in local noodle shops and conversing with those curious about his daily journal writing. While learning about a new culture, he teaches his students Beowulf and Shakespeare. The continual conflict between communist ideology and the liberal influence of Peace Corps volunteers was most aptly characterized in the English department’s banning of the staging of a Chinese version of Don Quixote. Hessler says, “…without our influence there certainly would not have been a Communist Party member with the English name Mo Money,” the star of the production. A young American engineer envisions the Three Gorges Dam in John Hersey’s fiction work, A Single Pebble (1956). The dam would change a way of life endured for centuries by villagers along the Yangtze. The engineer, also the narrator of the story, travels in a junk pulled by 40 trackers, men who manually tow barges and junks across the rapids and gorges of the Yangtze River. His task is to find the best spot for a hydroelectric project. Of the path the trackers follow through one gorge, he says, “Chinese rivermen had been satisfied for a millennium—for more than 5 times the age of my native country—to use this awful way of getting through the Wind-Box Gorge.” “Old Big,” the owner of the junk, his wife Su-ling, the cook, and the head tracker, Old Pebble, draw the young engineer into the rhythm of river culture, and he emerges in awe of the cliffs of the Three Gorges. He says, “My career, engineering, seemed only nonsense here. Nothing—absolutely nothing—could be done by man’s puny will for this harsh valley littered with gigantic rocks.” Although the engineer writes a favorable report for building the dam, “It was dismissed and I was tagged by sound men as impractical…The dam is still to be built. It will be, one day—of that I am sure.” Beautifully written, the book is still relevant to the eternal conflicts of man versus nature, and progress versus traditional culture. --Rosemary Conor * Selected World War I: In Flanders Fields. Nonfiction and Fiction; Various mediaIf you are in the mood for a different kind of armchair travel, I suggest creating your own kind of “time traveling” via a smorgasbord of materials, chosen intentionally to facilitate your exploration of that eternal question: “What must it have been like to have lived back then?” Delving into some background will allow you to embed yourself in the time period – and will allow you to kinesthetically feel closer to the characters – and to the real people – you will encounter in your reading. The first thing is to pick a time. For the purposes of this review, I have chosen the period of World War I – it is becoming so remote from our current generations as to seem almost incomprehensible. Next, you want to choose a range of material from different genres to try to evoke for yourself a good understanding of the period. Here are my choices (and why): Check out the Web: www.firstworldwar.com - this is an excellent site for all kinds of multimedia information on the Great War. Especially interesting are the audio and video clips. Then spend some time with Fields of Memory: A Testimony to the Great War, by Anne Roze (1999) – for photographs of the battlefields of France as they are now. For contrast, go through the encyclopedic World War I In Photographs (Carlton Books, 2002). These photos will give you real faces to remember as you read about the fictional characters in the novels. Next, take some time to either read or listen to the poetry of the lost poets of WW I – there were some great ones, and their verses, penned in the trenches, are a powerful testament to the loss of their talent. I recommend Great Poets of World War I, by Jon Stallworthy (2002). If you’re up for it, try a biography for the period. One that will give a slightly different perspective is Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, published first in 1970. The book has also been recorded on cassette. London Film Productions made the book into a film that is available at the library. Brittain was a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse, who lost her fiancé, her brother, and her closest friend in the War. (Did you know that Great Britain lost 658,000 in those 4 years of war?) This memoir is a vivid evocation of the passionate feelings and convictions of ‘The Lost Generation.” Now you’re ready to “time travel” with these fiction works that I recommend as the “best of the best:”
This multilayered, multimedia kind of “time travel” is guaranteed to make your reading of great novels even more enjoyable – by providing a rich bed of context. But be careful! It may take you in directions you had never imagined! Just don’t forget to come back…--Pat Chupa What to Read Next? Library Offers Online Help for Curious Readers. TRL Online Book & Author Information
"I've read all of Tony Hillerman's books. Who else writes mysteries set in the Southwest and featuring Navajo Indians?"
"My book group is discussing Cry, the Beloved Country. Where can I find information about the author?"
"I read a wonderful book 20 years ago, but I can't remember the author or the title. Can you help me find it?"
Yes! At Timberland Regional Library we can help you find all this and more. Better still, you can help yourself to a wealth of information online anytime. Just go to www.trlib.org and click on "Reference Resources" to get started.
Timberland subscribes to three databases designed especially for readers. These are available on computers at all 27 libraries, but you can also use them at home, at work or wherever you have Internet access and a library card.
The most versatile of these databases is called NoveList. When you click on the Start button, you'll see a number of ways to search. For the Tony Hillerman question, you can choose the first link, "Find a Favorite Author."
A search for Tony Hillerman results in 18 titles. Clicking on the first one, The Blessing Way, you'll see a button at the top of the page that says "Find Similar Books." Clicking there, you'll get a list of subject headings.
If you select the subjects "Mystery stories, American"; "Navajo Indians"; and "New Mexico," the NoveList search engine returns a list of hundreds of titles. High on the list are books by Aimee and David Thurlo, featuring Ella Clah, a detective with the Navajo Police.
Another way to find similar authors on NoveList is to look at the "Author Read-alikes." This link from the main search page brings up dozens of articles, listed alphabetically by author. Each article describes the author's books and suggests similar writers.
NoveList is also a great resource for finding those elusive titles of books read long ago. Using the "Describe a Plot" search, you can enter a series of words describing what you remember about the book. Narrow your search, if desired, by limiting it to certain age levels, publication years or even the number of pages.
Recently a woman called the library looking for a book she remembered about a magician who was a serial killer. In NoveList I entered the plot words "magician serial killer."
The first book that came up was The Vanished Man by Jeff Deaver, and that was indeed the book she wanted to reread. I never would have found it in the library catalog, because the word "magician" doesn't appear anywhere in the record for that book.
Another database for finding books is called What Do I Read Next? Though similar to NoveList in the type of information offered, searching it is quite different and can even be somewhat tricky. The key is to search as broadly as possible, avoiding the temptation to search for an exact time period or type of character.
One advantage of What Do I Read Next? Over NoveList is the inclusion of nonfiction titles. This is a big help if you don't remember whether a book was a true story, or if you want to explore a topic in both fact and fiction.
Both databases include lists of recommended and award-wining books. What Do I Read Next? has a category called Librarian Favorites that includes hundreds of book lists. There's even a list called Sled Dog Bibliography that includes fiction and nonfiction for all ages on the subject of sled dogs.
For book clubs, NoveList has a large selection of discussion guides for both adult and teen books. Each guide includes discussion questions and a biography of the author.
For more in-depth author research, try Literature Resource Center. You can search by author and title for biographical information and literary criticism, or find authors based on such criteria as nationality, genre and time period.
Literature is just one of the many topics you can explore online in the library's Reference Resources. You'll also find authoritative, reliable databases for business and investment research, genealogy, car repair procedures and much more.
To learn more about these resources or to get help with searching them, you can call the library's Central Reference department at 704-4636 (in the Olympian calling area, including Shelton) or 1-800-562-6022 (everywhere else). --Susan M. Colowick
Here's a great book for anyone interested in sailing or history. Have you wondered what Dr. Ballard has been up to since his discovery of the Titanic? Well, this book will bring you up to date. Dr. Ballard has been concentrating on undersea exploration in and around the Mediterranean. Each chapter is a chronological look at the early seafarers. The Phoenicians, Egyptians, Minoans, Greeks and Romans are examined in light of recent discoveries. Spencer Wells is a geneticist and historian who's examining the inter-relations of these cultures by using clues found in DNA. Toni Eugene pulls the whole thing together to present the usual and expected high quality offering that National Geographic is noted for. It's a beautiful book lavish with illustrations, photographs and maps. Among the intriguing topics examined: Was Minoan Thera the basis for the Atlantis legend? Are remains of habitations on the bottom of the Black Sea indications of a deluge that yielded the flood legends from many cultures? Who exactly were the Phoenicians, a trading empire that seemed to spring out of nowhere? The Romans called the Mediterranean Mare nostrum, "our sea." How did they pull off the stunt of using the entire Mediterranean to support their empire? These and other topics are examined drawing on sources in myth, wall paintings and artifacts together with a blend of speculation, theory and the use of new high-tech equipment. I found myself not only reading this volume from cover to cover, but also picking it up again and again to pursue bits and pieces that had caught my interest the first time through. --L. Hamburg Barghouti, Mourid. I Saw Ramallah (2003). 892.786 This memoir and winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for literature from the American University in Cairo was written by Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. Published in Arabic in 1997, the English translation by Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif (In the Eye of the Sun and Map of Love) appeared in 2000. It reads like a long and eloquent letter home. I Saw Ramallah is one of those incredibly important books like Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi) and Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde (Joe Sacco). Each takes place in a war-torn country, or occupied territory as the case may be, but they aren't abstract political writings. And unlike the average news story, these books don't fail to paint a vivid picture of the daily life of a select number of actual human beings leading their day-to-day lives in violent and complicated surroundings. As the book’s forward by the recently deceased author, political activist, and Palestinian Edward W. Said states: “Necessarily, there is a good deal of politics in Barghouti’s book, but none of it is either abstract or ideologically driven: whatever comes up about politics arises from the lived circumstances of Palestinian life…” Or as Barghouti himself puts it: “Politics is the family at breakfast. Who is there and who is absent and why… Staying away from politics is also politics. Politics is nothing and it is everything.” In 1967, when war broke out, Mourid Barghouti was in Cairo taking a Latin exam. He, like many young Palestinians studying abroad, was forbidden to return. I Saw Ramallah is the story of Mourid Barghouti's return to Palestine after thirty years and the time he spent displaced. During those years he spent varying amounts of time in furnished apartments in locales as disparate as Egypt, the United States, communist Hungary and Kuwait. Seventeen of those years were spent separated from his wife and child, seeing them only twice a year. This detailed memoir describes the exile of one naziheen (displaced one) and the lives with which his is intertwined. It’s a story of extravagant inconvenience, as in the case of the intricate bureaucracy one must pass through in order to cross into Palestine, the required shuffle between the official desks of the Israeli and Palestinian police officers in the small office on the border, and the piles of paperwork needed to prove one’s citizenship in a ‘country’ that doesn’t officially exist. This is a wide ranging study of loss, from the overpowering and sudden like the life of one’s brother, to the subtle and persistent like the olive oil one used to enjoy from one’s own backyard. "Displacement is like death. One thinks it happens only to other people. From the summer of '67 I became that displaced stranger whom I had always thought was someone else." There is no shortage of "other people" in the world, but lengthy intimate letters from them are a bit more rare, and you shouldn't leave this one unopened. --Sara Pete Broks, Paul. Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology (2003). 152Paul Broks feels profoundly ignorant about only one subject: neuropsychology. Unfortunately this also happens to be his area of expertise. Broks confesses his ignorance in a new book, Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology. In fragmented case studies, imaginary conversations, short stories and essays, he explores how the physical structure of the brain translates into what we know as the self. Readers who enjoy the case studies of neurologist Oliver Sacks will be drawn to this book. However, Broks is far more self-absorbed than Sacks. While he does present some intriguing cases, most are brief excerpts used to illustrate a particular point in his quest for understanding. The lack of details and follow-through may frustrate some readers, but most will find this an intriguing investigation of the link between the brain and the mind. --S. M. Colowick Davis, Sampson, Jenkins, George & Hunt, Ramek. The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream, (2002). 610.922, and
Jared Diamond won the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” He’s a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles but began his scientific career in physiology, evolutionary biology and biogeography. Professor Diamond has been elected to numerous scientific academies and has won several prizes and fellowships. He’s published over two hundred articles in several popular scientific magazines as Discover, Natural History and Geo. How he managed to find the time to write this doorstop of a book (it runs 575 pages) is a mystery. In recent decades, archaeologists, climatologists, historians, paleontologists and pollen scientists have confirmed that ecological damage was a root cause of the collapse of past civilizations. But, it’s not quite that simple. It’s pretty dense reading through the author’s prologue, but if you win your way through to Part One, Chapter One, it’s worth the effort. Diamond identifies 12 categories (8 ancient and 4 modern) by which societies undermine themselves. The ancient ones are deforestation, soil problems, water management problems, over hunting, over fishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people. In the modern world, we must also deal with human-caused climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment, energy shortages, and the full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. Pretty grim prospect. But what Diamond has discovered is that some societies, ancient and modern, overcame environmental damage while others were so fragile that they collapsed. What’s the difference? He developed a five-point framework of contributing factors. The first four, environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors and friendly trade partners, may or may not all prove significant. The author found no case where a society’s collapse could be blamed entirely on the first factor. The fifth, a society’s responses to its environmental problems, always proves important. Diamond then examines several cultures both ancient and modern. There are societies that fail, such as Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Mayan, Ansazi and Rwandan. There were other societies just as imperiled that survived, such as Iceland, Tikopia Island, Tokugawa Japan and the New Guinea highlands. A real puzzle is why the Caribbean island of Hispaniola is home to Haiti at one end, with an ever-declining quality of life, and the Dominican Republic at the other, where things are a lot more pleasant. Diamond builds a strong case that the difference is how societies respond to their problems, regardless of whether the response is from the people up or the rulers down. So why should we be concerned? Many of the societies that Diamond examines rose and fell in relative isolation. Now we live in a global community where events on the other side of the world impact us here at home. The twelve categories of environmental degradation affect everyone. We in the First World may think we’re insulated from societal crash. But to paraphrase Diamond, there were many elites in those vanished societies who thought they could remain unaffected by the problems of the society around them. In the final analysis, they had only bought themselves the privilege of being the last to starve. Is Diamond a total pessimist? No, he describes himself as a cautious optimist. He has found, here and there, signs of hope. At one end of New Guinea, he found an oil field that was a true nightmare. Oil spills, natural gas burn off, roads 100 yards wide and employees hunting down the remnants of endangered bird populations. At the other end of New Guinea was another oil field that was barely detectable from the air. So what is the difference? The second field is owned by an oil company that plans 20 years into the future and thinks it’s in its best business interest to properly steward the land in order to maintain its “social license to operate.” That’s a phrase that is being heard more and more in business circles. Everyday people in the First World and the Third World are demanding that renewable resources such as forests and fisheries be managed cleanly and sustainably. Nonrenewable resources must be extracted cleanly with little waste. Diamond uses the example of the Netherlands to illustrate that “we’re all in this together.” The Netherlands has perhaps the world’s highest level of environmental awareness and membership in environmental organizations. The author speculates that this is because over one-fifth of the Netherlands is below sea level. The Dutch are very aware that if the dikes and the pumps fail, they’ll all drown together. To put it another way, we all live downstream from each other. --L. Hamburg Esquith, Rafe. There Are No Shortcuts (2003). Biography In The Pact and There Are No Shortcuts, men from both coasts and both sides of the teacher’s desk tell inspiring stories of how belief in oneself and others, willingness to take risks, and hard work can make dreams come true. Eleven-year-old George Jenkins sat in the dentist’s chair in Newark, watching the dentist’s gloved hands pick up an instrument. "What’s that for?" he asked. The dentist explained, went on to tell his young patient the names of his teeth—and then quizzed him. George’s curiosity was the beginning of his dream to be a dentist and to make a difference in his community. As a high school senior, he talked his two best friends into going to college. Young teacher Rafe Esquith put together a class trip for 25 elementary students to the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. The plays were great, and the students had a wonderful time at their hotel, complete with Olympic-size pool. When Rafe mentioned the hotel to one of his students, she said that it was okay, but not as nice as the places she’d stayed at in Hawaii and New York. Rafe came to realize that he had worked very hard to bring a special experience to children who didn’t need it from him. And that what he needed to do was to find those kids who did need him. The Pact is the story of how three young men—Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt—made a pledge to help each other make it through college and dental or medical school. They grew up in poor neighborhoods haunted by hopelessness and crime, neighborhoods that had already swallowed up many of their friends. But by studying together, working summer jobs together, and talking about all the challenges of college and medical school, they looked out for each other. When one got discouraged, the other two were there for him. Their families helped, too, whenever they ran short on money to buy textbooks. All three men graduated and are now practicing physicians, and through their Three Doctors Foundation have created a scholarship program. There Are No Shortcuts is a story from the teacher’s side of the desk. Rafe Esquith left his first school and chose to teach fifth grade students in a poor, multilingual neighborhood in Central Los Angeles. He brought innovative teaching methods into the classroom, but also one very old-fashioned teaching method: hard work. There are no shortcuts to learning declares this teacher, who comes to school early, leaves late, teaches music at lunch, and tutors on Saturdays. Face it, he tells readers: although learning can be fun, it isn’t easy. Constantly looking for ways to bring the world into his classroom, he immerses his students in mathematics, music, writing, science, history, geography, literature, and more. They read Shakespeare and Maya Angelou and love them both. Peppering There Are No Shortcuts are vignettes of student successes and setbacks, and not a few stories of battles with school administrators and fellow teachers for whom teaching is nothing but shortcuts. Rafe shares plenty of strong opinions about teaching with the reader. For example, he questions the efficacy of prolonged bilingual education. Rafe teaches only in English, believing that while children can stay close to their family culture, fluency in English is crucial for school success, college entrance exams, employment, and financial well-being. For Sampson Davis, George Jenkins, and Rameck Hunt, there were no shortcuts. Rafe Esquith made a pact with his students. These men continue to make a difference in the lives of others, in Newark, Los Angeles—and wherever anyone picks up and reads their books. --Kristine Mahood Fagan, Brian. The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (2004). 551.6 and Harris, Robert. Pompeii: a novel (2003). Historical Fiction Global warming is virtually a household term these days. Politicians, governments, scientists and the rest of us debate almost daily over whether it’s happening, what the causes might be and what can be done. The Long Summer: how climate changed civilization, offers the perspective of thousands of years and a multitude of human civilizations on the question of what’s going on with the planet’s climate. All of recorded history and much pre-history have taken place during the “long summer,” the 15,000-year period of warming known as the Holocene that has followed the great Ice Age. During these millennia humans have moved into ever more complicated relationships with each other and their environment, from small groups of hunter-gatherers who survived through moving on to new territory, through the beginnings of agriculture and “rooted-ness,” to the enormous cities of today. Fagan, a Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara, asserts that these societal changes have been strongly affected by conditions of climate, and bases his account on the latest archaeological discoveries made through new techniques of tree ring documentation, radiocarbon dating, sonic reflection probes and sediment cores from rivers, lakes and oceans. He paints a vivid picture of human ingenuity constantly pushing against the limits imposed by climate, soil and water to insure a food supply. Again and again, however, societies have considered themselves masters of the surrounding world, only to be vanquished by natural forces beyond their control: alterations in the earth’s angle to the sun, major volcanic events that reduce absorption of solar radiation, El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) shifts and others. These major changes trigger dramatic disruptions in climate that can persist for centuries. Drought, rise and fall in sea levels, sudden cooling or warming have resulted in the collapse of entire civilizations from the Sumerian city states through the Roman Empire, ancient Egypt, the Maya civilization, the Anasazi – in fact just about all human societies that have preceded those of present time have thrived or disappeared in accordance with prevailing climatic conditions. In his epilogue, Fagan emphasizes that the important issue at this point in the acceleration of global warming in recent decades is not its cause but that we live in a time of the largest human populations ever seen on the planet, with unprecedented numbers living in cities. He states that the “potential for disaster is almost unrecognizable in historical terms…Of the six billion of us who now inhabit the earth, hundreds of millions still subsist from harvest to harvest…We can only imagine the death toll in a future era when climatic swings may be faster, more extreme, and completely unpredictable because of human interference with the atmosphere.” And, he asks, is there anyone noticing the approaching storm of disaster? Robert Harris’ novel, Pompeii, reads well in tandem with The Long Summer (above). His is a story of climatic and environmental disaster pinpointed on the surface of the planet to the curve of the Bay of Neapolis in A.D. 79, two days before and the day of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The reader moves from the global and millennial perspective offered in Fagan’s book to the intense drama of mere hours in a small, but—at the time—important corner of the Roman Empire. Marcus Attilius Primus, a hydro-engineer descended from a family of “aquarii,” has been sent from Rome to determine what is causing the decline of water flow in the aqueduct, Aqua Augusta, which serves the nine towns around the Bay of Naples. The aquarius originally in charge of the Augusta has disappeared, the crew who assist in the aqueduct’s maintenance are scornful of the young, big city newcomer and mystery and superstition cloud the indicators of where and how the Augusta is failing. Knowing what ultimately happened only serves to heighten the tension felt by the reader as the minutes and hours pass, bringing Attilius closer and closer to “ground zero,” Pompeii, in his search for the rupture in the aqueduct. Harris immerses his story in fascinating details about Roman engineering, social mores and lifestyle, the land and its inhabitants and, above all, the progress toward eruption in Mount Vesuvius. Each chapter is titled according to its time of day in Roman notation, and begins with brief, informative notes from modern texts on volcanology that give clues to what is taking place beneath the earth. Among the cast of characters Pliny figures prominently and engagingly. It is one of the delights of the book to have the bonus of a humanized glimpse into the character of this great writer from so long ago, along with nuggets from his texts. --Kristin Blalack Franzen, Jonathan. How to Be Alone: Essays (2002). 814.54 This collection of essays written between the mid-1990s and 2001 reveals Jonathan Franzen to be a writer who takes the time to think things through, to hatch out ideas, to follow the peregrination of those ideas, and to find just the right details and words which not only express those ideas, but which set off reverberations in the reader’s mind. Franzen is perhaps best known for his third novel, The Corrections, which won the 2001 National Book Award and was selected as an Oprah Book Club book—until the author declined inclusion, setting off a little firestorm. In an era of writing celebrated for being glib, cutting-edge, and "smart," Franzen’s work is thoughtful, resonant, compassionate, and devastatingly, sometimes painfully funny. The somber charm of Jonathan Franzen’s writing is exemplified through a visit to the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, chronicled in the essay "Scavaging." Built by a wealthy eccentric, the museum houses a large collection of tools and inventions left in the dust by 19th and 20th century mass production. Franzen strolls past exhibits of the usual suspects—butter churns, shoemaking tools, horse-drawn carriages—before stopping dead in his tracks before a glass case labeled OBSOLETE TECHOLOGY. For it is there, perched atop a stack of moldering eight-track tapes, that he spies the exact duplicate of one of the instruments that he is currently using as a telephone. This leads Franzen to ruminate upon the lengths to which he has gone to shield his basic black 1982 A.T.&T. living room telephone from voice mail systems—for which the deepest insult is the word "rotary"—by using his less convenient bedroom touchtone telephone to make business calls. He next reflects upon such other relics as his ancient TV set and clunky 1970s stereo system (minus CD player), and then upon the familial influences that led him to offer these hapless appliances safe harbor—his parents’ Depression-era thrift and his older brothers’ 1960s rejection of rabid consumerism. Born in 1959, Franzen nonetheless seldom races after the Next Big Thing. As a writer, Franzen has resorted to imaginative and inexpensive repairs of everything from hulking old typewriters to a computer. (Ironically, the computer fix involved a pencil torqued with a rubber band.) Further meditations on scrounging the streets for furniture and building materials lead Franzen to conclude, "Use and abandonment are the aquifer through which consumer objects percolate, shedding the taint of mass production and emerging as historied individuals." Other essays address bizarre summer jobs, the right to privacy, the state of literature in America, reading, celebrity, Franzen’s father’s last illness, and the tobacco industry. A magisterial account of the woes of the residents of the 60640 zip code in Chicago unfolds in "Lost in the Mail." The longest essay in the collection, it is a saga of undelivered mail: hidden in the back of mail trucks, tucked into storage units, stuffed into closets at home, burned under a viaduct, or simply buried. Franzen steadily illuminates the situation, conveying its humor without resorting to snap judgments, ridicule, or sneers. And what is it that teaches a person how to be alone? In "The Reader in Exile," Franzen explores an activity that well may sustain human beings as "historied individuals." Reading. --Kristine Mahood Glick, Daniel. Monkey Dancing: a father, two kids and a journey to the ends of the earth (2003). 306.8742 What do you do when your wife of fifteen years leaves you, your beloved older brother dies painfully from cancer during the year following and you realize you just aren’t having enough time with your two kids who will be grown and gone before you know it? Daniel Glick, journalist and single-parent, took to the Road, heading out on a six-month ‘round-the-world journey with son Kolya, thirteen, and daughter Zoe, age nine. There is another, global, concern motivating his decision to make this trip at this time: he wants his children to see some of the fast-disappearing environments and animals of our planet before they’re gone. As a child Glick had traveled extensively with his parents and brothers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and again as a newly-wed for three years with his wife, through all of Asia. He has vivid memories of those experiences and knows they shaped his love of Earth’s wonders and commitment to conservation. He wants to give similar opportunities to Kolya and Zoe. The trio begins their odyssey in Australia and moves on at a leisurely pace through Southeast Asia, Nepal and India, and then to Europe for a quick re-acculturation before returning home to Colorado. Their story is both a richly descriptive travelogue and a deeply personal narrative of the processing of loss, grief and new ways of relating to each other. --Kristin Blalack Guest, Emma. Children of AIDS: Africa’s orphan crisis (2001). 362.7309 Emma Guest, originally from England, has traveled extensively in Uganda, Zambia and South Africa, interviewing grandmothers, orphans, social |
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