The Thin Red Line

I have to confess, right off, that there is no theme, no connection no rhyme or reason behind today’s book selections.   These are five that just caught my eye and found their way home with me and each is just so unusual and interesting that I just had to share it.    Ranging from a huge 10 inches tall by 14 inches wide to a squat and chunky 6 inches square, from the Duba plains in Botswana (Africa) to the foot, err feet  of Texas, from the islands of the South Pacific to the crayon factory, these five books are just All over the map.

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First, my thanks to Techfun for suggesting this one to me.   It’s taken me an awful long time to read it but I have and I’m glad I did.   In Friday’s post I pointed out that art can be much more effective than traditional in conveying complex realities.   I believe that A Thousand Splendid Suns is an excellent example of a novel that conveys the complex and messy truths of the real life story through novels that, imho, do a better job than history books sometimes in educating a mind about a particular place and peoples.    I previously posted about Gary Geddes’  Kingdom Of Ten Thousand Things which touches briefly on the plight of present day Afghanistan before rushing off to pursue a very different main theme.

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April Fools!

Awhile back I did a post about Gary Trudeau’s latest Doonesbury collection and Frank Rich’s The Greatest Story Ever Sold and remarked that while both were excellent books I find I no longer have the stomach to read about our inept and corrupt politicians.   After reading an article in Newsweek  I recently posted to my politics blog (for the first time in ages) to plead my case that opposing Hillary Clinton does NOT constitute misogyny or sexism.   But the four books I am featuring today,  all of which have been in my stack for well over a month and some of which are Past Due at the library,  and  none of which I have been able to bring myself to read strongly suggest that I really am burned out on reading about political stuff.

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Awhile back I heard someone refer to the imprisonment without charges or recourse to the courts at Guantanamo Bay as "un-precedented".     This book of photographs I recently came across demonstrates it is anything but.

Dorothea Lange, a noted photo-journalist was hired by one branch of the government (the War Relocation Authority) to document the forced migration of Japanese Americans to the detention camp in the desert at Manzanar California.   The Army later ordered the photos censored and they remained hidden from public view until the publication of  Impounded:  Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internmnet.

Two lengthy introductions, totaling some eighty pages, by Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro tell the stories of Dorothea Lange and her extraordinary career and of the Japanese American peoples’ round up and imprisonment following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.   Highly Recommended to WWII history buffs.

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Yes, I know that we are fully half a year away from Independence Day when a book celebrating the United States flag might be most appropriate, but I came across this lavishly illustrated, Very Over-Sized coffee table book the other day and just Had to share it. Long May She Wave is a history of Old Glory that is loaded with pictures of every depicition of the flag imagineable from actual flags to knitted and crotcheted rugs and matts to products like a cell phone and an airplance, completely wrapped in stars and stripes. At a USD 60.00 cover price I can’t really recommend buying it, but it is sure worth a visit to 929.9209 at the library to check it out. Recommended.

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As much as I and some of my readers enjoyed the log mansions and other spectacular eye-candy architectural books I’ve featured,  I was struck by the fact that what seemed to touch most people’s imaginations most deeply was the idea of having a truly simple (though very nice) small cabin in the woods.   (And when I think about how much I hate housework, the idea of the small dream home becomes more and more appealing.)   So when I came across this loving tribute to a distinctive and distinctly small architectural icon,  I just knew I would have to blog about it.

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This one is for everyone who laughs at funny cat pictures.  Mario Garza, proprietor of the website stuffonmycat.com has put together a unique collection of pictures of, well, stuff on cats.   Most of the photos were submitted by visitors to the web site, though some are of Garza’s own cat.    The kitty sleeping peacefully beneath a plate of sausage, eggs and potatoes is quite striking as is the cover image of the red-eyed cat with whipped cream on top.   The kitty kicking back with a can of Bud and the tv remote is a hoot as is the cat who prefers the game controller and a bottle of Stoli.   And the cat beneath the bumper of the bus who appears to be straining to hold the whole thing up is priceless. Stuff On My Cat    Recommended.

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Today I am featuring Bill Keaggy’s  Milk Eggs Vodka not because it’s an interesting and amusing book,  though it is,  but as an example of someone who has turned a popular web site into a commercially successful book.

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After ‘ooohing and ahhing’  over the spectacular log mansions, I came across two more very eye-catching books,  that focus on very modern and high tech versions of the vacation cabin.   The Texas hill country vacation home pictured on the cover is a big glass box that’s been designed to be energy efficient and cool in the heat of the day.  It is just one of the oh-so-stunning vacation residences featured in Modern Cabin by Michelle Kodis.    Each featured vacation home is shown in multiple day and night exterior photos and multiple interior shots.   The floor plans for each home are also provided as are details of the use of recycled and eco-friendly materials and the incorporation of design elements and systems to make these homes low impact on unspoiled natural areas.

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Today is my second of twelve Christmas book selections. Yesterday Bev blogged about going downtown to Christmas shop and recalled how it was a major event, warranting one’s best clothes and all the trappings of an occasion. I remember as a child how exciting it was at Christmas-time to go downtown and gawk for ages at the many and spectacular window displays at the D. H. Holmes and Maison Blanche department stores on Canal Street in New Orleans. Indeed if you lived in a city of any size, you probably got nearly as excited by the spectacular displays of your department store as any of the folks who queued up in New York City to gawk at the windows of their famous stores.

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Last week’s books on spectacular log homes seemed to spark a real interest in the subject for Ron and today’s books are two he ordered from the library catalog which we both oohed and ahhed over. As eye candy, The Rustic Cabin: Design & Architecture, a lavishly illustrated over-size coffee table book is spot on. Ralph Kylloe is an expert on rustic furniture and design and this book spotlights magnificent homes built with every modern convenience in an elaborately rustic style.

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Earth Then and Now is a unique pictorial geography book showing dramatic changes to the earth’s surface all over the world. Consisting mostly of before and after photographs and some other before and after depictions of human impact on the earth in a particular country or region.

One of the most dramatic photos is a single photograph (not two before and after photographs) that shows the edge of the Gifford Pinchon National Forest where land owned by timber giant Weyerhauser has been clear cut to a straight line reflecting the boundary of the National Forest. I’ve been to the Gifford Pinchon forest and it is a magnificent special place. And this is just one of over 100 comparisons.

An abandoned open pit mine in Cornwall, England that has been transformed into a lush garden and a biosphere ecology exhibit is one of many comparisons that highlight a positive outcome. The spectacular reconstructed cathedral on the site of the Brandenberg Gate in the now unified Berlin, Germany is another strikingly positive comparison. The site of the former twin towers of the World Trade Center and a photograph of New Orleans on sunny day in March 2005 and flooded out following Katrina are among the more somber before and afters.

This one is definitely worth checking out to spend some time perusing and contemplating these very striking images. Recommended.

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The Sixties is a coffee table size book of photographs by Robert Altman, famed as the director of such movies as M*A*S*Hand Nashville. The photos, which include both musicians and other famous icons of the flower-power-era as well as many shots of ordinary hippies were taken during the years 1969–1974 and provide a striking look back the Summer of Love and all that it unleashed.

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There was a time after I got laid off from Earthlink and before Joel got too sick to travel that we went on a kind of non-stop vacation. My current budget doesn’t permit me to travel very far at all these days, though I hope I will get the chance to roam again. And I also find I sometimes enjoy a bit of vicarious wandering through some of the excellent books about far away places that pass through our library.

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I have to say, right off, that what follows is Not the post I had planned for today. I had intended to write about a book and an author whom I and some dearest friends have a personal history with. I had mentally composed a caustic and scathing diatribe castigating our former acquaintance. But as with another recent post, I found in the end that I could not write what I intended. And the reason I could not write that bitter, ugly post? Not because I came to believe that I was wrong in my conclusions but because a friend I care about deeply, who is wiser and stronger than I am (and who rarely realizes that he is in fact wise and strong) simply asked me not to.

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Ron and I went out with a couple of friends to a Chinese buffet last night (I pigged out on the king crab legs among other things) and seeing table after table laid out with all kinds of wonderful food brought to mind Hungry Planet, an over-sized pictorial book that documents what thirty families in twenty-four countries eat in a week.

Each family is photographed with their weeks’ worth of groceries. It is a study in contrasts. From the family in a refugee camp in Chad shown sitting on a blanket with a few small bags of grain that are their ration from a relief organization to the North Carolina family who’s weekly haul includes two large pizzas and lots of fast food containers or the Greenland family who hunt the walrus, duck and polar bear featured prominently on their table. Each family is profiled and you get a real sense of who these people are and why they eat as they do. Interspersed with the family stories are essays by a number of other authors on such topics as “diabeasity” (a newly coined term for the closely related issues of diabetes and obesity that are becoming endemic throughout much of the world) and “nutrition conversion”, a term which refers to people whose health was previously threatened by not having enough to eat who now face the “diabeasity” problem from eating too much of the wrong things. The writing and photography are both excellent and this one is well worth picking up next time you are at the library.

It is only a coincidence that I happened to read Hungry Planet at the same time as Beggars And Choosers, but the themes mesh in an interesting way. A somewhat high brow science fiction novel set in the 2100’s, Beggars And Choosers portrays a United States radically transformed by genetic engineering. Physically striking and remarkably intelligent people, who are called “donkeys” live in high security enclaves where they pursue intellectually challenging occupations and pay heavy taxes, while the un-modified, who are called “Livers” are no longer expected to work at all– they are fed at cafes and obtain clothing and other necessities from warehouses, all of which are operated by robots and provided free of charge by politicians in return for votes. Then a small group of super-enhanced people, called “the sleepless” (they have been modified such that they no longer need to sleep, have very long life-spans and are so highly intelligent they make the donkeys look like livers) concoct an injectable substance that makes humans completely impervious to disease and able to transform sunlight and exposure to soil into glucose, such that they no longer need to eat (although they still can). The political fall out from this extraordinary development is quite surprising. Recommended.

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Today’s Harry Potter debut at work was a bit anti-climactic. An e-mail last night advised that 175 copies were received at library hq at 4:30pm and were quickly stamped, stickered, cataloged and put on the trucks for this morning’s delivery. I will confess to sneaking a quick peek at the last chapter, though I was 368th on the waiting list so it will be awhile before I can check it out and read it. (After the first copies were allocated to the earliest holds I moved up to 198th in line, so my best guesstimate is 4–6 weeks.) Fearing that some patrons might help themselves if we put the books out on the usual self-service shelves for holds, we kept them on a special cart in the back room. And by the time I left at 2pm only one patron had come in and claimed a copy. I am hoping to avoid reading any spoilers until I can read the book, but that may prove difficult.

Today’s most interesting check in was A Field Guide To Sprawl, a pictorial dictionary that uses aerial photographs to illustrate several dozen concepts associated with sprawl– the phenomenon of scattered low-density development outside the boundaries of established and often declining urban areas. Concepts such as "ball-pork"– sports stadia constructed with tax payer funds for the benefit of rich team owners, "ducks"– buildings which serve as advertisements for the products sold within, "leap-frogging"– when development skips over vacant raw land and continues further out and "pods"– single use zones off a major roadway not interconnected to any larger street grid are explained in concise, readable terms and illustrated with excellent photographs. I was familiar with some of the concepts from reading Joel Garreau’s Edge City back in 1992 and enjoyed learning more.

Hope this finds your weekend going well.

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Joel and Alan– Summer 1997

I really like the way Bev’s blog shows This Day In My History, allowing easy access to posts from this day in years past. This started out to be a post remembering this day two years ago, based on the much more cumbersome method of digging through old e-mail files to remember what happened or seemed important June 1, 2005. The inspiration for this of course was a fleeting stab of grief for Joel that quite passed long before I could dress it up as a blog post, though I will leave this pic from the past above, since it is nice to see myself looking so much younger and all but giddy with happiness.

Yesterday I read a wonderful book, Not Left Behind, a highly visual account of the Best Friends Animal Society’s work rescuing abandoned pets in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The quality of the photographs is excellent. As heartbreaking as some of the rescue photos are, the later photos showing the animals being cared for at the temporary shelter and subsequently being adopted are joyous and moving. (And several of the rescuers are humpy.

When I post about a book, note that you can click on the picture to link to that title on Worldcat which is a kind of meta search site for public libraries. By entering your zip code (just once) Worldcat will locate a copy of the book at the library nearest you. If this doesn’t happen to be your library, you should be able to borrow it through Inter Library Loan. Some libraries charge for this service but most do not. Check your library’s web site or contact the Reference desk for details. Borrowing instead of buying saves paper and trees as well as space in your house. If you really do prefer to buy, click on the title of the book to link to an Amazon.com sales page. (I am not shilling for Amazon, btw, and do not receive commissions from them, the link is provided only as a convenience.) I will try to be consistent with these conventions going forward.

On Library Thing I post reviews for books that particularly interest me and that don’t already have good reviews (good meaning informative, well written and helpful as opposed to positive or recommended) regardless of when the book was published, but here on the blog I think I am going to only post about new releases. Which means that I need to close the lap top and get back to my reading. So that’s all for today. Having opened with an old pic of my old huzband I decided to close with a pic of my new hubby.

Ron and Alan– Christmas 2006

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