The Thin Red Line

Sub-titled  "How I Stopped Worrying About What To Do With The Rest Of My Life & Started Driving a Yellow Cab",  Melissa Plaut’s Hack is an easy and charming memoir on the life of a New York City cab driver.  With wit and understatement, Plaut relates her tale of deciding "as an adventure" to try driving a cab for a living for while,  filling out the forms, taking the test, obtaining her hack license and driving for a medium sized taxi firm in New York City.    From dealing with agressive and obnoxious drivers to competing with other hacks for fares, Plaut does a good job of capturing the romance of life behind the wheel.  She also manages quite matter-of-factly to out herself as a lesbian and reminds her friend, on a late night taxi ride home from The Hole, that taxi drivers always  listen in on conversations, so  the cab is Not a great place to dish an entire evening’s worth of people.   All in all a pleasant and informative read.   Recommended.

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Just in case $4.xx/gallon gas and the seemingly interminable and insurmountable problems in Junior’s Iraq weren’t causing you enough headaches,  Andrei Lankov– a professor of Korean history and politics at the Australian National University has written a distinctive and eye opening book about the realities of daily life in North Korea.    I have to confess that apart from occasionally shelving the Korean collection at the library and having once upon a time watched the television show M*A*S*H to the point of total immersion,   I know very little about either of the Koreas.    And precious little scholarship exists about current day North Korea,  despite the heavy coverage of Pyongyang’s nuclear arms program and the vague and ultimately empty threats from Washington.   So this 2007 trade paperback caught my eye at the circulation and I brought it home and learned a bit about North Korea.

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Starting off the new week with a Ron Review, one of my partner Ron’s occasional takes on a book I probably would not have selected.

Welcome to Your Brain by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang is a witty and well written tour through the human brain. They explore modern myths such as that we only use 10% of our brains, (we actually use it all). They also refute the myth that Alcohol and Pot kill brain cells.   The authors cover the basic anatomy of the brain. How and why it does what it does and that occasionally it will lie to you in order to do what you need to do during the day.

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Yikes.   How did I manage to let a whole week pass without doing a single blog post?   It’s certainly not that I didn’t read any noteworthy books this past week.   But somehow or other I let the whole week go by without posting so much as a book cover.    And everything about this first book is late.    I am late getting around to reading it,  the library branch where I work was a full year late getting around to offering this particular title and I had not previously read any of Christopher Buckley’s much-praised earlier works.

Boomsday is the story of Cassandra Devine,  the young Yale hopeful who learns that her father has invested her tuition money in a dot.com start-up and therefore must serve in the Army in order to earn her way to school,  is a comic delight.   As Cassandra’s brief stint in the service throws her into the arms of a lecherous Congressman who speeds Cassandra’s way into a power broker position at a hot K Street firm in Washington DC,  where Cassandra will go on to offer a ‘modest proposal’   that the Baby Boomer generation agree to "voluntarily discorporate" by age eighty in return for some eye-popping tax benefits.    Leading on a shadowy league of activists via her blog at cassandra.net  Cassandra and her Congress Critter actually get the darned thing passed,  though with so many typically Boomer perks thrown in (i.e.  tax exemptions for purchase of Sedgways) that the onerous burden Cassandra had hoped to lift from her own generation is as burdensome as ever.    Absolutely laugh-out-loud funny,  a Real Treat.  Not to be missed.  

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Happy Weekend!  For those of you who are off from work,  I thought I would pop in and post about the most interesting book that I came across at work yesterday.   Bruce Bickel and Stan Jantz have written an un-apologetic rant against Christians they describe as  "very much like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day".   This new 2008 original trade paperback release caught my eye while shelving this afternoon and after just a quick glimpse I just knew I would have to  blog about it right away.

Bickel and Jantz who have written over 50 books together, many of then Christian themed have decided it’s time for real Christians to stand up and condemn the outrageous behavior of their more colorful Christian counterparts,  such as the Rev. Fred Phelps (the "Got Hates Fags" Folks) and others who clearly seem to lose sight of Jesus’ message of love and compassion for your fellor humans, rather than a humorousless doctrinaire existence of rigid, inflexible rules.    I’m Fine With God…It’s Christians I Can’t Stand comes Highly Recommended.   

Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend and I will be back in this space on Monday night to share more books that have recently crossed The Thin Red Line.

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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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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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If you’ve ever felt royally ripped off by a big company chances are Bob Sullivan has some useful advice.   Gotcha Capitalism chronicles the ways that big corporations from hotel chains and airlines to supermarkets and cell phone providers use hidden charges and fees in order to advertise lower prices than can realistically be offered.   Sullivan, author of msnbc.com’s Red Tape Chronicles, provides clear and specific advice about what types of additional charges to watch out for as well as when and how to complain in order to maximize your chances of having extra charges waived or refunded.

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I don’t have regular recurring features tied to specific days of the week, like the very popular Wordless Wednesday that many of my blog friends unfailingly participate in.   I do, however, have a number of regularly recurring features, but you never know what day of the week they’ll pop up on. 

My partner, Ron, has very different tastes in books and reading and I am truly grateful for his occasional "Ron Reviews" wherein Ron writes about books of his own choosing, giving the blog a wider variety of books and a nice change of perspective from time to time.   Today’s book is not one I would ever have selected myself.    I hope you will enjoy reading Ron’s review of A Short History of the American Stomach.

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Happy Friday!    Back when I was in the eight grade one of our teachers made our course grade dependent upon a special project in which we would strictly limit the amount of television we watched and keep a journal and report on what things we did when not watching television.

I’m pleased to say that this junior high school experiment largely saved me from being a slave to the boob tube the way so many of my generation are.  So I was initially quite sympathetic in my approach to Living Outside The Box—TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets.  Surprisingly author Barbara Brock managed to quite lose me, in spite of my general and long time support of turn off the tv and DO SOMETHING with your life initatives.

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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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So I finished re-reading Half Blood Prince and am immersed in the story and ready to continue. And log in to check and find that I am now 113th in line for Deathly Hallows. I have resisted the temptation to break down and buy it but really haven’t been paying much attention to other books.

Moon Pies and RC Cola evoke the rural south like nothing else and David Magee has written a worshipful history of the marshmallow/graham cookie snack. Originally just one of over two hundred varieties of baked goods marketed by the Chatanooga Baking Company, the Moon Pie came to be its most successful and only product. Much ink is devoted to paeans to eating moon pies as a child and intense discussion of the variations (single or double decker, chocolate, vanilla or banana coating) worthy of Bon Appetit. It was something amusing to peruse over a lunch hour, though Ron loved it.

Doing nothing constructive on my day off and anxiously waiting for Harry…

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Confessing that I have been re-reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and just haven’t felt like reading or blogging about other books. Meanwhile I am up to 168th on the hold list so I should get a copy within three weeks. I have been unable to avoid a couple of spoilers that mostly confirmed what I had surmised from perusing a couple of paragraphs at the beginning of the epilogue. And decided to get set up to Continue the story when I finally get the damned book.

Staci and Clint flew home to Boise Wed evening. We fed them lunch and took them to the airport. She is going to have to come back in October for yet Another operation so we will look forward to seeing her again. Never did make it to the museum, but I still have the pass and Ron and I are planning to go Tuesday. And we already miss Staci.

Today’s book caught my eye, but proved to be a dud. A hodge podge of information on a wide range of diverse topics from how to tie a knot, to how to hold a baby, how to change a flat tire to how to order sushi, the things John F. Hunt states that every guy needs to know struck me as arbitrary and less than helpful, as least to me. And the depth and helpfulness of the treatment of the various topics varies greatly. Ordering and eating sushi is covered in great detail (which I already know and don’t much care about) but the section on how to tie knots consisted of a list of 8 different tpyes of knots, a sentence describing each type of knot and an illustration of each knot with no instructions whatsoever for how to tie it. Don’t bother with this one.

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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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So as I passed the umpteenth book under the scanner this afternoon it occurred to me it might be fun to write about the oddest, most unusual or most interesting book that passes through my hands each day. Thus I bring you The Thin Red Line:

Like the worst of cafeteria fare it looked much more appetizing than it turned out to be. With politics in his heart Katz meanders from underground food sales through the slow food movement and on to genetically modified foods and the regulatory activities and activism they’ve inspired exploring a theme that could be summed up as "all eating is political". And that is this book’s downfall, not only because eating is such a complex and personal behavior but because the author’s political agenda greatly interferes with his ability to report on the widely varied topics he attempts to cover.

It turns out that Staci is in town, staying at Kathi’s, and we’ll hopefully see them tomorrow. I didn’t get home from work until well after six and I was just exhausted so tonight was out. If I understand correctly she will be having surgery at UW next week then will be staying on at Kathi’s until the 20-somethingth. Apparently they will not let her fly right home to Boise after the operation.

Meanwhile I had another nice surprise when I got home– the copy of Ethan Mordden’s How’s Your Romance? that I ordered for 99 cents on e-bay came today. I have voraciously read about half of it already and since no work tomorrow I may stay up and finish it. When I think about it, it is amazing to me just how much the book business has changed since I had my first adult job at Waldenbooks in the 80’s. I remember hearing so much about how computers and the Internet would soon eliminate actual printed books, and yet it seems quite the opposite has happened. While things are very difficult for small, independent bricks and mortar bookstores, the distribution power of the amazons has really opened up the business to smaller and self-publishers and once the books have been bought they quickly become available quite cheaply in the huge re-sale market. This particular volume, which is less than 2 years old, was withdrawn from the New York Public Library. All libraries constantly weed their collections to make room for incoming materials and most (including PCLS) sell the withdrawn materials to vendors who peddle them on amazon and e-bay.

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