The Thin Red Line

I fear my techie friends will be disappointed to learn that this post has Absolutely Nothing  Whatsoever  to do with Digital Subscriber Lines or my (somewhat) High(er) Speed Internet connection.   The parents of pre-schoolers among my readership will be thrilled to learn that I am finally getting around to posting another Easy Picture Books Roundup!

D is for dragon and is also for Carmen Agra Deedy, author of a delightful book titled The Library Dragon.   When Sunrise Elementary School seeks a "thick-skinned" new librarian,  just about everyone is shocked that the new hire turns out to be a real dragon.   But when a child who lost her glasses wanders into the library and begins reading a book out loud,  the children gather round for story time and Miss Lotta’s scales fall off revealing her to be a wonderful children’s librarian.    Highly Recommended.

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Pass the egg rolls!  Jennifer 8 Lee, a first generation Chinese American (her middle name, the numeral eight,  connotes prosperity in Chinese) has written a rollicking fun book about everyone’s favorite cuisine.   Starting with an odd Powerball drawing that saw a huge number of second place winners which turned out to have been selected from a fortune cookie Lee dives into the topic of American-style Chinese restaurants with gusto and explores a number of issues most diners probably never considered.

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First off today,  a sincerest Thank You to Cromley over at Cromley’s World who a few days ago bestowed on me my  very own Arte Y Pico award,  which as I understand it is intended to recognize bloggers who are an "inspiration to others" in terms of   "creativity, design, interesting content, and contributions to the larger blogging community".     Long-time readers of this blog will certainly recall my fuming against "memes"  and probably will not be surprised to learn that I have decidedly mixed feelings about this award.

While I don’t in any way doubt the sincerity with which it was given and would like to believe that in my own small way I have done my bit to bring creativity, design and interesting content to the larger blogging community,   I can’t quite shake the feeling that these awards are something of a distraction, and one intended by their creators to serve a number of purposes quite apart from promoting design, creativity et als.

It would seem that William McCamment over at the Dead Rooster blog would agree.    McCamment,  another recent recipient of the Arte Y Pico award did a bit of digging around and announced on his blog that over Sixty-Five Thousand  of these Arte Y Pico awards have already been given out,  and assuming that most recipients followed the instructions,   created over 65,000 incoming links to the original site,   which as it happens is in Spanish,  making it difficult for me to even know if it is a site I would want to be associated with.  So rather than follow the instructions and post a copy of the rules and tag five more lucky recipients  I decided instead to tag my long lost blogging buddy Saphrym  (who just recently did an amazing post in response to my  The Why We Want To Kill You For Not Understanding Iraq Meme) with the Dead Rooster Award For Diabolical Greatness.   Again,  my sincerest thanks to Cromley along with my sincerest hopes that the memes and awards will disppear again, at least for awhile.

And finally today,  the actual book review.   I have to confess that I have never seen Ed Begley Jr.’s  cable television show or come across his Begley’s Best all natural cleaning products so his recently released book Living Like Ed was in fact my first acquaintance with Begley as a spokesman for "Eco-Friendly" Living.   The book is well written and offers a range of things one can do to be more "eco-friendly",  from the easiest things like replacing light bulbs with compact florescents and participating in curb-side recycling programs.   Begley also goes into considerable detail about more intensive greening activities, like solar power and even organic clothing.     I can’t honestly say that the book made me rush out to start living greener,  but it does provide a lot of information and will at the very least provide food for thought and guidance towards greener choices as time goes by.   Recommended.

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Part of me feels guilty for posting about a second memoir by a second Los Angeles area librarian within less than three months, but Quiet Please   Dispatches from a Public Librarian was just barely too good to pass up.  Scott Douglas’ memoir of his career with the Anaheim library lacks some of the pizazz of Don Borchert’s Free For All  (reviewed here)  but the crisp writing and the creatively Dewey-numbered chapters go a long way with me, though to be perfectly honest at times I found this young man’s outlook and worldview a bit appalling.  

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Sometimes, it seems to me, Rita Mae Brown is simply out to taunt me.  It was if she had somehow heard (or perhaps read) my wish that she write again about the old Runnymeade gang, and give us a break from all those mysteries, which Brown has been cranking out exclusively of late.  So I was initially thrilled when I spotted Ms. Brown’s name in the New Fiction stacks.  But I was struck immediately at what a very small book it is, a mere 102  four by five inch pages.  A longish short story or a very brief novella,  the entire action takes place in a single August day in 1952.  Julia (Juts) and her sister Louise  (Wheezie) Hunesnemeir, the former’s daughter, Nicole (Nickel) and the latter’s orpahaned grandson, Leroy,  are the only characters.

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Chas Newkey-Burden’s Great Email Disasters is a UK trade paperback book about e-mails that have come embarrassingly to light, leaving their senders to look like real schmucks.   While reading titillating e-mails is fun I suppose,  the fact that I really didn’t Know who most any of these people Were detracted for the experience for me.    This one is mildly Recommended to folks in the UK.   (And maybe they can tell me what all the fuss was about

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I have to say right off, going in, that I really wanted to like Clifford A Wright’s Bake Until Bubbly– The Ultimate Casserole Cookbook.   But Wright in several ways made that very hard for me to do.    The first time in the early pages he decried using canned cream of whatever soups in favor of freshly prepared bechmael sauces.  All of what I would call the easy steps in casserole-preparation have been replaced with extremely labor-intensive recipes which seem as though designed to show just how much hard work is normally replaced by the use of canned soup in casseroles that by the end of the 450 page plus new 2008 release I was mainly seized by an imperative urge to hurl the bloody book across the room.   This one is Not Recommended.

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If you’ve ever hesitated to eat seafood due to concerns about mercury or other pollutants or concerns about sustainability OR if you’ve ever hesitated to try cooking some exotic variety of seafood or other out of ignorance,  Paul Johnson has written the perfect book for you.   Subtitled "the definitive guide to understanding, selecting and preparing healthy, delicious and enviornmentally sustaingable seafood", Johnson’s Fish Forever is an encyclopediac guide to edibles from the sea.

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Pack your bags and get ready for the ride of your life.  The Space Tourist’s Handbook  tells you all you need to know about vacationing in space.  Written by Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, this $16 book is part brochure for the range of trips offered by Space Adventures, part introduction to various aspects of space travel and 100% All out of this world.

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$3,000,000,000,000.00.  Or, if you prefer, three trillion dollars.  Any way you cut it, that’s A LOT of money.  And according to Joseph E Stiglitz and Linda J Blimes, that’s how much the United States’ war in Iraq has cost, estimating conservatively.  Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist takes a fascinating look at the cost of the Iraq war.   And the numbers are not pretty.

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I had thought that  I was burned out on reading about hurricane Katrina but when I happened upon Michael Tisserand’s Sugarcane Academy the other day I stayed up until after 2 a.m. reading it.    I found myself fascinated by the story of Paul Reynaud– a New Orleans first grade teacher who was the driving force behind the creation of Sugarcane Academy, a school for evacuee children that was created in New Iberia Louisiana in the weeks immediately following the storm and then continued in borrowed space at Loyola University in New Orleans once people were allowed back into the city.

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Having considered and rejected five other cookbooks for today’s post, I can say without hesitation that Andreas Viestad’s Kitchen Of Light is no ordinary cookbook.   There is first the photography,  which is highly evocative of Thomas Laupstad’s blog, depicting ethereal images of Northern Norway.   And then there are the essays, each like a postcard or travelogue from a  cold, exotic land.   And then of course are the recipes– largely for fish with just enough vegetables and sweets to make a well-rounded cookbook.

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First off a hat’s off  to Cecilia Sherrard’s Cleveland Ohio Real Estate Blog,  which every day provides great advice for home buyers and sellers alike.  Today’s book, Buying A Home by the Better Business Bureau is a well-written  and down-to-earth "must read" for the first time home buyer.  Covering all the details from getting pre-qualified for a mortgage (an often overlooked, "must-do" first step) to the potentially confusing details of escrow and closing, Buying A Home offers detailed and specific step by step advice for the home buyer.   I was especially impressed by all of the detailed advice for things the buyer needs to do before beginning to look at homes,  not only pre-qualifying for a mortgage but also zeroing in on a neighborhood, learning about the current economic environment ("buyer’s market" vs "seller’s market") and finding the right real estate agent to work with.

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It’s time once again for another Easy Picture Books roundup and I have three really cute one for you today.   Tedd Arnold’s More Parts is one of a series of three books that are a pure D delight.   In charming rhyme,  Arnold explores the thoughts and actions of a small boy who takes common sayings literally.   From "broke your heart" and "give him a hand" to "jumps out of his skin" and "lost your mind", Arnold’s beautifully illustrated tale is a sheer joy.   This one comes Highly Recommended.

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So today I was supposed to write about Divided America,  a book long on statistics and short on useful ideas.   But given Barrack Obama’s selection as the Democratic nominee,  I find myself less able than ever to delve into Earl and Merle Black’s thesis that America is an evenly divided country with the Democrats controlling the Norheast and the West Coast, the Republicans controlling the South and the Mountains/Plains states and the Midwest  cast as the eternal "swing" region.   Of course, I could easily point out how dry and un-engaging I found the Black brothers analysis of long term regional polling data or the fact that the Black’s intense categorization of the electorate as, for example "non-Christian whites" vs "New American minorities" left me cold and confused.   But today, it seems to me is a day to celebrate Obama’s victory.   And the Blacks’ dry statistical analysis be damned.

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Several years ago I read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, an expose on just how badly low level employees of major companies are treated and an examination of just how challenging it is to actually survive on what these companies pay.   While it was mildly interesting to learn a few more details about just how bad it is down here in the trenches, being myself one of those over-worked and underpaid front line employees I was greatly offended by Ehrenreich’s rather condescending approach to the workers whose plight she examined and by the pains she took to establish that she was somehow different from and better than these people.

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Awhile back I was tagged with the Six Word Memoir meme and I wish at the time I had had this just recently release trade paperback from the editors of Smith Magazine.   Subtitled  "six word memoirs by writers famous and obscure", Not Quite What I Was Planning is a collection of over 1,000 stories, told six words at a time.  Some of the celebrity contributions were quite funny:  "Liars, hysterectomy didn’t improve sex life"– Joan Rivers while others seemed a bit odd: "Revenge is living well without you"– Joyce Carol Oates or merely lame:  "Brought it to a boil, often"– Mario Batali.

For the most part the obscure contributors were more clever:  "Without ideas intelligence couldn’t exist"–Ornette Coleman or witty:  "Aspiring lady pirate, disillusioned sells boat"– Diana White and sometimes even wise:  "Lived in moment until moment sucked".   And my favorite as a blogger:  "Blogging is easy.  Writing is hard"–Jennifer Shreve.

I doubt anyone will mistake this for great literature but it is a very amusing book,  the perfect thing to be kept in a bathroom or waiting room for those times when you want to read a bit but not get involved in a story that will keep you there.   Not Quite What I Was Planning   Recommended.

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Thank you to  blog reader PB for suggesting today’s title.  Steve Greenberg’s Gadget Nation is a lavishly illustrated over-sized hard cover filled with two page spreads about hundreds of inventions and the inventors behind them.  I was particularly intrigued by the "Clocky"– a rugged alarm clock designed by an MIT student with a bad habit of hitting the snooze button and sleeping in.   The Clocky is outfitted with large rubber wheels and when you press its snooze button, the Clocky rolls itself off of the night table and onto the floor, forcing the sleeper out of bed to hunt down and turn off the loud alarm.

Other especially interesting gadgets include a toddler’s food dish that you store in the freezer so that it will quickly cool down foods that are too hot for a young child,  supposedly saving Mom from hours and hours of blowing on forkfulls of food and comforting a child with mouth burns and something called the "Head Blade" a bizzare looking contraption with wheels and a squeegee-protected oversized razor blade which supposedly makes it a lot easier to shave your head if you are going for the chrome dome look.   I have to confess that none of the features products inspired me to rush to a web site and place an order, though the toilet tank aquarium (the fish and plants go in a transparent lucite box that surrounds the holding tank for flushing) and the "conedom" ice cream cone holder did intrigue me.

For anyone who is tinkering away in a garage or basement trying to invent the next big thing Gadget Nation would be an excellent resource for learning more about successful inventions and the people behind them.   Non-inventors will probably find enough that is interesting and unusual to enjoy the book as well.   Recommended.   Thanks again to PB for suggesting this one.

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In attempting to write this review of Barbara Wallraff’s  Word Fugitives, a book about finding or coining words needed to convey concepts not defined by a known or existing word, I found myself quite relating to Wallruff’s theme.   Somewhere out there, I am certain, is a word that defines a person who is extremely interested in odd and unusual words and enjoys using words no one around them has ever heard of.   Sadly neither Word Fugitives not any of the dictionaries or thesauri I consulted led me to this particular fugitive term.   Thus I was unable to begin this piece by saying  "This one is for my ______ friends."

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I’ve long been a huge Larry McMurtry fan.   While I don’t care for the Western genre and was never able to get into Lonesome Dove or any of his other westerns, I have very greatly enjoyed his novels about modern day Texans.   My all time favorite is The Evening Star which was a sequel to Terms Of Endearment.    I have also greatly enjoyed his sequence of novels about Duane Moore of the fictional Thalia, Texas which began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show and continued with Texasville in 1987,  Duane’s Depressed in 1999 and finally in 2007 with When The Light Goes.  It was thrilling to me to return for a few hours to McMurtry’s Texas and I say without hesitation that this volume finds McMurtry at the top of his form as a novelist.

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