MarysLibrary

The Big Burn (Wilhelm)

I have long had a bit of a fascination with forest fires.  Maybe that is because I grew up here in the Inland Northwest where forest fires are an annual fact of life.  Or, perhaps, it is because I spent a few summers during my college years working for the U.S. Forest Service in Northern Idaho.  I worked on survey crews and was sent out on a fire only once.  At that fire, we basically had nothing to do other than watch a fire line be constructed by a bulldozer operator from a logging company.  Still, seeing even a relatively small forest up close, at night when the smoke and flames turn a full moon bright orange, is a memorable experience.  

So, over the years I have read a few books about forest fires.  Perhaps the best is Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire, which recounts the tragic Mann Gulch fire in Montana in 1949 when most of a crew of smoke jumpers were killed when a fire blew up on them.  Then there was The Thirtymile Fire (named for the location, not the size, of the fire), also by MacLean, about a fire in Northern Washington State in 2001 where several Forest Service fire fighters were killed, mostly as the result of a series of mistakes and mismanagement.  The crew chief was later tried on criminal charges as a result of the fire. 

Most recently, Timothy Egan's The Big Burn tells the story of the grand-daddy of 'em all -- the fire of 1910 that ravaged parts of Western Montana, Northern Idaho, and Eastern Washington.  Along the way, Egan tells the story of the fight for conservation of the Western forests, led by Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir.  In all, the book has a wide and startling cast of characters who are variously herioc, cowardly, and just plain strange. 

The summer of 1910 was hot and dry in the Inland Northwest.  In July, hundreds of fires were started by heat lightning strikes in the northern forests.  But, over one terrible weekend in August, driven by heat and wind, the fires merged and exploded over a vast area.  The blow-up was beyond any human control.  Entire towns burned.  By the time the rains came and extinguished the flames, over 3,000,000 acres of forestland had burned -- an area nearly the size of Connecticut (or a bit larger than Yorkshire, for our British readers).

The history of conservation and of federal forest management since 1910 has been a decided mixed bag.  Nonetheless, Egan's book is a dramatic and readable account of the people and events that made conservation a factor in American public policy.

Posted by Wilhelm

The Computer

"The internet . . . can have an insidious, corrosive effect. Too much internet usage fragments the brain and dissipates concentration so that after a while, one's ability to spend long, focused hours immersed in a single subject becomes blunted. Information comes pre-digested in small pieces, one grazes on endless ready-meals and snacks of the mind, and the result is mental malnutrition." - Susan Hill

Howards End Is on The Landing

Having learned of The Book Depository,  I took advantage of their world-wide free shipping again recently and acquired Susan Hill's new book, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home. In about 30 chapters Hill talks about the books in her house, re-reading some, reading some that she bought but had never got to, and generally reminiscing about the books in her life.

The plan was to buy no new books for a year, reading instead books she already owned. The result is a delightful ramble through the world of literature and is filled with incidents in her life during which she met and sometimes became friends with a lot of famous writers. It's always a treat to read anecdotes that let you into the lives of writers you admire and Hill has many of them to share.

I naturally thought about doing the same thing: not buying books for a year and instead reading or re-reading the books I have around the house. This is unlikely to succeed, considering my history of new year's resolutions broken, usually by the end of the week, even when New Year's Day is on Friday.

But I can do something similar, with the understanding that I can buy a few books by authors whose works I collect (Michael Chabon, Dennis LeHane, Toni Morrison) and that I can borrow books from the library. I might also give myself the ok to buy books for my Kindle. And there's the problem of all the wonderful books Hill describes with such joy that I'm eager to read them myself.

In any case, this was a delightful book and I zipped through it in no time. And of course it wins second prize for the lovliest book cover of the year, comeing in close behind The Children's Book.

The Death of a President

The October issue of Vanity Fair magazine has an article by Sam Kashner about William Manchester and what he went through writing The Death of a President: November 20 - November 25 1963. Jacqueline Kennedy asked Manchester to write the definitive account of John F Kennedy's assassination and Manchester felt he could not say no. Mrs Kennedy encouraged everyone to speak frankly with him about the events of that weekend and everyone did, excepting Lee Harvey Oswald's wife, who apparently refused to talk to anyone unless she was paid. The Vanity Fair article sent me to the book, which I had failed to read when it was published. It was time to read it now.

Manchester spent two years researching and writing the book, with a much-reduced income during that time as he accepted only a small advance and expected to earn almost nothing for himself from the book. He designated that the profits should go to the Kennedy Library, and they have made Manchester one of the largest contributors to the institution as the book sold in the millions.

When the publisher arranged for an excerpt from the book to be serialized in Life Magazine with the money to go to Manchester, the Kennedys, who by now were having second thoughts about the book, threatened a lawsuit to prevent publication. Eventually Jacqueline Kennedy realized that suing Manchester would result in negative publicity worse than that which would result from the publishing of the private feelings and impressions that she had shared frankly with Manchester four years earlier.

The book is exceedingly detailed but never tedious. Those of us who remember that day in November remember it very well. I was living in Massachusetts at the time and teaching at New Bedford High School. I was in the teacher's room with two women who had been my teachers only a few years before when the principal, Mr Garcia, came on the PA system to tell us the president was dead. He dismissed the school early and my sister, who was a student at NBHS, showed up in my home room and we drove home together.

Our family like most Americans spent much of the weekend watching TV. It is enlightening now to read about what was going on behind the scenes and the scramble between Friday night when Kennedy's body was brought back to Washington, DC, and Monday when there was a full-scale, historically based, and perfectly produced funeral.

Thousands of decisions had to be made: whether to have an open casket in the Irish manner, which groups would sing or play during the ceremonies, where the funeral would be, what route the procession would take, who would walk behind the casket.

People walked the roads of Arlington Cemetery in the pouring rain  for hours to find the perfect site for the grave. Librarians dashed about in the darkened Library of Congress with flashlights to find reports and photographs of Lincoln's funeral and to research the history of "Hail to the Chief." Angier Biddle Duke, the chief of protocol for the White House nearly had a nervous breakdown dealing with the simultaneous arrival of 91 heads of state or their representatives, not least of whom was Charles De Gaulle.

One of the most interesting leitmotifs in the book is the ongoing and deepening feud between Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy. Manchester is exceedingly careful to be as objective as possible but the extreme dislike between the two men is impossible to avoid entirely. And of course the book skims over without mention the sexual escapades, the serious health issues, the amphetamine abuse, and various other less than admirable aspects of the Kennedy administration about which most of us knew nothing at the time or for many years after.

An excellent book. It's the first place to go if you're interested in this historic event in American history.

I've moved on to Seymour M Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), which is pretty depressing with it's tales of buying the nomination in 1960 and stealing the election and the connections with the Mafia and the antics of Kennedy's father and grandfather.

The "Best" Books of 2009?

I'm continuing to be intrigued by the list of "best" books from Publisher's Weekly. My library does have some of the books, but they are a little strange to say the least. Here's the PW description of Don Chaon's Await Your Reply:

Three disparate characters and their oddly interlocking lives propel this intricate novel about lost souls and hidden identities from National Book Award--finalist Chaon (You Remind Me of Me). Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who's been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle. Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters' individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what's real and what's fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel's structure echoes that of his well-received debut--also a book of threes--even as it bests that book's elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence.

Got that?

And here's Victor LaValle's Big Machine:

LaValle has garnered critical acclaim for his previous works (a collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and novel, The Ecstatic), and his second novel is sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe. Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice takes a chance on an anonymous note delivered to him at the cruddy upstate New York bus depot where he works as a porter. Quickly, Ricky finds himself among the "Unlikely Scholars," a secret society of ex-addicts and petty criminals, all black like him, living in remote Vermont and sifting through stacks of articles in a library devoted to investigating the supernatural; the existence of a god; and the legacy of Judah Washburn, an escaped slave who claimed to have had contact with a higher being that the Unlikely Scholars now call "the Voice." Ricky's intoxicating voice-robust, organic, wily-is perfect for narrating LaValle's high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, as the fateful porter-something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of "spiritual X-men"-wanders through America's "messianic hoo-hah."

Stitches, by David Small, is a graphic autobiography.

PW's 10 Best Books of 2009

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

Big Machine by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

Cheever by Blake Bailey (Knopf)

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War by Neil Sheehan (Random)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Lost City of Z by David Grann (Doubleday)

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Stitches by David Small (Norton).

I'm unimpressed.

Anybody got a rake?

An Air That Kills

I just wrote a lengthy review of a 1994 Andrew Taylor mystery, An Air That Kills, much more lengthy than my typical post about the books I've been reading. Typepad promptly erased it.

So I'll ask you to imagine a charming post about an unusually good mystery taking place immediately after World War II in a town on the border of England and Wales where newly arrived and newly promoted Detective Inspector Thornhill is assigned the task of identifying some tiny bones found in an old box in the foundations of an old (very old) inn. With the bones are a Victorian silver pin and a bit of a newspaper clipping.

Now imagine a witty description of the characters in this somewhat insular town, Lydmouth, and the problems the new detective is having fitting in. Picture an irascible boss and an untried assistant, an annoyed wife and a town butinski and a series of burglaries with something in common that leads our hero to a local criminal. But this guy doesn't do burglaries. It must be someone else.

Add a newspaperwoman from London who has given up her successful career for no reason her friends can discover and picture the negative electricity between this arrogant Londoner and the arrogant detective. Then mix in a possible murder and off you go. Oh, and assume that I recognized the title as a quote from a famous poem cycle that they are reading over at Cornflower Books.

It was a great review. Too bad Typepad lost it on me.

Campion -- a guest post by Wilhelm

 My word, has it really been 20 years since the debut of the BBC's brilliant Campion series, based upon the Margery Allingham novels?  Mary has been after me to do a guest post and I have just finished reading The Margery Allingham Omnibus, which collects the first three Campion novels -- The Crime at Black Dudley, The Mystery Mile, and Look to the Lady.  I suppose that would be of rather more interest to the readers of MarysLibrary than would my other current reading -- Wills, Trusts, and Estates, by Dukeminier, et al, (8th ed. 2009). 

Mary got me hooked on the Campion videos years ago and I have been meaning to get around to reading the actual books.  Awhile back I did read the final Campion novel, The Tiger in the Smoke.  Starting with the last book turned out to be a bad idea.  Tiger is a good mystery, but is only just barely a Campion mystery.  While reading the book I was struck by how easily Albert Campion could have been written out of it with little damage to the plot.  But, I perservered and got started, finally, on the right foot with The Margery Allingham Omnibus.

The first Campion novel, The Crime at Black Dudley, was similar to the final novel in that dear Albert is a supporting character who plays a relatively minor part in the story.  And, alas, Lugg does not appear at all.  The next novel, The Mystery Mile, introduces Lugg and further develops the character of Albert Campion.  Now, we're getting somewhere.  The third novel, Look to the Lady, is by far the best of the three.  This story was adapted for the premiere episode of the BBC's Campion series starring Peter Davison.  It's a delight. 

As the cold weather approaches, one could do far worse for an evening's amusement than to pass the time with a Campion book, or DVD, and some good Scotch whisky.

Daphne du Maurier

Nina Auerbach's 2000 "biography," Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress, is an unusual book. My library classes it as biography but it's really a book of the author's memories of reading du Maurier with a flashlight under the sheets at summer camp combined with literary criticism that laments the fame of those novels demonstrating less of du Maurier's talent and the obscurity of her best work.

Although Auerbach is a feminist critic, an approach that normally makes me sigh and hold my nose, she seems to have more of a grasp of the real du Maurier than many who talk about her "romance" novels. There is precious little romance in Rebecca (1938), or in Jamaica Inn (1936) or Frenchman's Creek (1942) either for that matter.

I picked up this book because my book club is reading Rebecca for our November meeting and I have been reading around before I finally re-read the novel. I started with Jane Eyre because so many critics say that du Maurier was deeply influenced by Charlotte Bronte. Auerbach says no. Just because both books have a wimpy first-person narrator, a large house that burns down, and a love interest with a demonic first wife doesn't mean the novels have anything fundamental in common. I would agree.

Jane starts out in early youth with a backbone of steel and by the time Mr Rochester is through with her and she hits the road she has developed a fully-formed character and is able to resist him with all her being. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins and ends the novel subjugating herself to Maxim de Winter. She is a sadder but wiser and better dressed girl when she dreams she goes to Manderly again, but she doesn't fundamentally change. She remains at the mercy of a man, as do most of du Maurier's female protagonists. By the end of Bronte's novel, Jane is Mr Rochester's equal.

Auerbach would have us read other du Maurier novels instead of the three  most famous. She recommends Julius (1933), My Cousin Rachel (1951), The Scapegoat (1957), and The Glass-Blowers(1963.) Having read My Cousin Rachel, I can recommend that powerful book without reservation but like most people I have read no other du Maurier except Jamaica Inn, which believe it or not, I read under the covers with a flashlight. No 12-year-old dared read so daring a book in daylight in those more innocent days.

It's Like This, Cat

Today I read Emily Neville's children's book, It's Like This Cat, which won the Newbery in 1964. It's about a 14-year-old boy living in Gramercy Park in New York City who acquires a stray tomcat as a pet from a neighborhood cat lady. (How many cat ladies do you suppose live in upscale Gramercy Park?)

This is a gentle book with only two scenes that are scary or distasteful, but children's books were gentler 45 years ago. The most wrenching scene in the book is when the lad has to decide whether to have his tomcat altered or not.

The thing that startled me about this book is how difficult it must be for the 12-year-olds who are its target audience to understand some of the now-obsolete language. The narrator, Dave, refuses to lend his records to a friend because the guy never changes his needle. Dave sits on the front steps and listens to his transistor. He has his hair cut in the ivy-league style which upsets him because it took him three months to grow it into a DA.

The book is as historical for today's pre-teen as something written in 1910 would have been to me when I was 12. It needs notes in the back like those in the Penguin classics.

Dave his friends take the bus or subway to the Bronx Zoo, Coney Island, and the Fulton Fish Market. He has a date with a girl and they take the Staten Island Ferry and decide on the spur of the moment to see West Side Story on Broadway. (It costs them $2.90 each for tickets to the matinee.) Can anybody imagine anyone today letting their 14-year-olds wander the city alone without telling their parents where they're going?

 

Stuck in a Book

I've been cruising the blogosphere of late and have come across some first-rate blogs that are now on on my list of places to visit often. One of them I found mentioned at Random Jottings of a Book and Opera Lover. It's written by an Englishman named Simon Thomas who describes himself as a Christian bookaholic vegetarian twin. Check him out at Stuck in a Book.

Cranford

Elizabeth Gaskell is a favorite of mine so while shopping for something else at Amazon recently I impulsively bought myself the Gaskell Collection DVDs of Cranford, North and South, and Wives and Daughters.

I had seen the last two but I somehow missed Cranford, though it stars one of my favorite actresses, Judy Dench, and has Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon for good measure. I watched my way through the five episodes the other day and immediately re-read the three novellas on which it is based: Cranford, Mr Harrison's Confessions, and My Lady Ludlow.

What a fine job they have done adapting these books for the screen. They have amalgamated some characters, cut some out completely, migrated some from one story to another, and put all of this together with lovely sets, costumes, and photography.

Next week, Wives and Daughters.

Goodbye Cazalets

I have finished reading the fourth book in the Cazalet Chronicle and I'm going to miss these people. No more giggling with Poly and Clary, no going to the Duchy for advice, no appeals to Rachel to help with things, no wisdom from Miss Milliment, no further swooning over Archie.

Fortunately, the novels were made into a fine BBC made-for-TV production which I have just ordered online for delivery Thursday or Friday. I borrowed the first of three DVDs from Netflix and it was delightful watching it on my laptop. But the second disc had some sort of problem and I couldn't play Episode 3. This was not to be borne and so I ordered the set from Amazon.com.

Wrinkles

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know why I look this way. I've traveled a long way and some of the roads weren't paved.

Simon's Cat

A Coup

When I lamented recently that we in the US couldn't get British books until months after publication dovegreyreader suggested I try my luck with The Book Depository (free shipping worldwide.) So I did.

And today there arrived in the mail A S Byatt's new novel, The Children's Book, which will not be released in the US until early October. And I got it in paperback.

The world is flat. You just need to know how to navigate.

Stormy Weather

James Gavin's new biography, Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne, has some surprises for those of us who thought we knew all about the singer's life. Yes, she was born into the "talented tenth" with a grandmother who was instrumental in the development of the NAACP. Her family had money and education.

But her parents' marriage disintegrated, her father ended up as a major underworld character in Seattle and her mother had neither the health nor the talent to succeed on the stage. The young Lena danced on streetcorners for pennies. But her talent is unmistakable and she soon made a successful career as MGM's "Negro goddess," the first black actress to win an academy award.

Gavin's book is inclusive: he has talked to or read the papers of every major black show business figure of the last 50 years. He first interviewed Lena Horne in 1994 and was captivated by her charm and talent. This is a good place to start if you are interested in Lena Horne or in black entertainers of the 1940s and 50s.

Inventing the Dream

The second volume in Kevin Starr's California Dream series focuses on southern California. Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (1985) describes the rapid development of the Southland when enormous numbers of people moved to the Los Angeles area, encouraged by boosterism and real estate development.

Enacting a 150 ft height limit on buildings and the rapid spread of the automobile made it easier for developers to sell the houses they were building by the hundreds of thousands. And the arrival of water from the Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley made all this growth possible.

From the beginning of statehood California was controlled by oligarchs - railroad men, real estate speculators, mining and timber interests, and eventually oilmen. The Progressives, led by Theodore Roosevelt, cleaned out much of the corruption in government across the state. This didn't last but there was for a time hope of fighting city hall.

In this volume Starr continues to describe the scholars and journalists, architects and writers, engineers and artists who flocked to California along with disillusioned midwestern farmers and shopkeepers, retirees and go-getters in the years between 1890 and 1920.

There is overlap and some redundancy in Starr's volumes and they aren't organized as well as they might be, but the story Starr has to tell is so fascinating and he gives us so many details that it doesn't hurt to be reminded in volume two what we learned in volume one. And now, on to volume three.

The Little Stranger

What a book! I recommend this: buy or borrow the The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Do not read the blurb. Do not read anything about the book anywhere. Just open it to page one and start reading.

The less you know about the essential plot and genre of this book the better. This is not a novel of suspense but rather of puzzlement. If you have no preconceptions about it you will have to figure out for yourself what is really happening and to whom and why and which characters you can believe and which you cannot and whether the narrator is reliable or not.

I think this is a classic. I know, that term gets thrown around a lot and every really good book gets labeled a classic by somebody or other. But this one seems to me to have the rich plotting, ambiguous characterization, and smoothness of style that will live on. I read it because it is a Booker nominee and right now I'm voting for this novel to win. (Mind I've read exactly two of the books on the list . . . )