Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You
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.
Posted by Kate
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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.
Posted by Kate
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.
Posted by Kate
Last year, a spider built her web at our house in a very lucky spot: on one of the widows of our glassed in porch, affording her a smorgasboard of small insects drawn to our porch light. We watched her grow over the weeks and repair her web, a thing of beauty if ever I saw one. Textile maker Simon Peers obviously sees the beauty in spider webs, but he took it one step further. He paid local weavers to gather over a million spiders and "silk" them for what is called dragline silk, the strongest type of silk a spider makes. They make several types, did you know that? Me neither. Mr. Peers and his weavers created an 11 by 4 foot golden tapestry, now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
This extraordinary story got me thinking about other ways we use animals in art, either as subjects or as objects themselves. Rarer, though, is the phenomenon of animals as artists. Monkey Painting is a serious look at monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates as creative beings. Thierry Lenain's volume explores attempts by researchers to connect the artistic abilities of primates to early art by humans. Monkey Painting also reproduces some of these works in full color. A delight to behold! Lest you think this is a tongue-in-cheek book, know that Mr. Lenain is a noted French writer of both art criticism and children's books.
A title that does play around a little bit is Why Paint Cats: the ethics of feline aesthetics. This is from the team that also brought us the original Why Cats Paint and later, Dancing With Cats, two titles that know how far to go in the pursuit of silliness. I'm sure some people took the phenomenon of cat painting very seriously as proof of cats' higher intelligence, but I'm not sure their intelligence can be vouched for if they were willing to sit still long enough for the creation of these startling images of cats painted as a butterfly, an American Flag, and a clown, among other things. Burton Silver and Heather Busch must be experts in the near impossible job of cat herders.
The first time I saw this book, I immediately sat down and started turning pages, despite the fact that at the time, I was supposed to be shelving books, not reading books. Outrageous colors, impossible shapes, and incredible animals fill the pages of Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. I was sure these most of these creatures were imaginary, until I learned more about the man. He was a trained physician who changed careers when he read Darwin's Origin of Species and became an expert in comparative anatomy, specializing in invertebrates. These illustrations are now in the public domain and are available on several websites, but we also have a few versions of the book, including one that has a clip art CD-ROM so you can download the images to your computer.
Posted by Kate
Several weeks ago, a friend brought a case of candy cigarettes to a party and passed them around to the delight of all of us who remembered them from childhood. They still had the poorly-applied red dye at the tip to give the impression of a lit cigarette and they still tasted as awful as they did when I was a kid and could buy a pack for a quarter. But that stretch of road on memory lane is about to be closed forever. The FDA recently announced that they will prohibit the production of candy cigarettes as well as all flavored tobacco cigarettes except menthol. The case of candy cigarettes my friend has is now contraband!
I'm not sure if the pseudonymous authors of the Sugar Needle zine have reviewed any candy cigarettes, or if they have any secreted away in what must be a pretty impressive candy stash. Corina Fastwolf and Icona Phlox write candy reviews of the strangest, most amazing obscure candy you can think of. They also do interviews including one with Dishwasher Pete about writing a book versus writing a zine and they ask his advice about how to clean burnt sugar out of a pan (soak it for days or chuck the pan). They also write about the candy industry, candy memories, great named candy bars (Plopp or Corny bar anyone?), and imaginary candies that they'd love to see. Each issue has a hand-colored cover and recalls the golden age of zines, when the biggest zines were handmade gems that covered one topic and one topic only, but exhaustively. I don't think I'm revealing too much with the info that one of the authors, Corina Fastwolf, is a Multnomah County Library Librarian. I wonder if she has candy on her desk?
Straight from the sugar-drenched mind of Ms. Fastwolf comes a recommendation for The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars. I read the excerpt that is available in our catalog when you click on the book cover and I was absolutely riveted. Joël Glenn Brenner provides an inside account of the business dealings of the two largest candy companies in the United States. The history of their companies is the history of candy and chocolate in America, and her portraits of the two very different founders, Forrest Mars and Milton Hershey, describe two divergent paths to power and corporate growth.
You may not like Steve Almond's Candyfreak: a Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. A mix of memoir and reportage about visiting candy factories, his book has some serious fans (me) and some equally serious detractors (I won't name names). Almond takes a most decidedly personal perspective on his visits and tells a larger story about candy through his personal lens. I know all about his likes and dislikes and some I agree with and some I'm definitely on the other side of the line. Candyfreak has made the rounds among my friends in the library and now we all know more than we ever expected to about The Enrober. What is The Enrober? The machine in the candy-making process that covers things in chocolate. Steve Almond is obsessed with The Enrober, so we learn all about it. And really, what isn't more mysterious and intriguing than how they get those candy bars covered in chocolate?
Posted by Kate
I heard on the radio the other morning that Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment, home of comics heroes Spider-Man, the X-men, and Iron Man, for the stunning price of $4 billion dollars. That could buy a lot of plastic sleeves to protect those comics! With the trend of movies being made from comics, it makes sense for Disney to own the content that it could use to make new movies, and then fill time slots on its television channels, and make all-new action figure lines, and then paste superheroes onto lunch boxes and pencils and notepads and folders and everything else you can paste a superhero onto. It looks like a savvy purchase, even though Disney's stock went down after the news broke. I just love to see comics discussed as news.
When you're ready to investigate the creative well that the world's largest entertainment company will now be drawing from, you could pick up The Marvel Comics Encyclopedia : a Complete Guide to the Characters of the Marvel Universe. Published by DK Publishing, the source of myriad exhaustive guides to everything from Spiderman to Horses, Spain to Hockey. The Encyclopedia combines an A-Z list of characters with essays about Marvel comics through the decades. For advanced study, you should definitely take a look at the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Multiple volumes, thousands of characters, alternate worlds and all the information you need to really geek out.
Oh, Scott McCloud, I have totally fallen for your bespectacled alter-ego in Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art. You lead me, Virgil-like, through the concentric circles of meaning in the comics world. Okay, I may be overstating it a teensy bit, but I do think this book is swoon-worthy, if only for the fact that it makes something invisible and ephemeral into something concrete and understandable. McCloud explains how all the elements of comics come together to create meaning. And he manages to do it without making it clinical or killing the beauty of comics art.
I have to admit that I am not really a superhero comics fan. Many friends over the years have tried to help me see the error of my ways and I have tried, really I have. What keeps me reading comics are stories about people's lives, whether they are autobiographical or use cartoon animals as stand-ins. Ivan Brunetti and I think along the same lines. He has collected a selection of the best contemporary "art comics" in An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. Brunetti hasn't just selected Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz Award winners, though they are represented in this two-volume anthology. A very personal selection of stories and excerpts, this book presents what he considers the best piece from each person, and unlike many comics anthologies, women artists and writers are fairly well represented.
The Library has a large collection of comics, including Marvel and other superhero comics, Manga, and a wide range of alternative and art comics for children through adults. For a short sampling of graphic novels, check out our Graphic Novels booklist in the Readers section of the Library's website.
Posted by Kate
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Who knew that the world of building demolition was rife with fraud, criminal activity, and Mafia connections? Maybe you did, but I just assumed it was a clean business, aside from all the rubble and dust, of course. A profile of one of the legends of the wrecking business, Philip B. Schwab, caught my eye the other day. Along with tales of his multiple bankruptcies and jail time--he took up tennis in federal prison--were stories about the unregulated piratical industry of building demolition. In some places, you don't even need a license to take down a building.
Oh, the glory of massive destruction! With before, during, and after pictures! In full color! If this sounds like your idea of a fun book, don't miss Demolition : the art of demolishing, dismantling, imploding, toppling & razing. Author Helene Liss worked with the firm Controlled Demolition to chronicle some of their many building takedowns, including Pennsylvania Station, the Kingdome and several Las Vegas hotels. She also includes information about the tools and techniques of demolition, but the focus here is really on the explosions.
For a more considered take on deconstruction, follow Bob Falk and Brad Guy through the process of Unbuilding : salvaging the architectural treasures of unwanted houses. Falk and Guy lay out to benefits of unbuilding as opposed to straight demolition--reducing waste to landfills, preserving period architectural details, and reusing or selling construction materials. This comprehensive guide will take you through the process of deconstructing a house, from how to organize the site, to selling what you've recovered, in detail that extends even to "denailing."
If you had the choice, wouldn't you make something that didn't need to be demolished and sent to the landfill? And you would make sure it was safe for humans and animals, right? Even in carefully deconstructed homes and buildings, toxins and pollutants left in walls, carpets or furniture can potentially harm workers or contaminate the environment. William McDonough and Michael Braungart provide a road map and a manifesto for using industrial design to completely remake the way we manufacture and dispose of goods. In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make hings they propose that contemporary environmental design and facilities for recycling don't go nearly far enough. Rather than create objects and materials that then become waste that we might be able to recycle (or "downcycle" into lower-grade uses), we should begin our designs with the end in mind. Designers should have a cradle to cradle mentality, only creating goods that can be fully reused or that nourish the environment as they biodegrade.
Portland being Portland, we have a few resources for reusing or donating construction waste. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these organizations have sorted through the rubble for you and they all have resources should you decide to do your own deconstruction and salvage project: The Building Materials Reuse Association, Habitat for Humanity ReStores, and The ReBuilding Center.
Posted by Kate
"Please have your photo ID, co-payment, and insurance card ready."
"Take a seat in the waiting area and they'll call you when the Doctor is ready."
"Hello, Doctor."
"Goodbye, Doctor."
A visit to the doctor can sometimes feel like a trip to the drive-through window. Estimates for the average length of an office visit range from 20 minutes to as little as seven minutes. A movement in primary care aims to change that. Longer visits, monthly fees rather than insurance reimbursements, and fewer visits to costly specialists are some of the features that come from creating patient-centered practices. Advances in technology have allowed some doctors to get off the treadmill of seeing 25 patients a day and reduce their pace to seeing 10 to 12 patients a day.
If you're curious about the snap decisions doctors make in those brief visits Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think is a must-read. Through compelling case studies and interviews with fellow physicians, Groopman describes how the training and clinical experiences that doctors have had can influence their diagnoses and lead to errors. Delving into the realms of cognition and perception, the book reports on such fascinating studies as one that tracked doctors' eye movements while reviewing chest x-rays. He uses his own experiences seeking treatment for hand and wrist problems to compare and contrast the styles of two physicians. He also includes an epilogue that walks step-by-step through an office visit with the questions you as a patient should be asking.
Just the title of this book lets you know you're in for quite a ride: Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids. Whew! Julie Salamon spent a year at Brooklyn's Maimonides Medical Center, a microcosm of the multicultural community that surrounds it and fertile ground for portraying the vibrant daily life within its walls. Salamon has a direct reportage style that will make you feel like you are following along with her as she sits in on consultations, follows patients through the labyrinth of hospital treatment, and listens in on feuding doctors. Giving just enough background information to keep her narrative flowing, Salamon's book is a rich and nuanced look at medicine as practiced in a modern hospital.
Have you ever had surgery? You should call your surgeon and thank him or her for going to medical school. Through the Middle Ages, your surgeon might also have been a barber, and prior to the 1840's your surgery would have been performed without anesthesia. Esteemed historian Roy Porter uses his deep knowledge of history to tell the story of how medicine was practiced before--before anesthesia, before antibiotics, and even before botox. Blood and Guts: a Short History of Medicine does include a short chapter on modern medicine, but the focus is on the past. This title includes a great section of further reading for each chapter.
For more great reads on medicine, check out the excellent booklist Medical Nonfiction that Reads Like Fiction.
Posted by Kate
It may be difficult to muster up a lot of sympathy for laid off Wall Street traders, especially when you start to think about how much money your retirement fund has lost in the last year, and it just keeps sinking, and sinking, and sinking. Or maybe that's just me. While most of these highly-compensated men and women are probably donning suits and hitting the pavement in search of another job in the finance industry, a small number are heading back to the classroom--to teach. Laid off traders are leveraging their years in the numbers racket to become math teachers in New Jersey, an area experiencing teacher shortages.
Before they stand in the front of the classroom, those traders might want to get a glimpse of life from a teacher's vantage point. Tracy Kidder follows Chris Zajac, a dedicated and formidable fifth grade teacher at an impoverished school in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The story of one school year, Among Schoolchildren shares Ms. Zajac's thoughts and captures her unflagging persistence at providing her students with a quality education.
For a more lighthearted story of a first-time teacher, turn to Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year. She has since given up the classroom to become a children's author and a certified Readiologist, but Esme Raji Codell's stories from the trenches will stick with you for a long time to come. Despite the intense challenges she faces from angry kids, stuffy bureaucrats, and less-than helpful parents, her stories will make you laugh out loud.
I hope you like documentaries. And subtitles. I know some folks have issues with these, but if you can get past them, one of the most charming and affecting films ever made about life in the classroom awaits you. To Be and To Have turns the lens on the teacher and children in a one-room schoolhouse in rural France. Teacher Georges Lopez has a quiet manner and seemingly inexhaustible patience for his pupils who range in age from 4 to 12. This delightful film gave me a warm feeling for its entire 104 minute run time and managed to do it without being syrupy-sweet enough to make my teeth hurt.
Extra Credit: A classic expose of the deep disparities in the public education system that still rings true today, Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools is a still-relevant read that might make you angry enough to want to throw the book against the wall--or at the unjust system of education that shortchanges so many.
Posted by Kate
The zombie is the monster of our times, according to Adam Cohen in a piece about the new book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. Cohen contrasts the sleek, investment banker-like vampire of the recent past with the more brutish and blunt zombies we now see shambling all over our movie screens and bookstore shelves. Jane Austen sequels, knockoffs, takeoffs, and remakes have flooded the market in the last few years as well. With the over-the-top conjunction of these two trends, I'm afraid they may have reached their apotheosis and that both zombies and Elizabeth Bennet will slowly fade from the front of our collective mind. Enjoy the mayhem and Regency manners while you can!
Memories of devouring Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was a kid flooded back to me on seeing Lost In Austen: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure by Emma Campbell Webster. A book that may polarize hardcore Austen fans into purists vs. non-traditionalists, it incorporates favorite characters from Jane Austen's novels and lets you decide on the steps you, as Elizabeth Bennet, will take on the path to matrimonial bliss--or disaster. The world of Pride and Prejudice opens up to Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Part of the fun of this book will be figuring out who belongs to which book and enjoying how they're put together in novel ways.
If your hobbies tend towards handicrafts, like the Bennet sisters and the ladies of their day, but you need a little edge to your projects, try this: Creepy Cute Crochet: Zombies, Ninjas, Robots, and More!. As a crocheter myself, I've experienced what I feel is a lack of crochet books with funky, fun projects compared to some of the knitting books I've looked at. Creepy Cute Crochet helps fill that gap. Using the popular Japanese Amigurumi style of crochet, Christen Haden provides patterns and instructions for a Corporate Zombie and a Cyber Zombie, as well as a panoply of monsters and their ilk. You can even make a crocheted Cleric to confront the Grim Reaper or to exorcise a crocheted Devil.
When you need to ready yourself for the inevitable rise of the undead, your indespensible companion will be The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead. This comprehensive guide to arming yourself, preparing your home for a long-term seige, and doing battle with the undead will keep you laughing through the apocalypse. Max Brooks' exhaustive guide includes a complete history of zombie uprisings dating from the dawn of human history and the details of the virus Solanum, which causes the infection that kills and then reanimates human beings. Don't read The Zombie Survival Guide if you're sensitive like I am. Its mock-serious tone could make you believe there really are zombies in your garden, hungry for your flesh.
Posted by Kate
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Our Fine Furry (and Feathered) Friends
I used to be on official dog-sitting duty for a couple I know. But not being a dog owner myself, I don't know what I would have done if he'd become ill. How would I make sure their dog was treated well while respecting their wishes for his care? When we keep pets, we are their voices, and they rely on us to communicate their needs to the veterinarians and who help care for them. Dr. Nancy Kay spoke so eloquently about this recently on Fresh Air while promoting her new book, Speaking for Spot, that it brought to mind a few other books about our relationship to animals.
I'm far too squeamish to have considered a career in veterinary medicine, but I love a book that presents a window into a job I'll never have. Luckily, Nick Trout combines memorable episodes and furry patients from his years as a veterinary surgeon to create a gripping story of one day at work. Tell Me Where It Hurts: a Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon shares his triumphs and failures with both his four-legged patients and their two-legged owners. Trout includes plenty of medical jargon for the interested--he is a surgeon at one of the largest animal hospitals in the U.S.--but not so much that it's distracting. His real story is of the love and commitment on the part of the pet owners he encounters to their animals. Even though I read this months ago, I still think about the faithful German Shepherd, Sage, and her elderly owner who asks Dr. Trout to do whatever it takes to save her life.
The animals and humans in Amy Sutherland's Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the World's Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers are of an altogether different breed. Sutherland spent a year following the students at the Exotic Animal Training and Management Program of Moorpark College, California, a rigorous program that trains graduates to work at the highest levels of the profession: from Hollywood to wildlife parks and zoos. Students learn that wild animals are truly wild even in captivity and that they will get bitten, shoved, cornered, and pooped on in the course of their training and their work. The program at EATM stresses that "The animals come first," and is based on a rewards-based training model that centers on communication rather than punishment. Sutherland discovered that this model was useful for training her husband, as well, and chronicled some of the things she learned in her more recent book What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage.
I never miss an opportunity to recommend My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. I am a book pusher by nature and will grasp at the thinnest of threads to get this one in the hands of anyone I can. Animal stories are your favorite? Future naturalist Durrell declared his intention to have a zoo when he was six and his fascination with animals began as a child when he kept a variety of fauna: a spider, a tortoise, a dog, two magpies, and even scorpions (that didn't last long). Oh, you like travel? Well, Gerald Durrell's family moved to Corfu in the 30's before the real tourist trade got going in Greece. They had all the adventures an eccentric English family should have, including living in three villas in four years, frightening away a string of tutors, and caring for Gerald's menagerie of animals. Oh, you love gentle family remembrances? This is the memoir of a loving family full of characters from the perspective of its youngest member. The stories about their adventures and daily life aren't 100% factual, but they are always true, and they depict the animals in the family and the family of animals in a way that will make you smile for years to come.
Posted by Kate
We're in troubled times for consumerism. On the one hand, we have people telling us to buy less, buy green, and to recycle what we've bought once we're done with it. On the other hand, we've got people from the government, supposedly very smart people, telling us to buy more, spend rather than save, and consume to get America back on track. I'm starting to feel like the fate of the whole economy depends on which kind of laundry detergent I buy. I'd rather not have that pressure. One thing is becoming clear, though: our love for the shopping mall is growing cold. The New York Times investigates the economic fate of the Mall of America and malls in general, but also tells the stories of the shoppers and retailers in this center of the American Dream.
The story of the American mall as we know it today actually begins with an Austrian architect. Victor Gruen fled the Nazis in 1938 and quickly established himself in the United States. His original vision for the suburban mall was as a center of community, though he later joined the criticism of his own work as creating urban sprawl. Jeffrey M. Hardwick's Mall Maker : Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream outlines the motivations of the man and delves into his most famous projects' influence on American society.
For a breezy, fact-filled waltz through our love affair with all things shopping--bargain-hunting, the Home Shopping Network, and the market stalls of Ancient Greece, to name a few--join Pamela Klaffke on her Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping. This factoid-filled book provides short takes on the history of shopping. The only heavy lifting required will be your shopping bags. If the economy sours even further, this book might serve as an artifact to share how lightly we used to view consumption in the late 20th Century.
For those of you ready to make a shift to a less object-focused material lifestyle (let me know how it goes), Jane Hammerslough explores why Americans are so attached to our posessions in Dematerializing: Taming the Power of Possessions. You could find a better guide for living simply or taking steps to live more sustainably, but Hammerslough's book focuses on decoding the meanings we ascribe to objects as a culture and deciding as individuals what truly is valuable and important to us. She takes a personal approach without telling us what to do and reminds us to be thankful for what we have in the richest--still--country in the world.
Posted by Kate
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In trying times, good advice can be hard to come by, let alone the wisdom that will help prop us up through crisis after crisis. The NPR project This I Believe is a simple one: to engage listeners in a discussion of and to record the core beliefs of people from all walks of life. It's no surprise that this project harks back to what we think of as a simpler time; it's based on an earlier project of the same name from journalistic heavyweight Edward R. Murrow. Last week, the voice of a seven year old boy reading a list of thirty of his beliefs roused me from a gentle slumber. These were heavyweight beliefs, too. Not one of them was, "I believe that candy is the greatest invention created by mankind." Tarak read, "I believe we live best in a community," and "I believe people should not give up." With the wisdom of a small child still ringing in my ears, I went searching for more guidance:
With selections from Tupak Shakur, Public Enemy, Wu-Tang Clan and many, many more, The Message: 100 Life Lessons from Hip-Hop's Greatest Songs stands on the shoulders of giants to deliver its message of optimism. It's a motivational self-help book from a woman who admits to her own baggage. Felicia Pride weaves a personal story of how the greatest lyrics and stories in hip-hop worked to help her in her own life.
Who says you can't reach Nirvana in a darkened movie theater? In Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies, Buddhist and meditation educator Dean Sluyter enlightens us on some of the spiritual principles we can glean from the movies. The Graduate, The Godfather, and even Jaws have messages for us. This book should be a fun way to learn more about Buddhist sprirituality or to explore a different persective on a selection of classic films.
You know Sesame Street's Elmo has lessons to teach children, but what about to the man who acts and voices him? In his first book, Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash tells us about My Life as a Furry Red Monster : What Being Elmo Has Taught Me about Life, Love and Laughing Out Loud. Each chapter is a life lesson: "Love", "Tolerance", "Cooperation", "Optimism". From his early days constructing puppets as a child, to his current dedication to entertaining and educating children, Clash tells his own story and the part playing Elmo has had in it.
Posted by Kate
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In some ways, I am an atypical American when it comes to money: I didn't have a credit card until I was 30, I started saving for retirement in my mid-twenties, and I have never taken out a consumer loan to pay for a car or appliance. In one way, I am completely typical: my balance sheet is in the red. I owe more in student loans than I have in all of my cash and retirement accounts combined. Over the last decade, the average American household debt has ballooned to over $100,000 and annual household savings has declined to under $400 in 2008. This and other scary facts are made startlingly clear in a recent New York Times series called The Debt Trap.
If there were an award-granting institution that gave an award for spot-on predictions, 2006's In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts would take the top prize. Filmmaker and author Danny Schechter starts the film by talking about his own debts and then trains his investigative eye on the credit card industry, the major financial institutions, and mortgage lenders. No predatory lending practice is free from his scorn. He talks to bankruptcy lawyers, think tank experts and economists to back up his claim that The United States is heading for a major financial collapse due to the over-extension of the credit and mortgage markets. A feeling of deja vu crept over me as I watched. What was true for a small number of Americans back in 2005 has become a grim reality for millions in 2009.
When I think about my grandparents, I marvel at how young they were when they started their families and built or bought houses. Very few of my friends started breeding before the age of 25 and most of the people I know don't own houses, and we're generally in our thirties. I've often wondered why. Personal choice? Not wanting to be tied down? Selfish career-obsessed behavior? Maybe not. It turns out that today's young and early-middle aged adults have less money than their counterparts of generations past. We earn less and our dollar has to stretch further. Tamara Draut is an expert on this squeeze and was interviewed for the film In Debt We Trust. Her book Strapped: Why America's 20 and 30 Somethings Can't Get Ahead details this problem and lays the blame partially on rising college tuition costs and the outsize student loans people have taken out to pay them.
One complaint about today's 20 and 30-somethings is that their expectations of what an adult, middle class lifestyle should look like are too high. People of my generation just don't know how to make the tough choices and sacrifice (though I would argue on my own behalf that not owning a car is a major sacrifice). The Economides family knows a thing or two about tough choices. Steve and Annette Economides and their seven kids, aka America's Cheapest Family, live on about $44,000 per year. The family scouts bargains wherever they go and they have tips to share on a range of topics, including budgeting, grocery shopping, planning budget vacations, and teaching kids about money. Though I'm sure they're pleased with the proceeds from this book, they would probably recommend that you check your books out from the library rather than buy them.
A recent Writers Talking event featured local blogger J.D. Roth, who's made a name for himself with the blog Get Rich Slowly, a blog about personal finance. He's got a low-key attitude and doesn't specifically endorse one system of managing your personal finances over any other. No hard and fast rules, just a general philosophy. For the full range of materials the Library has on offer, try searching the catalog for books about personal finance, budgeting, or consumer education.
Posted by Kate
One thing that photography does is to capture a moment and freeze it forever. But photography can't show the invisible. Or can it? I don't think of something as ephemeral as a cough as recordable, but according to an article in the New York Times, Dr. Gary Settles and Dr. Julian Tang of the University of Pennsylvania teamed up to photograph the disturbances in the air that result from a cough, among other phenomena. They use special techniques that probably don't involve magic, but do involve a curved mirror and a razor blade! The Times has a slideshow of several images including a gas leak and an AK-47 firing.
Another photographic pioneer who spent years perfecting his craft was W.A. Bentley. His fascination was not with capturing the invisible, but the truly singular: snowflakes. He spent years testing photographic materials and equipment. Lucky for him, he lived in Vermont and had a lot of opportunity to perfect his craft. A Caldecott Award winning children's biography about him by Jacqueline Briggs Martin was published a few years ago, Snowflake Bentley. The story of his life is supplemented by facts and beautiful, wood-cut-style illustrations by Mary Azarian.
I share the book Snowflake Bentley with many kids who have to do reports or read a biography for a genre assignment. One of my favorite things to do when I've sold them on the book is to say, "Do you know what else we have? Snow Crystals by Mr. Wilson A. Bentley himself, his actual published book of actual snowflake pictures. He set out to find out if any two snowflakes are alike, and he's pretty sure he did. What do you think?" They leave with the book, ready to explore.
Also capturing something indefinable through his lens, James Mollison photographs in close-up James and Other Apes. Who knew that a book of ape portraits could be so compelling? A quick glance through the book yields amazing portraits of incredible animals. Delving deeper into the introduction by Jane Goodall and the short (often sad) bios in the back reveals these to be portraits of unique personalities with names like Bonny, Jackson, and Fizi. On my subsequent visits with the apes, bonobos, and orangutans in this book, they became part of an extended family: their own, the Great Apes, and all of ours, as animals and humans together on this one planet.
Posted by Kate
