Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

All Singing, All Dancing

Andrew Lloyd Weber’s new musical Love Never Dies (sequel to Phantom of the Opera) is getting some harsh criticism from London’s theatre bloggers and from “phans” from around the world – but, although it's likely the show will see some changes before it makes it to Broadway, it's not like everyone hates it.

But it is still true that among many folks, musicals have the reputation of being shallow or even hackneyed when it comes to plot and character development, and over-the-top in the song and dance department. Like many stereotypes, this one wasn't developed out of thin air – there are lots of lightweight or schlocky musicals, with unnecessarily frilly orchestration and highly emotional lyrics. But musical theater has an adaptable structure, and it's not too hard to find musicals with intelligent, thought-provoking plots, compelling characters, wry lyrics, and socially relevant themes. Here are some of my personal favorites!

Songs tell stories, and stories can be about anything – even the struggle between workers and bosses. Marc Blitzstein's musical Cradle Will Rock chronicles Larry Foreman and his fellow workers as they struggle to form a union in a company town (Steeltown, USA) controlled by wicked businessman Mr. Mister. Cradle Will Rock was commissioned by the depression-era Federal Theater Project, one of the put-America-to-work agencies of the Works Progress Administration. The Federal Theater shut down the production before the first performance, citing budget troubles, but it was widely believed that the show was really being censored for its left-wing political slant. Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock tells both stories – the story of Larry Foreman vs. Mr. Mister in the play, and the story about the play's 1937 Federal Theater production, its cast, and how it was shut down. The film is poignant, funny, and a great history lesson, telling, as it does, the heartbreaking story of how the Great Depression affected the theater community, and the equally heartbreaking story of some of the political conflicts that eventually led to the 1950s red scare.

Stephan Elliott’s Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert follows a trio of female impersonators as they road-trip across Australia to a gig at a remote casino resort. Naturally this film features a lot of fabulous costumes, dance performance, and lip synching. But it's also great drama, with complex, challenging characters (even those with quite minor roles), unexpected plot twists, and breathtaking Australian scenery. And with master performances by Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving, and Guy Pearce (among others), what’s not to like?

I could really go on and on about this topic. But I don’t have space here to give you lots of detail about every single smart-and-sassy musical I’ve seen and enjoyed, so I’ll close with a terse list of further recommendations:

• When the Jack, the Pumpkin King, gets a chance glimpse at Christmas, he becomes obsessed with bringing this new holiday to the residents of Halloweentown. But will they be able to understand Christmas?  All is revealed in A Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Tim Burton.

• I have a new theory that all movies in the 1960s are actually dream sequences – figuratively or literally. Dr. Seuss’s little-known live-action musical The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (directed by Roy Rowland) is literally a dream, or more properly a nightmare, about the machinations of an obsessive piano teacher.

• If you're sick of all the love songs and happy endings, you need John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch – the loud, brash, and unapologetic story of an ambitious glam-rocker who escapes communist East Germany and comes to America seeking love, fortune, and fame.
• And, last but not least, a musical about musicals! And it’s a classic, from 1933: 42nd Street, directed by Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley. What happens when the star breaks her ankle right before the opening night, and the last-minute understudy is rather woefully under-prepared?

Do you have your own suggestions of musicals sure-to-be-enjoyed-by-people-who-say-they-hate-musicals?  Send them our way!

For Your Education

I have an aunt and uncle who are Japanese American.  My uncle was born here in the States and is a second generation Japanese American, or Nisei.  He was born in 1928 and spent time as a young man in the Gila River Relocation Center near Phoenix, Arizona.  Obviously, this had a huge impact on his life and every time I visit my hometown and see him, he brings me something new to read on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, he says it's for my "education".  I always look forward to seeing him and to receiving another book, article, or government document to add to my personal library on the evacuation and detainment of Nikkei (people of Japanese descent) during World War II.  And I will pass along what I've learned to my own child, not only because this happened to a member of our family, but also because these are the moments in history we should never forget.  When I saw OPBs story on the Portland Expo Center's role in the internment of Japanese-Americans, it struck a chord in me and prompted me to look again at our library's collection of materials on this subject.  

This library has hundreds of books on the subject of the evacuation and relocation of West Coast Japanese Americans.  I decided to focus on some that for me, make it more real.  For instance, in 1942 photographer Dorothea Lange was commissioned by the U.S. Relocation Authority to photograph the evacuation and relocation process of 110,000 Japanese Americans.  She not only photographed life in the assembly centers and the Manzanar Relocation Center, but also what these people lost due to their imprisonment: their homes, farms, businesses, and careers.  All of Lange's photographs were confiscated during the war for being too controversial.  The negatives were thankfully held at the National Archives and now many of them are available in different collections.  One collection I particularly like is Impounded in which Lange's photographs are beautifully displayed, along with the notes she wrote for each.  This book was edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro.

In a similar vein we find the book Placing Memory, by Todd Stewart.  Although it's been 65 years since a Supreme Court decision in favor of Mitsuye Endo paved the way for the opening of the relocation centers and the unrestricted release of their inmates, those camps still exist in the minds and hearts of those who were confined there.  And in some cases, they still physically exist in the areas they occupied so long ago.  Many of us have seen black and white images from inside the relocation centers, showing how families took what little they had and bettered their living conditions.  What is also important is to see, is the larger landscape in which these families found themselves.  In his book, Stewart combines archival photos, maps and color photographs of the sites as they exist today.  Imagine coming from the hustle and bustle of Portland to the harsh, bleak landscape of the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho.  Or coming from the lush and fertile California coast to the hot, dry desert of the Gila River Relocation Center, dotted with Saguaro Cactus.  This book will help you do that.

I mention above the families who took what little they were given and managed to build a home and a community.  The next book I want to mention really highlights that amazing spirit and the importance of art in creating such spaces. The Art of Gaman by Delphine Hirasuna explores the making of arts and crafts in the relocation centers, which she describes as "both a physical and emotional necessity for the internees."  The items contained within this book are stunning and I promise they will absolutely amaze you.  The first thing you must do is turn to page 74 and gaze upon the Japanese-style vanity made of persimmon wood by Pat Morihata, who was confined at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas.  You'll find it beautiful and will be amazed to know that this vanity is made completely without nails, but is instead held together by a perfect dovetailing of pieces.  Morihata made this vanity for the woman he was wooing; she said "yes".

In May Sky, by the late Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, we see more of the art that came from Japanese American internment.  De Cristoforo, a poet who was interned at the Tule Lake Relocation Center in Northern California, spent years compiling haiku written by others in the camps.  I am an admirer of haiku, and this is some of the most beautifully written and heartbreaking poetry that I have read.  Take these three pieces, from the famous haiku poet Neiji Ozawa who was interned at the Gila River Relocation Center:

Sensing permanent separation / As you left me in extreme heat / On gravel road

Even babies born / Inside barbed wire fence / Mingling on New Year's Day

From the window of despair / May sky / There is always tomorrow

For each haiku de Cristoforo provides the original Japanese characters, the romanji (romanized form of Japanese) and an English translation.

Safety First!

Surgical teams in three quarters of Oregon hospitals have started using a simple tool to make operations safer, and it’s cut down on mistakes by 30%! This new tool is a short checklist developed by the World Health Organization (though we have our own version in Oregon), and it gives nurses, technicians, and doctors a methodical way to make sure they have all their ducks in a row. Do we all know each other by name? Check! Do we have the right patient and do we know what operation we’re performing? Check! Does this person have any allergies? Check! Have we removed all the sponges, surgical towels, needles, and instruments we used in this person’s body? Check!

Are you fascinated to learn more about how this works? I’ve got the book for you: The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande (a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School who also writes for The New Yorker). Gawande examines checklists in construction, investing, aviation and other fields, but he focuses on checklists in his own profession, medicine. Here’s what I found most fascinating: research has shown that surgeons are so rock star-like that it’s hard for other members of a surgical team to interrupt if they notice something’s amiss. It’s too intimidating! But, when people are polite and friendly, it makes that interruption feel collegial instead of confrontational – that is, if everyone has to say “Hi everyone, I’m Dr. So-and-so and I’m the anesthesiologist” (or whatever), they’re more likely to speak up when something’s wrong.

Safety checklists were first developed in aviation, and even those of us who have never once fantasized about being behind the controls of a jet airplane have seen this in action. Before takeoff in every commercial flight, flight attendants (whose main job is promoting safety, although they will also get you a ginger ale if you ask nicely) take their passengers through a miniature safety training. If that doesn’t do it, you can always review the information in the safety card in your seat pocket. Eric Ericson and Johan Pihl’s Design for Impact explains the history of airline safety cards, and reproduces hundreds of elegant, amusing, and instructive examples from the last fifty years of safer flying.

Everyone knows that scientists have to follow careful safety protocols – Professor Max Axiom, Super Scientist teaches kids the basics of science experiment safety measures in Lessons in Science Safety. This helpful comic from Donald B. Lemke, Thomas K. Adamson, Tod Smith and Bill Anderson gets readers ready to learn basic lab science safely with sections on preparing for the lab, working safely, handling accidents, and cleaning up. Entertaining and instructional!

An Imaginary Wife

I read Sandra Tsing Loh's recent New York Times op-ed piece with a sense of recognition. She tells a fantasy story of the mythic housewife of the 20th century, who had dominion over her home and the time and the will to devote to achieving perfection in the home and to dote on her bacon-bringing husband. Today's reality is markedly different. Loh identifies herself as part of the statistic from a recent PEW Research Study that reports that 22% of women now earn more than their spouses, up from 4% in 1970. The study, Women, Men and the New Economics of Marriage, makes for fascinating reading and illuminates the drastic changes in women's economic lives over the last 40 years. In Loh's family, she acknowledges, when both parties come home exhausted from work and try to share duties, no one is really in charge of the housework. Decision-making about the home has to be negotiated, rather than just left up to a wife who no longer exists.

For men who are committed to taking up the mantle of domestic work but don't know where to start, you might try Nigel Browning and Jane Moseley's book, How to Satisfy Your Woman Everytime: the Straight Guy's Guide to Housework and Good Grooming. This guide will take you from the basics to more advanced housework topics and will even teach you about moisturizing your feet with mashed fruit. Don't let that metrosexual moisturizing tip prevent you from picking up this book. It's a lighthearted tour through the chores that await you as you pick up the broom and learn to banish stains forever.

Now that most families have two working parents and mom is too tired after work to be the only one making dinner and getting the kids ready for bed, it's time to make some changes. It's not going to be easy, though. Two working moms who are working on creating this balance themselves, Sharon Meers and Joanna Strober, have written a book that could help: Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have It All By Sharing It All and Why It's Great for Your Marriage, Your Career, Your Kids, and You. That mouthful of a title may foreshadow the complexities you face at home when challenging roles and shifting responsibilities. Though this book is aimed primarily at women who want to maintain and grow their careers, there's a fair amount here for the men in their lives as well.

For those ready to give up on the institution, or whose marriages have seen both better and worse, the women who tell their own stories in The Honeymoon's Over: True Stories of Love, Marriage and Divorce may have some words of wisdom for you. Editors Andrea Chapin and Sally Wofford-Girand collect the stories of 21 women writers on topics that range from infidelity, the suicide of a partner,and the blossoming of sexuality. The essays include Terry McMillan on the nationally-televised betrayal by her husband, Lee Montgomery on contemplating infidelity, and Joyce Maynard on the sudden end of her slowly-fraying marriage.

Putting Things in Order

The American Psychiatric Association is working on a new revision to its massive catalog of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This time around, proposed revisions include eliminating a hard-and-fast distinction between Asperger's syndrome and autism, revising the criteria for some eating disorders, and offering a new tool for suicide risk assessment.

We humans are very interested in categorizing and classifying our world. Art and cultural historians, doctors, biologists, librarians, and many other thinkers have used classification as a tool (however flawed) to bring order where there appeared to be chaos. The news about revisions to the DSM has reminded me of several fascinating books about how we have managed (or mismanaged) this sort of tidying, and how to use classification systems to our advantage:

In Naming Nature, New York Times science journalist Carol Kaesuk Yoon outlines anthropological evidence that naming systems to describe plants and animals are universal among humans; as well as scientific research that indicates there is a special part of the brain used for naming natural objects, different from the part of the brain that we use to name inanimate or human-made objects! Yoon's narrative is readable and thought-provoking, particularly when she discusses the depth of meaning in traditional taxonomies, and argues that when we discard these traditional naming systems in favor of systems based on evolution, genomes, or chemical structures, we lose something meaningful. Folk taxonomies, she asserts, have a certain je ne sais quoi scientific taxonomies will never attain.

Take a look at the traditional names we use for plants and animals, though, and you might start to get confused. Is it a hawk, or a falcon? A moth, or a butterfly? What's the difference between corn and maize? Or mushrooms and toadstools? Answers to all these questions, and more, are to be found in This is Not a Weasel: A Close Look at Nature's Most Confusing Terms. In this helpful but entertaining reference, Philip B. Mortenson explains the history and etymology of common names of plants and animals – but even better, he looks carefully at the differences between confusingly similar organisms. Readers will leave Mortenson's tutelage with a clearer understanding of what makes a mammal a mammal, the differences between spines and thorns, and so on.  Useful knowledge indeed.

Of course, science is not the only place we employ classification systems. Per Mollerup illustrates this vividly with Marks of Excellence: The History and Taxonomy of Trademarks. The book is large, colorful, and richly illustrated, but it is more than a visual reference. Mollerup first presents an intelligent history of trademarks, their use, their ideal function, and their cultural role. Then, he lays out a detailed taxonomical structure for trademarks, with branches for different types. For example, at the roughest level, there are graphic marks, and non-graphic marks.  Among graphic marks, a further division can be made between letter marks, and picture marks.  Each element of this taxonomy is described in the text, and illustrated with specific examples of real-life trademarks. Marks of Excellence is fascinating to leaf through, but Mollerup's explanations and history are so interesting that they would be worthy of attention even if the illustrations were not so many, so varied, and so beautiful.

The Intersection of Ingenuity and Desperation

Customs authorities in Vancouver, B. C. made a grave discovery this week when they found nearly 57 kilograms of opium inside a hollow tombstone being shipped from Iran. The find is being called the province's biggest opium seizure ever. This type of criminal activity might be considered the intersection of ingenuity and desperation or perhaps optimism and immorality. In either case, these people and objects could tell an interesting tale.

Best known for his work as an award-winning writer for young adults, Jack Gantos tells the harrowing story of being drawn into a drug smuggling scheme and his ensuing arrest in Hole in My Life. As a teen living in the Virgin Islands fearing that his life was going nowhere with no chance getting away, Gantos was approached with an offer to transport a large quantity of hashish to New York City in return for free transport and money to start a new life. Hole in My Life documents the entanglements that slowly surround him as he realizes this adventure. Using a stark and direct style that eschews moralizing, Gantos captures an image of himself as a teen hungry for internal catharsis. Desperately looking outside himself for forces of change, Gantos ultimately finds an internal motivation  that drives him from wanting to write to actually writing during his incarceration. Our author finds that nurturing the creative impulse requires a self-discipline and self-care also essential to successfully surviving the harsh realities of life in prison.

Evidence of creativity out of desperation abounds in Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts. Collected here by Vladimir Arkhipov are ingenious examples of craft that put a hollow Iranian tombstone to shame. Leather cap made from an old punching bag? Check. Old Fanta cans turned into artful maracas? Check. Poet's flashlight for recording mid-slumber muse visits, built-from-scratch? Check. Home-Made is a testimony to the material expression of self-actualization that occurs when resources become bitterly scarce. Better yet, this is no simple picture book. Each example is grouped with insightful, and often entertainingly off-topic, comments from its creator. We learn that a hand fabricated motor scooter windshield was obtained by bartering medical alcohol and that the windshield's owner then attached a plastic visor himself, bending it to fit over an open fire. Our proud owner, Grigory Samorin, goes on to explain that the stickers of girls on the windshield are courtesy of his son who brought them back from Germany and that a similar trend has filled every kiosk in his town with porn.

Visceral yet hallucinatory, the images collected by Danzig Baldaev in the three volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia are by turns inspiring and disturbing. Baldaev was the warden of "Kresty" an infamous prison in Leningrad. During his fifty-two years there (and in other reformatory settlements) he recorded hundreds of tattoos as they appeared on both men and women. Most of the tattoos here are presented as illustrations making Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia a flash book of sorts. Though translations are provided, only the most cursory explanation of the tattoos' meaning within the deep, complex subculture of Russian prisons is included. Still, the shocking power of these drawings speaks to a type of creative expression born out of a criminal subculture's tragic and autocatalytic need to define and enforce an articulated power structure. Plus, the drawings are cool looking.

Street Art 101

I am a wannabe artist and I love art of all kinds: dance, music, theater, and the visual arts.  I've been to the Louvre and seen da Vinci's Mona Lisa and I am lucky enough to own a couple pieces by some very talented Portlanders. But honestly, some of the stuff that has moved me most, I've seen just walking down the street.  I'm talking about what is commonly referred to as graffiti, street art and murals.  Much of it could be described as crude, youthful angst spray painted onto a wall, but some of it is thoughtful, poetic, powerful and even inspiring.  Have you seen some of the beautiful City Repair projects, or the whimsical little horses around town, or just what some extremely talented individual has done in the dead of night with some spray paint and a vision! As part of their Pictures of the Day series, the Christian Science Monitor pulled together 14 images of graffiti from around the world.  

The library has many books on graffiti and street art and murals but I want to point out one in particular, the bible of graffiti if you will, The Faith of Graffiti with photos by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar. This work was originally published in 1974 and is often referred to as the "classic text" on the birth of urban street art, focusing specifically on the emergence of graffiti on New York City subway trains.  It is an oversized book with pages and pages of amazing images, with the 2009 edition including some additional photos that Naar has taken through the years. And both editions have a mind-blowing essay on street art by Norman Mailer. Here is a taste:

...the unheard echo of graffiti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt intent seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apocalypse less and less far away. Graffiti lingers on our subway door as a memento of what it may well have been, our first art of karma, as if indeed all the lives ever lived are sounding now like bugles of gathering armies across the unseen bridge.

If, like me, it's the images you are interested in, take a look at the zine Scrawl.  In this zine, author Amy Adoyzie includes photographs of graffiti she took while in Asia.  In her introduction she says "it's a sample of art from kids in developing nations...taking back space with their own aesthetics."  You'll note that even though the languages (and the alphabets, for lack of a better term) are different, the graffiti looks reassuringly similar to right here at home.  It's well laid-out with vibrant pictures.

If your inspired to create your own street art now (though you should know that "unlawfully applying graffiti" is a Class A violation in Oregon) the library has a book for you!  Check out Graff by Scape Martinez.  Martinez is a veteran artist from San Jose, California, who goes into step-by-step detail on how to take an idea from paper to wall. Plus, it's fun for learning some of the lingo around this art form, and thankfully a glossary is included. Speaking of which, if you need some help deciphering our own local world of graffiti, Portland's Office of Neighborhood Involvement has created a guide on how to read graffiti!

The last book I want to share has nothing to do with spray paint or markers on walls, but it does, in the most wonderful way possible, capture the beauty that is street art.  Slinkachu is a street art/installation artist who takes hand-painted figures, or "little people", and photographs them in the big city (mostly London and Manchester).  This is difficult for me to describe in words, but I ask that you take a look!  The book is titled Little People in the City and it is a wonderful, whimsical collection of photographs.  As The Times so perfectly put it, "even when you know they are just hand-painted figurines, you can't help but feel that their plights convey something of our own fears about being lost and vulnerable in a big, bad city."  This is definitely my favorite book right now.

More Than Simply Sport

The 2010 Winter Olympics are approaching fast, and news stories about it are beginning to appear more frequently. Trolling for Olympics-related news recently I noted several that deal with politics, community, and the social and business impacts of the games: petrochemical companies sponsoring the games hope to get "green" points with the public, even as they continue to support environmentally destructive tar sands mining in Alberta; NBC, which has an exclusive contract to broadcast the games on US television, expects to lose money on the deal, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is merely expecting to break even; renters have been evicted to make way for tourists; critics complain that the B.C. government is not using available resources to estimate the economic impact of the games; and Olympic tourists may be lucky enough to encounter Captain Condom, a superhero who will be on hand to encourage people to practice safer sex. Clearly there's a lot more going on here than sport. And it's nothing new for the Olympic Games to have a huge social impact.

The most famously controversial modern Olympics is probably the Berlin Games in 1936. Adolph Hitler's government placed great importance on the Games's ability to showcase the success of Nazi ideology and fortify Germany's place in the world scene – and German officials and amateur sports promoters went to great lengths to manipulate the International Olympic Committee to arrange the games to suit their purposes.  The United States and other countries considered boycotting the Berlin Games because of Nazi policies on racial purity, but Jewish athletes who had been prohibited from competition by the Nazis were compelled to compete for their country to prove Germany was playing fair, and the U.S. backed down. Spain, which had recently elected a left-wing government, did boycott the games, and they set up their own People's Olympiad, to be held in Barcelona. Guy Walters details the fascinating history of this unusual and complex chapter in modern Olympic history in his readable but detailed book Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream. What I found most intriguing about Berlin Games, really, was how much the controversies of 1936 have been echoed by conflict and turmoil around more recent Olympiads.

David Maraniss argues that the 1960 games in Rome were a watershed Olympics, and the evidence he presents in his book Rome 1960 are pretty convincing. The 1960 Rome games ushered in the first Olympic doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, and the first apparel sponsorship contract for an Olympic athlete. Rome in the summer of 1960 was also a hotbed of international intrigue, with rumors of defections circulating everywhere and the intensity of cold war conflict rising sharply all the time. Maraniss's history offers a personal look into these questions (and many others more directly related to the actual sporting competitions) with information gleaned from dozens of interviews with athletes, coaches, journalists, and many other people whose work made the games happen – and on the whole it is quite a compelling story.

If you're wondering how the modern games compare to their ancient predecessors, check out The Naked Olympics. Tony Perrettet takes readers through the games chronologically, beginning with athletes' pre-games training, administrative and religious preparations before the games began, and spectators' journey to Olympia, and moving on to cover each stage of the festival and its aftermath. It's a lively, entertaining history, and Perrettet's focus on details (and the book's many illustrations) allow readers to get a sense for what it might have been like to actually have been present – at the sporting events, the religious ceremonies, and of course, at the parties and the political fights.

I can't leave you without recommending my favorite fictional Olympics story: Asterix at the Olympic Games, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. In this episode of the long-running comics series, Asterix and his companion Obelisk travel to Greece to compete for the Gauls in the Olympic Games – with the help of the magic potion created by their village Druid, Getafix, which makes them incredibly, ridiculously strong. Naturally this leads to a doping scandal (though our heroes comport themselves most honorably), and many pages are taken up with jokes and situation comedy at the expense of the self-righteous and irritating Romans. If you find this comic suits your reading tastes, there are many other Asterix and Obelisk books for you to enjoy!

How's the Air Up There?

In recent days the completion of the world's tallest building was announced and 6'8" Brittney Griner became the second woman to dunk more than once in a single NCAA basketball game prompting the question, "How's the air up there?" In the case of the newly minted Burj Dubai (which reaches 2,717 ft in to the sky) the air at the top is a full 8 degrees cooler than at the bottom. This necessitates a complex series of airlocks through out the building to dampen the possibility of sudden shifts in air pressure causing structural damage to the superskyscraper. For Griner the question would be the sort of playful comment that is a bit of a back-handed compliment but make no mistake, her arrival in the WNBA will have serious implications. She has serious talent to go with her height. But really, how is the air up there?

Gabrielle Walker's An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere provides a variety of insights about the air around us. From Colonel Joseph Kittinger's record setting skydive from an altitude of 102,800 feet (in 1960!) to the recent scientific supposition that precipitation is seeded by unseen and omnipresent atmospheric bacteria, An Ocean of Air weaves an amazing tale from historical and scientific elements. Walker's text alternates between the fascinating stories of those who have studied the air around us and the implications of their findings. An Ocean of Air's quick pace and engaging articulation of complex scientific concepts makes for a great contrast to the ephemeral and essential nature of its subject. As the author suggests in finalizing her description of Kittinger's death defying fall to earth, "We don't just live in the air. We live because of it."

Kittinger's awe inspiring military mission was scientific in purpose but shared a passion for adventure with the subjects of Michael Abrams' Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers: Wingsuits and the Pioneers Who Flew Them, Fell in Them, and Perfected Them. Here Abrams reveals the history of the questionable and highly hazardous pursuit of flight using wingsuits. Many of the stories included here end poorly for the participants; broken bones and death are fairly predictable outcomes. Still, Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers captures a sort of lunatic mania that is inspiring. From that most famous of men to theorize about (and perhaps attempt) winged flight, Leonardo da Vinci, through the golden era of wingsuits and into today's scientific advances, which allow for accomplishments such as Felix Baumgartner's crossing of the English Channel in a wingsuit, Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers contains some truly batty tales!

Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air personalizes the gases around us and waxes philosophical on how our human experience is necessarily and inextricably immersed in the nature of air. Beginning with an infant's first breath Joe Sherman plots a course through the history of air that touches such seemingly unrelated topics as; the evolutionary source of fear in humans, the return of life to Krakatau, how and why mammals returned to the sea as whales, why you should never get between a hippo and the water, the physiology of hearing and the etymology of the Arabic word for absurd. Those topics are discussed over the course of just three pages and all within the context of  how air defines and informs our human existence. Yes, Gasp! is dense, it may even leave you breathless, but Sherman's writing is more inspirational than existential so it's well worth diving in!

Cultured Crime

Art theft is a glamorous, intellectual sort of crime – or at least it is in our collective imagination. Thieves who specialize in stealing art objects, jewelry, and the like are generally portrayed in fiction and drama as clever, humane individuals who practice theft as a skilled trade, eschewing violence and intimidation – picture Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, Robert Redford in Hot Rock, or Nick Nolte in The Good Thief. The reality may be quite different, but crime is not a business that operates in public, so it's hard to know. Certainly I have little idea what art thieves and art theft are really like – but reading last week that more than two dozen works of art had been stolen from a private villa in the south of France – the second major art heist in less than a week – I began to wonder more about what motivates art theft, who pays for it, and how it works. And so, of course, I turned to the library.

I found a good place to start with the coffee-table book Museum of the Missing. Art journalist Simon Houpt starts with a basic premise: art objects are only worth stealing if you can command a high price for them, and that's why art theft has been on the rise since auction and sale prices began to rise dramatically in the 1950s. Houpt relates the stories of noted art thieves and those of the detectives who hunt them down, and talks about what the loss of an art object means for a museum or collector. Every single page is illustrated with reproductions of stolen art pieces and photographs of the human element: collectors, curators, gallery owners, art detectives, and thieves.

To get a little more in-depth, I turned to investigative journalist Peter Watson's rather sensational Sotheby's: The Inside Story. It's an exposé of borderline shady deals done by major museums, auction houses, and collectors – in particular, Watson makes the case that Sotheby's has systematically participated in smuggling, helping to transport antiquities and artworks across international borders in violation of the law. This is real, old-fashioned gumshoeing, and although sometimes Watson and his investigatory colleagues seem nearly as shady as the art smugglers they're tracking, it does make for a fascinating story.

The Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous painting in the world, and at this point, one of the most challenging to steal – but it has been stolen and recovered before. When it went missing from the Louvre in 1911, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were among the top suspects (darn those pesky radical artists!). The public mourned the painting's loss deeply, thronging to the Louvre to visit the blank space where it had hung, and expressing their sorrow with flowers and other tributes. R. A. Scotti's The Vanished Smile examines how the Mona Lisa came to be such a meaningful symbol, and along the way, tells the story of its theft and recovery.

Looking for information on this topic, I found myself almost overwhelmed by the huge number of interesting-looking books on various aspects of art theft. As I mentioned above, there are many novels and films about art thieves and the detectives who investigate their crimes. But there are also lots more true-story books, on grave robbery, the theft of antiquities and archaeological artifacts, and the systematic looting of European art by the Nazis during World War II, among other things. Perhaps one of these books will be just what you're looking for! Of course, if not, you can always ask your friendly librarian for more suggestions.

Season of Giving

Last week the Christian Science Monitor reported that even during our current economic crisis, folks are giving to those in need. For many of us, this is what the holiday season is all about, being generous and compassionate with our fellow human beings. And even though we may not have a lot to give, anything helps.  Plus, we never know when it might be us who needs the helping hand. One particular issue this article focused on is food insecurity here in the United States. Did you know that in 2008, 49.1 million people lived in food-insecure households, including 16.7 million children? This is according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, click here for more of the USDA's information on "Food Security in the United States". But no matter what the need, I wanted to highlight this article in the hopes of inspiring a season of giving for all of 2010. Let's start the new year off right!

For information on how to make even the smallest donation count, please take a look at Wendy Smith's Give a Little. This book is chock-full of information on a variety of charities, and the ways in which they help people throughout the world.  It also includes heart-warming stories from the people on the receiving end.  Smith makes clear that even a $10 or $20 donation can really help a person in need.  And with so many worthy causes, Give a Little is valuable for the person who knows they want to give, but doesn't know where to start.  Smith does an excellent job showing how just a few dollars can cause a ripple effect that "lifts a whole family, a town, and, astonishingly, even a nation of out poverty."

A similar philanthropic how-to is Town & Country: the Guide to Intelligent Giving by Joanna L. Krotz.  Again, this book includes personal and inspiring stories of people making a difference, and also gives advice on how best to donate money or time to make the most impact, no matter what your financial status.  There is a helpful chapter on examining the things that are important to you in order to find your cause, for "the world and its communities are overflowing with need."  Krotz also offers numerous resources at the back of her book to help you create your own "giving plan".  This book is full of facts, tips and moving accounts of people's generosity.    

Lastly, and again in the hopes of inspiring, Frans De Waal, renowned author and Professor of Psychology at Emory University has written a very interesting book that argues humans and animals are "hard-wired" to express empathy.  So often we hear of the selfish acts of our fellow human beings, just look at the actions leading up to our recent economic bust.  But in The Age of Empathy, De Wall believes there is a behavioral "glue" in primate societies that includes empathy, sympathy, a sense of fair play, and trust.  De Waal refers to this as the "fellow feeling" and goes so far as to quote Adam Smith (who some refer to as the founding father of capitalism) from his own Theory of Moral Sentiments:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

De Waal uses insight and humor to compare human behavior to that of our animal friends and in doing so, makes us all feel a bit more human...and hopeful.

Now go forth and make the world a better place and happy 2010!

Spiking the Eggnog

I prefer my winter holidays with a bit of bite--a little spiked eggnog, if you will. And though I personally don't own a single pair of Christmas socks, a holiday scarf, or even a light-up Rudolph brooch, the sartorial choices of others are not mine to judge. The Oregonian's Grant Butler recently confessed to a conversion to the cult of the Christmas sweater after a holiday party that featured prizes for the ugliest sweater. He came in third, but his devotion to holiday kitsch lives on. Send in your own pictures or just chuckle in delight at the reader participation slide show!

As far as my mom is concerned, It's a Wonderful Life is the best holiday movie of all time. And despite my impatience with sappy Christmas miracles, I can't help but tear up at the story of George Bailey. I blame my mother. Luckily, I have a back-up holiday film tradition that won't make me grab for the hankies, but still serves up a satisfying holiday story. In La Bûche, a funeral brings together a French family of grown sisters and their long-divorced parents who may be even more unhappy at the holiday than you are. An ensemble piece that follows the family members through uncovering old secrets, flirting with new loves, and revealing infidelities (it is French, after all), this film is just bitter enough to help me get through this season of schmaltz.

Opening John Grossman's collection of cards and ephemera in Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas feels like opening a box of holiday ornaments that has been wired with a time bomb. All your ideas about the beauty and purity of Christmas will explode when you get to the end of this book--no, it won't even take that long. Have you ever heard of Krampus? The incubus-like creature that beats and kidnaps children? How about images of lecherous Santas, or mean-looking Santas, so unlike our jolly version of the kindly red-suited man. Get your fill of naughty children, dead birds, and other Victorian-era nasties in this book that might just crush your holiday spirit.

I certainly wouldn't recommend the short story collection Holidays on Ice to everyone. Though the story "SantaLand Diaries" has become a modern holiday classic, these stories are not for the "Christmas is a magical time" believers. Holiday pragmatists only need apply. It probably reveals a lot about me, then, that one of my most cherished holiday memories involves one of these David Sedaris stories. One year, I was lonely and away from home until well after Thanksgiving when a friend called to read a Christmas story to me over the phone. He couldn't wait to share the story "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!", a satirical look at one family's annual Christmas letter. Throughout the letter recounting the absurd challenges of the previous year, the matriarch of the family maintains her perky tone. A good dysfunctional family story is the perfect antidote to homesickness.

How far would you go for a cup of joe?

Coffeehouse culture did not sweep through my small town until long after I graduated from high school and moved to a city. When I was a teenager and needed the jolt of caffeine and the heady aroma of bohemians to get me through the day, I had to drive to the nearest city to frequent my coffeehouse of choice. I have been a devoted coffee drinker and occasional coffee-slinger ever since. Though Michael Idov laments the long lost coffeehouses of Europe in his paean to the period when quiet talk in a coffee shop could signal revolution, I still think of the coffee shop as a cultural force. Today's chain coffee shops may attaract more Mom-Groups than splinter groups, but they will always attract anyone who needs a little pick-me-up, radical or not. I almost can't imagine a week without a trip to the neighborhood coffee shop, at the very least to pick up my beans.

Coffee-Slinger was my first job out of high school after moving away from my coffeeshop-less town. This may give you a clue about how long ago that was: I had pink hair for the interview and the owner made it very clear that "natural" was expected. I dyed it brown. When the coffee culture did finally hit my hometown, it rolled through with a vengeance, and now, in addition to the four sit-down shops in town, you can drive through at least three. Apparently, our fascination with the mobile cup is not ours alone. Ray Weisgerber photographs the region's drive-through espresso stands for his book, Driven to Espresso : Drive-Through Coffee Stands in the Northwest. These beautiful black and white photos showcase the amazing variety of drive-through coffee stands, from a double-decker bus to a trailer staffed by a bikini babe. I feel a certain kinship with these places because that first coffee job I mentioned--it was at a drive-through.

Someday I will go to Paris. I most likely will spend a day at the Louvre. I will probably make a trip to Versailles. I might walk along the Left Bank and I could even go to the Eiffel Tower. But the one thing I most assuredly will do is sit in a cafe. It sounds silly to travel the world and then hang out in a coffee shop, I know, but having a little time for reflection over a cafe au lait and a brioche is just my kind of itinerary item. I have never visited a city without researching and staking out a coffee or tea house as a break from the usual tourist attractions. When I go to Paris, I will bring Christine and Dennis Graf's handy guide, Café Life Paris: A Guidebook to the Cafes and Bars of the City of Light. The first time I held this lovely little gem I became so absorbed in my fantasy of Parisian life that I forgot I was actually supposed to be working in a library at the time. If you're skipping Paris but are still headed to the continent, you could also pick up Cafe Life Venice, Florence or Rome by different authors.

I don't think too much about how my coffee is produced. To relieve my ignorance, I've got Black Gold, a film by Marc Francis and Nick Francis which focuses on Tadesse Meskela, the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, who is a tireless crusader attempting to get fair prices for Ethiopian coffee farmers. I am crazy about Ethiopian coffee and have been known to travel to more than one coffee shop in a day in pursuit of a pound of Ethiopia Mordecofe, but the famine in the 1980s has left me with a warped impression of Ethiopia as a land of unrelenting poverty. The Ethiopia of this film is green, lush, and populated with people who are working hard for a fair shake in the global economy.

Words in Politics

Morning Edition had an article this morning about how political experts differ when it comes to defining the word "terrorism." Is an act of terrorism simply any kind of politically motivated violence? A campaign to severely intimidate and harass that may or may not be violent? A violent or intimidating attack that is clearly directed by a political group? A violent act perpetrated against a noncombatant? Each expert had a different take.

In the political context, words can be weapons and language a battlefield. Stephen Poole picks apart some of the layers of meaning in political speech in his book Unspeak. Political terms and names such as "war on terror," "Friends of the Earth," "free trade," and "gay community," he argues, are carefully chosen for the extra weight they carry by implication. That is, these terms are so evocative that they create a specific story that effectively silences any opposing viewpoint. If you don't support Friends of the Earth and its activities, then you must be an enemy of the earth; "free trade" has a positive, hopefully sounding cast, so if you're against it, you must be against freedom. Poole discusses eight politically charged words and their fellows – including, you'll be glad to hear, "terrorism."

Clearly political change itself is a driving force in the development of language – and this is true in our history as well as our present. The United States was founded at a time when politics, public debate, and access to the pulpit of the press were the nearly exclusive domain of a very few privileged people – land-owning, educated, protestant white men. In Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, historian Kenneth Cmiel considers how the idealism of our young nation's grand experiment with democracy challenged this orthodox arrangement and caused a whole series of questions to arise: Is American English its own entity, meriting its own dictionaries and grammars? If so, should these include slang words and colloquial terms, or should they reflect a more refined manner of speech? Should newspapers, textbooks, and other books published here reflect colloquialisms or should they instruct Americans by their erudite example? What, indeed, is correct American English?

But how, you might ask, do words come to mean what they mean? Have you ever created one yourself? How did you do it? Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer help explain how all this works in their book The Life of Language: The Fascinating Ways Words are Born, Live and Die. They look at their subject with a broad view, from word roots, to methods for shifting the meanings of words, to words we borrow from other languages, to how words can eventually pass out of use altogether.  This potentially dry subject really comes to life under Steinmetz's and Kipfer's care, and anyone with an interest in words or in language generally should find their book an engaging read.

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.