The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt by David Giffels

Having grown up and stayed in Akron, Ohio, David Giffels tells in The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt of seeing most of his friends move far away. They were not the only ones to leave, as the city's the population is down to its count from 1910. Once the world center of the rubber and tire industries, Akron is a poster child for the Rust Belt, Midwestern cities that lost their factories to nonunion cities in the South or overseas. Akron also lost many of its company headquarters, many absorbed by foreign corporations. By the 1990s, much of downtown Akron was empty. Giffels witnessed the city's decline as a child, then teen, and later as a journalist.

Giffels can be described as an inside observer. His father was an independent engineer who contracted for most of the big companies at some point - Goodyear, Firestone, Goodrich - and Giffels tagged along. As a teen and young adult, he and his friends often climbed fences to explore abandoned factories. As a journalist, he was granted access to buildings before demolition. In The Hard Way on Purpose, he recounts his city's fall and recent signs of recovery at street level.

In his wide-ranging essays, Giffels also comments frequently on Cleveland, the state of Ohio, and the region. Topics include basketball, bowling, punk rock, and saving architectural pieces from demolition. He begins the collection telling how Akron native LeBron James became a Cleveland Cavalier and nearly lead the team to championships but after several years signed with Miami Heat, becoming the most prominent symbol of flight from the Rust Belt. (In 2014, too late for Giffels' book, James returned to the Cavaliers.)

In The Hard Way on Purpose, Giffels offers readers an intimate look at his beloved city and his own life in it. I enjoyed it and would now like to try All the Way Home, his book about living in and restoring a house that was to be condemned.

Giffels, David. The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt. Scribner, 2014. 256p. ISBN 9781451692747.

Bowling for Christmas and Other Tales from the Road by Mark Dvorak

Here's more about folksinger Mark Dvorak, who plays at many venues in the Chicago area, including libraries. He also writes poetry and essays. When he played at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library in September, he brought along copies of Bowling for Christmas and Other Tales from the Road. He sold them along with his CDs after the concert.

I got my copy weeks later by mail, when I had several other books to finish. When I caught up, I settled in and read the entertaining personal essays and poems over several days. They are much like Dvorak between songs in concert - pleasantly conversational. He speaks thoughtfully and with humor. He also tells good stories that illustrate the life of a full time folksinger who will go wherever he is hired. Most of the stories took place close to home, but he also made trips to Nebraska, West Virginia, and Finland.

Because a listener expressed interest in Dvorak's rendition of Lead Belly's "The Bourgeois Blues," Dvorak sent us a personally burned copies of his special tribute concert to the folk legend. The text from that concert is also in Bowling for Christmas and is called "Chasing the Great Lead Belly."

The essay that lends its title to the collection is the next to the last piece. In it, Dvorak tells about the people he met at a holiday concert in a nursing home. It bears rereading during the upcoming holidays.

Dvorak, Mark. Bowling for Christmas and Other Tales from the Road. Denim Press, 2013. 120p. ISBN 9781619276819.

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

In writing the novel Flaubert's Parrot, novelist Julian Barnes imagined grief felt by retired doctor Geoffrey Braithwait upon the death of his wife. According to Barnes, he never expected to be in the same position himself, assuming that his wife would survive him. But she died in 2008 very soon after her being diagnosed with cancer. In the third essay "The Loss of Depth" in Levels of Life, Barnes describes his grief, a reality much beyond anything he imagined for poor Braithwait.

The reviewer from the New York Times said that he wished that Barnes had only published the 56-page third essay, as it is so eloquent and powerful. It seemed to him the first two essays did not matter. I would disagree. I think their stories of amusing lightness followed by almost predictable tragedies set readers up well for the third essay. The two pieces (one true and the other fiction) give us memory in common with the author, and he draws from them in telling his own story of grief. We have shared an interest (if the two essay interest you) and are in a sense attune to the author. Their lightness makes the impact of the weighty third essay greater. 

Working in a library, observing the requests for Levels of Life, I saw a borrowing pattern much like that for The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Having now read both, I see why. A book discussion on the pair might be very interesting.

Barnes, Julian. Levels of Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. 128p. ISBN 9780385350778.

The Light in High Places: A Naturalist Looks at Wyoming Wildness, Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, Cowboys, and Other Rare Species by Joe Hutto

Add Joe Hutto to my list of favorite authors. After finishing Touching the Wild: Living with the Mule Deer of Deadman's Gulch, I had to read his previous book The Light in High Places: A Naturalist Looks at Wyoming Wildness, Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, Cowboys, and Other Rare Species. The subtitle well describes the wide-ranging subject matter, except it does not indicate how autobiographical a book it is. Anyone who has been charmed by Hutto in Touching the Wild or his early book Illumination in the Flatwoods: A Season with the Wild Turkey will want to read what Hutto tells about himself. He is a most interesting character.

Reading The Light in High Places reminds me how great it was that Bonnie and I went to Wyoming last year and makes me want to go again. Hutto probably does not want the place overrun with tourists, but he sees that well-run, eco-friendly tourism can help with the protection of the places and wildlife that he loves. A reader will see that as a hunter Hutto also sees a place for hunting, but he is greatly troubled by the idea of hunting as sport and big business. The aims of traditional rural life and wildlife conservation are not served by such sport, which caters to people who pay to kill threatened species.

Hutto does not consider himself a cowboy, coming from Florida and trained as a naturalist, but he is very respectful of men and women who grew up with traditional cowboy skills. He has learned many of those skills and managed ranches, but he still seeks advice and assistance from the experts. He sees himself as a dedicated scientist and enjoys spending months alone in species studies on the tops of mountains. He tells us how hard such studies are, but I bet many of us would like to join him for a day or two. Imagine the vistas!

If Worldcat is to be trusted, there are just about 150 copies of The Light in High Places in U.S. libraries, only about three per state. Illinois has eight. I think there should be more copies available. I am afraid Hutto and his eloquent books are among the rare species in need of attention. They should not be allowed to disappear unnoticed.

Hutto, Joe. The Light in High Places: A Naturalist Looks at Wyoming Wildness, Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep, Cowboys, and Other Rare Species. Skyhorse Publishing, 2009. 281p. ISBN 9781602397033.

For the Love of Baseball: A Celebration of the Game That Connects Us All edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner

Baseball has a great literary tradition, and with the histories, biographies, memoirs, and novels that I have read, I have just barely sampled what is available. Every summer I try to read a couple of baseball books. (I also read a few in winter to rekindle memories of summer.) I started this June with a book sent to me by a book publicist, For the Love of Baseball: A Celebration of the Game That Connects Us All edited by Lee Gutkind and Andrew Blauner.

For the Love of Baseball is an updated collection of baseball-related stories and essays previously titled Anatomy of Baseball and Great Baseball Stories. Many are somewhat autobiographical and are as much about their authors as about actual games. In some, stars of the game play supporting roles for fans who are the real subjects. Contributors include a few familiar names, such as George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Frank Deford, and Roger Angell, but most names were new to me.

As you might expect with a diverse collection, not every piece fit my taste, but I found many entertaining and thought-provoking. I particularly liked "My Brilliant Career" in which Susan Perabo tells about her difficulty retiring from her pretend career as a major leaguer. She has mostly succeeded. I'm not sure I am there yet. I laughed while reading "My First Day with the Yankees" in which Matthew McGough describes his initiation as a batboy surrounded by well-known players and coaches. I was moved by the story of Art Williams, second black umpire in the major leagues, told in "Overhustle" by Lee Gutkind. The most surprising story was "Pesapallo: Playing at the Edge of the World" by teacher Caitlin Horrocks who describes baseball's evolution in school yard Finland.

For the Love of Baseball is a book you can read a little at a time if you like, savoring each story. You might even understand your own role in the culture of baseball by the time you finish.

For the Love of Baseball: A Celebration of the Game That Connects Us All. Skyhorse Publishing, 2014. 237p. ISBN 9781629142470.

I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn't) by Leah Hager Cohen

It has happened to all of us. Topics about which we know nothing are introduced into a conversation, and everyone else seems to be very knowledgeable. Then someone turns to us and asks our opinion. What do we do? Reveal our ignorance? That is often what we should do, according to Leah Hager Cohen in her four-part essay I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn't).

The settings in which we hesitate to admit a lack of knowledge are many, if we are like Cohen, who writes from experience. One of the most common is the college classroom. Students are there to learn, but many competitively pose that they already know everything when they don't. Sadly, opportunities for learning are lost when insecure students won't lower their shields of preconception. Admitting ignorance frees us from pretense and opens our minds. But only secure people seem to have the ability to say "I don't know."

I like the story of a reference librarian using his lack of knowledge as a good starting point to helping his clients. See pages 95-96. I also love the ending in which Cohen tells about being a girl walking home from the library with her mother in a snow storm.

I Don't Know is a book that I would enjoy giving to friends - because it is good reading not because they need reforming. It is surprising how few libraries have it yet. I imagine that reading Cohen's novel The Grief of Others would also be worth reading.

Cohen, Leah Hager. I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn't). Riverhead Books, 2013. 116p. ISBN 9781594632396.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit writes personal essays about travel, art, architecture, and culture. In each she mixes her experiences with what she discerns through research. Because the pieces are unpredictable, the reader never knows what to expect, other than Solnit will be insightful and entertaining.

In her 2005 collection, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, her binding idea is that getting lost can be a good thing. Only when you are lost do you have the freedom to discover what you never imagined. She writes about losing one's way, losing things, losing one's confidence or identity, losing loved ones, losing focus, and even disappearing. Even painful loss can yield benefits, such as the deepening of one's soul.

A second common element through many of the essays is the color blue, how it is used and what it means in various situations. Deeper blues show greater distance in Leonardo's paintings. Lakes and the sky are blue until you reach them, and they then prove colorless. Blue can be perceived as calm or cold. We sing the blues. Some of Solnit's reflections on the color are autobiographical, revealing losses in her life, a life about which we come to care in our reading of her essays.

Solnit has written at least a dozen books so far, including A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland. You may find A Field Guide to Getting Lost your portal to more reading.

Solnit, Rebecca. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Viking, 2005. 209p. ISBN 0670034215.

The Best of Mary Schmich: Selected Writings by the Tribune's 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner by Mary Schmich

I do not always make time to read Mary Schmich's columns in the Chicago Tribune, but when I do, I often appreciate her wit and insight. So, when we signed up for the Digital Chicago Tribune, which was free with our print subscription, I chose her The Best of Mary Schmich as the first free Tribune ebook to download.

Over the course of about a month, I have been reading a few columns a day, usually at the beginning and end of the day. I've enjoyed revisiting events of the past twenty years, many of which took place in or around Chicago, and learning about Schmich and her family. Being her age and growing up somewhere else but now living in the Chicago metropolitan area, I find I have a lot in common with her and can identify with much that she says. I am the perfect target audience.

Schmich has had a more challenging life than I have for sure. My Texas family did not have a lot of money either when I was young, but there were not so many of us, so we never had to actually pinch the pennies as hard. Still, I can remember not wanting to pass on notes from school asking my mom to make a couple of dozen cookies for a bake sale. Could we afford that? It turns out that we could, and I should not have worried so. As Schmich's dad explained to her, we were not actually poor, having more than the people who really were.

Her columns about her mother and her sister Gina are the pieces that I found most touching. She always writes respectfully and with the intension of informing readers about life in general. Though she uses the personal as her foundation, she and her family are not the real focus.

Wondering whether readers other than Tribune subscribers can get this collection, I discovered that it is available digitally from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but not Google Play. It will be coming out in paperback later this year.

Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

I have not read the novels of Jonathan Franzen and probably won't, but I have tried his essays. I enjoyed the mostly autobiographical collection The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History a couple of years ago. Now I have just listened to Farther Away as a downloadable audiobook. Franzen sets the tone by reading the first two essays "Pain Won't Kill You" and "Farther Away," and actor Scott Shepherd continues with nineteen more. All have a certain storytelling hook that will appeal to listeners of National Public Radio. Franzen discusses his writing, recounts life with family and friends, reports on birding issues, and profiles his favorite authors.

The name that comes up continually throughout is the novelist David Foster Wallace. Franzen says in an essay about his always-fragile friend that Wallace was trying to mature and wean himself off antidepresants before the final depression that led to his suicide. Readers will sense Franzen's feelings of loss and resolve to honor his colleauge.

I especially appreciate Franzen's reporting on the welfare of birds. He has traveled around the world to see endangered species and meet with both people who poach and protect the birds. He tries to be understanding of all viewpoints but regrets being so polite to hosts as to eat songbirds in Cyprus.

Several essays at the end of the book profile novelists and their books. I found myself placing requests for even more books. Thanks, Mr. Franzen.

Franzen, Jonathan. Farther Away. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 321p. ISBN 9780374153571.

Macmillan Audio, 2012. 7 discs (8.5 hrs). ISBN 9781427221483.

Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports by John Casey

I could count if I knew what to count, but I don't. What are the twelve sports to which John Casey refers in his new book Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports? I don't see a list on the cover or in the preface. There are 24 chapters whose titles are not "Number 1: Swimming," "Number 2: Hiking," and so forth. Is survival training a sport? Do we differentiate between canoeing and sculling? He mentions throwing a shot-put once - do I count it? Do I count hunting and fishing? Maybe teasing readers?

Casey is a novelist, so maybe he is trained not to be so obvious as to include lists in his autobiographical essays. As readers we are supposed to discover his story of sport a little at a time, cheering as he turns his law school era fatness into hard and lean fitness and then staying actively athletic for fifty years. Most of that time is spent outdoors, and many of his activities are extreme. Would you run-walk 50 miles on your 50th birthday? Casey recounts his efforts with enthusiasm and vivid detail. The most gripping story is about his three weeks spent with Outward Bound off the coast of Maine. It is all what-does-not-kill-you-makes-you-stronger stuff.

I enjoyed Room for Improvement but not enough to reread to count the sports. If you can count them, let me know.

Casey, John. Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. 229p. ISBN 9780307700025.

Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town by Susan Hand Shetterly

When Susan Hand Shetterly left the city with her family to move into a cabin in rural Maine in 1971, she had some experience with nature. She had always enjoyed a walk in the woods, but she had not yet heard the many sounds of stormy nights, seen predation, or stepped into sucking mud from which there seemed no escape. She recounts her own survival and the plight of wildlife in an increasingly suburbanized coastal community in Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town.

Shetterly's notes are short, quick-to-the-point essays about the forces of nature. She tells us about the run of the alewives, the cracking of ice, the paving of an old country road, and the care of injured birds. I particularly enjoyed her tribute to a dead tree that served as home to many birds and insects. While not so spiritual as Annie Dillard, Shetterly still takes us with her into the marshes, woods, and shallow waves offshore to discover something worth preserving. 

Settled in the Wild is a book I'd like to send to friends.

Shetterly, Susan Hand. Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010. 240 p. ISBN 9781565126183.

Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets, & Gatemouth's Gator by Michael Perry

I enjoy autobiographical books by Michael Perry, and I enjoy reading essays. So, why had I not read Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets, & Gatemouth's Gator, Perry's collection of essays published in 2005? The "too many books, too little time" excuse seems insufficient. We make time to do things we want to do. I knew I'd like these essays. Perhaps last week was my appointed time to enjoy what I knew I would like. And I did. How could I not like passages such as this about a funeral in the essay "Catching at the Hems of Ghosts"?

... and then we all joined in on Hymn 495, as posted. Your average Wisconsin Lutheran can turn "Sweet Georgia Brown" into a funeral dirge, so the appropriate mournful tones were achieved without great difficulty, although we did tend to thin out and break down a little when we hit the high parts; but like an old farm truck wheezing over a hill, we'd pick up speed and volume on the downslope.

You can see a lot about Perry right in this passage. He is a Wisconsonite, raised in a religious home on a farm, now a respectful doubter with a good sense of humor. He loves music and knows a lot about truck. He knows "although" is better than "though." His three memoirs Population: 485, Truck: A Love Story, and Coup let you know much more about all of this. What I particularly enjoyed about Off Main Street was reading another side of Perry, the freelance writer on assignment. He traveled across the U.S. with truckers, hung out with country musicians in Nashville, and ventured into Central America. He was on a quest, on the surface to practice his craft of writing, but ultimately to discover what was real and moral.

Off Main Street did not get nearly as much attention as Perry's other works, which puts it in a good position to be a welcome find for his fans and others who enjoy essays. Librarians should put it on display.

Perry, Michael. Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets, & Gatemouth's Gator. Perennial, 2005. ISBN 0060755504.

Brave Companions: Portraits in History by David McCullough

When you think about David McCullough, you think first about big, addictive biographies of American presidents. It was not always this way. Before the presidents, he wrote about big engineering feats, like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, and short pieces for journals, such as American Heritage, Audubon, and Smithsonian. Brave Companions: Portraits in History collects twenty years of magazine articles and essays, starting with short biographical pieces on naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Louis Agassiz. Most of the pieces are biographical until near the end of the collection, where in essays McCullough tells about his love for Washington, D.C. and recommends that graduating seniors from Middlebury College travel the world to see historic places.

I read the collection a little at a time, enjoying a totally new subject every couple of days. My favorite pieces may have been the first two about the two naturalists about whom I really knew nothing but their names, or the piece about his day with photographer David Plowden taking pictures of small towns and cornfields, or the profile of scientist Miriam Rothschild, who studies anything and everything that interests her. The most moving piece may be "The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man" about Harry Monroe Caudill, who fought the coal companies over strip mining in Kentucky. The cast of characters that McCullough includes in this book is fascinating.

I suspect McCullough would be a great dinner guest, as he has been so many places and knows so many things. He's probably not available, so check out this book instead.

McCullough, David. Brave Companions: Portraits in History. Prentice Hall Press, 1992. ISBN 0131401041

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

At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman

I was excited when I saw that Anne Fadiman had a new book, At Large and At Small. Several years ago I enjoyed Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader immensely. I thought that I had reviewed that book here on my blog, but I can not find it. Perhaps I reviewed it at the library instead. Whatever, it was a great read.

I was pleased when I finally got the new book to see how it physically resembled the older title. Both are undersized and have attractive woodcut illustrations on the cover. They look nice shelved together, which I am sure pleases the book-loving author. They are easy to carry around and read at lunch or in bed at night.

As I said in my little piece yesterday, Fadiman's new book is a collection of familiar essays, a literary form that she says is endangered. This type of essay blends qualities of the critical essay with the personal essay. Most readers will not bother thinking about such distinctions, but will instead just enjoy her reflective writing. I most enjoyed her essay "Ice Cream" in which she mixes the history of the dessert with her personal experiences and thoughts. I laughed when she suggested that eighteenth century physician Filippo Baldini, who wrote about the benefits of eating Italian ices, might write her a prescription for Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk. (I might need a prescription for B&J Cherry Garcia.)

As in Ex Libris, loving books comes up again, as does living in New York. Fadiman also reveals her outdoor experiences, first as a child who collected insects and later as a guide for the rugged National Outdoor Leadership School, which she says was much tougher than Outward Bound. Every essay pleased me, except "Coffee," but my dislike of the drink is more at fault than her writing.

Not many libraries in my area have added the title yet. Perhaps my writing about it two days in a row will help. It is a charming, lively, entertaining book.

Fadiman, Anne. At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. ISBN 9780374106622.

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott

"You can't go limp in the face of the world's horror."

One of the things I really enjoy about Anne Lamott is that sprinkled among her engaging stories about her life are great pronouncements fit for framing. If I had had a paper copy of Grace (Eventually), I could have yellow highlighted something on nearly every page. As it was, I listened to her read her book on my iPod. She is the exception to the rule that authors should not read their own books. She is very expressive and conversational. I could listen again.

Librarians will like the story that she tells of going to a rally in Salinas to support keeping the public library open. She was just going for the day and planned to sleep comfortably in a bed that night. When she found that all the old hippies and famous authors and actors were camping out, she felt it was the right thing to do. She has many wonderful things to say about libraries in this story. Have a highlighter handy when you read.

Not all the stories are so happy. Lamott tells about the friends she has lost, fights with her son, and the days before she quit drugs and alcohol. She describes fearful times when she lost the dog in the woods, when she was taken for a long ride by a suspicious cab driver, and when she was very sick after an eating binge. She has trouble asking for help, but when she does, she comes through her trials. If only she would learn before the next incident.

Lamott is not neutral on any subject and will annoy some readers. However, if you like humorous, sometimes outrageous tales from left-wing sunday school teachers, you will like Grace (Eventually).

Lamott, Anne. Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith. New York : Riverhead Books, 2007. ISBN 1594489424

Letters from New Orleans by Rob Walker

I reviewed four books about New Orleans last year preparing for the ALA annual conference in the city. The Garrett County Press noticed and asked if I would accept a free copy of the second edition of Letters from New Orleans by Rob Walker. There were no strings attached, though the publisher hoped that I would like and review the book. I said yes and received it in the mail a couple of weeks ago.

Walker and his girlfriend E moved to the Crescent City late in 1999 and were surprised by the local tradition of firing of guns in the air on New Years Eve. He wrote a letter about the random injuries that resulted and government efforts to curb the gun play. In the letter he also wrote about unpacking, buying paint, listening to New Orleans music, and the theft of the rental car. He sent the letter to friends by email, who shared it with strangers.

In the next three years he wrote thirteen more letters and sent them to an increasing number of people. They also found their way to Slate.com, the New Republic, and other websites and magazines. In 2005, just before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the book was published.

Walker wrote lovingly about what he saw everyday riding his bike around the city. He told about street life, housing projects, musicians, and the annual Carnival, which is capped off by Mardi Gras. He spoke to lots of people and described intersections, vacant lots, pillars under the Interstate, and old buildings.

The second edition is little changed from the first. An introduction and two postscripts have been added and one chapter has been updated. Walker admits that the stories now reflect a life that is past. He also mentions the great interest in the tragedy from outside the city. He suggests that many of those criticizing New Orleans refuse to see that their lives are in as much danger from forces beyond their control as the citizens living below sea level.
Letters from New Orleans is an interesting book that should find more readers.

Walker, Rob. Letters from New Orleans. Garrett County Press, 2006. ISBN 1891053019

I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts About Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

"Why are you listening to that?" my daughter asked, hearing that I had I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron on my iPod. "That's a girl's book." I remember what she asked better than my answer. I think I just said, "I thought I might enjoy it." I did.

Ephron is at times very funny, though I am sure I did not catch all the humor. I do not buy purses, cosmetics, or hair dyes, but I can understand the issues involved and laugh with the author about her choices. Good writing transcends common experience.

Not all of Ephron's essays are strictly about women's issues. I would worry about what to serve the author of a cookbook should one come to dinner. I have trouble finding my reading glasses. I have mourned to loss of favorite restaurants and their dishes that I can no longer find. I enjoy reading Wharton and Trollope. I have aging friends with health problems. We are all facing death.

The audio version of I Feel Bad About My Neck is especially good because Ephron reads. As I said before, she can be very funny.

Ephron, Nora. I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts About Being a Woman. New York: Knopf, 2006. ISBN 0307264556

Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature

Bordering Fires is a literary collection with a message. It poses that Mexico is an idea that goes beyond the country's treaty boundaries. People of Mexican heritage still belong to the common culture whether they live within its borders, have been born in the United States from legal or illegal immigrants, or are in exile in any country. While these people share many traits with other modern people, they do have a unique cultural identity, which Bordering Fires tries to define through fiction, poetry, and essays.

Bordering Fires is open to criticism. First, its editor Christina Garcia is not Mexican. Second, there are only twenty literary voices, who certainly do not account for every Mexican viewpoint. Still, the collection counters many misconceptions about the country and showcases its diversity. It is a good starting collection for a study Mexican literature.

Librarians and readers will recognize some of the authors, including Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Sandra Cisneros. Many of the others will be unfamiliar. The beauty of anthologies is the introduction of new authors to readers through selected pieces.

My favorite story is "Major Aranda's Hand" by Alfonso Reyes, which is as creepy as anything written by Edgar Allan Poe. "I Speak of the City" by Octavio Paz is a poem that I like that is in the tradition of Walt Whitman in structure but is distinctly Mexican in spirit. "Excerpt from Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail" is an essay by Ruben Martinez that should be read by anyone studying U. S. border policy.

I felt some confusion reading several of the pieces which seemed to be memoirs or biographies but could have been fiction. The editor did not label works, and readers must research them to identify fact and fable. Some of the people profiled do not really exist, but they easily could have.

Bordering Fires is an inexpensive paperback, probably used in some college literature classes. Some stories may offend some readers. Public libraries should consider it.

Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. ISBN 1400077184

Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

I was a little late noticing Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver. I had ordered the book when it was first reviewed, but I did not read it until after I saw the author on a CPAN-2 book discussion. I was impressed by her wit and rhetoric. The very next week, my minister quoted her in a sermon. I moved the book to the top of my reading list.

Kingsolver lives outside Tucson, Arizona, gardening, raising her daughters, and writing novels and essays. While she is most known for her novels, this is a collection of her published essays, many in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. My favorite is a four-page piece about forgiveness titled “Going to Japan.” It is followed in the book by “Life is Precious, or It’s Not,” which discusses the mixed messages our children get about justified and unjustified use of weapons to kill. Throughout the book Kingsolver questions how our daily lives contribute to the world crisis and how to live an ethical life. The decisions you make every day are important. This book was written in 2002 but is still timely. Every public library should have this book.