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.

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.

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.

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!]

Make It Yourself

So as you know, the economy is a bit dodgy right now. Money is tight and folks want to find ways to economize. At the same time, public concern for the well-being of our natural environment is rising, and many people are looking for ways to live lighter on the land. This combination of influences is encouraging people to spend more time and effort making things they once would have bought, repairing things they would once have paid to replace, and repurposing things they would once have thrown away.

Crafts! DIY! Homekeeping skills! I'm here to tell you, there are a lot of swell books, zines, and magazines about how to make, do, maintain, repair, and repurpose things! Here are just a few that I especially like:

If your chief interests in do-it-yourself are saving money, learning how things work, and making neat stuff, sometimes it's best to cast an eye back to the past. Practical Projects for the Handy Man is a reprint of a book originally published in 1913 by the editors of Popular Mechanics Press, and with it in hand, you can learn to make furniture, toys and household objects, how to build the apparatus for magic tricks and science projects, and a dizzying array of other tips and tricks. The how-tos are interesting and helpful, but part of the charm of the book is the way it reflects the energy and, dare I say it, vim of an idealized active boy of 100 years ago.  This imaginary boy is fun loving, nimble with tools, curious about science and the natural world, and above all interested in creating things that will make life more interesting and amusing, save laborious work, and build his skills.  Being something of an optimist, I think there's a little bit of that idealized boy in all of us, and Practical Projects might help set yours to work!

But modern-day crafters and creators are all about sharing their how-to's also. The Best of Instructables collects more than 100 super awesome projects from the web community of the same name, where people around the world share how-to instructions for everything from soup to nuts. With The Best of Instructables, you can learn how to: eat a banana like a monkey, build a teeny greenhouse inside a light bulb, take the case off of your flash drive and stick the guts into a Lego brick, or make a frighteningly realistic werewolf costume, among other things.

Enough with the amusements, bring on the ideas and instructions for serious work! Formulas, Methods, Tips and Data for Home and Workshop, by Kenneth M. Swezey and Robert Scharff is a compendium of information you might need if, for example,  you wanted to determine what color a particular species of wood will turn when weathered outdoors, figure out what materials you'll need to build a brick wall of a certain size, or find a recipe for making homemade hand lotion. The sheer quantity of data, recipes, explanations, and project instructions in this 600+ page book is amazing, but it's readable, clearly organized, and incredibly down-to-earth.

If you'd like to try a few projects that are a bit more unusual, try browsing through Making Stuff and Doing Things, edited by Kyle Bravo and Jenny LeBlanc. How-tos from dozens of zines are reprinted in facsimile form, which means you'll get all the pleasure of the cute little drawings and diagrams illustrating how to do and make whatever it is. Some of my favorites explain how to make your own soymilk, unstink your socks, re-use typewriter ribbons, and do basic electrical wiring.  The book also has a nice little essay on some of the philosophical underpinnings of the DIY ethic.

If these particular books don't make your inner do-it-yourselfer jump up and down with excitement, try taking a look at the books on specific kinds of projects. Whether you want to learn about knitting, woodwork or upholstery, do a little appliance repair, plan some garden crafts, study furniture making, fix your bike, learn how to bind a book, build a fence or brush up on your jewelry-making skills, I promise you the library can help you get started.

And if you don't spot what you're looking for right away, there's always someone to help you out. If you're in the library, stop by the reference desk and we can help you find books, magazine articles or websites about your project. Or, if it's not convenient for you to visit the library immediately, a friendly librarian is only an email or a phone call away!

Seriously, if you’re ready to make stuff, the library is a great place to start.

Authenticity in Every Glass

Season three of the period 1960s drama Mad Men starts this weekend, and I'm sure you're all quite excited. There's nothing like a whole tv show full of smoking, drinking, sexism, and completely fabulous vintage clothes & interiors! The New York Times reported a few days ago that the show's prop masters work terribly hard at getting all those vintage details just perfect, including the drinks, the glasses they go in, and the liquor brands they use. Mad Men's network has an online guide to 1960s era cocktails, but since I know you're all so incredibly retro that you prefer to get your information from books, here are some suggestions:

If you want to make cocktails, learn to drink them with discernment, or just find out a bit about what can make them truly great, you could hardly find a better place to start than Dale DeGroff's The Essential Cocktail. DeGroff is a leading authority on cocktail history, and not only does he know how to mix a dreamy drink, he can show you how to do it too. He's arranged his recipes into logical categories, and he explains the features of the classic version of each famous drink, as well as providing an intelligent guide to creating variations. (And, as the Times article noted, DeGroff is not only a cocktail expert, he was himself in the advertising business in the early 70s, so he's definitely got the down low on authentic Mad Men-style boozing.)

If you require a wider knowledge of the drinking arts, you might turn to Kinglsey Amis's Everyday Drinking, a compendium of highly intelligent (though thoroughly subjective) drinking lore, advice and history originally written between 1971 and 1984. Among other things, Amis can help you figure out how to fool people into thinking you’re an expert on liquor or wine even if you know next to nothing, he provides thorough advice on all aspects of dealing with a hangover, and he outlines a recommended weight-loss diet for the heavy drinker. But humorous content aside, Amis was a great authority on wine, liquor, and beer, and had a lot to say about how to understand it and how to best enjoy it.

If you'd like to reach even further back in the past, well before the Mad Men era, I must recommend Charles H. Baker’s Jigger, Beaker, & Glass: Drinking Around the World, originally published in the 1930s. It provides an astonishing catalog of libations and detailed instructions for making each one, together with a dictionary of cocktail ingredients and a huge amount of commentary and advice. Some recipes are exotic, some familiar; some are complex, some incredibly straightforward; but all are clearly but amusingly written -- in fact, you could pick up this book without ever intending to mix a cocktail or concoct a punch, and still find it delightful.

Climate and Civilizations

One of the most-reported outcomes of last week's G8 talks in L'Aquila, Italy was the agreement reached by the rich and poor nations alike to attempt to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). There has always been a lot of disagreement among politicians and laypeople about whether our climate is actually changing, and if it is, whether the changes are part of a natural fluctuation or are due to human activity.* On the other hand, the scientific community is in overwhelming agreement that climate change is occurring, that it's dangerous, and that it's because of industry and other human endeavors. News from the G8 has got me thinking, just what would it mean for the world's climate to warm by 2 degrees Celsius, or more?

I'm no scientist, so to understand this set of questions better, I turned to Mark Lynas's Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Lynas wanted to know what climate change could actually do to the Earth, so he read thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers reporting experiments that model future climate change and its effects. Six Degrees is essentially a literature review, reporting the results of all these studies in an intelligent narrative meant for non-scientists. There are six chapters, explaining what scientists think will happen with each successive degree (Celsius) of global warming, including its effects on coral reef ecosystems, changing ocean currents and weather patterns, monsoon failures, melting mountain glaciers, and many other horrors. This layperson's report on the science is excellent and valuable, but Lynas also examines how the effects of global warming might affect people, politics, and the societies of the world. Overall, it's a very sobering book, but valuable for anyone who wants a good, solid introduction to how the best scientific minds would answer the question, "What if?"

We are not the first culture to face the question of our own possible demise. Many societies have collapsed in the past, for a variety of reasons, and their stories might give us some ideas for what to avoid, and how we might best cope, if indeed, major changes are in our future. Archaeologist Brian Fagan has written many books about how climate has affected human history, and one of these, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, describes the worldwide changes during the "Medieval Warm Period," in the years 800 to 1300. Europe flourished during this period – Norse sailors established settlements as far away as Greenland and Newfoundland, wine was successfully produced in England. But other regions of the world suffered drought, which Fagan argues contributed, among other things, to the collapse of the classical Mayan civilization in North America. Fagan is a great writer, and he manages to make the most arcane scientific points both clear and interesting.

There are lots of other books about the collapse of past civilizations – two noted examples are Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Clive Ponting's A Green History of the World.  But Mike Davis's Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World tackles a related but slightly different subject – the worldwide wave of famines that occurred in the late 19th century, in India, China and Brazil. Again, this is sometimes a challenging book to read, well, because it's difficult to read about starvation without empathizing with the people affected by it. But Davis's astute breakdown of how the worldwide economic system (and, more specifically, the economic interests of Britain) put pressure on social and practical dynamics that had been in place in these three countries to such a degree that when El Niño weather patterns struck, people were not able to adjust, and famines resulted. He further argues that famine relief was hampered by the same systems that helped create it – the world economic market was not flexible in this regard, and the British empire did not find it in its interests to help feed the hungry in Brazil, India, or China.

* I should note, for those who are interested, that the library has many books which argue that global warming is a myth, is a natural cycle not caused by a rise in human-produced carbon emissions, is caused by something outside the earth's atmosphere, or is otherwise not threatening the well being of the earth. Some examples are: Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, by S. Fred Singer, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder, Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming, by Patrick J. Michaels, and Global Warming: The Truth Behind the Myth, by Michael L. Parsons.

Students and anyone interested in reading both sides of the political debate at the same time might enjoy the essay collections Global Warming: Opposing Viewpoints, edited by Cynthia A. Bily, and Global Warming, edited by Debra A. Miller. For a wider variety of essays and opinion pieces about global warming (or indeed, about any controversial issue), you might want to take a look at the Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (be sure to have your library card number and PIN handy; you'll need them to log in, since this is a library database!).

Robert S. McNamara

Robert S. McNamara, former World Bank president, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ford executive, and Army Air Force officer died on Monday. Obituaries for him have appeared a wide variety of venues, and they've been varied in content and in tone. Motor Trend focused on McNamara's years as an executive at Ford and his effect on the domestic automobile industry, Alternet rather unconventionally compared him to Hunter S. Thompson, and the New York Times published the sort of long, careful obituary one expects from the Grey Lady.

Most remembrances of McNamara highlight his position as U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and his role in shaping the United States's prosecution of the Vietnam War. Perhaps the best and most thorough examination of this aspect of McNamara's career is in Errol Morris's documentary The Fog of War. The film revolves around interviews with Morris conducted with McNamara, but it's more than a biography or a history of the war in Vietnam. Morris also lays out, through McNamara's reminiscences, a chilling account of the American bombing of Japanese cities during World War II, a discussion of innovations at Ford during the 1950s, and an analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Since news of McNamara's death broke, the list of holds on The Fog of War has skyrocketed from zero to (at this writing) 32. The film is definitely worth the wait, but if you're eager to learn more about Robert McNamara right now, you might want to start elsewhere.

You could begin with The Whiz Kids, John A. Byrne's biography of a group of ten influential businessmen – among them Robert S. McNamara. All ten were veterans of the Army Air Force's Office of Statistical Control, created in 1942 to gather and analyze information about military operations, improve efficiency, and streamline internal operations monitoring. Statistical Control worked on the principle that everything could be reduced to numbers, then analyzed and improved; a method that was wildly successful. After the war, the ten men who were the stars of this group applied en masse to the faltering Ford Motor Co., and were hired as executives. The Whiz Kids examines the business lives of all ten men, and teases out their philosophies of statistical analysis and business management, how and why their ideas worked at Ford, why they were eventually surpassed by others, and the influence they've had on the business world. This might sound like a dry set of topics, but instead it's a revealing and compelling look into the heart of how American business operated during the middle of the last century.

In 1960, Robert McNamara accepted the post of U.S. Secretary of Defense for President Kennedy, a position he held through the Johnson administration. It is in this job that McNamara gained most of his fame, through his role as "architect of the Vietnam War." In 1967, he commissioned a classified report on the history of U.S. decision-making about and military involvement in Vietnam, which became known as the Pentagon Papers when it was leaked to the press by researcher Daniel Ellsberg. The whole collection is long, and admittedly a bit dry, but volume five of the original 1972 book edition (pictured at left) consists of a whole series of interesting essays about Vietnam and American foreign policy during the Vietnam era, written by a variety of influential intellectuals of the day. Many profound and still-controversial questions are discussed, for example: What do the Pentagon Papers say about the structure of power in the U.S. government? Did the authors of the Papers actually do a good job of assessing the true history of the administration of the war? Had the government ever really had the interests of the Vietnamese people in mind?

And the Winner Is. . .

The Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences recently made a surprise announcement – next year, the field of nominees for the best picture will be increased from five to ten. This may be great news for movie lovers, since it will hopefully make more superlative movies accessible to more people on more movie theater screens in more towns across America.

For many people, the highlight of the Academy Awards broadcast is checking out the stars’ outfits and discussing which ones are fabulous and which are appalling. Fashion writer Bronwyn Cosgrave has written just the book for folks with this interest – Made For Each Other is a carefully researched history of the intersection between high fashion and the annual trip down the Oscar red carpet. Cosgrave chronicles the history of Academy Award fashion from the first ceremony in 1928, discusses the partnerships between stars and designers (Audrey Hepburn and Hubert de Givenchy; Cher and Bob Mackie; Grace Kelly and Edith Head), and considers how press coverage of Oscars fashion can be an easy route to positive publicity for an actress. Of course, the book is lavishly illustrated, with designers’ drawings as well as historic photographs of some totally fabulous dresses.

And speaking of the glamorous side of the Oscars, don’t miss Oscar Night, Graydon Carter and David Friend’s lavish celebration of tinseltown parties. You’ll learn some fascinating facts, for example: from the 1920s to the late 1950s, the Oscar ceremony was the party, and there were no after-the-ceremony parties. Lots of photos, lots of stars (current, former, and nearly forgotten), and lots of vintage gossip!

If facts, data and history are not your bent (no matter how glamorous they may be!), you might want to check out the film For Your Consideration. Writer/stars Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy present a comic examination of the effect Hollywood buzz has on movie people. The story is this: The independent film "Home for Purim" is still in production when the cast and crew learn that one of their number may be in the running for an Oscar nomination. Then the pressure is on: tensions between cast members rise, the producers worry that the film might be "too Jewish" and press to change the title to "Home for Thanksgiving," one of the actors demands a raise, and another breaks up with her actor boyfriend, saying he’s not supportive of her career. The question that remains is, will any of the actors actually get nominated?

Car Crazy

General Motor's bankruptcy filing this Monday is all over the news – one element that's been widely reported locally is the closure of 40% of the company's dealership franchises throughout the U.S., including many in Oregon. I don't know why I never stopped to think about it before, but it was news to me that car dealerships are often franchises, rather than fully independent local businesses. So of course, I turned to the library's amazing collection to see if I could learn more about the history of selling cars in the U.S., and I found a great book that got me started on a trajectory of reading about the automobile industry, the impact of cars on cities, and more. Read on if you'd like to share this journey with me!

I started with the pictorial celebration and history of the American way of selling cars in Robert Genat's The American Car Dealership. Genat starts out with a brief history of the automobile business, explaining the rise and fall of the many small car manufacturers in the early 20th century, the eventual rise of the "Big Three," and the methods all of them used to get their product from the assembly line into the hands of American drivers. He also discusses the architecture of car dealerships, promotional strategies they employed, the art of car salesmanship, the used car business, and the role of dealers' parts and service departments. There are fascinating historic photos to illustrate this narrative on every single page.

Obviously cars themselves have completely changed the American landscape. The next book I turned to was Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane's history of the rise of the automobile and the development of 20th century cities and suburbs. In a way, it's more a history of roads than it is a history of cars – McShane sets the stage with a history of urban travel before the arrival of streetcars, then discusses the development of large streetcar networks and their attendant streetcar suburbs, then examines various uses of urban streets in recent history. After providing all this context, he examines how the technology for building smoother roads developed, and explains how Americans began to view streets as arteries for transport rather than open public spaces for socializing and providing fresh air and light in crowded cities. Down the Asphalt Path is a serious intellectual work, but it's also an engaging story tracing the changes in American streets (which, after all, cover a pretty significant portion of the land in our cities!).

My personal experience has been that the different kinds of cars on the road is part of what makes different places special. For example, I lived on the east coast for a few years, and it really made me nostalgic for Oregon, where classic cars are fairly common – because in the east, all you see is late model stuff. Another thing we've got a lot of here on the west coast is art cars. You've probably seen one or two around town, but if you want a real eyeful, take a peek at Harrod Blank's photo book Art Cars. It's a hundred and forty pages of amazing, one-of-a-kind cars. Seriously, these cars are incredible! One is completely covered in beer cans, another in cigarette butts, another in Pez dispensers. World-famous telekinetic Uri Geller is pictured with his car, which is, you guessed it, covered in bent spoons and forks. There's no way I could describe all the fabulous cars in this book, you'll have to check it out yourself!

But perhaps you want to create your own auto-related tangent? More power to you! If you want to leaf through some beautiful pictures of classic cars, learn about how cars have influenced and shaped society, or read about the history of car design or of the the auto industry, the library can totally help you out with that too! Or, of course, you can always ask a friendly librarian to help steer you towards the car book, article, DVD, or website that's just right for you.

Um, How Do You Spell That?

I'm not completely horrid at spelling, but it's never been intuitive for me. In my line of work, it can be a real challenge to be a poor speller! But I manage, and I think working as a reference librarian has actually improved my ability to spell correctly at least some of the time – mostly because when I spell something right, like the name of an author, a book title, or a historical event, I can find information about it!  There's nothing like positive reinforcement.  The young superspellers in last week's Scripps National Spelling Bee are working at a far higher level than I can ever aspire to, but like them, I love words. So here's a small collection of some of my favorite books and films about words, spelling, and the English language.

There are lots of books about the history of English generally, but Righting the Mother Tongue, by David Wolman focuses specifically on the history of spelling the English language. Readers will visit with the inventor of spell checking software, learn about the history of spelling reform, explore the impact the internet has had on spelling, and much more. Wolman lives right here in the Rose City, and the last chapter recounts his experiences competing in a spelling bee for adults in an unnamed Portland bar – a nice local touch!

If you're interested in spelling, and you enjoy stories with a "triumph over adversity" sort of narrative, you need to check out the film Akeelah and the Bee. Eleven year old Akeelah is a smart girl (and a great speller!) from a low-income South LA neighborhood. She's smart, but hasn't been challenged much in school – until her principal gets her to sign up for the school spelling bee to make up for her many absences from class. She wins easily, and the experience gives her the drive to try to make her way to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. But there are so many obstacles! Akeelah's mom is worried that the other spellers won't accept Akeelah, and tries to keep her from competing. Dr. Joseph Larrabee, an English professor who confirms that Akeelah has the potential to be a champion speller, doesn't want to coach her at first, because she comes off as rude to him. And after her first few successes, Akeelah starts to feel a lot of pressure to do her neighborhood proud by always winning.

Where would spellers be without dictionaries to back them up? Defining the World explains how Dr. Samuel Johnson created the first comprehensive English dictionary in the mid-1700s. The explosion of the publishing industry and the rise of literacy in 18th century Britain created opportunities for a myriad of arguments about which spellings, word definitions, and grammatical conventions were correct. Many smaller dictionaries of English already existed, of course, but Johnson's task was to create one that would be complete and authoritative. Despite his humorous definitions and inventive etymological techniques (shaky by modern standards), Johnson's dictionary was a great success, and remained the most respected comprehensive dictionary in Britain until the publication of the first volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary more than 100 years later. Henry Hitchings's fascinating account of Dr. Johnson's dictionary project is arranged, charmingly, in a series of alphabetically titled chapters, from "Adventurous" to "Zootomy."

And lastly, but not leastly, word aficionados should make sure to take a peek at The La-La Theory, a series of short zines about language by Katie Haegele. #1 Fun With Words (pictured at right), explores the humorous side of language, discusses the evolution of English, and introduces readers to several fun word games. #2 A Fancy Word for Widow, like you might expect, is all about the word "widow," with synonyms, quotations, etymology, and much more. #5 Blizzards, Blindfolds, Squatters and Cartoonists, and Other Words That Were Born in 1880, is devoted to words that have their origins in the year 1880.  Fabulous!

Death of the Daily

Washington governor Chris Gregoire signed a bill Tuesday that makes a 40% cut in state business taxes for newspaper publishing companies. The bill is in response to the local effects of a nation-wide crisis in the newspaper industry (affecting, most notably, the Vancouver Columbian and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer).  In fact, Gregoire and the members of the Washington legislature aren't the only politicians who're taking the crisis seriously – the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held hearings last week on the future of journalism, where journalists, publishers, and media pundits testified on their views about what the real problems are and how to fix them, while senators used the hearing as an opportunity to air their own ideas for solutions.

No doubt as long as newspapers are in crisis, there will be debate about what is dragging them down, but one thing I can say for sure is that it's unlikely that you'll ever find a shortage of things to read about it. Journalists are, after all, mostly writers, which means that they are more inclined than most of us to write about their profession, its history, its development, and its successes and failures. Here are a few of my favorite books about newspapers and journalism:

During the American revolution, newspapers were scarce and news was precious, so folks got together and read the paper out loud, in groups. Early 19th century taverns drew patrons not just with their libations, but with the newspapers they stocked for drinkers to read. Around 1900, newspapers small and large ran contests with fabulous prizes, to increase circulation. You can read up on these and other details of the social history of newspapers in Thomas C. Leonard's News for All. Leonard also ponders the future of journalism, and argues that in order to thrive, newspapers must reaffirm their commitment to community responsibility and their role as vital elements of civic discourse.

In the 20th century, more and more local newspapers came under the control of a small group of large corporations – by 2000, roughly 80% of newspapers in the U.S. were owned by chains. Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering is a collection of essays discussing the history of American newspaper conglomeration, its effects on journalism, on the public's access to information, and on the shape of our culture. A second volume, Breach of Faith, follows up with an exploration of how the corporate focus on making profits has influenced news coverage and crippled newspapers' ability to cover local and state government, international news, and other subjects that require investigative journalism or intensive staffing.

On a slightly different note, I have to recommend Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism, by Bob Edwards. The book follows Murrow's life story, from his boyhood in Skagit County, Washington to his unfortunately early death from lung cancer. But Murrow's journalism career is the real focus, and readers will learn how he became the first person to bring vivid, up-to-the-minute international news home to American radio listeners, and later a huge influence on the development of news and current affairs programming on television. This book is short – less than 200 pages – but it delivers a clear, interesting picture of the experiences that shaped Murrow, and of his considerable impact on the profession of journalism.