NPR Driveway Moments: Baseball and Questions About Audiobooks

When an audiobook is not first a printed book is it a book? Is it really even an audiobook? Do you prefer "audio book" or "audiobooks"? Does it matter if you enjoy the audio?

I enjoyed very much NPR Driveway Moments: Baseball, a two CD set of baseball-related stories from All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, Day to Day, Tell Me More, and News & Notes. There are many familiar voices, including Bob Edwards, Alex Cohen, and Melissa Block, interviewing old stars, authors of books, fans, and other people somehow related to the game. There are also commentaries from Bill Littlefield, Frank Deford, and Neal Conan. It is purely entertaining and unbroken by depressing news or pledge drives.

My favorites include Bob Edwards interviewing Mamie "Peanuts" Johnson, a woman who pitched in the Negro Leagues in the 1950s. She tells how she was excluded from the white women's leagues that sprung up around World War II but played competitively with men. Most of them were gentlemen, according to Johnson, but there were a few she had to "put in their place." Her favorite moment may have been striking out Satchel Paige.

One of the most touching stories is "Braves Cheered On by Truly Brave Hospice Fans" which tells about a coach visiting the patients and nuns at a hospice close to Turner Field and bringing them to games. One of the funniest is "Aren't We Tired of Watching the Pitch Count?" by commentator Frank Deford, but I can not tell you why it is funny without giving away the joke.

I nodded in agreement with writer Paul Schersten who critiqued all the new corporate names for ballparks. I laughed with author Derek Zumsteg telling about ballplayers falling for the hidden ball trick.

The only problem with NPR Driveway Moments: Baseball is that there are only two CDs and slightly less that two hours of content. I could have listened for weeks. So, now I'm listening to NPR Driveway Moments: All About Animals, which has some great stories about talking birds.

Back to my initial questions. My fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary recommends "audio book" to writers. Most of the definitions on the web also separate the words but I did find some for the word "audiobook". Worldcat separates the words but our SWAN catalog in the Metropolitan Library System uses the one word version. All the definitions say that audio books are taped readings of books. It seems they have not caught up with the transition to compact discs and digital files. I believe that they also have not caught up to broader ideas of books and audiobooks as commonly used in libraries and bookstores.

NPR Driveway Moments: Baseball. HighBridge, 2008. ISBN 9781598875874

As You Like It: A Film by Kenneth Branagh

I'll admit right off the bat that I am a Kenneth Branagh fan. I've liked almost everything that he's directed, even the four-hour Hamlet, which made more sense to me than many other productions of the tragedy. My favorite has to be Much Ado About Nothing, which has Emma Thompson, whom I like even better than Branagh. Too bad they don't like each other anymore, for they made a great team.

I did not know about Branagh's As You Like It until Bonnie brought it home. It appears that it was on cable rather than in the cinema in the U.S. I must have had my head in the sand because a fair number of libraries have it. It is comforting knowing that collectively librarians keep up when we sometimes slip up as individuals.

About half way through the movie I imagined seeing it over and over again for the scenes in the woods are so beautiful and the romance is so sweet. Also, the film has such a great cast, including Brian Blessed who plays both the good duke and the evil duke, and Kevin Kline, who I like even more than I like Branagh and Thompson.

The play requires the viewer to suspend critical thinking to accept the beautiful Rosalind disguised as a boy and not to question why some people never meet in the woods when everyone else does. Some of the plot is quickly dismissed with a line or two. Still, it is Shakespeare and full of great lines. It belongs in more library collections.

Why Not .lib as a Top-level Domain Name?

I saw this article from c/Net News about a group called ICANN choosing web domain names in my email from AL Direct this week. It tells about ICANN voting to allow specialty top-level domains (TLD) , also called top-level domain names (TLDN), such .ebay or .intel for clients willing to pay for the right. It made me think about library TLDs. They are inconsistent, as there is a mixture of .com, .net, and .org right now. Wouldn't it be great to have a generic library TLD that the public would know, like .lib?

Wouldn't it be great if a library user could find the local library web site by just entering the community or college name and ".lib" in the "go to" box on a web browser?

www.downersgrove.lib = Downers Grove Public Library
www.mortoncollege.lib = Morton College Library
www.westernspringsil.lib = Thomas Ford Memorial Library in Western Springs

The consistency would help in those communities where the library is named for a benefactor, local hero, or geographical feature.

There might have to be some use of state codes for cities like Springfield, Illinois and Springfield, Missouri. Perhaps web pages giving links to all the library choices could direct people who put in just www.springfield.lib.

Libraries probably would not want to get rid of their current web addresses, which are already known, but the new address could direct new users to their sites.

Usually it is easy to find a library through a search engine, but not always. Plus, it would say that libraries are a big part of the web if they had their own TLD.

Book Alert for the 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street

Early in 2007 I wished that there was a complete history of Sesame Street. One of the readers who commented noted that the 40th anniversary of the debut on PBS was soon coming. That was foresight! Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers has now announced in a two-page spread in its fall catalog a new book Sesame Street, A Celebration: 40 Years of Life on the Street by Louise Gikow, who wrote some scripts for the show. Scheduled for November, the book is to have 256 pages with over a thousand illustrations. That sounds like a few hundred pages short of what is necessary to cover such a big topic but I am still excited. I know what I want to read at Thanksgiving.

Gikow, Louise. Sesame Street, A Celebration: 40 Years of Life on the Street. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, November 2008, ISBN 9781579126384

Biography: A User's Guide by Carl Rollyson

I usually wait until I finish a book to review it, but I already know I want to recommend Biography: A User's Guide by Carl Rollyson. I wish that I had had it to consult a year ago when I started my biography book project. Being a biographer himself, the author has thought a lot about the genre, and he is not shy about telling what he thinks. He has a wicked wit and probably a list of enemies.

Rollyson addresses a lot of issues that interest me. As I started writing, I considered a readers' advisory chapter on "definitive biographies." I had seen the term frequently, but I could not pin it down, nor could I fairly identify a list of books that fit the bill. In his book with topics arranged alphabetically, Rollyson explains why I had such trouble. He reviles the term, which he says is just a marketing ploy, almost always self-proclaimed. His view is that every biography has a point of view and none puts the debate of a character to rest.

As the title suggests, the book is a sort of reference guide, but it is also a bit of a memoir. Rollyson provides some background on his own experiences. I enjoyed the entries "Fair Use" about his and colleagues' legal struggles to use quotations from unpublished sources and "Authorized Biographies" which discusses the upsetting of family members when writing authorized or unauthorized biographies.

Not many libraries seem to have added this book yet. They should consider it, for both readers and writers will find it interesting.

Rollyson, Carl. Biography: A User's Guide. Ivan R. Dee, 2008. ISBN 9781566637800.

Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan

Looking through the YALSA Best Books for Young Adults lists in search of biographies, I came upon a book with a pretty scary cover, Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan. Though I readily recognize Warhol's distinctive paintings, I really did not know much about his life other than it was shocking in the eyes of many moralists and probably not a life to recommend repeating. Reading this mostly nonjudgmental book confirmed my general impression and filled in the story of the 1960s icon.

When you read about the lives of artists, you discover that many lead unconventional lives, often outside the strictures of their societies. To make their art, they devoted themselves to their work and obsessed about the details. Often shunning society at large, they associated with other artists when they were not isolating themselves. Andy Warhol's life seems to have been a variation of this model notable for being extremely social within the counter culture of the times. Warhol's Factory, where he painted and shot films was almost always open to his associates, employees, and fans until one of them shot him. Then it became a fortress.

Why is the book on the 2005 YALSA list? "Books with proven or potential appeal to teens" is the criteria for inclusion. According to the web page for 2005, the book was a unanimous choice of the fifteen member committee. I suspect that they all recognized the teen appeal of rebellion and celebrity. Adults enjoy reading about these themes, too. I enjoyed the quick read and now want to see the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop goes well in either teen or adult collections. The authors included a chronology, glossary, bibliography, and film list, giving the book some reference value.

Greenberg, Jan and Jordan, Sandra. Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop. Delacorte Press, 2005. ISBN 038573056x

Herbert Hoover, Boy Engineer by Mildred H. Comfort

As frequent readers of this blog know, I have been thinking about biography a lot for over a year now. As I am preparing to write a chapter on Coming of Age Biography for my book, it has occurred to me that my first experience with biography that I remember was with a book in the Childhood of Famous Americans series. It was a summer day in 1964, and my mom had taken my sister and me to the Reagan County Public Library in Big Lake, Texas. There I found John Audubon, Boy Naturalist by Miriam Evangeline Mason (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962). I started reading while still in the library. I continued on the ride in the station wagon back out to the ranch and took the book to my bedroom. I was captivated by the story of Audubon's coming to America and traveling around its woods and prairies drawing and painting its birds. I did not put the book down until I had finished. It may have been the only time in my life that I read a regular-size book cover to cover in one session.

I know that I read a bunch of books from the Childhood of Famous Americans series in my fourth to sixth grade years. I remember titles on George Washington, Sacagawea, Robert Fulton, and Eli Whitney. As I reached college age, I heard a professor putting them down as sanitized and idealized. He said this as part of his "do not trust what your high school football coach told you about history" speech. Since then I have seen them in libraries, but I had not thought to read one again until now.

Wanting to refresh my knowledge and reassess these books, I found Herbert Hoover, Boy Engineer by Mildred H. Comfort in the 1965 book jacket still in my library. There are three copies in the SWAN Catalog of the Metropolitan Library System, and 244 more entries for books in the series, which is still being published and republished in more modern jackets. I prefer the 1960s jackets, which have two-color printing over the older covers with silhouettes or the newer versions with red, white, and blue framing.

I chose the book about Hoover because Bonnie and I recently visited the Hoover historical site in West Branch, Iowa. Reading the book, I thought about what I had read at the visitor center and museum and had seen in the historical buildings. Like when I was ten, I found that I was enjoying the story and was reminded of Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The book is about Hoover's childhood but it is also about any childhood in rural America in the later part of the nineteenth century, as there is wealth of cultural information. The books in the American Girl series follow right along with this same formula that Wilder created.

The professor was right about the sanitizing of the story but it did not veer away from what I learned in West Branch. As a young Quaker, Hoover probably was a very well-behaved youth, which is what most of this book is about. He graduates from Stanford University as an engineer on page 168. The rest of his life gets 24 pages.

The story is somewhat fictionalized, as it is told as a series of incidents with setting descriptions and conversation. I thought Comfort did a good job of describing the places of Hoover's youth. I saw again the small family home, the blacksmith shop, and the Quaker meeting house, as well as the hills and the stream. I think a few lines of dialog are suspect, especially line of page 53 in which his father says, "I hope, Bert, that thee'll live to see fifty stars in that flag." Why would anyone in the 1880s pick out fifty? There were only thirty-eight on the flag in the Fourth of July scene in the book.

It is hard to judge a series by a single book, but the Hoover book does encourage me to try a few more. It is fun to be ten again.

Comfort, Mildred H. Herbert Hoover, Boy Engineer. Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965. There is no ISBN.

Book Line in the University of Iowa Main Library

Book line in the Main Library
Originally uploaded by dzou.

One of the encouraging stories out of Iowa this week is the great volunteer effort to save the library collection at the University of Iowa. All the story is not told as yet, but there are photos appearing across the web. Using Flicker I found this photo from dzou showing the line of students and employees moving books out of the Main Library's basement to upper floors.

Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, and many other communities will be telling their library stories soon. Among those will be some tragedies and calls for help from the wider library world.

Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II by Jennet Conant

Here is a great biography for entertaining summer reading.

The story of Alfred Lee Loomis (1887-1975) sounds like 1940's Hollywood movie plot, something for the kid's matinée on a Saturday afternoon. Handsome millionaire stock broker Loomis kept a secret laboratory in his fabulous mansion where he met with great scientists to invent devices to save the world from the Nazis. When he wasn't at a night club or on his yacht with attractive women, he was meeting with Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. According to author Jennet Conant in Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II, this adventure story is true. Loomis really led a double life of financial business by day and developing radar and the atomic bombs by night.

Currently every copy of this exciting book in the SWAN catalog of the Metropolitan Library System is on the shelf. It is time for action! Put it on display and offer it to readers.

Conant, Jennet. Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. Simon & Schuster, 2002.

Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays by William Styron

Before he died in 2006, William Styron selected fourteen of his essays for a volume reflecting his lighter side. Of course, Havanas in Camelot is still very frank and confessional, for he was a man of strong opinions willing to take on anyone in a debate. Still, he succeeded in avoiding the topic of depression to celebrate the mostly good times of his life.

The title essay ran in Vanity Fair in 1996. In it Styron tells about his brief acquaintance with President John F. Kennedy. Through White House friends Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Richard Goodwin, he was invited to a state dinner and later to the more intimate gathering afterwards. The President was very interested in Styron's upcoming book about rebel slave leader Nat Turner. The author admired how the President could enjoy Cuban cigars at a time when he himself had made them illegal.

The second essay in the volume is "A Case of the Great Pox." You might wonder how he might lightly regard an episode in his life when he was mistakenly told that he had syphilis, but he portrayed himself as a raw nineteen year old recruit confined in a military hospital by a judgmental Navy doctor who wanted to see him suffer for his sins. He was quite happy to learn that he only had a dental disease. To his dying days he harbored a wish to again expose the bad doctor for his terrible bedside manner, as he had in the New Yorker in 1995.

My favorite essays are a series of tributes that Styron wrote about friends and acquaintances that had died, including Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern. There is also a revealing previously unpublished piece about joy and utility of walking a dog.

Readers who enjoyed Styron's previous books or who want a look into the literary world of the 1950s and 1960s will enjoy this quick read.

Styron, William. Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays. Random House, 2008. ISBN 9781400067190

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing by Elmore Leonard and illustrated by Joe Ciardiello

Elmore Leonard must have laughed all the way to the bank. His advice to would-be authors, Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, is an attractive publication but the text would make a short powerpoint presentation. He must have gotten the idea from David Letterman that he can make ten quirky statements and entertain his fans. It is entertaining, but it could be reproduced on a couple of postcards. You can read the book in five minutes or less.

To be fair, Leonard may have aimed this book more at the gift market. I can imagine it as an encouraging item to give to an aspiring author, who would keep it next to his/her desk as a reminder not to start novels with weather or use adverbs to modify the word "said."

The book does quickly convey Leonard's philosophy and the drawings are clever, but the book hardly seems worth taxpayer dollars. If you have a request at your library, you may borrow ours.

Leonard, Elmore. Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. William Morrow, 2007. ISBN 9780061451461

The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World by Andy Merrifield

The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World by Andy Merrifield is a book to read slowly. I took ten days to read this account of the author's walking trip through the Auvergne region of central France with a rented donkey named Gribouille. I fell asleep several times while reading his descriptions of the tranquil bridle paths and rural villages far from the hectic cities of his somehow unsatisfying career as a teacher and writer. Merrifield urges readers to daydream. Unlike many authors, he probably smiles when readers drop his book as they nod off.

Gribouille, a chocolate brown donkey with a placid personality is more than a beast of burden. He is a friend and adviser who makes the pilgrimage possible. His calm restrains Merrifield who might pick up the pace and miss much of what there is to see if he were alone. If the donkey declines to cross a bridge or go down a path, the author reconsiders the way. If the way can not be changed, the man waits for the donkey to agree, which he always does.

On the way, Merrifield recounts many donkey stories from history and literature, showing that the equines are intelligent and companionable animals. He rues their misrepresentations in Aesop's fables and stereotypical comedies. He contends that communities that still harbor donkeys are more pleasant places. A man or woman with a donkey is better off than someone with an SUV.

The Wisdom of Donkeys is a quietly persuasive book that deserves more attention at this time when our whole way of life is questioned. More libraries should consider it.

Merrifield, Andy. The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World. Walker & Company, 2008. ISBN 9780802715937

Isn't it cool that the publisher is "Walker"?

Readers' Advisory Online Demonstartion by Sarah Statz Cords

Sarah Statz Cords asked me to pass along that she is presenting on Friday, June 13, a web-based demonstration of Readers' Advisory Online, which includes content from her The Real Story: A Guide to Nonfiction Reading Interests and books in the Genereflecting series from Libraries Unlimited. If you would like to learn about the online source, register quickly by emailing Laura Calerone at laura.calderone@lu.com.

Here is the official notice:

Sarah Statz Cords, from Madison Public Library, Wisconsin, author of The Real Story, and associate editor for the Reader’s Advisor Online, will be offering a web-based demonstration Friday, June 13, 2008 at 1PM EDT / 10 AM PDT (noon central time). Attendees will view the training via the web and will call a conference number to enable full participation in the training. Spaces are limited ­ please register ASAP! You may reserve a seat by emailing laura.calderone@lu.com. Confirmation of registration and access instructions will be sent by email

http://www.readersadvisoronline.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/06/webinar-demo-for-readers-advisor-online-tues-may-20/

The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl

William Shakespeare is the subject of many biographies that take threads of evidence and try to weave his whole life. In The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street, historian Charles Nicholl takes a different approach. He focuses on a short period of Shakespeare's life, 1603-1605, the time during which he resided in an upstairs room in the home of the tyremakers Christopher and Marie Mountjoy. Without making many firm statements about the Bard himself, Nicholl fully describes the circumstances of his life.

The Mountjoys were French Huguenots living in exile in London, a very cosmopolitan city to which many European refugees had fled. Many of these people were living fairly prosperous lives as artisans, a sore point with many English-born craftspeople who felt that the immigrants were stealing their jobs. Nicholl thinks it is very interesting that Shakespeare whose Catholic affiliations are highlighted in many recent biographies lived with Huguenots, Protestants who were chased from Catholic France. The author's suggestion is that religion did not really matter that much to the playwright.

Nicholl tells much about the making of tyres, fancy ladies head decorations. These works, including hats and wigs, were created for wealthy ladies, ladies of ill repute, and theatricals. The author speculates that Shakespeare may have been introduced to the Mountjoys as a customer of headpieces for some of the plays that his company produced. In residence above the workshop, he would have come in contact with ladies of all sorts who visited to get their tyres.

While he lived on Silver Street, Shakespeare was middle aged and at work on the plays Othello, Measure for Measure, King Lear, and All's Well That Ends Well. Nicholl quotes heavily from them to show how the playwright incorporated his surroundings and the events in his own life. The historian especially draws on documents concerning a lawsuit involving Christopher Mountjoy and his son-in-law Stephen Bellott. Shakespeare gave a deposition for the case and was later required to testify what he knew about an unpaid dowry. Nicholl draws parallels between the facts of the case and King Lear disinheriting his daughter in the tragic play.

I listened to the book superbly read by Simon Vance, who kept all the minute details of daily life interesting. While working in the garden, cooking, and driving the car - my daily activities - I got the scoop on what Shakespeare did with his days 400 years ago. It is a bit of gossip that you might enjoy hearing.

Nicholl, Charles. The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street. Viking 2008. ISBN 9780670018505

8 compact discs. Tantor Audio, 2008. 9781400106288

The Library Ivy

I nominate my library as most worthy of being in Hobbiton or an English village.

Picasa Web Albums

Bonnie received via email a link to a Picasa Web Album from our niece Stephanie with photos from birthday party. The photos in the slide show were big and sharp, and I was impressed. This morning I decided to see if I could set up an album myself and discovered that I already had one web album. By being a member of Blogger and already having loaded Picasa onto my PC, I had a default album collecting all the illustrations that have added to this blog this January 3, 2007.

Because I mostly review books, my Picasa Web Album is mostly a wall of books. It looks pretty cool. We could easily set up something like this for our library website. You could, too.