Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Going Hungry

The U. S. Department of Agriculture released a study this week which reported that one in every seven American families struggled to get enough food on the table last year, and that overall, 49 million Americans suffered from "food insecurity," or the inability to be sure of adequate food to maintain healthy, active lives. These numbers don't just reflect conditions in some faraway part of the country, in fact, Oregon ranks near the top of the list of hungriest states.

Of course, hunger is by no means a new phenomenon. Nearly 10 years ago, Journalist Loretta Schwartz-Nobel took on the challenge of investigating the scope and depth of hunger in America in her book Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America. What I find most interesting is the way Schwartz-Nobel carefully examines a series of different groups – the middle class, the working poor, the military, new immigrants, etc. and explains how hunger affects them, and how public policies (even those originally intended to assuage hunger) have made the epidemic worsen. It's not always easy to read the heartbreaking stories Schwartz-Nobel has to tell, but overall the book provides a good overview of how very real this problem is, and how it's affecting communities across the nation.

Some people's reaction to widespread hunger is to get right out and do something about it. One way is to grow food – and for more than a hundred years Americans have built and tended community gardens specifically designed to feed the hungry and help people in poverty build new skills to help themselves. Laura J. Lawson's City Bountiful explains this fascinating history, along with the stories of other kinds of community gardens tended by schoolchildren, urban gourmets, and wartime patriots.

It's not just Americans who are going hungry. The international press is reporting that the United Nations Hunger Summit earlier this week in Rome was not productive, partly due to the fact that among wealthy nations, only Italy sent its leader to attend the summit. Meeting the needs of hungry people around the world can be quite a challenge, particularly when changing weather patterns, a volatile economic climate, and wars all complicate the issue. The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where, and Why can help clarify some of this complexity. Authors Erik Millstone and Tim Lang provide a wide array of maps and charts explaining various aspects of the word food system – starting with a section on challenges, from water shortages to environmental challenges to political factors that affect people's ability to get access to food.

When the Wall Came Down

What were you doing 20 years ago?  I was in high school and I can clearly remember coming home from basketball practice and seeing people on the T.V. standing on top of this well-graffitied wall, arm-in-arm, celebrating like I'd never seen before.  I was not a young woman who paid much attention to politics.  I was all about sports and music and my friends.  But I remember the profound impact these images made on me.  Before that moment, I theoretically understood that people all over the world were living under very different circumstances than my own.  But in seeing those images, I finally, really got it.  Monday marked the twenty-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and The New York Times did an Op-Ed piece asking poets to write works inspired by the events of November 9, 1989.  Reading these poems brought up a lot of those same feelings for me and was a good reminder that the world is full of many people, living in different situations, all trying to find peace and happiness.

Though I already had leanings, this event hit me at just the right moment to turn me into a true history buff.  If like me you prefer to start at the beginning in order to get a better understanding of an event, then I recommend The Berlin Wall: A World Divided by Frederick Taylor.  Taylor will take you through the division of Germany after World War II , the flight of refugees to the West, the construction and eventual bringing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  He discusses the origins of the Cold War and the stark contrast in living conditions between East and West Germany.  It is a thick book, but a good one and reads at fairly fast pace.  Plus it has pictures, and who doesn't like pictures!  

For me, history really is about the people, and Anna Funder's Stasiland looks back at real people's experiences being under the organized surveillance of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, with its army of citizen informers.  She looks at both those who had the courage to resist during the Communist regime as well as those within the Stasi.  There are heartbreaking stories of mothers unable to see their sick children on the other side of the Wall, teenagers arrested for distributing protest flyers, and (for me at least) very unlikeable members of the Stasi regime.  Funder does a really wonderful job with this book and I highly recommend it.  

You never know when you wake up in the morning what the day will bring, and there are many events that have been so dramatic as to change the course of history.  A compilation of these kinds of events can be found in Where Were You When?: 180 Unforgettable Moments in Living History by Ian Harrison.  Mainly through images and with quotes from folks who remember back to the moment, Harrison takes us on a journey starting with the outbreak of World War II through to the 2008 cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China.  The stories range from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix breaking all publishing records, to Armstrong and Aldrin first walking on the moon.    

And then because this post is just a bit too serious, I need to diverge a bit.  Perhaps if you listened to NPR's All Things Considered on Monday you will have heard an interview with David Hasselhoff.  Hasselhoff was huge in Germany around the time of the Wall coming down and he believes he may have had a part in its falling.  You see Hasselhoff was on his "Freedom Tour" through Germany in 1989 and his song "Looking for Freedom" topped the charts.  According to his autobiography Don't Hassel the Hoff, he had the idea of "destroying the Wall as a dramatic part of the show." So he "recreated the Wall out of painted Styrofoam blocks and...drove a Trans Am named 'Freedom' straight through it. And the crowd went wild."  Stories like this makes this book (with many color photos) a fun read.

If you were alive back in 1989, please share your memories of this momentous event.  And if you have a favorite book, movie or piece of music that reminds you of that time, please share those as well. 

A Shanty for the Salish Sea

Bellingham biologist Bert Webber is closing in on accomplishing his goal of unifying Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia under the name he first coined in 1988, The Salish Sea. On October 30th the Washington State Board of Geographic Names voted 5-1 to adopt the new name and similar committees at other levels of government are expected to follow in coming weeks. Webber's interest in suggesting this new umbrella term is to acknowledge, and promote understanding of, the ecological interconnectedness of these bodies of water. That it has taken twenty years from Webber's first push to place the Salish Sea on maps for this to occur might mislead one to believe that the geographical lexicon is nearly static. In fact, we are encompassed by constant, subtle changes in geography.

Cartography itself embodies a certain paradox. Even the perfect map is by definition an abstraction and as our understanding of the world changes and increases so must our maps morph and reflect these improved, or simply different, forms of comprehension. As the companion publication to the Field Museum of Chicago's "once-in-a-lifetime exhibition" Maps: Finding Our Place in the World is an amazing compendium of maps developed by a vast cross section of our world's cultures. Edited by James Akerman, Maps explores how mapping has changed over time in many ways. From the technological perspective, Maps contains examples from the most rudimentary (but aesthetically stunning) maps of ancient mariners to modern maps of the ocean floor created using advanced sonar techniques. More impressively, Maps provides a context for understanding maps as the product of historical and cultural circumstances. The maps shared here, as a near universal form of communication, express an inspiring variety of data and desires. From maps that illustrate the spread of disease to those that show our position relative to heaven or explore Middle Earth, the images here say as much about how we want others to see the world as how the world might actually be.

Adding the Salish Sea to our maps may seem a small way to express a vague, shared appreciation of our region's waterways but a look below the surface of the ocean reveals that this other world truly deserves our attention. The Blue Planet, as adapted by Andrew Byatt, lets readers follow along with the truly stunning images from the documentary series by the same name (available on DVD in four parts: 1 2 3 4). It's fair to say that most people would not consider these works to be of tremendous scientific value. Instead, their function is to inspire and the breath taking visuals associated with this series succeed wildly in that regard. If ever one needed to find inspiration to cherish and protect the Earth's oceans from excessive human impact these works would be an entirely appropriate place begin that search.

Wish to delve a little deeper into the question of just what life below the waves is like? The World Ocean Census (as compiled by Darlene Crist) may well provide the answers you seek. However, one of this census's great strengths is that it embraces the mystery of the Ocean. Water covers 71% of the surface of our planet and a vast portion of this area remains unexplored. Even in more approachable areas there is much to be learned. Scientists say that as little as 10% of life in coral reefs has yet to be identified. Still, the life forms detailed and pictured in these pages are striking and serve as a potent reminder that the expression of our understanding about the world we live in has real consequences, even for those for those life forms that we have not yet encountered and who may inhabit the familiar waterways or our own region. These life forms may yet find a place in the feedback loop comprised of what we understand, the understanding we project and what we hope to understand.

The Webs We Weave

Last year, a spider built her web at our house in a very lucky spot: on one of the widows of our glassed in porch, affording her a smorgasboard of small insects drawn to our porch light. We watched her grow over the weeks and repair her web, a thing of beauty if ever I saw one. Textile maker Simon Peers obviously sees the beauty in spider webs, but he took it one step further. He paid local weavers to gather over a million spiders and "silk" them for what is called dragline silk, the strongest type of silk a spider makes. They make several types, did you know that? Me neither. Mr. Peers and his weavers created an 11 by 4 foot golden tapestry, now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

This extraordinary story got me thinking about other ways we use animals in art, either as subjects or as objects themselves. Rarer, though, is the phenomenon of animals as artists. Monkey Painting is a serious look at monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates as creative beings. Thierry Lenain's volume explores attempts by researchers to connect the artistic abilities of primates to early art by humans. Monkey Painting also reproduces some of these works in full color. A delight to behold! Lest you think this is a tongue-in-cheek book, know that Mr. Lenain is a noted French writer of both art criticism and children's books.

A title that does play around a little bit is Why Paint Cats: the ethics of feline aesthetics. This is from the team that also brought us the original Why Cats Paint and later, Dancing With Cats, two titles that know how far to go in the pursuit of silliness. I'm sure some people took the phenomenon of cat painting very seriously as proof of cats' higher intelligence, but I'm not sure their intelligence can be vouched for if they were willing to sit still long enough for the creation of these startling images of cats painted as a butterfly, an American Flag, and a clown, among other things. Burton Silver and Heather Busch must be experts in the near impossible job of cat herders.

The first time I saw this book, I immediately sat down and started turning pages, despite the fact that at the time, I was supposed to be shelving books, not reading books. Outrageous colors, impossible shapes, and incredible animals fill the pages of Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. I was sure these most of these creatures were imaginary, until I learned more about the man. He was a trained physician who changed careers when he read Darwin's Origin of Species and became an expert in comparative anatomy, specializing in invertebrates. These illustrations are now in the public domain and are available on several websites, but we also have a few versions of the book, including one that has a clip art CD-ROM so you can download the images to your computer.

What Price Fame?

Miley Cyrus has had it with Twitter. I knew it would come to this eventually – if not for Ms. Cyrus, then for some other tweeting celebrity. There is no doubt that for stars, the intensive connectedness of social media leads inexorably to a total lack of privacy.  I suppose that lack of privacy is just what some stars are aiming for, to feed their publicity machines, but I would imagine the joy found in the adulation of strangers pales eventually. So I'm not surprised that Miley eventually hit her limit (though I do admire the irony of quitting Twitter only to explain why via YouTube – see below for the video!).

Fame is a strange notion. We've always admired people for their humor, intelligence, knowledge, and for other skills and abilities – but it seems that fame based (or partly based) on celebrity itself is a relatively recent invention. In the last hundred years or so, we have created a whole new kind of notoriety with the help of the mass media, and now with social media like Twitter. To learn about the roots of this orgy of fame, I turned to Samantha Barbas's Movie Crazy. Barbas explains how the first film stars came to prominence, and discusses the movie studios' publicity machine, both of which are interesting stories. But more fascinating still is her history of fandom itself. She shows that early film fans helped shape the movie industry through fan club activities and through their letters to studios and stars. They didn't run things – studio moguls did – but they did have an influence. For example, producer David O. Selznick only agreed to cast Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind after he received hundreds of fan letters encouraging him to do so – imagine what a different flavor the film would have had if Gable's fans hadn't won out and the role had gone to one of the other top contenders, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn!

Miley Cyrus is no has-been – she's at the top of her game, fame-wise, but many child stars slide down into the abyss of un-famousness as their youth fades. Jeff Guinn and Douglas Perry investigate the personal and professional consequences of becoming no-longer-famous in their book The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame. Guinn and Perry discuss the fame and not-fame of entertainers like American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, and Fame star Irene Cara, but they also consider the cycle of fame for people who are notable by circumstance, like Susan McDougal, who served time as a consequence of the Whitewater scandal, and Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have saved Howard Hughes's life and later to be his heir based on a handwritten will.

Of course, the ins and outs of fans, famous people, and the idea of fame are also discussed at length in literature and drama. One of my own favorite Hollywood classics is on this theme: director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. Bette Davis stars as Margo Channing, a successful but aging Broadway star. When devoted fan Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is introduced to Margo, the star takes the young fan under her wing, and gives her a job as her assistant. But Eve is interested in more than just basking in Margo's limelight – she orchestrates a series of mishaps that result in her going on stage as Margo's understudy, on a night when all of New York's theater critics are in the house. Clearly Eve's skill at manipulating people to follow her schemes has the potential to make her a star, and destroy Margo in the process. It's just a question of whether Margo's own capable strengths will keep Eve at arms length.

Is it gauche to point out, after all this, that if you're a fan of Twitter, you can follow Multnomah County Library there to your heart's content?

* Here's Miley, doing her best to explain why she needs her privacy:

A Well Regulated Militia

Last Thursday’s Tigard/Tualatin Times reported that Oregonians are more into guns than ever. Local gun club memberships are on the rise, and local and national sales of guns, holsters, and other gun-related equipment are increasing as well. The article doesn’t have a terribly empirical explanation for this set of trends, but it quotes local gun shop owners and club spokespeople attributing the rise in gun-love to the election of Barack Obama last November. They say that gun enthusiasts fear that the Democratic president will curtail American’s Second Amendment rights.

Whether or not the Second Amendment is in peril, it’s true that guns are a permanent and contentious part of American culture. Laura Browder traces the always controversial history of women and guns in her book Her Best Shot. You might think this account, which describes women hunters, sharpshooters, political activists, and other women gun owners and advocates, would be either dry and academic, or imprecise and sensational; but instead, Browder’s readable narrative emphasizes the complexities (and often the contradictions) of the roles guns have played in women’s lives, and the roles armed women have played in our society. In particular, she shows how women with guns bring out our culture's anxieties about gender roles and morality. And the book's introduction features a survey of the use of images of young women in gun advertisements, which is also fascinating.

Images of Americans and their guns are the focus of photographer Kyle Cassidy’s book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. It is, just like it sounds, a collection of family portraits. The only twist is that these families are visibly armed, many of them heavily. But, in living rooms and kitchens, with pet dogs and cats in attendance, with babes in arms, all the folks in the pictures are just that, regular folks. Each portrait is accompanied by a caption listing the names, home state, and weapons of the family in the picture, together with a brief statement from one or more family members explaining why they own guns, and what their weapons mean to them. The reasons, the weapons, and the people are all surprising – gun ownership is often a very private matter in our culture, and Armed America helps bring this facet of American's lives out into the open.

One group of Americans who have a lot of pressure to keep their interest in guns under wraps are political progressives. But left-wing gun aficionados can always turn to the American Gun Culture Report for a little fellowship. The zine is full of critical perspectives on all issues relating to guns, progressive and conservative politics, and U.S. culture. Some highlights from the first three issues: a discussion of the portrayals of guns in Hollywood films, analysis of mainstream gun magazines, a profile of the Portland branch of the gay gun rights organization the Pink Pistols, and a regular feature highlighting unexpected gun owners.

(For those of you who, like me, have not yet committed the entire Bill of Rights to memory: the title of this post is the first phrase in the Second Amendment.  You can peruse all the amendments, and the rest of the Constitution at the National Archives' online exhibit The Charters of Freedom.)

Prose on Poetry

Many months ago on February 14th, Oregon had its 150th birthday. But when you're 150 years old, your birthday party lasts longer than a single day – all year, all around the state, folks have enjoyed celebrating our state's history, reflecting on its future, and bringing the word "sesquicentennial" more fully into our vocabulary. Poetry Northwest magazine and the Oregon State Library are doing their part; they've compiled a list of 150 outstanding Oregon poetry books for our enjoyment and edification. So I'll take this as an opportunity to do a little poetry celebrating too!

A few years ago I realized that not only did I rarely read poetry, I had no idea how formal English verse structure worked, and had never really tried my hand at writing poems myself. To resolve these problems, I turned to The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by actor, novelist, comedian, director and also poet Stephen Fry. The book is an instruction manual for poetry-writing, and it is a sincere and careful text, introducing readers to meter, rhyme, and verse forms with a series of explanatory chapters and instructive exercises, illustrated along the way with numerous examples of both excellent and execrable verse. Fry's descriptive and instructional style is logical, helpful, and clear – but at the same time, his famous wry wit is decidedly present. The book should be enjoyable to all who wish to understand poetic structures better, as well as to those who want to write and those who enjoy a bit of humor while they learn.

If you're more fascinated with the process of poetry than you are with writing it yourself, you might be interested in Abigail Friedman's story. Her book The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan chronicles her personal journey exploring the form of haiku and discovering the world of people devoted to the haiku life, while continuing to attend to her family and her day job as an American diplomat in Tokyo. Why is the book worth reading?  Friedman's account of her exploration of a specific piece of Japanese culture is interesting, for sure; but beyond that, The Haiku Apprentice introduces readers to the beauty and precision of the Japanese language, and to the intriguing spiritual aspects of the practice of reading, writing, and enjoying haiku.

I said up above that although I don't, as a rule, enjoy reading poetry, I do like to hear it read or performed. I am not alone here – spoken word poetry has experienced a revival in the United States in the last twenty years in the form of the poetry slam. It's a very democratic sport, and the rules are simple: poets sign up to compete, they must perform original work, they can't use costumes or props, and they get three minutes. Judges are picked from the audience more or less at random, and they score each performance. That's it. If you want to see and hear how this works but don't know where the best local venue is, take a look at the film Slamnation: The Art of Spoken Word, directed by Paul Devlin. It's a profile of the 1996 New York City slam team as it makes its way to the national contest right here in the Rose City.

Candy, the Gateway Drug

Several weeks ago, a friend brought a case of candy cigarettes to a party and passed them around to the delight of all of us who remembered them from childhood. They still had the poorly-applied red dye at the tip to give the impression of a lit cigarette and they still tasted as awful as they did when I was a kid and could buy a pack for a quarter. But that stretch of road on memory lane is about to be closed forever. The FDA recently announced that they will prohibit the production of candy cigarettes as well as all flavored tobacco cigarettes except menthol. The case of candy cigarettes my friend has is now contraband!

I'm not sure if the pseudonymous authors of the Sugar Needle zine have reviewed any candy cigarettes, or if they have any secreted away in what must be a pretty impressive candy stash. Corina Fastwolf and Icona Phlox write candy reviews of the strangest, most amazing obscure candy you can think of. They also do interviews including one with Dishwasher Pete about writing a book versus writing a zine and they ask his advice about how to clean burnt sugar out of a pan (soak it for days or chuck the pan). They also write about the candy industry, candy memories, great named candy bars (Plopp or Corny bar anyone?), and imaginary candies that they'd love to see. Each issue has a hand-colored cover and recalls the golden age of zines, when the biggest zines were handmade gems that covered one topic and one topic only, but exhaustively. I don't think I'm revealing too much with the info that one of the authors, Corina Fastwolf, is a Multnomah County Library Librarian. I wonder if she has candy on her desk?

Straight from the sugar-drenched mind of Ms. Fastwolf comes a recommendation for The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars. I read the excerpt that is available in our catalog when you click on the book cover and I was absolutely riveted. Joël Glenn Brenner provides an inside account of the business dealings of the two largest candy companies in the United States. The history of their companies is the history of candy and chocolate in America, and her portraits of the two very different founders, Forrest Mars and Milton Hershey, describe two divergent paths to power and corporate growth.

You may not like Steve Almond's Candyfreak: a Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. A mix of memoir and reportage about visiting candy factories, his book has some serious fans (me) and some equally serious detractors (I won't name names). Almond takes a most decidedly personal perspective on his visits and tells a larger story about candy through his personal lens. I know all about his likes and dislikes and some I agree with and some I'm definitely on the other side of the line. Candyfreak has made the rounds among my friends in the library and now we all know more than we ever expected to about The Enrober. What is The Enrober? The machine in the candy-making process that covers things in chocolate. Steve Almond is obsessed with The Enrober, so we learn all about it. And really, what isn't more mysterious and intriguing than how they get those candy bars covered in chocolate?

An Open Invitation to Visit the Library

Last week on NPR's Morning Edition they did a fascinating story on the only unsolved prison escape from Alcatraz.  On June 12, 1962, Frank Morris, and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin, escaped from the Rock never to be seen or heard from again.  I have to say, I love this stuff!  The idea that these three guys may have gotten away with what was said to be impossible, and that they could still be around today, living their lives - it's thrilling!  I grew up in the Bay Area, but it wasn't until I was home on summer vacation from college that I actually toured Alcatraz.  It was a dreary place and when it came to the part of the tour where they lock you in a cell, I refused.  Looking back on that day, I can imagine the desperate need to escape that place, spending months painstakingly digging a way out.   

If you want to learn more about Morris and the Anglin brothers, and other attempts to escape Alcatraz, you have to check out the classic text Escape from Alcatraz by J. Campbell Bruce.  This book was originally published the same year Alcatraz was shut down as a federal prison, 1963, and it reads like a movie script.  Frankly, I'm not sure how he figures the last thing Frank Morris said before leaving the island was "Where the hell's the other oar?...Never mind, let's shove".  But I don't care because it's fun to read.  You can also watch the 1979 movie based on his book with the same name, Escape from Alcatraz, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris. 

Morris and the Anglin brothers are famous for their escape, and we all know about Al Capone's stay on the Rock and about the Birdman of Alcatraz, but there were many other men imprisoned there during its 29 years as a federal prison.  Thomas E. Gaddis highlights some of the less prominent inmates of Alcatraz in his book Unknown Men of Alcatraz.  Gaddis' is obviously on the side of the ex-cons he interviews for his book and very much against Alcatraz and all that it stood for.  This is made clear with his over-the-top writing style and lines like, "Over in San Francisco Bay sits the evil stone, Alcatraz.  It's a gem of a ruin.  Its name is the blare of a trumpet.  The late slammer wears its hornet's nest of memories like something alive." But this book is a quick and interesting read, and the illustrations at the beginning of each chapter are priceless.

Another aspect of Alcatraz that I find intriguing is that even while it was a federal prison, entire families lived together on the island.  It's hard to picture children playing and going to school with Machine Gun Kelly as their neighbor, but it happened. Claire Rudolph Murphy talks about two centuries of children living on the Rock in her book, Children of Alcatraz.  This book is nice because it discusses what was there both before and after Alcatraz was a federal penitentiary.  She highlights the multiple times it was inhabited by Native Americans, its use as a lighthouse and its role today as a historic national park and museum.  Furthermore, Murphy's Children of Alcatraz is written for kids, which means the great stories are accompanied by pictures, maps and photographs including one of a young Frank Morris, in reform school at age 14.

So, Morris and brothers Anglin, if you're out there somewhere and want to take a trip down memory lane, stop by the Central Library and ask to see the March 1962 Popular Mechanics' article on flotation devices titled "Your Life Preserver: How Will It Behave if You Need It".  We have it here on microfilm and we understand it was a helpful article to you when you needed it...and that's what the library is all about, getting folks the information they need, when they need it!

Fictional High School Breaks Out in Song

With news that the new television drama Glee has been picked up for FOX’s fall season, I have the oddities of high school on my mind. Glee follows a motley group of kids who are the core membership of the McKinley High School glee club, and their club director, Spanish teacher Will Schuester. There are many elements to the show’s plot, but here’s what strikes me: Glee kids are losers. Popular kids (that is, football players, cheerleaders, and the like) mock them constantly – every moment of the schoolday they’re laid open to harassment, teasing, and humiliation. Glee is lame, but if glee becomes cool (as all six kids and their director fervently hope), so will they.

But in some schools, there are no jocks, no cheerleaders, and more or less no richie-rich kids. At Edward R. Murrow, a public high school in New York City, the A-list kids are the members of the championship chess team. Sportswriter Michael Weinreb followed the team throughout the 2005-2006 school year, relating stories of chess club meetings, competitions, and cash games played in public parks; of rivalries and friendships; of talent and obsession with the game; and of the charismatic teacher who coaches the team. The Kings of New York is about the game of chess as much as it is about the Murrow team, and in the end it's a fascinating portrait of both.

The tension between popular kids and losers is at the very heart of the literature of adolescence. Nearly everyone who loves books or movies can cite a few that focus on the struggle for identity, on the horrible things kids do to each other to draw social lines, and the pressure everyone’s under. One of my personal favorites is The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton*. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, there are greasers, and there are socs – two groups widely separated by economic status, neighborhood, and general outlook on life. Violence between them is common, usually with the clean-cut socs as the initial aggressors, and it's a series of soc/greaser fights that forms the structural framework of the story. But in many ways, it's really about friendship and loyalty, and about understanding the different wisdom and strengths that different people have.

With all of its social pressure, high school is not for everyone. But how are you supposed to build a life after your teens if you don't have an education? You will find answers in the classic guide to unschooling, The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Former middle school teacher Grace Llewellyn provides guidance for kids who want to quit school but keep learning, every step of the way from investigating non-school options to talking to parents to getting into college without a high school diploma. This isn't a guide for homeschoolers, it's a guide for teens who want to set their own educational goals and reach them on their own terms. Llewellyn went on to write another book, Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Own Stories, which should provide would-be unschoolers with more inspiration.

* Library-related trivia: a film version of The Outsiders was released in 1983, after Jo Ellen Misakian (a librarian at Lone Star School in Sanger, CA) wrote to Francis Ford Coppola to ask him to make it into a movie. She attached a petition signed by her eighth-grade students, who loved the book, and had hit on the idea that as a film, more people could enjoy the powerful story. And of course, the library has The Outsiders DVD as well as the book, for all of you who prefer watching to reading – or who just like to try both!

Penalty of Death

The Salem Statesman Journal reported this week that Marion County prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty in their case against Bruce and Joshua Turnridge, who are accused of aggravated murder in the deaths of two police officers in a bomb explosion at a Woodburn bank last December. Aggravated murder is the only crime for which a sentence of death is allowed in Oregon, and though the death penalty and discussion about it are relatively rare in the media here, Oregon does have a long history of executions.

And some of them have fascinating stories behind them, for example:  In 1858, Portland-area settler Danford Balch's teenaged daughter Anna eloped with a hired hand named Mortimer Stump – Balch was so angry about this that two weeks later, when he ran into Stump in a Portland bar, he followed him to the Stark Street Ferry and killed him with a shotgun blast to the head. Balch was convicted of murder and then hanged on October 17, 1859 at a public gallows set up near First and Salmon Streets while 500 people looked on. If this is the kind of grisly tale that suits your tastes, you need to check out Necktie Parties: A History of Legal Executions in Oregon 1851-1905, Diane L. Goeres-Gardner’s history of public executions in the Beaver State. In a series of short, readable chapters, Goeres-Gardner details every legal execution between 1851, when William Kendall was hanged in Salem, and 1905, when Daniel Norman Williams was hanged in The Dalles, the last man to be executed outside of the walls of the state penitentiary. (Or, if you'd rather focus on the political and legal history of executions in Oregon, take a look at A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon, by William R. Long. It's a bit more scholarly, and it focuses on the development of the institution rather than on the stories of people who were condemned to death.)

Oregon executes condemned prisoners with lethal injection, as do many other states. But lethal injection has only been widely used by government executioners in the U.S. for about 25 years – historically, prisoners have also been killed by firing squads and in gas chambers, hanged, and electrocuted. In his book Edison and the Electric Chair, Mark Essig explains that electrocution became a truly viable option when Thomas Edison, America's favorite inventor and entrepreneur, threw his weight behind the promotion of the electric chair. Interestingly, Edison was an opponent of the death penalty, but his rivalry with George Westinghouse put him under considerable financial pressure. Edison's company was providing electricity using the direct current method, which was more expensive than Westinghouse's alternating current (the system we still use today). This, Essig argues, led Edison to advocate for an electric execution chair using alternating current. Essig's history examines more than just the interpersonal and political aspects, though – he also provides thorough technical explanations of direct and alternating current, explains how the electric chair works, and describes the experiments that allowed researchers to develop the final model that was actually used for executions.

Not all executions are carried out within the framework of the formal legal system. Eliza Steelwater's The Hangman's Knot chronicles two parallel stories: the history of legal executions in the United States, and the history of lynching. Ultimately, Steelwater is looking to examine why the U.S. still employs the death penalty when most other democracies have long outlawed it. Steelwater is an opponent of the death penalty and it shows in her writing, but anyone interested in this history, regardless of their own political position, should find the book fascinating.

Caster Semenya and the "Rules" of Gender

South African, middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has been embroiled in controversy these last few months. Last week Semenya withdrew from competition amid reports in the Australian media regarding leaked findings of a sex-determination test that implied Semenya, who had dominated the field running against women, has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Indicators of AIS include elevated testosterone and the presence of undescended testes. Semenya's success as a runner brings to light surprising limitations in our culture's conception of gender but this is not the first time that an athlete has faced such scrutiny. Indian runner Santhi Soundararajan tested positive for possessing a Y chromosome and was stripped of her silver medal from the 2006 Doha Asian Games. Soundararajan attempted suicide the following year. The International Olympic Committee banned genetic testing in 1999 but during the 1996 games in Atlanta eight women athletes tested positive for having a Y chromosome. Of those eight, seven had AIS and all were allowed to compete.

Gender is, of course, a complicated issue and as a construct it is difficult to contextualize. Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature succeeds mightily in comparing/contrasting human expressions of gender and sexuality to those found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. The book's title refers to the Red Queen's race in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass during which the Queen remarks, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Ridley uses this analogy in explaining the advantage of sexual reproduction for individuals within a species as well as the constant evolutionary arms race that exists between species competing for resources in their shared environment. By using frequent examples from throughout the animal kingdom Ridley illustrates that our cultural concepts of gender and sexual reproduction are frequently much narrower than those recognized by science and expands these insights into valuable reflections on the nature of our behavior as a species.

Then again, if professor of genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University Bryan Sykes is correct, humans may not have to worry about gender issues in the future. In Adam's Curse: a Future Without Men he posits that within 125,000 years (not really that long by evolutionary standards) Homo sapiens may lose the Y chromosome entirely. Sykes describes the deterioration of the Y chromosome in dramatic terms and proposes that its diminishing stability may be responsible for increasing rates of infertility among men. Though the author has impressive academic credentials, this story of conflict and cooperation between mitochondrial DNA (which we all inherent from our mothers) and the Y chromosome (which males inherent from their fathers) is written in concise and entertaining prose. The central thesis of Adam's Curse may not come to fruition until well beyond our days but the science that Sykes describes in exploring this intriguing possibility has many applications in the present.

As much as the parent's genes may battle for expression in their child's body, sexual reproduction is still an altruistic (and very successful) process. How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do by Dr. Sharon Moalem explores human sex from a practical, scientific vantage point and the results are a fascinating and revealing look at what makes us human using our sexuality as a lens. Moalem presents up to date research about human sexuality in a compelling and informative way and doesn't shy away from difficult issues (can twins have different fathers?) Competing theories are included in an effort to be as informative and honest as possible about the complexities of the issues at hand. Although How Sex Works enthralls with its detailing of the unseen machinations of our bodies, such as the development of the secondary sexual characteristics that we commonly use to distinguish the sexes, its greater import is to suggest how flexible our society may need to be if we are to acknowledge the gap between our cultural constructs of gender/sexuality and science's interpretation how and why we behave the way we do.

A Good Investment After All

I heard on the radio the other morning that Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment, home of comics heroes Spider-Man, the X-men, and Iron Man, for the stunning price of $4 billion dollars. That could buy a lot of plastic sleeves to protect those comics! With the trend of movies being made from comics, it makes sense for Disney to own the content that it could use to make new movies, and then fill time slots on its television channels, and make all-new action figure lines, and then paste superheroes onto lunch boxes and pencils and notepads and folders and everything else you can paste a superhero onto. It looks like a savvy purchase, even though Disney's stock went down after the news broke. I just love to see comics discussed as news.

When you're ready to investigate the creative well that the world's largest entertainment company will now be drawing from, you could pick up The Marvel Comics Encyclopedia : a Complete Guide to the Characters of the Marvel Universe. Published by DK Publishing, the source of myriad exhaustive guides to everything from Spiderman to Horses, Spain to Hockey. The Encyclopedia combines an A-Z list of characters with essays about Marvel comics through the decades. For advanced study, you should definitely take a look at the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Multiple volumes, thousands of characters, alternate worlds and all the information you need to really geek out.

Oh, Scott McCloud, I have totally fallen for your bespectacled alter-ego in Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art. You lead me, Virgil-like, through the concentric circles of meaning in the comics world. Okay, I may be overstating it a teensy bit, but I do think this book is swoon-worthy, if only for the fact that it makes something invisible and ephemeral into something concrete and understandable. McCloud explains how all the elements of comics come together to create meaning. And he manages to do it without making it clinical or killing the beauty of comics art.

I have to admit that I am not really a superhero comics fan. Many friends over the years have tried to help me see the error of my ways and I have tried, really I have. What keeps me reading comics are stories about people's lives, whether they are autobiographical or use cartoon animals as stand-ins. Ivan Brunetti and I think along the same lines. He has collected a selection of the best contemporary "art comics" in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. Brunetti hasn't just selected Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz Award winners, though they are represented in this two-volume anthology. A very personal selection of stories and excerpts, this book presents what he considers the best piece from each person, and unlike many comics anthologies, women artists and writers are fairly well represented.

The Library has a large collection of comics, including Marvel and other superhero comics, Manga, and a wide range of alternative and art comics for children through adults. For a short sampling of graphic novels, check out our Graphic Novels booklist in the Readers section of the Library's website.

Lost and Found

Wired Magazine writer Evan Ratliff recently wrote a story about Matthew Allen Sheppard, a manager at an Arkansas electrical plant who charged $40,000 worth of personal items on a company credit card, faked his own death and fled to Mexico, but missed his family and was eventually caught while trying to reunite with them. How difficult is it to disappear in the digital age? Pretty challenging! Electronic traces are everywhere: ATM records are networked; any kind of email, Facebook post, text message, or other electronic communication can be monitored; and lots of regular people have their photograph and personal details all over the web so it's easy to see what they look like and what they're into. So Evan Ratliff and his editor Nick Thompson are making a game of going underground – Ratliff has disappeared, and Thompson is leading worldwide manhunt for him. Anyone can join in and compete for a prize of $5,000.  I'm sure you're rarin' to go, but if you'd like to do a little reading first about how to find missing or lost people, research how criminals manage to stay underground, or consider what you might do (or not do) if you wanted to disappear yourself, I've got some suggestions for you!

Imagine you're working on a mystery novel and you need details of how local police go about tracking a suspected pseudocide*. Cozy up with real-life gumshoe Fay Faron's Missing Persons: A Writer's Guide to Finding the Lost, the Abducted and the Escaped and you should pick up a few tips. Faron explains who is likely to go missing, who might want to find them, and common techniques private investigators like herself employ to start finding their quarry. (Writers and other folks generally interested in learning other bits and bobs about crime, criminals and investigators might want to look at the other books in the Howdunit Series, which cover everything from poisons to private investigation techniques.)

Evan Ratliff has to follow some rules for the month that he's underground – one of them is that he can't simply fade away into the wilderness. But some folks who disappear or go missing do it by getting away from cities, traveling on foot, and living close to the land. You can learn how to follow and find people in the natural world with Tracking: Signs of Man, Signs of Hope. Author David Diaz has spent the last twenty years learning advanced techniques for tracking people using the subtle signs they leave behind – foot prints, broken leaves, disturbed undergrowth, trash, blood trails, and more, and he shares his strategies in detail in this creepy but fascinating manual.

People go underground for lots of reasons. Some are trying to escape prosecution for a crime, like Matthew Allen Sheppard. Some just want to turn over an emphatically new leaf. Some folks, though, have stepped so far outside of their cultural norms that their lives are in danger because of their actions – people who turn "state's evidence" and testify against fellow criminals in exchange for immunity are sometimes given new identities, new lives, and long-term protection from the US Department of Justice in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Pete Earley's WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program is the story of how Justice Department attorney Gerald Shur created the program in the early 1960s, to help the Department win its war on organized crime. The book is filled with interesting detail about how WITSEC operates, and stories about people who have been offered protection through the program.

Criminals who've gone underground aren't all mobsters, though. Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty, starring River Phoenix is the story of a whole family on the run. Phoenix plays 17-year old Danny Pope, son of a pair of ex-sixties radicals who blew up a chemical lab that produced napalm scheduled to be used in the Vietnam War, and then were forced underground. The pressure of life in the shadows is getting to Danny, and he realizes he is going to have to make a choice: does he want to stay with his family, or try to strike out on his own without them?

* My new word of the day! The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thusly: "pseudocide, n. 1. A suicide attempt which is intended to fail, a pretended attempt at suicide. Also: the faking of one's own death. 2. A person who attempts or commits pseudocide." [Emphasis mine, of course!]

The Legacy of Les Paul

Les Paul, the man who helped bring the world the solid-body electric guitar and arguably helped make rock and roll music what it is today, died last week at the age of 94. I couldn't tell you the name of the "best" guitar out there, or the "best" guitar player, but I know that those questions would be mute without the inventor and musician Les Paul. And from what I've been reading about him over the past few days, not only was he brilliant (and a wicked good guitar player), but he was also a positive, "can do" guy who overcame physical obstacles and continued to play weekly with his friends at New York's Irridum jazz club right up to his death. Les Paul is a person who made the very most of his life, and I think that's something to celebrate.

So let's start the celebration by listening to him play! The library has several CDs featuring Les Paul. I recommend the compilation The Complete Decca Trios-Plus, with two CDs and over two hours of music. This covers recordings made for Decca between 1936 and 1947, earlier then most of the other compilations you'll find, and right around the time Les invented his first solid-body electric guitar prototype, nick-named "the log". These recordings really show the amazing range Les Paul had and feature him with other greats like The Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby.

We also have a documentary put out by PBS's American Masters titled Les Paul: Chasing Sound! where the man himself talks about his extraordinary life, including his time on television in the 1950s with then wife Mary Ford and his struggle with multiple health issues and injuries that threatened to keep him from doing what he loved best, playing music. The film incorporates footage of him playing with the likes of Keith Richards and Merle Haggard. It also has interviews with folks like B.B. King and Bonnie Raitt. This is a fun 90 minutes with a real American legend who was truly down-to-earth, and extremely well-regarded amongst his peers. Plus, there is a ton of amazing music!

If you want to know more about his life and the instruments he helped create, I have a couple of suggestions, both written by Robb Lawrence. The first is The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy, 1915-1963 which as its name suggests, covers the beginning of Les Paul's career. It is not only thoughtfully researched, but includes some beautiful original photography. This book really brings home why they call his life and his work a "legacy".

Lawrence follows this first book up with The Modern Era of the Les Paul Legacy: 1968-2008 highlighting Paul's special-themed model guitars of the 1960s and 1970s, and his Custom Shop models of the 1990s. It also talks about Paul's comeback Grammy Award-winning album with Chet Akins titled Chester & Lester in 1976, as well as his weekly gig at the Irridum jazz club that started back in 1996. There are some great videos on YouTube of Les Paul playing at the Irridum. I've included one here from August of 2006.

Bye Les, thanks for the music!