In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson by Sue Erikson Bloland

In the Shadow of Fame is a psychoanalytic memoir by the daughter of one of the twentieth century’s leading psychoanalysts, Erik H. Erikson, the famous author of Childhood and Society and Identity, Youth, and Crisis, books that I saw on many desks and bookshelves when I attended college in the 1970s. Like her father before her, Bloland has become a psychoanalyst, but it took her many years to embrace this career. She spent much of her youth trying to escape the family fame.

According to Bloland, her parents suffered from addiction to achievement and desire for renown. Though her father was famous as a healer attuned to the mental health of individuals, he and his wife were unable to cope with their own problems. When her younger brother Neil was born with Down’s syndrome in the 1940s (he was called a Mongolian idiot at the time), her parents sent him to an institution immediately and told their children and friends that he had died at birth. This lie led to further lies. Not knowing what was wrong with her parents, the author felt that she had lost favor with them. About this time, Childhood and Society became a best seller, her father and mother spent more time focusing of his career, and the author was sent to boarding school.

Now that she is a psychoanalyst, the psychology of fame is the author’s specialty, and she discusses her studies of the famous, especially Lawrence Olivier, in this book. Her conclusion, that fame does not validate a person’s self worth, that fame does not bring happiness to troubled individuals, may sound cliché, but in a society in which celebrities are worshiped and many people long to be chosen for reality television series, it bears repeating. Bloland can verify that the byproducts of fame can be unpleasant.

Bloland, Sue Erikson. In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Viking, 2005. ISBN 067003374X.

Unabridged compact disc: Blackstone Audiobooks, Inc., 2005. ISBN 078618230x

Go to rickindex to find more book, movie, and music reviews.

Ghosting: A Double Life by Jennie Erdal

Jennie Erdal did not intend to become a ghost writer. She was a young mother with three small children who had published an English translation of letters by the late Russian artist Joseph Pasternak. She met Tiger (not his real name), a Palestinian book publisher, when he asked her to help him buy Pasternak painting from the artist’s sisters. When she first saw Tiger, he was wearing a bold striped suit with a fancy lapel pin and a silk tie. She had no inkling of how this flamboyant man would dominate the next twenty years of her life.

Ghosting: A Double Life tells the story of a young woman who is offered a job in the world of publishing that she can do from her home in Scotland. It begins with editing translations of works by Russian authors and evolves into editing Tiger’s interviews of famous women for a book in mid-1980s. The book is a bestseller and Tiger becomes a celebrity with an increase desire for public acclaim. He starts asking her to complete his magazine and newspaper articles, compose his more difficult letters, and eventually ghost his novels. He installs a direct telephone to her Scottish home, asks her to accompany him on trips to France, and requires her presence in London more frequently. As you might expect, Erdal becomes uncomfortable with her secret life and begins to question the morality of ghosting.

At no point in the book does Erdal reveal the name of her employer, for whom she expresses concern. Curious readers can find it in many British book reviews for Ghosting. Americans will not recognize the name, but they can still enjoy a good story.

Erdal, Jennie. Ghosting: A Double Life. New York: Doubleday, 2005 ISBN 0385514263

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Case Histories is a novel. I was not sure at first as the first three cases (chapters) seemed in no way related and seemed to me to be complete stories in an economic way. Was I listening to a gory collection of short stories with sudden plot twists? I had to double check the box for the compact discs to see “novel” attached to the title. I continued to listen.

Now that I have finished listening to Case Histories I still question the novel label. The author ties the three cases together by employing two more, and Jackson Brody, the former policeman and struggling private investigator, who is central to case four, eventually solves all the mysteries in cases one, two, and three. The book proves to be a novel in that it is one imaginary world inhabited by many loosely related victims and survivors, but I wonder why it is not labeled as a mystery. There are three unsolved crimes and an investigator seeking answers, and readers continue reading (listening) to learn who committed the murders. I am surprised that no library I know has classified it as a mystery. Is the book too “literary” to be a mystery? I know some libraries in the past put P. D. James books in fiction because they had qualities beyond most mysteries. Is Case Histories getting the same treatment?

What about case five? I think I will leave that for you to discover on your own. My advice for readers is look for a blue mouse, a yellow golfing sweater, and a gold Lexus.

Case Histories is the book being discussed on the Litblog Co-op blog.

Atkinson, Kate. Case Histories: A Novel. New York : Little, Brown and Co., 2004. ISBN 0316740403

Compact discs: Hampton, NH : BBC Audiobooks America, 2004. ISBN 0792733835

To find reviews by category use my companion blog rickindex.

Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation

When three ships with colonists arrived on Jamestown Island in 1607, England was not a significant colonial power. King James was not really interested. A group of businessmen, hoping for a quick return on their investment, were able to convince him into giving them a charter, so long as they did not bother him much. They sent a ragged group of men (no women) with much ambition and little practical skill into a humid, mosquito ridden marsh and waited for their profits to appear. The author suggests that without the emergence of John Smith as a leader and the courageous intervention of Pocahontas, the colony would have failed. Despite their help, Smith was later banished from Virginia and Pocahontas was kidnapped and held for ransom by the governor. How this came to be is a fascinating story to which Price adds great detail.

Readers who are more familiar with the story of the Pilgrims settling in Plymouth will note the near lack of idealism and religious motive in the settlement of Jamestown. The Virginia colony was a poorly conceived business venture and the settlers were desperate for profit. Respect for neighbors and indiginous people had no place in their considerations. A lack of forethought and decency led to many deaths in the early years.

Jamestown Island was hit hard by the Hurricane Isabel of 2003. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities and the National Park Service have had to work quickly to clean up the island and prepare for the 400th anniversary of the colony in 2007. To read about the archeological work on the island go to the APVA website.

Price, David. Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation. New York: Knopf, 2003. ISBN 0375415416

Birds of heaven: Travel with Cranes by Peter Matthiessen

African Grey Crowned Cranes
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

In the January 9, 2005 issue of Chicago Tribune Sunday book section, Bill Belleville reviewed three books about birds, including The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik. He liked all the books, but none as much as Birds of Heaven by Peter Matthiessen, which was published in 2001. So I checked out the older book from the Thomas Ford Memorial Library.

Peter Matthiessen must be one of the luckiest people in the world. He gets to travel all around the world to investigate the state of wildlife conservation and write about his experiences in books and in articles published in nature magazines. In Birds in Heaven, he tells about going to all the continents to see cranes in the wild. It took several years and he spent months in very remote locations with experts, including George Archibald of the International Crane Foundation.

The cranes are not so lucky. Many of the species are threatened by habitat loss and poaching and the dangers of migrations. Matthiessen had to be guided through reserves to very inaccessible places to see some of the rarer species. His quest is a good story.

Included in Birds of Heaven are two sections of color plates with beautiful illustrations by Robert Bateman. I turned to these frequently as I read Matthiessen's accounts of the species. I recommend this classic book to all nature lovers.

Matthiessen, Peter. Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. New York: North Point Press, 2001. ISBN 0374199442

westernspringshistory.org

The Thomas Ford Memorial Library and Western Springs Historical Society officially launched a joint local history website Saturday with a party at the library. House historian Jean Follett started our program with a slide show explaining how to identify historical housing styles. Aaron Schmidt then demonstrated our new website, which has a collection of photos of Western Springs houses built before 1900. Pete Caras of the Western Springs Historical Society then said a word for the Historical Society and thanked the Library for partnering with his organization.

We feel very proud of what we have accomplished. Nancy Long has put many hours into scanning photos and adding metadata to our database. Aaron put up the website. I have made the arrangements with the Historical Society and written the reports. There are still more reports to write, as we got our funding from an LSTA Grant, awarded by the Illinois State Library, but we now feel we have left stage one of a longtime project.

What comes next may be just as challenging. The Library and the Historical Society have to form a committee and lay out plans for the expansion of the website. There is no shortage of ideas, but we have to decide what deserves our limited volunteer time. Wish us luck.

In the meantime, take a look at our new website http://www.westernspringshistory.org/ and feel free to make comments. We are open to new ideas.

A Son Called Gabriel by Damian McNicholl

A Son Called Gabriel is the story of a Catholic boy in Northern Ireland struggling to discover his sexual orientation. He is at times very confused by his feelings and really tries to obey the rules that his parents and the church prescribe, but his schoolmates, cousins, and neighbors tempt him into many sensual experiences. An aunt warns his parents very early in the story that he might be “fey” and urges that he be required to go out for sports and spend less time playing with the girls at recess. His father wants him to show more interest in trucks and football, while his mother wants him to study harder and be like his uncle.

Gabriel’s uncle Brendan is also struggling. He obeyed the wishes of his parents that he become a priest, but much against his mother’s wishes, he went to Kenya to teach in a mission school before Gabriel was born. When he comes back to visit the family, he is questioning his vocation. He has tried to please the family, be the son to take holy orders (every Catholic family was supposed to raise one priest), but he has suffered a nervous breakdown.

Damian McNicholl has filled his novel with well-rounded characters. The parents hate the Protestants and the English, but they are very decent people who deal fairly with individuals from any faith. All the family worries about upsetting Gabriel’s grandmother with any bad news, but she actually is a fairly tolerant person who accepts the family disappointments well. The bully who makes walking to school difficult for Gabriel is a poor, neglected child who is to be pitied. Even the British soldiers who raid Gabriel’s house in the middle of the night looking for an IRA suspect are just obeying orders and trying to get along as best they can.

In an interview, the author states that the book is not a memoir, but he has drawn from his experiences as a boy in Northern Ireland. Readers will find that he remembers well what people said (some of the language is pretty rough) in the old houses, buses, meat markets, and school yards of the time. Some book clubs would enjoy the book. A discussion guide for the book is available at the author’s website http://www.soncalledgabriel.com/. Click “about the book” on the menu bar.

McNicholl, Damian. A Son Called Gabriel: A Novel. New York : CDS Books, c2004. ISBN 1593150180

Population: 485 by Michael Perry

As a volunteer fire fighter in New Auburn, Wisconsin, Michael Perry fights fires in houses, barns, cars, and fields. Being in a rural area with the nearest ambulance at least twenty minutes away, he is often first on the scene of car accidents, farm accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides. It is a hell of a way to get to know the neighbors.

Perry grew up on a farm outside the town but left for ten years. After working as a cowboy out west (he was not very good at it) and going east to become a nurse and work for an ambulance service, he felt the need to return to New Auburn. In the chapter “My People,” he says the place called him back and land welcomed him, but he found it hard to feel accepted in the community. So he joined his mother and two brothers in the local volunteer fire department, where he met new people, including One-Eyed Beagle, a veteran volunteer whose ex-wives both worked at the Gas-N-Go.

In Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, Perry often hears his pager in the middle of the night. He runs out of his house half clad and down the block to the firehouse, where he checks the county maps for the fastest roads to the emergency. He and the other volunteers throw their gear into the trucks and rush to the scene, where they may enter a burning building or prepare an accident victim for the arrival of the ambulance or helicopter. When the job is done, the volunteers have coffee and share the latest gossip.

The value of Perry’s stories comes from the wealth of detail and the author’s frank observations about how people deal with tragedy. The bonus is the humor. Perry balances the serious and comic aspects of his life well.

Perry’s newest book Off Main Street has just been published. Readers may also want to visit Perry’s website http://www.sneezingcow.com/ to learn more about the author and an archive of writings for Salon and Road King trucking magazine.

Perry, Michael. Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. ISBN 0060198524.

Go to rickindex to find more book, movie, and music reviews.

Peter, Paul & Mommy by Peter, Paul & Mary

One of my favorite old records is Peter, Paul & Mommy by Peter, Paul & Mary. It is a collection of songs for children issued in 1969 (my copy is from the early 1980s). I still enjoy the songs, which are so familiar and comforting. I recently listened to this vinyl album on my turntable. Side one starts with “The Marvelous Toy” and side two starts with “Going to the Zoo,” both joyful songs written by Tom Paxton. Other popular songs I remember well are “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” “Day is Done,” and “All Through the Night.” My favorite on the album is “I Have a Song to Sing, O!” which the trio adapted from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Yeoman of the Guard; I feel very mellow listening to the beautiful harmonies.

I also have a fairly recent CD by the trio, called In These Times. The singers' voices have gotten older, but they can still belt out a good folk song to protest unfair labor practices, injustice, and discrimination. Hardly anyone else will sing union songs these days. The CD also includes a stirring rendition of “The Great Storm is Over,” a lively version of “All God’s Critters,” and a calm, sweet “Oh, I Had a Golden Thread.”

Many news sources reported in late April that Mary Travers would have a bone marrow transplant to treat her leukemia. No date for the operation was stated. No major news sources have run stories since, but I did find an update on a folk music blog called The Back Porch News, which indicated that May 7 was the ninth day after surgery and Mary’s white blood cell count was rising. Other blogs that I found referred back to the same report. For further information, I recommend watching The Back Porch News or the Peter, Paul & Mary website.

Update on the Litblog

Yesterday the Litblog Co-op announced its first selection for its Read This! book discussion, a sort of online Big Read program. The title is Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. The selection is a little bit of a surprise, as Kate Atkinson is not totally unknown and the book was published by Little, Brown and Company, not a small press. There was some indication from the group as it formed that it would be promoting new authors. The announcement indicates members of the committee chose this book partly because they themselves ignored it until someone in their trust persuaded them to read it.

The public libraries in the Metropolitan Library System seem to have done better than the writers of the Litblog Co-op in this case. Thirty six of the libraries already have the book in their collections. I just ordered it for ours.

In the next week the group will announce visits with the author and her editor, moderated book discussions, and a minority report from the members who supported other books for the initial selection. Everything will be posted on the mainpage of the Litblog Co-op blog.

Praising Public Libraries

Last week, before the announcement of the book for the program, Sam Jones of the LitBlog Co-op wrote "At a Library Near You," which tells about finding good books to read on the new book shelves at his favorite public libraries. Evanston and Ann Arbor libraries are praised. Jones says that he finds books in these libraries before he sees them reviewed.

Not the Same Litblog

I stumbled across another blog with a similar name, which seems to be a discussion by two friends who seem to be very concerned about how literature is defined and which books pass the test. If you find this site, look around, as there are a lot of good reading suggestions in the sidebars. I enjoyed some of the postings, especially the guide to judging people by the books on their shelves. I hope they never set their eyes on my books.

Atkinson, Kate. Case Histories. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2004. ISBN 0316740403

Go to rickindex to find more book, movie, and music reviews.

Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry

Billy Collins started a program called “Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools” when he was United States Poet Laureate in 2001. A website was created, and relatively short, accessible poems by recent (mostly living) poets were posted. High schools were urged to read a poem a day over their public address systems to promote poetry reading as an every day event.

In his introduction to the companion book Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, he says that he chose to work with high schools because that was “the place where poetry goes to die.” He saw right away the pain students suffered trying to read Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, whose poems were still being presented by many textbooks as “modern” poetry more than fifty years after publication. The problem with poetry of the 1930s and 1940s, Collins says, is that difficulty and obscurity were considered virtues by the intellectuals who dominated the publishing of the time. Readers turned to novels for their pleasure and poetry lost much of its following.

Collins chose to start the collection with one of his own poems to address the need for poetry education reform. “Introduction to Poetry” ends with the following lines:

But all they wanted to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Sound familiar?

I am currently reading Poetry 180 for a second time, preparing for a book club discussion later in the month. I suspect we will have a lot of fun pointing out our favorite works from the collection. I particularly like the poems that tell humorous stories, such as “Mrs. Midas” by Carol Ann Duffy, in which the wife of the king tries to cope with her husband’s turning everything to gold. Not all of the poems are funny. “The Cord” by Leanne O’Sullivan, “I’m a Fool to Love You” by Cornelius Eady, and “Wheels” by Jim Daniels tell stories of teenage uncertainty, dysfunctional parents, and the death of siblings. I think there will be much to discuss.

While this book seems to be stocked by all the major book chains, many public libraries seem to be missing the boat. I see it is in only eleven of the approximately eighty libraries in the SWAN database of the Metropolitan Library System. It is an inexpensive volume collecting many of today’s best poets. Every library should have it.

By the way, the titles on the website change. Go there for new poems.

Poetry 180 : a Turning Back to Poetry. New York : Random House Trade Paperbacks, c2003. ISBN 0812968875

Visit rickindex to find more book, movie, and music reviews.

Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen

I first heard about Luba from the folksingers Curtis and Loretta in 2003 when they played a concert for Friday at the Ford at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library. Loretta said that she had written the song "Angel of Bergen-Belsen" after reading an article in a news magazine about Luba saving over fifty children from death in a Nazi concentration camp. After she and Curtis performed the song, she expressed a wish to find Luba, who was reported to still be living. I volunteered to help.

In my part of the search, I learned that Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen, a children’s picture book with text Michelle R. McCann and illustrations by Ann Marshall, was scheduled to be published. McCann had interviewed Luba, according to the press release. I told Loretta but I never saw the book until Friday, when my coworker Nancy Long loaned it to me.

Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen is a beautiful book. Marshall's illustrations practically glow. For each picture page there is a page of text by McCann based on the story Luba told her. What I like most about the story is that Luba did not really accomplish the miracle of saving the children by herself; she inspired many in the concentration camp to help her. I also like that the book has some extras, including a list of all the children, a story about the survivors gathering in 1995, a bibliography, and a nice photo of Luba Tryszynska-Frederick on the back cover. I recommend the book to young and old.

Loretta has been granted her wish and has met and sung for Luba. More of that story is told on the Curtis and Loretta website. (Click "news" on the menu on the left of the main page. Go to the bottom of the resulting "What's Happening" page and click link to old news for October 2003.)

McCann, Michelle R. Luba: The Angel of Bergen-Belsen. Berkeley, Calif.: Tricycle Press, c2003. ISBN 1582460981

Go to rickindex to find more book, movie, and music reviews.

Googling the Blog, Part 2

As I said last week in Googling the Blog, people are finding the reviews that I post on this blog through Google, for which I am grateful, but I can see that some of the visits are not satisfying. The seekers did not really find what they sought in my reviews. This is not really surprising, for we get false hits in our search results all the time. What I find interesting is viewing the process from the other end. I did not expect some of these visitors.

The reason I am able to see how people find this blog is that I subscribe to a free service from Site Meter. It does not give me any personal information about the visitors, but it does tell me their Internet provider, time zone, and referring URL. If I click on the referring URLs, I see the pages that they saw to get to the reviews. In some cases the pages are Google results lists. Here are some examples of the false hits.

A Google searcher in India was seeking the name of the business manager of the actor Nitin Chandra Ganatra who played Mr. Kholi in the movie Bride and Prejudice. I reviewed this movie and the posting was still on the main page of the blog when the search was conducted, as were four or five other items. I had used the word “business” in a review of Fair America and the word “manager” in a review of the baseball book I Was Right on Time. I had not posted information on the actor’s business manager.

Just two days ago someone sought information on the unabridged audio recording of Devil in the White City. I had reviewed Erik Larson’s presentation about the book in one entry. I had used the word “unabridged” in my review of The Laments by George Hagen. Again both reviews were on the main page of the blog at the time.

Yesterday someone submitted the search “looking for old movie with baboons and plane wreck” to Google. The March archive page of ricklibrarian was result #2 of 667 for this search. “Looking” was in several postings, “old movie” was in the Muppet Treasure Island review, I had posted a photo of baboons at the Brookfield Zoo, and the review of Curtis and Loretta CDs mentioned the song “Deportee: Plane Wreck at Los Gatos.” I am sure my blog did not answer the person’s question.

A searcher in Spain combined the words “Grove” and “Muppet” in a search that resulted in her finding the Muppet Treasure Island review. I suspect that she meant Grover, the Sesame Street Muppet, who was not in this movie. The word “Grove” had been in my profile, not the review.

A third searcher came to the Muppet Treasure Island review through the phrase “frogs in wheelchairs.” I had not used this phrase, but Dan Trabue had in mentioning the original Muppet movie in his comments to my review. I hope this helped the searcher.

One of my favorite examples of false hits came from a Google search for the words “revolutionary” and “librarian.” The first word is found in the posting for the book review of Revolutionary Mothers and the latter is in my profile. I am not often called “revolutionary”, though I might like to be, so this was probably a false hit.

While this is all entertaining, it also points out a Google shortcoming. Because all the indexing for the search engine is done by computers, no person selects which blog pages to index. Each of the postings on my blog has a separate page, which is the case with many other blogs, and if Google could index these pages and not index the main page or the monthly archive pages, which collect many postings, many of the false hits would be eliminated. I doubt the great minds at Google could actually do this without causing other problems. False hits may be a necessary side effect of the process.

To end on a more positive note, let me say that I am happy that many of the search engines are now indexing blog postings. Other than Google, visitors have found the reviews via MSN Search and a couple of European search engines. It is a pleasure seeing searchers find these reviews, and I hope they are as pleased reading them.

Photography in Nature Magazines

Anyone who has seen traditional Chinese painting has noticed the inclusion of birds, strangely shaped trees, bridges, and boats in water in front of tall, rocky mountains. To the Western eye, the paintings, with some finely drawn items in less defined settings, seem very stylized. The photos of Don Hong-Oai (1929-2000) in the May-June 2005 issue of Audubon magazine suggest the Chinese painters were just painting it as they saw it. These misty, foggy landscape photos could easily be mounted beside the paintings in art museums. See pages 52 to 57. I do not see one good website of images by Don Hong-Oai, but many gallery sites can be found through search engines.

The May-June issue of Sierra has an interesting environmental photo essay. Yann Arthus-Bertrand is an aerial photographer who gives us interesting perspectives of a cotton fabric drying field in India, a mud hut village in Mali, and housing developments outside Miami. See pages 36-43. The photographer also has a web site with aerial photos from all the continents.

Don Hong-Oai. “East is East.” in Audubon. May-June 2005. Volume 107, number 3: 52-57.

Arthus-Bertrand, Yann. “Above It All” in Sierra. May-June 2005. Volume 90, number 3: 36-43.

rickindex, a companion blog with a nice picture of a toad

I enjoy comments and encourage them. In one comment entry, Dan Trabue asked if I had a list of the books I have reviewed, which made me think about reader access to the reviews. The most recent reviews have links along the left of the page. Other reviews you find by scrolling through all monthly archives. There is no other good way to find the titles, unless you already know the titles and use the search box. So I have started a companion blog to serve as the index to this blog. I am calling it rickindex. The address is rickindex.blogspot.com.

I have split the index into categories to make the list more useful to general readers. In doing so, I see how little fiction that I have reviewed. I started the blog with a great novel and then went about two months before reviewing fiction again. I know I will add more fiction during the summer.

There are many books of history and biography. This makes sense, for these are the works that I feel need more attention. I am blogging for books. I am especially blogging for nonfiction.

I see that I have reviewed only a few movies. Many sources review movies and I do not want to repeat what has already been said. I will review movies only when I think the film is neglected or really needs to be pointed out to librarians collecting DVDs for their collections.

I am obviously blogging out of the mainstream in my music reviews. It is obvious that I am an advocate for Curtis and Loretta. I know what I like.

rickindex is a work in progress. I will be adding more categories. Not every item that I have written is indexed yet. I have added some photos to make it more attractive. Take a look.

Peonies in My Yard

Peonies
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

If you would like to see what is blooming in our yard, click this photo and then click the link to the slide show. You will also see a rabbit, a squirrel, and a toad from our yard.

First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung

Loung Ung has written a remarkable book. It is not easy to look back to one’s childhood and write honestly about one’s early experiences. Many of us forget much of what happened. Ung, however, was witness to one of the 20th century’s most brutal civil wars. She cannot forget.

Ung was only five years old when her family was forced by the Khmer Rouge to flee from Phnom Penh in 1975. After abandoning their truck, the family of nine hiked with what little they could carry for seven days to Krang Truop, where her uncle sheltered them until neighbors from the city arrived, threatening to expose them as the supporters of the Khmer Republic. Her father tried to keep the family together as long as he could, as they moved through a series of resettlement camps, where they served as field laborers, raising crops to feed the rebels. As the months and years passed, as they schemed to earn and steal enough food to survive, their neighbors began to disappear. Her father feared the morning when soldiers would come to take him away.

Just as in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Ung tells a story filled with daily events, like walking to work sites, working without rest, waiting in lines for inadequate rations, hiding items from guards, and visiting ill-equipped hospitals. Guards might at times be lenient or very cruel, they might turn their heads to the breaking of rules, but few could escape from the camps. There was nowhere safe to go. For four years Ung and her siblings struggled.

Loung Ung is now an activist for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World and has just published a second book, Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind. I am looking forward to reading more of her story.

Ung, Loung. First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, c2000. ISBN 0060193328

The Big Read: An Author Lecture by Erik Larson

This review is for Aaron, who had to work at the reference desk on Thursday night, and for everyone who missed hearing a very entertaining author lecture.

Approximately 900 people filled Ashton Place in Willowbrook, Illinois last night to hear Erik Larson, author of the popular history The Devil in the White City. Many were readers from the eight suburban libraries that sponsored The Big Read, a series of book discussions and lectures spotlighting Larson’s book and the events of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Staff members from all the libraries were there, taking tickets, giving out prizes, and enjoying the lecture. It was a wonderful gathering of book lovers.

After being introduced by architect Daniel H. Burnham (looking very good for his 159 years), Larson told about his desire to bring history alive, to be an animator of history, to write books that readers enter but do not leave. To succeed, he said authors must balance story and detail. He loves the details, spending much effort on evoking the odors of the location, believing that smell triggers many mental images. He said that a visitor getting off the train in 1893 Chicago would have been immediately aware of the thousands of horses in the city and the pervasive smoking of cigars. Weather is also important to the author, who told readers about the storms that played a role in the story. He reported that getting the story line in order was the more difficult task for him. At one point in the writing process, he had the pages of his manuscript all over his bedroom floor, as he tried to get the order right. With Devil in the White City, he had the architect’s story, the story of the mass murderer, and several side stories, including the development of the Ferris wheel and the fate of a Chicago mayor, to weave together. He must have a big bedroom.

In the question and answer period, he told how his wife helps him pare down the manuscripts, using up and down arrows, smiley faces, and sad faces with tears. What he notices most are the sections she does not mark at all. He wrote 28 pages about the building of the Auditorium Theater but dropped this section when his wife passed it over without comment.

When asked about the movie rights to the book, he said that Paramount has lined up Adrien Brody to play H. H. Holmes and is suggesting Jack Nicholson for Burnham (the audience groaned “no”), but the struggling studio is having second thoughts about the costs for animating the scenery of the fair. The movie may not be made.

In a response to a question about his research, Larson said that he visited Chicago in all seasons and spent much time in both the Chicago Historical Society and the Art Institute libraries, where he made hundreds of photocopies on each visit. He added that on the lecture circuit he has learned interesting facts that he would have used had he known them before publishing. A reader in Philadelphia told him that Aunt Jemima Pancakes were originally names “Slave in a Box.”

Larson said that he has always wanted to be a writer. When he was twelve, he wrote a detective novel with what he thought was a sex scene. He spent many years writing for the Wall Street Journal and other publications. He got the idea for the type of books he is writing now when reading the novel The Alienist by Caleb Carr; he wants to write nonfiction books that tell history in like fashion.

On the way home, thinking about Larson saying that the 1800s were his favorite century, it occurred to me that the author lecture is a very 19th century entertainment. When done as well as it was last night, it is a very good entertainment choice. Libraries should produce more of these lectures.

Googling the Blog

Being a reference librarian, wanting to understand how reference tools work, I have been testing Google to see whether the reviews and comments that I post on this blog can be found in the vastness of cyberspace. I want to know the odds that a reader has of finding one of my reviews. I want to know whether posting reviews via a blog is an effective way to distribute them. Some of my findings have surprised me.

I started blogging on February 17 and looked at Google four days later. When I entered the author and title of the first book I reviewed into the search box and clicked Google Search, I retrieved hundreds of hits. I scanned more than a dozen pages without finding my review and stopped. I was not surprised. Google uses popularity in ranking results and very few people had seen my blog at that point. I also tried searching “ricklibrarian” and was pleased to find Google had found me. A link to my blog was listed in the results right below a link to Aaron Schmidt’s blog. Aaron, who had announced my blog in his, had more cyber presence and got top ranking. That the search engine listed my blog very quickly was not too surprising, for Google owns Blogger, the service I use to blog. I tried other search engines, but none of them had found me.

In early April, about six weeks after starting my blog, I again tried to find some of my reviews by Googling. In a few cases, less reviewed works of nonfiction, I found my work on the fifth or sixth page of results. My stock was rising slowly.

Also, in early April, I placed a counter on my blog, using the free service from Site Meter. In addition to learning how many (or few) times the website was visited, I also learned how people linked to my blog; the referring URL was rarely Google.

In second half of April two of my blog postings were cited by LISNews, Library Stuff, and the Norweld Library System in Ohio. Traffic on my blog increased for a couple of weeks, as librarians from across the US, Europe, and South America read my more popular postings. It was still small potatoes compared to many library-oriented websites, but it must have meant something to the Google algorithm. Suddenly my reviews rose in the Google rankings. I even made the first results page several times.

According to Site Meter, a majority of the visits to my blog in the past several days have been linked to Google searches. My joy and pride have been tempered a little, as I notice a new trend that I certainly did not intend. Read more about that in Part 2 of “Googling the Blog,” coming soon.

The Laments: A Novel by George Hagen

“If only …” thinks Will Lament. “If only I had paid more attention to the twins, they would not have ...” “If only I had not been born in Rhodesia, Dawn would not think …” “If only my family would stay in one place, we could …” “If only I had a normal family, I could …”

“If only Will knew the family secret …” thinks the reader of The Laments by George Hagen. Will’s father and mother do not want to tell him too soon, before he will understand, so they drag him from Rhodesia to Bahrain back to Rhodesia then to England and on to New Jersey. They never fit in, never make real friends, and never stop looking for better opportunities on new continents. They are lovable dreamers who never appreciate what they have.

Using a portable CD player and headphones, I listened to most of The Laments while gardening. I broke the quiet of the garden with my laughter several times, as the Laments continued to suffer the most bizarre accidents. The author mixes comedy with tragedy very well in this novel. If only you would read it, you could laugh, too.

Hagen, George. The Laments: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2004. ISBN 1400062217

Unabridged compact discs. Santa Ana, CA: Books on Tape, 2004. ISBN 1415901244

Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet by Charlotte Gordon

Being a descendant of the poet Anne Bradstreet, wanting to read everything I can about her, I ordered Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet by Charlotte Gordon as soon as I read a review in Booklist. Bradstreet came to America in 1630, arriving on the Arbella with her husband Simon, her parents Thomas and Dorothy Dudley, and her three sisters and her brother. She was only eighteen at the time, but had been married for two years, and she was not happy about coming to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Conditions in the colony were desperate. Many in the previous year’s shipload of Puritan colonists had died over the winter, and they had failed to plant crops to feed the second wave of settlers. Many more would die the next winter.

Bradstreet and all her family survived the early years of the colony, moving from New Towne (Cambridge) to Ipswich and later to Andover, each community freshly cut from the forest. She managed a growing household, including indentured servants, and raised eight children. While in Ipswich, she read heavily, borrowing books from the personal libraries of several wealthy Puritans, including her father’s close friend, the minister Nathaniel Ward. Able to get parchment from her father, who had taught her the mechanics of poetry as a child in England, she began to write verse for her family and learned friends.

What is remarkable about Bradstreet is that few women were allowed as much freedom as she was granted in Puritan society. Anne Hutchinson had just been expelled from the colony for questioning the tenants of the faith, and Bradstreet’s writing could easily have upset church leaders. Her poems were kept within her close circle for years.

Bradstreet wrote two types of verse. Modern readers without knowledge of Puritan theology have trouble understanding her epic works, which deal with humors, graces, elements, and other antique concepts. What many readers enjoy are her personal poems, works that she never intended for public reading, which are simple, intimate, and elegant. These shortened poems, which broke with academic tradition, have influenced generations of poets. Many anthologies of American poetry begin with “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “The Author to Her Book,” or other Bradstreet poems.

Charlotte Gordon drew on Bradstreet’s autobiography, her poems, and many other primary sources to write Mistress Bradstreet. Anyone interested in poetry or in the history of early America should check it out.

Gordon, Charlotte. Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005. ISBN 0316169048