Category: Books & Writers

Recommended reading

Stray Shopping Carts

In a week in which attention has been focused on the big names and big money of the Man Booker International prize, the 29th winner of arguably the most original literary prize has also been quietly announced.

The Diagram Oddest title of the year award – for which content is irrelevant and the prize is a bottle of wine – has had a surprise winner this year: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague.
. . .

With 1,866 votes of the 5,500 polled via the Bookseller website, Shopping Carts beat the bookies’ favourite How Green Were the Nazis? Second prize went to Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, while Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence took third.

Guardian Unlimited Books

Kurt Vonnegut Says This Is the End of the World

. . . But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. “Oh, yes,” he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. “I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?” “Lung cancer?” I offer.

“No. No. Because I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, ‘Colon.'”. . . .

From an article last August in Rolling Stone

No longer a Muggle

At the insistence of Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, I have just read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first of the Harry Potter books (published 10 years ago).

I’d seen enough of the Potter movies with grandson Mack to have the gist of Hogwarts and all, but still the book was fun and engaging, well-worth the $3.61 a used copy of the paperback cost me.

Indeed, good enough to want to read Year Two.

Another good read

NewMexiKen failed to mention a good book I read while visiting in the San Francisco area last month. It’s The Last Season by Eric Blehm.

Blehm tells the story of Randy Morgenson, a seasonal back country National Park Service ranger in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. During the summer of 1996 Morgenson went missing from his station high in the Sierra Nevada. The book tells of the search — and its eventual outcome — but also Morgenson’s life, family, devotion to the wilderness, life as a seasonal ranger and much more. Morgenson was a special, if not completely likable man. It’s an interesting story.

The man behind the curtain

NewMexiKen finished The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World yesterday and came away with a more realistic view of the great inventor.

The book, published just two weeks ago, attempts to discuss Edison as the first great American celebrity who was not a politician or military leader. In that regard it pretty much succeeds; as a full-scale biography, however, the book falls short. We get nearly day-by-day discussions of the important inventions — though no real technical details — then skim through the last 50 years of Edison’s life in a couple of chapters. (Edison was 32 when he invented the incandescent light bulb. He lived to be 84.)

Stross writes well and he does make the case that becoming famous contributed to Edison’s limitations as a businessman, which were well known even then. Indeed, Edison was a fairly one-dimensional human being — but it was an important dimension.

Aside: When Edison died in 1931, much of the country — including the White House — turned off the lights for a minute the evening of his funeral as a salute.

Further aside: Here’s the recommended biographies from The Edison Papers. (The first item is by the managing editor of those same Papers, so take that for what it’s worth.)

The standard biography is Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley, 1998). A good older biography is Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959; reprint New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992). Two other biographies that focus on Edison’s personality and family relations are Robert Conot, A Streak of Luck (New York: Seaview Press, 1979) and Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995). A short biography is Martin V. Melosi, Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization of America (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown Higher Education, 1990).

Wild America

NewMexiKen has been reading Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent’s Natural Soul by Scott Weidensaul. It’s a travel narrative detailing Weidensaul’s reprise, 50 years later, of the famous trip and book by naturalists Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. Wild America had inspired Weidensaul as a boy. At times he inspires us now.

Visiting many of the same places as the original, Return to Wild America brings us bad news but also much that is good: species that have recovered, land that is being preserved. Faithful to Peterson, we read descriptions of, frankly, more birds than I care about, but still the book conveys the wonder of North America that makes one want to throw the sleeping bag into the car and take off for Newfoundland, or the Everglades, or Kartchner Cavern.

Great read

NewMexiKen recommends Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont, which I am just finishing. It’s the story of the brutal rape and murder of a 62-year-old woman just a mile from Junger’s own childhood home — and on the very day that eventual Boston Strangler confessor Albert DeSalvo was working at the Junger home. Was the man convicted of the Belmont murder guilty? Did DeSalvo kill her instead?

In a review last April, Alan Dershowitz wrote that A Murder in Belmont “though nonfiction, reads like a novel. Its narrative line is crisp. Junger takes us through the trial and conviction of Roy Smith, the series of stranglings in and around Boston, and the arrest and confession of Albert DeSalvo. But there are threads left untied by the imperfect system of Massachusetts justice that Junger describes so well.” Dershowitz does find fault with the speculative nature of some of Junger’s conclusions: “But when a writer has a stake in playing down coincidences and emphasizing connections, his work must be read with caution, especially when it contains no footnotes or endnotes.”

Indeed, but it’s a great read.

Junger is best known for The Perfect Storm.

Thanks to Ken for recommending the book.

This Is Your Brain on Music

Back during the Great New Year’s Weekend Snowstorm NewMexiKen mentioned This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.

I’ve just finished the book, which I found interesting but a struggle. I have a difficult time understanding music theory and an even more difficult time understanding neuroscience. I don’t think my limitations were the main problem, though. I think the real problem was with the author who, in this reader’s mind at least, exhibited no sense of structure or organization in how the material was presented. Well, “no” is too strong; let’s say limited structure. The discussion always left me fuddled.

Nonetheless the book was interesting because the two subjects themselves are so fascinating.

Two factoids:

Apparently EMI (the music conglomerate) invented magnetic resonance imaging, investing their music profits into the research. Next time you get an MRI you have the Beatles to thank.

And this:

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Still Sweet, Not So Baby James

James Taylor is 59 today.

Liza Minnelli is 61.

Jon Provost is 57. Who? Timmy on Lassie.

Courtney B. Vance is 47.

Dave Eggers is 37. The Writer’s Almanac has an interesting essay today about Eggers.

Jean-Louise Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on this date in 1922.

He grew up speaking French, and couldn’t speak English fluently until junior high. He was a football star in high school and got an athletic scholarship to Columbia University. It was there that he became friends with Allen Ginsberg.

In 1951 he sat at his kitchen table, taped sheets of Chinese art paper together to make a long roll, and wrote the story of the cross-country road trips he took with Neal Cassady. It had no paragraphs and very little punctuation and Allen Ginsberg called it ”a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself.” And that became Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957).

The Writer’s Almanac

John McPhee

It’s the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in 1931 in Princeton, New Jersey, and considered one of the greatest living literary journalists.

When he was in high school, his English teacher required her students to write three compositions a week, each accompanied by a detailed outline, and many of which the students had to read out loud to the class. Ever since he took that class, McPhee has carefully outlined all his written work and has read out loud to his wife every sentence he writes before it is published.

He is known for the huge range of his subjects. He has written about canoes, geology, tennis, nuclear energy, and the Swiss army. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book about the geology of America, Annals of the Former World (1998).

In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange-growing business, he wrote, “An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a 10-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.”

The Writer’s Almanac

This week’s New Yorker has an article by McPhee. What’s it about you ask. Who cares, it’s by John McPhee.

A “literary journalist.” That’s what I want to be when I grow up.

Yet another book

Some time ago NewMexiKen began Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, but then set it aside about half-way through. I finished it today, probably one of the last last people in America to read it.

But if you haven’t read it, and you like your history laced with serial killers, then I urge you to pick it up. Subtitled Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Larson tells the story of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the mad doctor, serial killer than operated on its fringes. Fascinating reading.

(That’s two-and-a-half books in three days.)

Two great histories

Over the weekend NewMexiKen read Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick and The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. Both are excellent, readable and informative about two periods in American history where mostly myth abounds. Egan’s book won the National Book Award.

Philbrick begins by retelling the story of the Pilgrims, their voyage on the Mayflower, and their colony at Plymouth. But he also tells the story of the people who were there to meet them and the interdependence that developed — and then collapsed. Subtitled A Story of Community, Courage, and War, the second half of the book describes King Philip’s War, Philip being the adopted Christian name for the Pokonokets sachem, a son of Massasoit. It was the deadliest war, proportionately, ever fought on American soil.

Egan’s book is subtitled The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Centered around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas, and particularly Boise City, Oklahoma, and Dalhart, Texas, Egan tells a half-dozen personal stories from the greatest environmental disaster in American history.

It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed, where Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, where German POWs were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons. Over the last half-century, towns have collapsed and entire counties have been all but abandoned to the old and the dying. Hurricanes that buried city blocks farther south, tornadoes that knocked down everything in their paths, grassfires that burned from one horizon to another— all have come and gone through the southern plains. But nothing has matched the black blizzards. American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster.

And the worst of it was man made.

But it’s the stories of the people where Egan excels; of lost jobs, lost farms, lost children, and lost hope. Even in the years before the drought and dust, life was tough.

In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel’s first job. She had to be there before the bell rang — five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way — to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. … After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day’s kindling — dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

One of nine kids, Ike Osteen grew up in a dugout. A dugout is just that — a home dug into the hide of the prairie. The floor was dirt. Above ground, the walls were plank boards, with no insulation on the inside and black tarpaper on the outside. Every spring, Ike’s mother poured boiling water over the walls to kill fresh-hatched bugs. The family heated the dugout with cow chips, which burned in an old stove and left a turd smell slow to dissipate. The toilet was outside, a hole in the ground. Water was hauled in from a deeper hole in the ground.

N. Scott Momaday

… is 73 today.

Momaday has always understood who he is. “I am an Indian and I believe I’m fortunate to have the heritage I have,” he says, speaking as a Kiowa Indian who defines himself as a Western Man. But that sense of identity didn’t evolve without difficulty. “I grew up in two worlds and straddle both those worlds even now,” Momaday says. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life. I’ve been able to deal with it reasonably well, I think, and I value it.” (PBS – The West)

From Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, House Made of Dawn, the Navajo Ben Benally remembering a snow-filled day:

And afterward, when you brought the sheep back, your grandfather had filled the barrel with snow and there was plenty of water again. But he took you to the trading post anyway, because you were little and had looked forward to it. There were people inside, a lot of them, because there was a big snow on the ground and they needed things and they wanted to stand around and smoke and talk about the weather. You were little and there was a lot to see, and all of it was new and beautiful: bright new buckets and tubs, saddles and ropes, hats and shirts and boots, a big glass case all filled with candy. Frazer was the trader’s name. He gave you a piece of hard red candy and laughed because you couldn’t make up your mind to take it at first, and you wanted it so much you didn’t know what to do. And he gave your grandfather some tobacco and brown paper. And when he had smoked, your grandfather talked to the trader for a long time and you didn’t know what they were saying and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything—where you were little, where you were and had to be.

February 27th is the birthday

… of Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward. She is 77 today. Miss Woodward won the best actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was nominated for best actress three other times. Woodward and Paul Newman have been married 49 years.

… of two-time Academy Award winning actress Elizabeth Taylor. She is 75 today. Miss Taylor won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

… of Ralph Nader. He’s 73.

… of Chelsea Clinton. She’s 27, which means she was 12 when her father was elected president.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born on this date in 1807.

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter’s voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother’s voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his haul, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling,–rejoicing,–sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, “who observers believe influenced American life more than any of his colleagues in modern time,” was born on this date in 1886. The Constitution was his bible.

“Where’s my Constitution?” Justice Black asked, ruffling through his pockets and spreading out the papers on his desk.

“I always keep my Constitution in my coat pocket. What could have happened to it? Have you got one on you?” he asked of a visitor a few years ago.

“You ought to keep one on you all the time,” he said, buzzing for his secretary. “Where’s my Constitution?”

The woman searched his desk drawers and scanned the library shelves in the spacious Supreme Court chambers, but found no Constitution.

“I like to read what it says. I like to read the words of the Constitution,” Justice Black said in a slight Southern drawl, after dispatching the secretary to fetch one. “I’m a literalist, I admit it. It’s a bad word these days, I know, but that’s what I am.”

Shortly, the Constitution was delivered. Hugo LaFayette Black, then 81 years old and completing his 30th year on the United States Supreme Court, laid it tenderly on his lap and opened it to the Bill of Rights.

“Now,” he said with a warm smile, “now let’s see what it says.”

Perhaps as well as anything else, the incident illustrated what formed Chief Justice Earl Warren called the “unflagging devotion” of Mr. Black to the Constitution of the United States.

Perhaps no other man in the history of the Court so revered the Constitution as a source of the free and good life. Few articulated so lucidly, simply and forcefully a philosophy of the 18th- century document. Less than a handful had the impact on constitutional law and the quality of the nation as this self-described “backward country fellow” from Clay County, Alabama.

“I believe that our Constitution,” Justice Black once said, “with its absolute guarantee of individual rights, is the best hope for the aspirations of freedom which men share everywhere.”

John Steinbeck was born on this date in 1902.

Among the masters of modern American literature who have already been awarded this Prize – from Sinclair Lewis to Ernest Hemingway – Steinbeck more than holds his own, independent in position and achievement. There is in him a strain of grim humour which, to some extent, redeems his often cruel and crude motif. His sympathies always go out to the oppressed, to the misfits and the distressed; he likes to contrast the simple joy of life with the brutal and cynical craving for money. But in him we find the American temperament also in his great feeling for nature, for the tilled soil, the wasteland, the mountains, and the ocean coasts, all an inexhaustible source of inspiration to Steinbeck in the midst of, and beyond, the world of human beings.

The Swedish Academy’s reason for awarding the prize to John Steinbeck reads, “for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humour and a keen social perception.”

Nobel Prize in Literature 1962 – Presentation Speech

“I know this—a man got to do what he got to do.”

February 18th is the birthday

… of George Kennedy. Dragline is 82.

… of Toni Morrison. The Nobel laureate is 76.

… of the woman who broke up the Beatles. She’s 74 today. That’s Yoko Ono.

… of Cybill Shepherd. She’s 57.

… of Vinnie Barbarino. He’s 53 today. So are Vincent Vega, Chili Palmer, Michael, Buford ‘Bud’ Uan Davis, Tod Lubitch, Danny Zuko and Tony Manero. And so is John Travolta.

… of the letter turner. Vanna White is 50 today.

… of Matt Dillon, 43.

… of Molly Ringwald. She’s 39.

In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.

NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists several times, but repeats them each year — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born on this date in 1909.

Stegner is first in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.

TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett

TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis

[Stegner had] already begun writing fiction, but he wanted to write a new kind of novel about the American West. At that time, the only novels being published about the West were full of cowboys and heroic pioneers. Stegner said, “I wanted to write about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities all used up. “The result was his first big success, his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family. It tells the story of a man named Bo Mason and his wife, Elsa, who travel over the American West, trying to make it rich.

Stegner went on to write dozens of novels about the West, including Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). But he also started one of the most influential creative writing programs in the country, at Stanford University, where his students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, and Scott Turow. (The Writer’s Almanac)

Ballsy decision by librarians

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and re-opened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. …

The New York Times

Jefferson: ‘I cannot live without books.’

It was on this day in 1815 that the U.S. Congress accepted Thomas Jefferson’s offer to rebuild the Library of Congress with more than 6,000 books from his own library. The Library of Congress had been established in 1800 as a research library for congressional members, and it was located in the Capitol building. But in August of 1814, British troops had burned much of Washington, D.C., and the library had been destroyed.

At that time, Thomas Jefferson owned the largest private collection of books in the United States. He’d been a lifelong booklover and collector. He loved books so much that he gave up reading the newspaper so that he’d have more time to read the great philosophers, and he said, “I am much the happier.”

Within a month of hearing the news that the Library of Congress had been destroyed, Jefferson offered his own library as a replacement. Congress eventually agreed to purchase Jefferson’s library for $23,950.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

The Library at the U.S. Department of State has a few books in its holdings acquired by the first secretary of state — and duly signed by him, Thomas Jefferson.

Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore–
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door–
Only this and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;–vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow–sorrow for the lost Lenore–
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore–
Nameless here for evermore.

The first two of 18 stanzas of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, born on this date in 1809.

Project Gutenberg has an illustrated version from 1885. The poem was first published in 1845.

The Poe Museum has a nice, concise biography of Poe.