The Food of a Younger Land, by Mark Kurlansky

Subtitled “A portrait of American food — before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation’s food was seasonal, regional, and traditional–from the lost WPA files,” you must at least read the extremely interesting Introduction to this treasure mine sampled from what remains in the archives of America Eats, five dusty boxes of manuscript copy on onionskin.  Here Kurlansky showcases the best of what he uncovered, just as writer Merle Colby had hoped when writing the final report before the unedited, unpublished manuscripts were tucked away in the 1940s: “Here and there in America some talented boy or girl will stumble on some of this material, take fire from it, and turn it to creative use.”

The entries are informative and amusing excerpts from food writing and recipes gathered regionally for a federally funded writing project that employed out-of-work writers.  When spending priorities changed after Pearl Harbor, the unfinished project materials were abruptly preserved in the Library of Congress, and we can thank Kurlansky for digging out its most fascinating gems for our enlightenment.

Among the southern and eastern sections where I focused my perusal, I really got a kick out of the anecdotes and details on preparing such delicacies as squirrel, [o]possum, chittelins, and corn pone, how the hush puppy got its name & why some forms of cornbread were once much lower in status.  Of course, Virginians will find some definitive yet highly opinionated historical notes on the famed Brunswick Stew.

The WPA (Works Progress Administration) was a government agency that sprung up as one of  many efforts to alleviate poverty in 1930s America.   Some WPA projects designed programs according to individual skill, field of study or expertise. Remarkably, these included plans for the fields of art, music, drama, and literature. The Federal Writers’ Project commissioned writers to research, write, edit, and publish works and series on particular topics, usually with American themes or interests in mind; writers employed included Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty. Following the successful production of numerous travel guidebooks, the concept for America Eats provided a means for capturing the distinct regional and cultural uniqueness of food and how it was prepared, served, and eaten in an America on the cusp of immense change. America’s culinary differences were destined to be homogenized through the diverse means that food production would soon become so heavily industrialized and globalized.

If you’re one of the many readers eagerly devouring information on real food, whole foods, traditional foods, or even paleolithic foods, in what seems like a mass revolution against modern food (in which I’m still trying to figure out what works best for my lifestyle), you’ll find much to inform and inspire you in Kurlansky’s book.  Some will reminisce; others will find a lot of eye-opening and useful knowledge about the way we once were; all we be entertained.

Check the WRL catalog for The Food of a Younger Land

I read the title in the e-book version.

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Celebrating Pride and Prejudice: 200 Years of Jane Austen’s Masterpiece, by Susannah Fullerton

Approximately five years ago, I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as well as her other five novels after receiving an all-in-one collection as a gift. Having only truly read Pride and Prejudice once (I can’t count the Cliff Notes I used in high school), it’s a wonder that I am reviewing this festive micro-history which delightfully illustrates why Jane Austen’s perfect Regency romance has remained so untouchable since its publication in 1813, even as her style and subject matter are profusely imitated, now more than ever!  

Reading Susannah Fullerton’s pleasant homage to the timeless novel upon its 200-year anniversary provided me with all sorts of intriguing details, historical background, and gossipy tidbits about its creation and legacy that enhance my appreciation of the novel.  Fullerton, president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, effectively demonstrates the reasons for the novel’s perfection and its ever-increasing appeal for readers of either sex, of all ages, in nearly every community worldwide. She cheerfully describes her analysis of individual characters, Austen’s style, and the famous opening sentence on which an entire chapter is devoted.

It was especially amusing to learn of all the various editions, versions, translations, sequels, retellings, mash-ups, adaptations, film interpretations, and other assorted Austen-inspired endeavors that have fueled a sort of Pride-and-Prejudice mania. Darcy-mania culture took off on the tails of the sexy 1995 BBC film version, starring Colin Firth (of the infamous lake scene), and kindled much new interest in the reading of the novel.

Fullerton pretty much concludes that no sequel author or film producer has ever really matched Jane Austen’s masterful style and that what lovers of the novel should really ever do is just keep reading and re-reading Pride and Prejudice. I agree that the masterpiece stands alone, but Austen did very effectively infect most of her readers with a desire to continue knowing Elizabeth and Darcy and to learn ever more about each well-drawn character’s future. Imagine if she’d lived long enough to write her own sequels, or to taste the fame her novels eventually gave her!

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Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

Reading this book was like watching a car accident, I was compelled and horrified at the same time.  Katherine Boo spent almost four years interviewing and living alongside some of the world’s poorest people in the slum of Annawadi near Mumbai’s international airport. She has written the results of her researches into an un-put-downable book that reads like a novel.

A myriad of characters from different religions and at different places in the hierarchy of the slum, come living, smelling, fighting, struggling and striving off the page. But don’t get too attached, as several of them die in sordid, pointless and horrible circumstances. Others are entangled in a web of police corruption that just keeps on getting worse. I found myself wanting it to be fiction so that it could have a happy ending for some of the characters, but Annawadi is a place with few happy endings.

Katherine Boo says that when she gave a character thoughts, she has based this on extensive interviews where her subjects revealed their actual thoughts about life in general or a particular incident. What makes me uncomfortable is the extremely personal nature of some of the thoughts she puts in the book. If I revealed to a friend in quite crass terms that I was annoyed with my father for being too sick to work, but not too sick to get my mother pregnant ten times, then I don’t think I’d want my annoyance–perhaps understandable, but definitely tactless–revealed to my father in a New York Times bestseller.

This book has won lots of prizes, and was suggested to me in my book club as a must-read. I agree that is an important book because it paints a picture of a life that I cannot imagine, but a real life that these people often cannot escape through no fault of their own. It is a book that puts human faces and lives on news stories of India’s growth or India’s problems of TB. This is a great book for fans of fiction about the poor of India like A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry. I also recommend it for readers who want to get a glimpse of a whole society through the lives of some of the most powerless, like in Margaret Powell’s  Below Stairs,  or readers of popular sociology books like The Big Necessity by Rose George.  It is essential reading for anyone who wants to learn more about the underside of India. Just don’t expect to feel comfortable after you finish the book.

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Rabid: a Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

Did you know that rabies still kills 55,000 people worldwide every year?  And that there are plausible connections between rabies and the myths of werewolves, vampires, and zombies?

Everyone has heard of this disease.  And many of us take our dogs and cats regularly to the vet for their rabies shots.  Why do we bother?  Why are we so scared of rabies?

It could be the 100% fatality rate.

It could be that rabies is one of the few diseases that travels through the body through the nervous system, rather than the blood stream.

Rabies is a singularly frightening disease and Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus is a great way to learn about it its effects on human history.

Bill Wasik is a journalist who wrote the book with his veterinary wife, Monica Murphy.  The book goes over the basics of the disease, but as its subtitle,  A Cultural History suggests, it goes into depth about what rabies means to people throughout history.  The disease has been known since ancient times and ancient writers like Pliny the Elder described it with some accuracy, although their cures usually weren’t much help.

One reason that rabies is so horrifying is that it attacks the brain and changes a person’s personality in a way that a disease like pneumonia doesn’t.  A person with rabies is often affected psychologically,  including symptoms like paranoia and hallucinations.  Victims frequently become terrified of water, even though they want to drink, so rabies is known as hydrophobia.  Bill Wasik suggests (as others have done) that these changes are what led to myths of vampires and zombies as they are creatures that are human, but not human at the same time.

The book reveals many quirky facts about rabies.  For example, because the rabies virus travels slowly along the nervous system, once a person is  bitten by a rabid animal, the onset of symptoms depends on how far way the bite site is from their brain.  Therefore a person bitten on the face will get sick more quickly than someone bitten on the foot.

Although still a horrifying incurable disease, rabies does provide some hope in medical science.  The rabies virus is unusual in that it can get past the blood brain barrier, which usually prevents viruses and bacteria, but also medicines, from getting from our blood into our brains. This means that theoretically a modified version of the rabies virus could be used to get medicine into the brain.

Rabid: a Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus is  a fascinating, but sobering book.  It is not a medical text, but it is an excellent choice for people who enjoy medical and epidemiological history like The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson or Plague: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Slack.  I also recommend it for people who like science writing, or those who are fascinated with zombies and vampires and other creatures who are frighteninglyaltered humans.
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One Pair of Hands, by Monica Dickens

The popularity of Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs has brought interest back to old books like Below Stairs,  first published in 1968, and Rose, My Life in Service from 1975, not to mention older TV series like Flambards.

Another half-forgotten book in this category is Monica Dickens’s One Pair of Hands from 1939. Monica Dickens was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, but this isn’t her main claim to fame in her series of books about her forays into the working world in the 1930s.

Monica Dickens is unusual in the stable of domestic servant memoirists as she didn’t have to take on domestic servitude to prevent herself or family from becoming destitute. She came from a wealthy family and was a debutante who came out with all the glamour of a debutante ball. She became bored with her social existence and thought, “Surely… there is more to life than going out to parties that one doesn’t enjoy with people one doesn’t like?”. She was thrown out of drama school and had taken a class in French cooking, so she decided to turn to cooking.

I have difficulty believing that anyone would do the dishes who didn’t absolutely have to, let alone scrub a stone floor on their hands and knees using a wooden handled pig’s hair brush and harsh ammonia. As I said in my October post about Dick’s Encyclopedia of Practical Receipts and Processes, our ancestors had to work very hard in the domestic sphere. My children often claim (with good reason) that I seem to like the Roomba and the dishwasher more than them. It’s really that I appreciate how much work those esteemed appliances do for me, freeing up my time and energy to pursue more interesting tasks like writing blog posts (which is not something I can truthfully say about my children).

Her tone is light, but as I said, she does have the choice to go home to the comfort and support of her parents’ house. In her gentle way she sums up the cruelties acted upon the powerless servant class by saying “my jobs at various houses only served to convince me that human nature is not all it might be.” Her jobs are generally short term, but she does quit one job when a sleazy Butler tries to blackmail her.

The book is often funny as Monica Dickens points out the foibles of the personal lives of the people she meets. She makes even her most obnoxious employers amusing and shows the human side of the people below stairs.  ”I threw down my sodden dishcloth and went to gatecrash the most wonderful party that was being held in the kitchen. The Butler, a sporting old devil with white hair was taking advantage of his possession of the wine cellar key to celebrate his birthday in the best champagne and port that the house could offer. There he sat, jigging one the the parlourmaids on his knee.”

Unfortunately this is the only book by Monica Dickens that our library owns. She also wrote books about her other jobs as a nurse, One Pair Of Feet (1942,) and in a newspaper office, My Turn To Make The Tea (1951), and later went on to become a successful novelist and children’s book writer. One Pair of Hands will suit people interested in the upstairs/downstairs conflicts of Downton Abbey, but it will also be appreciated by readers of domestic humorists like Erma Bombeck.

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Plague: A Very Short Introduction, by Paul Slack

” There was plague somewhere in Europe almost every year between 1348 and 1680″ page 34

“Most poignant of all are the expressions of the pain and loss created by one of plague’s cruelest features: the heavy mortality it inflicted on single families and households, as relatives and servants died one after the other” page 66

The library owns over sixty volumes in an interesting series that are literally easy to miss, because they are slim books less than seven inches tall, with covers I can only describe as boring.  They are Very Short Introductions published by Oxford University Press.
Our titles range from Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, by Robin Le Poidevin to World Music: A Very Short Introduction by Philip V. Bohlman, stopping on their polymath way to visit The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction by Linda Greenhouse and Plague: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Slack.

The topics are all serious, including subjects that many people would like to get to know better, but don’t have the time to study in depth.  These little volumes are just the place to start if you don’t want commit to a lengthy book.  Despite their small size every Very Short Introduction includes references, further reading and an index.  They are written by learned people who do a good job of making their subjects accessible without dumbing them down.

Plague: A Very Short Introduction is about the Bubonic Plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, but the book covers other plagues with uncertain causes that were recorded right back to Biblical times and beyond.  Author Paul Slack points out that virulent epidemic diseases can have similar effects in human lives, no matter what their causes or when they occur. One effect can be a loss of population and seemingly empty cities ” ‘Grass grew in the streets,’ says Paul the Deacon in Rome about a plague in 680, and Samuel Pepys about London a thousand years later in the plague of 1665.”

Plague: A Very Short Introduction covers the biology of the disease but it is mainly about its history and social effects.  It is often argued that the decline in population from the Black Death in Europe in the 1300s caused the end of Serfdom, a system that tied Serfs to their Lords and the Lord’s land.  Other people think that it also led to the Industrial Revolution because technology was needed to fill in for labor shortages.  Paul Slack argues that this is too simplistic a view.  The long term effects of plague depended on the situation before the disease hit.  Some places, like Sicily recovered more quickly, even though they had a higher mortality rate.  Serfdom did decline in Western Europe, but in Eastern Europe the lords were powerful enough to impose serfdom on previously free populations.

The book also uses written accounts from the time to look at the effects of the plague on individuals, even those who survived.  Despite not knowing about bacteria and viruses medieval people observed that human contact made disease spread.  They frequently instituted quarantines that kept people in as well as keeping people out, sometimes cruelly as family members or servants were thrown out of their homes at the first sign of disease.  Other people showed a better side of humanity, nursing abandoned strangers at the risk of their own lives.

Unsettlingly for the future, Paul Slack says that we don’t know the exact reasons that the plague became so devastating.  Changes in climate (possibly caused by a meteor), changes in animal populations, expanding trade routes and increasing urbanization are all possibilities.  We don’t even know why it ended:  ”The end of the first pandemic remains a puzzle, the greatest mystery in the whole history of plague.”  Maybe it hasn’t ended, Bubonic Plague still occurs naturally in the Western United States and infects up to 5000 people worldwide every year.  In terrifyingly dry language, the World Health Organization classifies plague as a “re-emerging” disease.

Plague: A Very Short Introduction is a good choice for readers of historical medical non-fiction such as The Ghost Map and I recommend the entire Very Short Introduction series  for anyone who ever needs any short introduction to a topic (and who doesn’t?).

Check the WRL catalog for Plague: A Very Short Introduction

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Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer

I’ve always believed I possessed a good memory, but as my forties progress, and especially since I’ve taken up the amateur theatrical life and the line memorization that comes with it, I’ve had to face the limits of my brain more frequently. So when I saw good reviews for a book about all things memory, I had to give it a try.

A trip to the World Memory Championships in pursuit of a magazine article sends Joshua Foer (brother of the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer) on a year-long memory odyssey in Moonwalking with Einstein.

At competitive memory events, contestants battle to remember the longest strings of random numbers possible, to recite poems word-for-word after an initial reading, and to memorize the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards as quickly as possible (among other events). Apparently American competitors aren’t quite up to world standard, and a cocky young European convinces Foer that with his expert training, Foer could be a real competitor at the next American championship. Curious about the potential of his mind, Joshua begins.

Over the coming year, he participates in studies with memory scientists, meets both gifted savants and sad medical cases with severe memory disabilities, and learns a variety of methods for enhancing the capacity of his memory. He discovers that “photographic” memories are considered a fiction by memory scientists and along the way uncovers the fraudulent claims of one memory expert. He is baptized in the quirky fraternity of competitive memory experts. He learns the ancient technique of the “memory palace,” and other methods that allowed scholars to memorize entire books before modern practices, an overload of information, and contemporary technologies wiped away most of our facility with this ancient intellectual art.

The book culminates as Foer scopes out the competition and puts his obsessive year of hard work to the test at the American championships. To save a little suspense, I won’t tell you whether or not he won, but I will say that Foer explained a few tricks that have made memorization easier for me. Regardless of the strength of your memory, I think you’ll be as fascinated as I was by a prime example of immersive journalism that gives the reader a better understanding of the capacities of the human brain.

Check the WRL catalog for Moonwalking with Einstein

We also have the book in large print or ebook format

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Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, by William Shawcross

How does a just and civilized country conduct the trial of the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11? Is he an enemy combatant? Is he a civilian who is deserving of a civilian trial? And what happens if, despite his confession, the rules of civilian justice require that evidence against him is inadmissible?

In trying to answer these questions William Shawcross refers to the famous Nuremberg Nazi war crime trials after WWII because they set a precedent for a new kind of justice. Previously, winners of many wars have conducted trials, but the Americans wanted to do something different. In 1945 the Americans, against the wishes of some of their allies, declared that they would not conduct simple sham or show trials at Nuremberg. In a speech to the American Society of International Law in 1945 Justice Robert Jackson said that, “You must put no man on trial under the forms of judicial proceeding, if you are not willing to see him freed if not proven guilty. If you are determined to execute a man in any case, there is no occasion for a trial; the world yields no respect to courts that are merely organized to convict.”

Since 9/11 these same questions of justice have vexed the government, the military and many individuals. How do we keep the public safe from self-avowed terrorists who promise to attack any target in their power, and at the same time ensure justice for the accused? With a sketchy knowledge of both Nuremberg and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed I was interested to learn how these newsworthy events and people are connected. I have to admit that even with an interest in the topic I was doubtful about starting a tome with such a weighty title, but I found that William Shawcross has a very readable style.

This book highlights fascinating background for the events that are in the news all the time. For example, the book states that only three prisoners were ever waterboarded by representatives of the U.S. government. Perhaps this is three too many, but from the controversy and vitriol surrounding the issue, I thought it must have happened to dozens, if not hundreds of people.

Author William Shawcross is the son of Chief British Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Hartley Shawcross. He obviously grew up hearing about the trial and occasionally inserts what his father said. This book is sure to be controversial and you may disagree violently with Shawcross’s conclusions, but it is definitely still worth reading to consider some depth behind the headlines.

Check the WRL catalog for Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

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The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters, by Rose George

Like many who have traveled I am intimately aware that umpteen people around the world have dirty, nasty, and awkward toilet facilities.  It is great to see the world but sometimes even better to get back to my own bathroom.  What I didn’t realize before reading The Big Necessity is that “2.6 billion people don’t have sanitation … Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box.”

These figures are astonishing and are what drew me to read The Big Necessity when a biology professor recommended it for Freshman Seminar classes.  Ever since reading it I have been recommending it to people, from my book club of older women to my husband as he was deploying to Afghanistan.  All of them, after giving me a strange look and being initially reluctant to tackle a book with a cover picturing a roll of toilet paper, have said that it was well worth reading.  ”Fascinating” was a word I heard a lot to describe the book and I agree–it is a surprisingly engrossing read.

Perhaps it is engrossing because this is a subject that we are even more reluctant to talk about than sex, but it is vitally important and affects us all. In ten chapters, British journalist Rose George travels from east to west as she looks at aging sewer systems in New York and luxurious robo-toilets in Japan.  The chapters on biogas and biosolids point out that the admirable goal of making use of the resources in waste has advantages and big disadvantages.  If you like to read while you eat, the chapter “Open Defecation-Free India” is the one to avoid over lunch, but even it has positive notes.

The Big Necessity isn’t a simple tirade about how people in poor countries have terrible lives while rich people have life easy–it is more than that.  It points out how we are very conservative about our toilet habits–conservative in the sense that we don’t like to change them–deep down we feel that what our mother taught us when we were toddlers is how we should conduct our business all our lives.  In many cases, whether we have a squat toilet or a seat, a private room or no doors is immaterial to health and safety but is individually very important to us.

This is an important book on an important subject that makes a great read for anyone interested in topics as diverse as international development to the psychology of our private acts.

Check the WRL catalog for The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters.

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Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, by Olivia Judson

Poor seaweed flies (and roundworms, rabbits, and rodents).  Until 2008, they had no one to turn to to explain their lusts and reproductive hangups.  Fortunately Dr. Tatiana (as created by evolutionary biologist Judson) happened on the scene, and now they can turn to the relevant portion of her self-help book and solve those problems.

For humans, it offers a funny and informative tour of the sexual habits of flowers, animals and insects from around the globe.  Want to know why female sponge lice all go to the restroom at the same time?  Or how the losing male just may wind up fathering offspring anyway?  Or the evolutionary imperatives for both promiscuity and fidelity?  Dr. Tatiana has just the book for you.

Olivia Judson has sorted through the scientific literature and translated it into easily understood descriptions of natural selection in its infinite varieties. (The text is thoroughly supplemented by double entendres.) She doesn’t sacrifice accuracy for readability, but effortlessly transforms reproductive science into compulsively readable information for the layperson (whoops, now I’m doing it!).  It isn’t surprising that the New York Times asked her to write a science column for them.   (Ahem, Dr. Judson, the yearlong sabbatical is up.  When can we look forward to your return?).

So until the seaweed flies, roundworms, rabbits, and rodents evolve opposable thumbs, why don’t you do them a favor and read Dr. Tatiana’s book aloud outdoors?  Who knows– you might be doing someone a big favor.

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Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen

I love history.  One of the reasons I was attracted to Williamsburg (other than the opportunity to work at a fantastic library), was that I’d be surrounded by the early history of what would become the United States.  But the way history is taught to kids dissatisfied me, although I couldn’t articulate it until I got to college.  Even then I didn’t have the sufficiently detailed perspective to point out what I thought was wrong.

James W. Loewen puts his finger right on the problem in Lies My Teacher Told Me: the textbooks used to lay the foundation of our country’s past, its present, and most important, its future.  Unfortunately, textbook publishers seem to think that teachers and students in middle and high school are dumb, and they write the narrative of our history with that understanding.  What schools wind up with, then, is about as bland and challenging as a helping of dehydrated mashed potatoes, perfect for the ScanTron testing that has replaced genuine education in this country.  (You’ll notice that I included teachers in the low estimate of the publishers.  The shock title is belied by the book’s subtitle–Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Loewen is generous in his praise of teachers who struggle to educate in spite of the six pound millstones around their necks.)

Loewen lays out examples from Columbus through the Iraq War to demonstrate the omissions and out-and-out fabrications making their way into the classroom materials that unwary students accept as gospel.  Those examples, which are scandalous enough, illustrate the real scandal–that from first to last textbook publishers set out to deceive.

• Start with the authors: respected academics who have taken on the noble mission of nurturing budding citizens and future historians.  Whoops–the only place their work appears is on the cover and the endorsement of their paychecks.
• With the imprimatur of those “educators,” the publishers hire out the actual work, often to anonymous hacks who may never have studied history or to people who use questionable sources for their material.  Some of those writers even work for multiple publishers and plagiarize themselves.
• Move on to the design and layout of the books. Colorful banners and lavish illustrations are supposed to entertain media-saturated youth of today. Instead, they add to the page count and put in print that which could easily be found as an outside resource through the publishers’ websites. Loewen cites The Americans, published by McDougal Littel – at 1358 pages and seven pounds–as requiring a whole chapter telling students how to read the book.  Surely, that’s a failure of the designers.
• Content slanted towards what Loewen calls “hero-making,” which shows only the positive side of those deemed the good guys. North America didn’t exist until Columbus found it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson didn’t own slaves.  Benevolent industrialists created jobs and opportunities that only benefited their grateful employees.
• Content that marginalizes or vilifies troublesome or inconvenient figures.  Helen Keller was the embodiment of American self-reliance, right up until she became a socialist “agitator”. John Brown was a madman who singlehandedly started the Civil War. Without significant pushback, people like Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez may have suffered the same fate.
• A view that the onward and upward path of the United States is preordained–no involvement by the citizenry is necessary, because everything worked out in the past and it will continue to do so under the guidance of the wise men who will arise as needed.  The United States always acted with the best interests of the world in mind, and its actions never had consequences.
• A loaded adoption process which guarantees that all of the above come to pass. At $84 a copy (in 2007), The American Journey is simply too expensive to revise according to the individual standards of each state or community. So California and Texas, the largest customers in the textbook market,  get to decide what kids in the whole country study. Knowing that, a few conservative organizations raise a fuss over content and prevent adoption until everything they perceive as anti-American or anti-Christian has been removed.

I’ve written before about my genius phrase, “living forward into history.”  Without using that pithy term (though he’s welcome to in future editions), Loewen advocates showing students that people just like them made decisions with lasting consequences. By understanding the trauma of losing their homes, or publicly identifying themselves with unpopular stances, or being something other than white, male, and Christian, our youngest citizens could learn that they too will be faced with challenges they can’t ignore. Too bad the people entrusted with teaching them are saddled with such poor resources.

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Causing a Scene, by Charlie Todd and Alex Scordelis

Some people have no sense of humor. Thankfully, others more than make up for them. Charlie Todd is one person who redeems hundreds of the humorless, and in Causing a Scene he shows why he is probably one of the funniest people you’ve never heard of.

Charlie is the founder of Improv Everywhere, a loose-knit group of fun-loving and risk-taking “agents” who meet in places around New York City to perform brief sketches.  These are not pranks (although several unhappy police officers and store managers would beg to differ), since pranks are meant to cause discomfort to specific targets.  Instead, Charlie and his friends create unique situations that are purposefully absurd, recording the reactions of the witnesses who have innocently crossed their path.  For those witnesses, you could call it a case of being in the right place at the right time; they’ll be telling these stories for years to come.  Some of my favorites: the Olympic synchronized swimming tryouts in the fountain at Washington Square Park, the Rob! mission, in which an entire section at a sporting event is involved in calling a wayward fan back to his friends, and, of course, the booksigning by Anton Chekhov in the Union Square Barnes and Noble.

Charlie Todd and co-author Alex Scordelis have captured the planning, setup, and execution of these scenes with the same sense of fun.  Approaching each event as if it were a case file, they lay out the details of the mission’s intent, methods of recruiting “agents,” the mission itself (and the priceless reactions of the witnesses), and they  debrief a participant who shares his or her insights about their experience.  They aren’t meant as instructions—oh, no, you might get into hot water doing these (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)— but as reports from the front lines of public performance.  Technically, these aren’t improvisational, since Charlie scouts locations,  plans the scenes, and briefs the participants, but to onlookers it can seem like a trip into the bizarre.   Those forays into the land of weirdness are the best part of improv theater.

Although the setups varied widely, one of the constant reactions surprised me—in almost every mission, someone would ask whether the event was some form of protest.  In an odd way, it could be considered a protest against canned entertainment, but I don’t believe Charlie and his agents care about anything but creating and spreading fun whenever they can.  Causing a Scene does that on its own—several times I found myself chortling in public—but even better, I started thinking, “what if…?”  Keep your eyes open.

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The Gifts of the Jews, by Thomas Cahill

 

What is it about a ragtag group of nomads that has both inspired and outraged civilizations for four millenia?  In the second book of his Hinges of History series,  Thomas Cahill digs into the larger themes that separate the Jewish peoples from the people around them, and shows how the evolution of a culture, a collection of religious writings, and the history of worship created an unimaginable entity that is present in three of the world’s major religions and most of its modern political structure.

There is possibly no one more qualified to attempt such a feat than Thomas Cahill.  His credentials as a theologian are impeccable, and his work as a scholar and translator is both rigorous and sensitive.  But it is his gift for finding the humanity in the philosophies that he examines that makes his writing approachable and enlightening.  The result is a popular work of history that can withstand the examination of scholars.

So what is the gift of the Jews?  Purely and simply, it is identity.  The identity of the individual, the identity of a society that recognizes individualism, and the identity of a deity that calls for respect towards those individuals.  Prior to Abram’s walk with YHWH, Cahill writes, a single person had no distinct role in the world – he or she was born, served the gods of planting and harvest for a span of years, and died.  The cycle of the world turned on such fatalistic seasons, and no one had anything to look forward to or to look back on.   Like cogs in a wheel, they furnished the motion that ground within the great machine of early civilization.  And like cogs, they were forever interchangeable and anonymous.

Then along comes Avram, a wealthy man from the city of Ur in the Mesopotamian culture of the Chaldeans.  He is picked out and told to set out on a journey that has not yet ended.  And so the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam steps out of the impersonal machine and into a covenant that has repercussions throughout the ages of the world.

Regardless of your spiritual identity, you have been marked by this gift.  It manifests itself in myriad ways – from the idea that it is both possible and necessary to know that you have ancestors to the idea that “…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  You may not believe in a God, you may not follow one of the three major monotheistic traditions, or you may believe that your path is the only true one, but if you’ve ever voted, gone to court, protested, or desired change in your surroundings, you have this idea, this gift, to thank.

Cahill is not writing to proselytize, although he makes his own belief in God plain.  His intent is to lead the reader through the evolution of ideas that we take for granted, showing us how they came to be.  From Avram through the minor prophets, Cahill examines the Old Testament and places markers along the way to show us how that path was recorded even when it was not followed.  But he does it with a light touch, even with an occasional leavening of humor which makes this an immensely enjoyable read.

Check the WRL Catalog for The Gifts of the Jews

 

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The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson

“Reports had surfaced of some customers discovering live eels in their drinking water, which suggested that the filters were not perhaps working optimally.”

CSI: 1850. A deadly epidemic of cholera sweeps through a London neighborhood, claiming its victims in a pattern with a deadly epicenter: the Broad Street water pump. OK, it’s tough writing a medical thriller in which the plumbing did it. But that’s what Steven Johnson has done in this engaging account of Dr. John Snow and the medical detective work that kept London’s plumbing from killing again.

Johnson paints a lively, frightful picture of the Victorian city, its sounds, smells, quack medicine, and state-of-the-medieval-art sewer system. No one knew yet how cholera was spread. “Miasmatists” thought the cause was bad air, and so the primary goal of public health officials was to get rid of things that stank. Unfortunately, their remedy was to shovel all of the, um, “cess” from London’s backyard cesspools into the river that supplied their drinking water. Victorian logic: if, by shoveling manure onto our fields, we get larger plants, then surely by emptying excrement into the Thames, we will get… bigger fish?

Enter John Snow, our workaholic hero. Already an innovator in the new science of surgical anesthesia, he also has a theory about the waterborne transmission of cholera, and the latest outbreak is his chance to test it. Knocking on every door in Soho, he constructs a map and a timeline of deaths per household, painstakingly assembling the evidence that will prevent a terrible outbreak from becoming even worse.

As in most microhistories, Johnson starts with a single event and follows its details into unexpected places, writing about microbes and then about coral reefs and then about the need to get rid of nuclear stockpiles… ok, the big picture got a little confusing by the end. It’s the little things, like the bacteria (and the eels), that I enjoyed reading about, and on that scale The Ghost Map entertains.

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Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To the Revolution, by Caroline Weber

If you need something to fill up the empty space where Project Runway used to be… if you pause the DVD of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette on the close-ups of Marie’s satiny, beribboned heels… do I have a book for you!

Weber looks at the reign and downfall of Marie Antoinette, eighteenth-century fashionista, with a focus on her clothing, from her first step onto French soil wearing nothing but her birthday suit to the white shift she wore to the guillotine. It’s an eighteenth-century take on What Not to Wear: Weber shows how the dissent and dissatisfaction of a country centered on whether this woman wore a corset, or chose a dress of silk or muslin (wrong on either count), at a time when the color of the ribbons in your hat could get you strung up in the streets.

Poor Marie! When she dresses the regal part, they accuse her of overspending and call her “Madame Deficit.” When she makes herself over as a fake milkmaid (complete with perfumed sheep), they say she doesn’t look enough like a queen. And everyone knows there’s only one reason a milkmaid wears fluttery, loose dresses: easier to lift her skirts for illicit liaisons!

It helps if you already know a little about Marie’s life before you tackle this book. Weber approaches her subject as an academic, and at some points the analysis of image and power gets a little dry. But then you get to the chapter on the pouf! People wearing artichokes in their hair, and commemorative model ships! Color plates add to the fun; I only wish there were more of them.

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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan

What if we misused and overextended our natural resources so badly that we ruined the environment? What if years of mistreatment led to a day when the land, depleted, suddenly went into a dangerous and rapid decline that we couldn’t fix? These are questions that many of us worry about today as pollution worsens, carbon in the atmosphere leads to increased warming, factory farming and agriculture depletes land, and basic resources like water are overused.

What I didn’t know is that American history has a lesson in this very subject. I’d always thought of the Dust Bowl as an unhappy change in the weather pattern, a fluke drought that unfortunately coincided with the Great Depression.

I was wrong. We made the Dust Bowl.

Timothy Egan’s immensely readable, suspenseful, and entertaining history of the Dust Bowl shows beyond any doubt that overusing land unfit for farming caused the disaster. The drought was not unusually long or severe for regional weather patterns, but when it hit grasslands that had been turned over en masse for a few years of high-paying agriculture just after WWI, the land simply blew away. For over five years, nothing could be grown at all in a large region of Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and New Mexico, and what had been alive previously died.

Egan follows about 50 residents of this region through the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, years when people died of dust pneumonia, horrendous walls of dirt and giant hailstones blew down suddenly out of the sky in freakish storms, roads became treacherous due to limited visibility and ever-shifting drifts, static electricity was strong enough to knock adults down at a touch, and hard-working people lived in dirt-filled houses and fought against starvation every day. These are real people: Some heroes who helped others when they themselves had nothing and took great chances to save the endangered; some who tried valiantly to stave off the depression that came with failure after failure, stressed relationships, and physical ruin; and a few villains whose actions led to the disaster or who turned a blind eye to the misery of others in order to pursue their agendas. All of these personal stories are fascinating, as is the response that government made to eventually alleviate the worst of the problem (although to this day, much of the land in question is ruined, while other parts rely on the use of an underground aquifer of water that is quickly becoming depleted).

As you read Egan’s book, you won’t be able to help but think about what might happen if we continue to push our own environment too far. Whether you simply like true stories or need to experience a great cautionary tale, this winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction is a must read.

Check the WRL catalog for The Worst Hard Time

Or listen to The Worst Hard Time on audiobook

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Wild Trees, by Richard Preston

What is it about coastal redwoods that would inspire people to risk their lives to be near them? For starters, this type of redwood is located in only a few areas, but those are nearly inaccessible to all but the most dedicated bushwhackers. It is impossible to see the trees in their entirety, so a combination of imagination and rigorous measurement is required to assess their true size. They support an abundance of flora and fauna (even plankton) in an unexpected place. And they are the largest living things in the world. (OK, there’s a honey mushroom fungus in Oregon that is technically bigger, but no one’s organizing trips to see it…) But what kind of oddballs, misfits, and romantics would embark on arduous trips to find and study these giant trees?

For Steve Sillett, it started as a rebellious and incredibly dumb free climb that uncovered a new world. For Michael Taylor, a childhood trip introduced him to the trees, which became first a hobby, then an obsession. Marie Antoine’s risk-taking youth evolved into a desire to study rare plants found in the canopies of these tall trees. Arborists Scott Altenhoff and Kevin Hillery took on the job of teaching ‘skywalking’ to the climbers, equipping them to ascend the trees then move among the branches in a kind of ballet. These, and the other people in the tiny community of canopy scientists, learned by the seat of their climbing saddles. All of them bring a love of the trees, incredible athletic ability, and a desire to learn to their vocation.

Their experiences were not without cost. Relationships suffered, job opportunities were set aside, expensive equipment purchased by sacrificing necessities. The searchers only looked in places deemed inaccessible by logging companies, fighting through tangled bushes and poison oak in often fruitless searches. Michael Taylor’s fear of heights tortured him even as he told other climbers where to find bigger trees. The dangers inherent in climbing were amplified by inattention and possibly self-destructive impulses. These stories provide motion and drama while clearly keeping the giant trees at the center of the book.

The trees themselves? If you have ever visited Muir Woods National Monument in California, you may have seen a popular tourist attraction – the coastal redwood measuring 285 feet tall, or about the height of the United States Capitol Building. A member of this community discovered the tallest tree in the world, called Stratosphere Giant. It stands 370 feet tall (as high as a 35 story building) and is estimated to be 2,000 years old. An incredible series of drawings in the book depicts a small segment of a tree called Iluvatar, which has 220 trunks growing from its main trunk in an astonishing maze that dwarfs the humans. As both living organisms and habitats, these trees are incredibly complex, perhaps beyond our understanding.

In Encounters with the Archdruid, John McPhee writes about the philosophical divide between conservationists who want to maintain pristine wilderness and land managers who say everyone should have recreational access to those wild places. The people Richard Preston writes about have made that decision for themselves. To avoid divulging locations of the trees, the climbers and scientists go to great lengths, even approaching from different directions so they don’t leave trails. For me, it is enough to know that the trees are there and that people who respect and love them are serving as their stewards – I don’t need to see them to understand their value. Long may they stand.

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They Call Me Naughty Lola, edited by David Rose

If you’ve ever closely read, or even scanned, the pages of a typical personals ad, you’d recognized the usual format – gender preference, age, something about the advertiser’s looks and interests.  Specialty and ‘elite’ publications might have more information tailored toward the expected demographic – second home location, brand of Scotch, favorite theorist – that tells those in the know what kind of person is placing the ad.  All of the advertisers, though, try to present themselves in the best possible light.  Then you look at these selected ads from the London Review of Books personals column, and see how little light those other ads really shed.

In 1998, the LRB began the column with the ideal of emulating the successful New York Review of Books’ attempt to match literate and presumably solvent singles.  They reckoned without the sense of British humor, and their readers’ apparent willingness to lay everything out for their hoped-for matches.  Thus an ad that reads:

Gynotikolobomassophile (M, 43) seeks neanimorphic F to 60 to share euneirophrenia.  Must enjoy pissing off librarians (and be able to provide the correct term for same). 

Not exactly the kind of person most of us (especially the librarians) would consider, right?  Editor David Rose, who wrote the introduction and the footnotes that translate cultural references, speculates that those advertisers might be using a kind of reverse psychology that attracts attention and may even make their ad worth a reply.  Then again, maybe the writer is summoning up his or her courage and trying to be honest about their perceived shortcomings:

Like the ad above, but better-educated and well-read.  Also larger bosoms.  Man, 38, Watford. 

If you can discipline yourself (I couldn’t), these are best taken in small doses to preserve their individual shock and/or humor value.  Opening the book at random can produce those milk-out-of-your-nose moments, and also make you wonder about the hidden biographies of people you may see every day.  But there’s always that ‘what if’ moment – what if the writer actually is in jail?  What if she does have a contagious foot disease, or he might run off with your music collection?  What if the ad is meant to be whimsical and humorous, and you take it seriously, or vice-versa?  Most importantly, what if this is a person you might really connect with?   

This is a fun little book with moments of surprising insight.  And if anyone can tell me the correct term for pissing off librarians, I know someone else who’ll be impressed.

 

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