The Thin Red Line

This one is for all of my bibliophile friends, regardless of their taste in genres and subjects.  Alan Powers has written a guide for those of us who want to get the maximum enjoyment out of Living With Books.  Filled with spectacular photographs and incisive advise, Living  With Books covers everything from selecting and acquiring a collection to many beautiful and unique designs that incorporate book shelves and other book storage into beautifully decorated rooms, book plates and advice for book collectors to the practicalities of caring for fine books and the rudiments of constructing a variety of book cases DIY.   If you desire to live stylishly surrounded,  Powers’ Living With Books is Highly Recommended.

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I’ve previously written about Tilt,  a book about the famous leaning tower of Pisa, Italy that is cut on an angle so that the spine of the book slants back towards the rear of the shelf rather than standing up straight.    And when I recently came across The Slant Book by Peter Newell, which has the same angled spine, I knew immediately I would have to blog about it.    Originally published in 1910 when novelty books of this sort were a popular amusement, it was re-published in the 1960’s by Tuttle Publishing Company and as of the edition owned by my library was in its fifteenth printing.   The story of an old fashioned baby carriage that slips away from the baby’s nurse on a steep slope and slides all over town has charming illustrations evocative of its period and the slant of book cleverly contributes to the illusion of the pram rolling downhill out of control.    Recommended both as a children’s book and for those interested in novelty books and popular art from the early 1900’s.

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Time was, I  was a huge fan of Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, which I largely credit with enabling me to survive the Raygun Years with my sanity and ability to laugh relatively intact.   (Who knew Presidential advisers of a sort that would some years hence make Nancy’s astrologer seem relatively professional and qualified would be our lot under Bush 43?!?)      And when the Raygun Years gave way to the Clinton Era,  I was thrilled to learn that Trudeau could skewer and lambaste Bill and Hill as hilariously and effectively as he had Nancy and Ron.  

And then came Bush America.   It was, at first, a veritable feast for political humorists like Trudeau, but after 8 years of breath-taking ignorance and arrogance and enough humorous copy about Junior’s storied ineptitude and insensitivity,  I opened this book length collection of the latest Doonesbury comics,   read three very funny, very on-target jokes about  the current Administration,   sighed deeply and put the book down having found I can no longer laugh at this tragedy.

By much the same token,  New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s eloquent and highly readable account of how the second Bush Administration has played fast and loose with the truth, co-opting the formerly free press and manipulating the public’s access to information for its own nefarious ends is an excellent book and one I can honestly Recommend,  IF by some miracle you still have the heart and the stomach to read Stilll More about the already well documented criminal malfeasance of our current government.    I find I am burned out on the whole thing and just can’t bring myself to read books like this anymore.

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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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Recently Tiffany created a Blog Catalog discussion decrying the over-use of terms like "censorship" to the point they become meaningless and useless (in a ‘boy who cried wolf’-sort-of-way) and I was inclined to agree. I suspect taht Peter Phillips and the folks at Project Censored would agree as well. If you, too, think that terms like censorship should apply to things like a well written book detailing the 25 most important stories affecting our planet and its peoples that you are Not hearing about on the news or on the nets, head to the 900’s* and check out Censored 2007: The Top 25 Censored Stories. Recommended.

*at my library this book can be found at 909.83

Jenn’s blog, The Thriftshop Romantic is a treasure trove of wonderful vintage "stuff" that Jenn finds and rescues from thrift shops. I don’t specifically recall Jenn doing a piece on old magazine advertisements, but this very visual identification and price guide for Old Magazine Advertisements, somehow made me think of Jenn’s blog immediately. Many of the featured ads reminded me a great deal of the tin advertising signs Joel used to collect. Recommended.

Even though Google backed away from the change that removed the ability to leave backlinks in blog comment signatures on blogspot, I continue to see a numbe of my old Blogger buddies migrate to Word Press. For those who are not as fortunate as I am in having a host who is also a friend and an IT hotshot who nurses along all my techno-dweebishness, may I suggest Maria Langer and Jordan Miraz’s Visual Quickstart Guide to WordPress 2. If you’re not a techie and just need a book that shows you where the controls are and how to use them, this one will fit the bill just fine. Recommended.

And finally today a huge Thank You to Will who recommended the offline composter program Blog Desk. My DSL again today went down just as I finished composing and was ready to publish this entry, but with Blog Desk my work was not lost and I was able to simply wait and publish when the DSL conneciton came back up.

 

 

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The powers that be are conspiring to prevent me from posting today.    I spent over an hour on a long post about Herb Boyd’s We Shall Overcome and Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar’s favorite words.   My DSL failed at the moment I pressed publish and the post disppaered  into the ether.

The DSL came back up after a bit and I wrote a new post about my problem with the disappearing post and how hard it is to write an article a second time when you have no access to your first draft.    It wasn’t Really a book review but I did include all the links.    Then I clicked publish, the connection failed and the computer ate my post.   Again.

Clearly the powers that be do NOT want me to promote these two books today.    Want to join me in thwarting them?  Go over to Worldcat and order these books from your library, even though I have included NO links.    Or type the titles in the Powell’s search box and buy the new Carle cuz it’s so cool and to show those powers that be that didn’t let me put a link for your to do so in this space.

The gods willing, The Thin Red Line will return to regular publication tomorrow.

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This one is for Chelle, who lives where it’s cold and snowy, the sort of weather that makes a steaming mug of cocoa seem like the perfect idea.   Michael Turback has penned a delicious collection of recipes for a number of gourmet versions of  Hot Chocolate and a variety of cookies and sweets that go well with a cup of rich cocoa.    The Midnight Cowboy, made from Mexican chocolate, milk, Meyers Dark Rum, Kahlua and Jack Daniels  (a Very adult version) caught my eye and I swooned when reading the recipe for Black Bottom Hot Chocolate,  which first calls for making fudge and pouring it in mugs then pouring a rich hot chocolate over the fudge.   If you are a chocolate lover or live in a cold, snowy climate, Hot Chocolate is Highly Recommended.

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Happy New Year!   Now that the holidays are over, and having indulged in an orgy of spending and consumption to commemorate the birth of a long ago moral philosopher,  most folks who don’t have WWJD bumperstickers on their cars will feel free to forget about that philosopher and the morality he preached for another year or at least until Easter rolls around, and focus on important things like the Presidential election campaign.   So I decided today to feature a couple of books that might otherwise fall through the crack between faith and politics.

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I don’t usually post about books that are not in English but this Spanish language children’s book I came across today is so unusual and a lot of fun even if you do not comprehend Spanish at all.   Animalario Universal  is spiral bound at the top rather than on the side and except for a few introductory and concluding pages, each page is cut in two places, creating three ‘mini pages’ or frames which can each be flipped independently.   The first image shown is an elephant.   As you flip each of the three segments over one by one the elephant becomes a pig, then the pig becomes an armadillo and so on until finally after the last three flips a camel becomes a fish.   The Spanish words for each animal are displayed beneath the pictures and as best I can tell the book is intended as a fun vocabulary/animal names lesson for the Easy books crowd.   Though it will certainly also appeal to anyone who admires clever and artistic books.  Even it they no hablo Espanol.

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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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This one caught my eye while shelving in the 200’s.  Subtitled "Biblical Women’s Deadly Banquets", Nicole Wilkinson Duran’s Having Men for Dinner looks at the symbolism of food and drink in the Bible and relates them to issues of seduction and murder.  I had expected it would be an accessible re-telling of the stories of Jael, Judith, Esther  and Herodias with a humorous contemporary feminist perspective.    Sadly, I was very much mistaken.   This slim trade paperback is a Very academic and dry discussion of these famous Bible stories and is not suited for the casual reader.   Unless you are interested in graduate-level critical Bible study, this one is Not Recommended.

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I have long been a huge fan of Unshelved, the daily comic strip about the life of Dewey, the lazy librarian at the Mallville Public Library. The strip by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum is wildly popular with library staffs everywhere. And it’s very funny, even if you don’t happen to work in a library. So I was thrilled when shelving in book length comics collections at 741.5973 to come across a copy of Read Responsibly, the latest Unshelved collection. As always the strips are clever and thoughtful and laugh out loud funny. "Creative Problem Avoidance" is a hoot. Highly Recommended.

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Happy Saturday! I’m off from work today and we plan to spend the afternoon hanging out with Staci and watching videos. (We finally managed to get together with her for lunch the other day– the operation went well and she looks great; then yesterday we stopped over there to drop off a care package and got to see Kathi for a few minutes as well.)

How I Learned To Cook is a collection of forty essays from chefs, some famous some less so, relating a defining moment in their culinary educations. It is a companion to a very similar volume Don’t Try This At Home, which featured essays about each chef’s worst kitchen catastrophe. I suppose it is inevitable that the quality of the various essays would be somewhat uneven, though most seem to have as their theme that it is the most difficult and painful experiences that teach us the most. One chef, however, contributed a long piece about going to college in Hawaii and spending lots of time skipping class and getting monumentally stoned. It wasn’t clear what he learned but certainly did its part to maintain the ‘chefs as wild ass party-ers’ meme that Bourdain introduced back in Kitchen Confidential. I thoroughly enjoyed reading both books, which are recommended if you like reading about life in the commercial kitchen.

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I vaguely remember reading, not too long before I left New Orleans in the mid–late eighties of the arrival of Andrei Codrescu, though I don’t recall hearing anything of him since and had not previously read anything he wrote. So there were the dual pleasures of discovering Codrescu and seeing Codrescu discover N’awlins. The included essays were written over a 20 year period or so and thus cover the author’s becoming a New Orleanian. Most of the pieces are of a very short form written as weekly newspaper column and even the longer pieces are still fairly short and for the volume of it, you’d think this would be a quick read, but it isn’t. I found many of the stories required savoring and digesting and in the end they proved just too rich and filling to have more than two or three at a sitting. Recommended.

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