Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr

How can I encourage you to read Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr? How about a paragraph showing his passion for the great old city?

"We came to Rome because we would always regret it if we didn't, because every timidity eventually turns into regret. But the enormity of what I don't know about this place never ceases to amaze me. In 1282, the Tuscan monk Ristoro d'Arezzo declared, "It is a dreadful thing for the inhabitants of a house not to know how it is made." Dreadful indeed. What I think he meant was that we ought to understand the earth we live on, its skies, its stones. We ought to understand why we live the lives we live. But I don't even understand the apartment building in which I live. How is linoleum made? Or window glass or porcelain? By what power does water rise to the third floor and pour out of this faucet?"

Coming to Rome was not easy for Doerr and his family, as the twins were only about six months old. It would have been much easier to stay comfortably in Boise, Idaho, but the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts was an offer that was too good to refuse. Can you imagine being paid and housed for a year in Rome so you could work on whatever you wished - your novel, your art, your research?

Doerr does not actually write much on his novel. The wonderful distractions of family and the ancient city are too much to ignore. He walks the streets of the city, looks in the museums and alleys, tastes the food, meets the neighbors. He and his wife visit surround villages. What he tells you makes you want to visit.

• You can lie on benches to look up at the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.
• To see the Crucifixion of Saint Peter by Caravaggio you have to put coins in the vending box to turn on the spotlights.
• Giotto added ground lapis lazuli in the blue robes in his frescoes in Assisi.

The big event in Rome during Doerr's stay is the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Thousands of people young and old stream into the city during the pope's last days and sit in vigil. The lines to view the body are so long that many never reach their goal. Doerr wades into the crowd to feel the passion.

As interesting as the funeral reporting is, it is the descriptions of Rome and everyday dramas that make this book worth reading. It certainly substitutes well for the novel he has not written. Look for it at your library.

Doerr, Anthony. Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World. Scribner, 2007. ISBN 9781416540014

At the Ranch in West Texas

I have been in West Texas for a little over a week with my mom. On Monday, I got to go out to the ranch north of Big Lake. I took over one hundred photos of cattle. The photo to the left is just one. Many of them include my mom's calves. I will be posting the better shots on Flickr when I get back to Illinois.

In the next post you will find my review of Wildlife by Richard Ford. In the story, fires are burning outside Great Falls, Montana. There have been daily brush fires outside Big Lake every day since I have been here. The alarm calling for volunteers has gone of daily. We saw one of the fires as we drove in from San Angelo last week. Because there was lots of rain early in the year, there is lots of dry grass and brush now. The cow and calf in this picture are standing in a fire hazard. Do not worry. Should a fire start, they would move.

While in Big Lake, I have been visiting the Reagan County Library every few days to check my email and post. Thanks, RCL.

I have my laptop, so I have been working on my book, rewriting book reviews and working on the index. I am struggling a bit with consistency in the way I apply descriptors. I am sure Bonnie will be able to advise me when I get home. I am looking forward to getting home.

Wildlife by Richard Ford

I have planned to read Richard Ford for years, ever since I read about awards that he won for The Sportswriter. At a recent book sale benefiting the Iowa City Public Library, I found a nice paperback edition of his book Wildlife. The price and time were right, so Bonnie bought it for me, and I brought it with me to Texas.

It is a good traveling book, easy to carry, memorable to read. Ford hooked me in the first couple of pages. I did not read it in one evening sitting because I needed sleep, but I did pick it up in the morning and again whenever I could through a day and half. I had to hear Joe Brinson's story.

Wildlife is a first person narrative told by sixteen year old Joe whose family has moved to Great Falls, Montana. When his father, a golf instructor, is unjustly fired from the country club, he uncharacteristically decides to join a forest fire fighting team, leaving Joe and his mother alone for several days. His mother reacts badly, and Joe's life seems to unravel.

In his book, Ford suggests that we are all only a couple of stupid decisions away from disaster. The bad moves may not even be our own. Joe is not responsible for any of his bad fortune, and his words and actions are confused, as you would expect from a teen whose home and prospects are threatened. I really wanted his parents to straighten up.

Because Ford does not tell us what to think or really spell out why the characters do what they do, Wildlife would be a good discussion book. I also recommend it to teens.

Ford, Richard. Wildlife. AMP, 1990. ISBN 0871133482

Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass

I am again blogging from the Reagan County Library in Big Lake, Texas. I appreciate that this rural library now has a great computer lab.

Poetry is not easy to read. I have just finished Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass, which is nominated for the National Book Award for poetry. I have mixed feelings about this collection. There were some poems I understood and liked, but I was unable on the first attempt to find the meaning of others.

One of the reasons that many people do not like poetry is they do not understand it. That seems a rather narrow view to take, but I think not understanding is why people have many of their prejudices. They do not like certain forms of music, computers, electronic devices, other people, or foreign nations because they do not understand them. Understanding takes effort. With poetry, you can reread. You can read aloud. With a good try, you can eventually get it. Perhaps reading poetry can teach patience and be practice for other forms of tolerance. You do not want to have a closed mind.

In the next to last poem in the collection, "Exit, Pursued by a Sierra Meadow," Hass says that beauty is "unendurable." Humans do not really value what is not immediately useful. He is commenting on the beauty of park land and wildlife in this poem, but he could apply the thought to poetry as well.

Birds appear in many of the poems as the focus or as incidental details. I wonder whether they have a certain meaning to Hass or whether he just likes birds. The truth is probably a bit of both. In "On Visiting the DMZ at Panmunjom: A Haibun," the cattle egrets at the end of the poem seem to be the witnesses of human folly. Perhaps they will even inherit the earth after all the people have been killed by war.

While most of the poems are environmental, the poet does get political in "Ezra Pound's Proposition." Look out, World Bank and Halliburton! Robert Hass has figured you out. I do not know what the reference to Pound in the title means; he is not mentioned in the poem.

My favorite poem is "Art and Life," in which the poet looks at paintings in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague. When he lunches in the museum cafeteria, he looks at the staff, wondering who has restored the paintings, bringing back their colors, peeling back time. I also enjoyed the little stories in "Domestic Interiors" especially the incident in which a village comes together when it loses its electricity.

Not many libraries have Time and Materials, but I think that they should consider it. It may never be popular but some one is going to enjoy it very much.

Hass, Robert. Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005. CCCO, 2007. ISBN 9780061349607.

Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio by Jeffrey Kluger

Before Jonas Salk introduced his vaccine for polio in the 1950s, it disabled and killed many American children every summer. Some years were much worse than others, requiring health officials to shut down swimming pools and movie theaters. My mother remembers a summer in San Antonio when she was not allowed to go anywhere that the virus might be found. Years later, I remember a friend who wore a leg brace because he had contracted polio as an infant. I also remember going to our school cafeteria in the early 1960s to orally take the vaccine on a sugar cube.

In Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, science writer Jeffrey Kluger profiles reluctant hero Dr. Jonas Salk, who was born in New York at a time when infantile paralysis was an annual concern in the city. Mothers hid their children from the health department patrols, who combed neighborhoods looking for suspiciously ill youths. Salk's mother was especially diligent, making sure he always washed his hands and did not play with other children in the streets. She wanted him to become a rabbi, but he chose to become a doctor dedicated to disease research instead. Before work on polio, he helped develop influenza vaccine.

Though polio primarily attacked young people, it occasionally infected adults, including failed vice presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt. Kluger tells how the future president went to Warm Springs, Georgia seeking treatment in the hot water. His buying the old resort that he modified for polio victims led to the creation of the March of Dimes, which later funded Salk's work.

The story of the development of the vaccine is filled with disappointments and controversies. I enjoyed hearing Splendid Solution read by Michael Prichard, who I have heard on other nonfiction audio books. Baby boomers who grew up in the wake of the polio epidemic will enjoy reading about their roots. Medical professionals will also find the story inspiring.

Kluger, Jeffrey. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio. G.P. Putnam's Sons, c2004. ISBN 0399152164.

Audiobook: Tantor Media, 2005. 11 compact discs. ISBN 1400101492

Library Technical Competencies: What Do We Have? What Do We Teach? What Do I Hire?

I am posting this from the Reagan County Public Library in Big Lake, Texas, where I will be for the next week.

Zone One Reference Librarians met a couple of weeks ago to discuss computers in libraries and staff technical training. In all our libraries we have computers for staff and clients to use. Most of us also have web sites, and many offer wireless Internet. Our staffs have developed many technical skills in the past ten to fifteen years. No one has totally non-technical staff members anymore.

Technology continues to change quickly, and libraries want to use these developments to better serve clients. This requires us to have well-trained staffs both in public service and working behind the scenes. How to get everyone on a staff up to par on the latest skills is a great challenge. In many cases, some one lags behind, resulting in varying public service. You know your library has a problem when some fairly common client requests are regularly written up and referred to the more savvy staff.

Sarah Houghton-Jan's points out a process to improve staff competencies in her technology report. What she leaves for the reader to discover is the specific competencies needed in her library.

During our conversation, I thought of one way to start the specific list competencies for my library. All staff members in public service can log every technical skill used for several days. These logs can also record when a skill is missing. Before I ask anyone to do this, I thought I should try it out myself.

For two days I kept a running log of technical tasks, including time in public and behind the scenes in support of our library mission. Here is what I listed.

· Turn on public PCs
· Turn off PC security to load software
· Load Firefox browser update
· Troubleshoot printing on the microfilm reader printer
· Read and write email
· Edit online calendar
· Set up projector and laptop for a meeting
· Add to the staff wiki
· Load paper into the copier
· Open an email attachment and save it
· Set up an Excel spreadsheet
· Send document to remote printer
· Add book titles to an online shopping basket
· Post on the staff blog
· Teach client how to create a PIN for the online catalog
· Troubleshoot monitor
· Resize photocopies for a client
· Cut and paste into Word document for our newsletter
· Search remote databases to answer reference questions
· Troubleshoot email with client
· Use Dreamweaver to update library web pages
· Load web pages onto the remote server
· Place holds for clients
· Explain "reply to all" to a client
· Search library catalog
· Load an iPod for a client


As I look at this, there are many skills that I did not have fifteen years ago. It was not hard to learn them, but I can remember times when I was baffled by something that ended up being easy. Luckily for me, my library has always sent staff to classes, workshops, and conferences. The knowledge gained at outside training has laid the foundation of my technical skills. In our meeting, we talked about our libraries sending more staff out for training more often, but we recognized this still is not enough. Besides, we need our staffs in our buildings most of the time.

One of the librarian at our zone meeting told about how her library's technical trainer, a person hired part time to do classes for the public on mostly Internet topics, gives some classes for staff as well. These are helpful but do not meet the need for current awareness of late breaking technical developments. On her own the trainer started sending occasional tech briefs to staff, alerting them to news. We all agreed that she is the kind of person we all need in our libraries.

This reminds me that my library's needs a new reference librarian. I have learned much from and been encouraged to try new things by the last two librarians in this position. Much of this transfer of knowledge happened in our daily unplanned conversations. For this position, we have a brand new job description that more than ever lays out skill sets that are required and activities that will be performed. Teaching other staff members is in the mix. What it does not say is "Will teach the old guy some new tricks." Maybe it should. Teaching the supervisor is important, too.

As important as the formal training and the daily conversations are, I realize further that I am also somewhat self-taught. I think all the best technical minds are. They play with the new technology fearlessly, learning what it will and will not do. They do not wait for their libraries to arrange training. Self initiative needs to be written into all of our job descriptions, too.

For more information on library technical competencies, look at Cultivating Tech-Saavy Library Staff, one of Sarah's presentations as reported by Chad at Library Voice.

They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race by James West Davidson

Born during the American Civil War, about the time of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Ida B. Wells was witness to the initial promise and subsequent failure of Reconstruction. Her earliest memories were of her father as a local black activist in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and of her mother as a woman determined to see her children live a better life. When Wells was sixteen years old, they both died from yellow fever, leaving her to support her siblings. In They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race, historian James West Davidson tells how she transformed herself from a teacher with Victorian attitudes to a crusading journalist dedicated to exposing racial injustice.

As a reader, I enjoy how Davidson weave many colorful details into this small book. He tells us how Wells attended as many as three or four chruch services on Sundays when she first moves to Memphis. He describes the rotten wooden streets in the city and the towers of hay along the docks after regional harvests. He quotes Wells saying that she was "unladylike" at a baseball game and moved by the character of Koko in The Mikado. I see Wells as a person with charms and flaws, not a historical figure.

Central to the story is an incident in which three blacks are executed by a mob for an incident that may have been a set up. For reporting on it and questioning the validity of rape charges in many of the lynchings across the South, Wells has to flee death threats in Memphis. Then she becomes famous lecturing in the Northeastern U.S. and in England on the injustice of Southern lynchings.

Using Wells as the focus, Davidson tells a story of increasing racial violence across the country in the late nineteenth century. He stops the story at the point Wells becomes a full time advocate for racial justice. Many readers will enjoy this lively coming of age story.

Davidson, James West. They Say: Ida B. Wells and the Reconstruction of Race. Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 9780195160208.

Mongolian Ping Pong

Bonnie brings home some wonderful movies. The latest is Mongolian Ping Pong, a comic look at three young boys in remote Mongolia who find a ping pong ball floating down a stream. Wondering what it is, they ask their parents, a grandmother, and even the local Buddhist monks and get some amusing answers. Even when a wandering merchant, selling odd items from his stripped down van, says that it is just a ping pong ball, they are unenlightened.

There are several things that I really liked about Mongolian Ping Pong. First is the goofiness of the three boys, whose actions make me imaging of Spanky and Our Gang in Mongolian with subtitles. Bilike, Ergoutan, and Dawa run wild with little supervision, cooking up schemes that rival those of old child-star comedies.

I liked the scenery. The vast Mongolian grassland is so green and mostly flat until you see the odd house or rocky outcrop. Anyone who has been to the Serengeti plain will long now to go to remote Mongolia. The background of approaching storms and herds of horses and slow twisting rivers makes me want to see it.

I also liked the camera work, especially how scenes often ended with all of the characters walking out of the frame. The movie watcher is left looking at the beautiful scenery.

There are many themes to contemplate in Mongolian Ping Pong, which seems to show the last days of a rural society being brought into modern society. There are the introduction of technology, the longing of the young to leave, and the care of the elderly. It is a fascinating film that many libraries should had to their collections.

The Contemporary Problem of Mass Rape by Allison Ruby Reid-Cunningham

Today I am reviewing something a bit different. The Contemporary Problem of Mass Rape is a self-published book by my niece Allison Ruby Reid-Cunningham, a doctoral student in social work at the University of California at Berkeley. I promise to write a fair review.

The topic about which Ruby writes is mostly ignored by the popular press and commercial publishing. Do a search of "mass rape" in Worldcat from OCLC and you find little. There is an article in Maclean's in 2006 and another in New Statesman in 2005. There are a few university press books. Otherwise, the topic is found only in reports from international organizations and articles from academic journals. Reading Ruby's book, I noticed that most of the references are to reports from groups like Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and various bodies of the United Nations.

What is mass rape? In the context of Ruby's book, mass rape is sexual violence against women as a part of war. Throughout history, as the saying goes, "to the victor go the spoils." Victorious armies have always celebrated by looting their conquered cities and raping the women and girls. As horrible as this is, the topic of this book is even more shocking. Rape is used as a weapon of genocide.

Ruby's book includes discussions of recent or on-going wars in Bosnia- Hercegovina, Rwanda, and Darfur. In these wars, soldiers were (are) often under orders to rape women. In these wars, commanders at the highest level directed their forces to use all means to humiliate and eliminate the ethnic peoples against whom they fought. In these societies, the ethnicity of offspring is thought to come from the father and not the mother, so rape serves to wipe out conquered populations. To accomplish the work, rape camps were set up where women were systematically raped, kept until pregnancies were verified, and sent back to their own communities. Many babies were subsequently abandoned.

What is to be done about these atrocities? Ruby discusses war crimes trials. According to current conventions, mass rape is a war crime, but it is often not one of the charges that is pursued. The problem is under reported because in many cultures being raped is actually considered a crime of adultery. Women reporting their rapes in these societies condemn themselves to expulsion or death.

Being a student of social work, Ruby discusses the need for social workers in the wake of ethnic warfare and the care which they need to provide.

On her website, Ruby discusses her ongoing work, which includes interviewing women from the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. I hope she writes a narrative book for mass publication. Readers need to know about this subject. In the meantime, Ruby provides a link to buy her book from Lulu. The paperback is $10 and the download is only $1.25.

300 Books, 300 More to Choose

Today is a milestone in the writing of my readers' advisory guide for biography. I have chosen 300 books and written short descriptions of them. I want to choose 300 more and then put them into a useful order with finding aids and further recommendations. I also will add some helpful appendices.

Number 300 is Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams by Michael D'Antonio. I celebrated with a bit of left over Halloween chocolate. Delicious!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

I have just finished my second reading of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling. I took two months, often reading a few pages or a chapter a day, sometimes skipping a couple of days. At this relaxed pace, the tale becomes an installment story. Of course, I understood much more the this time through.

I was particularly struck on the second reading how Voldemort really is just Tom Riddle, not all powerful. He is so obsessed with Harry that he loses his original vision of dominion. He makes mistakes in front of his Death Eaters, shocking them. He worries about wands and horcruxes. Moreover, you see he is not so different from Dumbledore in his origins. The late headmaster of Hogwarts could have let hate make him into a monster, too. Dumbledore's failing was not finding a better path for Riddle when he might have had influence. Maybe he would have failed, but he did not really try.

Before the seventh book was issued, I worried that it would be a long battle, constantly tense, losing all the charms of the earlier books. At the end of the sixth book, there was such a sense that the time of conflict had come. I need not have worried. I liked how Rowling was able to still include humorous lines and situations in the final book.

I also like how the characters continue to develop in the seventh book. In fact, we learn much about Harry, Dumbledore, Snape, Luna, and Neville. Rowling had many threads to tie in the final book and I think she succeeded, staying fair to all of her characters, even Riddle.

Now what do I do? The story is over. Well, I might reread book six again.

Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007. ISBN 9780545010221

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver

Here's food for thought. (I could not resist the pun.)

I have just finished listening to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, read by the authors. I was not sure how interesting twelve compact discs about a family growing, buying, and eating local food would be, but I was hooked. Kingsolver is so talented a storyteller that she could probably entertain readers with a story about asparagus. In fact, she does tell a good story about the tall green vegetable, first food of spring.

In one essay in her book Small Wonder, Kingsolver discusses the great waste of shipping foods around the world when they could be grown locally. Admittedly, they would not always really be the same foods, but buying local would foster strong local farming communities. No one would go hungry, and third world farmers would not be enslaved by corporations to feed wealthy Americans. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she and her family take the topic much farther.

I enjoyed hearing three voices on the audiobook. Kingsolver delivers the main narrative, which hardly sounds like reading. Her husband Hopp is "Mr. Science," reading his fact-filled sidebars about politics, economy, and ethics. Her college-bound daughter Camille reads her essays on nutrition, describes meal plans, and provides a young point of view.

Kingsolver's younger daughter Lily is also a principle in the narrative. One of the best recurring themes is development of the budding entrepreneur's egg business.

The central story is that the family pledges to eat locally grown foods for one year. Each person gets an exception, such as coffee. To accomplish the feat, they garden and raise their own chickens and turkeys on their farm in North Carolina. They also frequent the local farmers' market, visit neighboring farms, and buy from grocers who stock regional foods. There are some sacrifices; they have no bananas with breakfast or any foods out of season. There are a few failures: they never find a good local source for grains and flour. Still, they succeed in the spirit of the venture, helping the local economy, reducing the burning of fossil fuel, eating well, not losing any weight.

In an interview on the last compact disc, Kingsolver says that she does not expect everyone to replicate her family's experiment. What she does hope is that concern readers will start to examine what they eat and question its origins. If they start buying more local products, the food industry will have to take notice and will adjust to meet the demand. Eventually, a more sustainable system will be established.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle would be a good book for discuss because our whole way of life is questioned. Libraries should expect this book to continue to be popular for a long time.

Kingsolver, Barbara with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Harper Audio, 2007. ISBN 0060853573

Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World by Phil Borges

Photographer Phil Borges has traveled to many developing nations to witness the efforts of CARE to assist women's rights and welfare. The result is his book Women Empowered, which includes photos of and captions about individual women who are prospering and in turn assisting their neighbors to fight poverty, disease, illiteracy, rape, genital mutilation, child trafficking, political repression, and environmental exploitation.

The beauty of this book is its direct appeal. Readers see and learn about strong women who have defied conventions to demand their rights in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Benin, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, and even Montana. Several of the women have used microloans to start village industries that have allowed them to feed their families, secure homes, and send their children to school. Others have chased off illegal loggers, stopped slave traders, and joined village governments for the first time. You see photos of these women and then of young women and girls who are in line to benefit.

With the effects and ethics of foreign aid often in question, this is an important book for students and citizens who contemplate their charitable giving. It is a good addition to any library.

Borges, Phil. Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World. Rizzoli, 2007. ISBN 9780847829279

This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley

Are you one of many readers who have dreamed of being a novelist? If you are, Walter Mosley has written This Year You Write Your Novel for you. Why has he done this? Did he do so to help you, or did he do so to take your money?

Evidence of helpfulness #1 - In this small book, which takes only a couple of hours to read, Mosley strips down the process of novel writing to its essentials, making his points clearly. The author says that to write a book you have to be disciplined and write every day, and he lays out a plan that can help you do that in a year. He says to get a first draft written before you worry about all of the books problems. Then he gives advice for rewriting. This may be just the encouragement that you need to rise to the call. He has given you a method.

Evidence of helpfulness #2 - This Year You Write Your Novel is small and attractive. It might work as a nice gift of encouragement to a friend. I would like to give the book to several people I know. Giving it might be that extra statement of faith that would spark a friend to do what he/she has promised/threatened.

Evidence of taking the money - The book is rather small for the price. It is sketchy. It does not refer to any other tools to help the writer. (He does mention using a thesaurus.) Like many self-help books, it is common sense spelled out.

I like to think that Mosley's intentions are honorable. Perhaps a bigger book with more details would be less read and not as influential. Still, I think more people would be better served by a cheap paperback version. This definitely does not need to be hardbound.

Mosley, Walter. This Year Your Write Your Novel. Little, Brown & Company, 2007. ISBN 9780316065412

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

The popularity of Agatha Christie mysteries continues thirty years after her death. Thanks to new editions of the books published by Black Dog & Leventhan, my library has restocked the mystery shelves with a couple dozen new Christie volumes. Among these is The Body in the Library.

I have opened the library many times and never found a body in front of the fireplace. At Thomas Ford, we do have a fireplace but no blood stains. Actually, there were no blood stains on Colonel Bantry's library floor either. Obviously, the heavily made-up young woman with the bleached hair in the cheap white gown was strangled somewhere else. Who was she and why was she in the library? Mrs. Bantry knows the local police will botch the investigation, so she calls her friend Miss Jane Marple.

As I read the book, I started remembering much of the plot, which I saw dramatized on Masterpiece Theatre recently, but I did not recall who the murderers were. This may be because as a viewer and a reader I spent almost the entire story contemplating the clues and testing scenarios. Then Miss Marple reveals the solution and the book ends rather quickly. In Body in the Library, there is no great scene were all the suspects are brought together. Two weeks from now, I may have forgotten the solution and could read it all over again.

I was struck on this reading how Miss Marple is not a sweet old lady. She is the least trusting of all the investigators, attune to the moods of the suspects. She also tells about catching her housemaids at lies. Christie hints that the sleuth has perhaps gone through many maids. I do not think I saw that in the dramatizations.

Libraries may want to inspect their Agatha Christie collections now as there are inexpensive editions available to fill the gaps and replace the tattered copies. Your readers will appreciate them.

Adventures of a Biographer by Catherine Drinker Bowen

A colleague at the library wished recently that publishers would stop the flood of new books so she could catch up with all the old books. I would not go so far, but I sympathize, as there are many old books that I will never read, and every time I go in the stacks to weed I find more.

I do what I can. So, here is a new review of a book from 1959.

I first became aware of the biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen in August when I was studying the ALA Notable Books lists. Bowen had seven books on the lists, second only to Sir Winston Churchill. When I looked through our library catalog to see if any were still available, I found that they all were somewhere in the Chicago suburbs. The title that caught my eye was her memoir Adventures of a Biographer, published in 1959, before ISBN numbers.

I could tell I had made a good choice from the first page of the first chapter. The year is 1937 and a Russian friend tries to talk Bowen out of going to Moscow to research pianist Anton Rubinstein. She had already written a book about Tchaikovsky without visiting his homeland, but she felt that it lacked authority. Now she is determined to wade into Stalin's Soviet Union to get the goods that she needed to write a great book. Of course, she finds many barriers to her research in the cold capital. She cannot go anywhere without her official translator, who seems at first bent on showing her all the city's factories and communist shrines instead of letting her study a musician who was a loyal subject of the last czar. Eventually she gets into Moscow Conservatory where she is only allowed in certain rooms. During an afternoon concert, when no one is looking, she sneaks into the upstairs archive where an old librarian welcomes her and shows her some of Rubinstein's manuscripts.

Not all of the chapters are as thrilling as the first, but Bowen usually finds people or institutions opposing her work. When she goes to Boston to study Oliver Wendall Holmes in the 1940s, when many people remember him, she is viewed as an outsider and shunned. In Washington, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter tries to discourage her from writing a "popular" book and denies her access to the Holmes papers under his care. He then hires an academic read these papers and write a scholarly book. Bowen is not able to cozy up to Holmes' old friends until she pulls out her family tree.

While writing about John Adams, Bowen attends a conference of history professors. Thinking that she will learn some new techniques for research, she finds herself frustrated by the academic attitude that requires the scholars to be almost without opinion about their subjects. Bowen believes biography should be written with a point of view. She admits to bias. She says most biographers learn to love or hate their subjects.

Of course, my favorite chapter is the ninth, "Salute to Librarians." Early in that chapter is a great paragraph.

"In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret's nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eyes bright with battle. But I did not know this. All unaware I used to make my way to those long-block municipal buildings, hope in my heart and in my hand a list of ten or fifteen books. Not books to read in the library but to take home, where I could copy at length, with time to think about what I was copying. I did not telephone beforehand and ask to have my books ready at the desk. I took my list and looked up the proper numbers in the card catalog, rechecked each one and carried the cards to the desk. The young woman would glance at the cards and then she would say, "Only two books at a time can be taken from the circulation department, miss." Black hatred would then well up in a heart that had been ready to love."

Bowen continues in this chapter to tell stories about her sometimes difficult but usually rewarding work with librarians. Some are just as reticent as the Bostonian friends of Justice Holmes. Others bend as many rules as they can to widen her access.

In the final chapters, Bowen tells about a dry period when she struggled to select a subject for her latest book. When she finally settled on Edward Coke, an adviser to Elizabeth I and James I of England, she found some English ancestors very suspicious of having an American writer in their midst. They claimed Coke was an English topic for an English scholar. For Bowen, the research was never easy.

Not many libraries have Adventures of a Biographer now, but it is a book worth seeking out. Try out your local interlibrary loan.

Bowen, Catherine Drinker. Adventures of a Biographer. Little, Brown, 1959.

Graduate School of Art, University of Iowa

On Saturday, Bonnie and I toured the Graduate School of Art at the University of Iowa with our daughter Laura. Laura told us that there was a really cool exhibit, but it had closed when we got there. So we just wandered around the building. There was still plenty to see.

We went up the industrial metal ramps to the second level, where we found a collection of paintings around the landing walls. Most had no attributions. Were they by students? What I liked best was a little green figure, a detail in a larger piece. I'd tell you what it is, but I do not know. Maybe it is an angel.

The art school library was fairly deserted while we walked around. It was mostly an unadorned, more functional than artful space, but I saw much to like from a service point of view. The reference collection and new titles were right up front. There were still many empty shelves for future acquisitions, and there were many interesting looking periodicals. Around the library were displays of red-colored uncovered structural steel.The large glass windows looked out on a goldfish pool under a limestone wall. If the windows were washed, it would be very nice. If I were a student, I'd like studying in the art library, away from the noise of dorms.

On the third level was a display of metal box sculpture. I liked the the burned-out oven. There were three other pieces, one of which I almost tripped over when I was looking at something else. There were more big windows, lots of faculty offices, and more naked structural steel.

It was a cool building. I have loaded 18 photos from around the graduate school in a set on Flickr.

Great Tales from English History: Joan of Arc, the Princes in the Tower, Bloody Mary, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, and More by Robert Lacey

In his series Great Tales from English History, Robert Lacey retells some of the most known stories about the monarchs and subjects of England. While this could be pretty dull reading in a less talented author's hands, Lacey entertains with humorous details, thoughtful observations, and swift portrayals of the key historical figures. In doing so, he often dispels myths and humanizes the exalted figures about whom he writes.

I read the second book Great Tales from English History: Joan of Arc, the Princes in the Tower, Bloody Mary, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, and More. In this volume, Lacey covers events and people between 1387 and 1687 in chapters that range from three to seven pages. You could read several a day and enjoy the book for a couple of weeks and then get one of the other volumes.

I most enjoyed reading about people whose names I knew but about whom I knew little.

• Famous for his role in the folk tale Puss in Boots, Dick Whittington really did rise to become mayor of London and a counsellor for King Henry IV, but there is no evidence that he ever owned a cat.
• Lady Jane Grey was a pawn in a political struggle and never deserved to lose her head at the block.
• William Tyndale, who translated the Bible into English and who lost his head for criticizing King Henry VIII's divorce, is the source of many famous phrases, including "salt of the earth," "the powers that be," and "eat, drink and be merry."
• Samuel Pepys traveled to Holland to get an exclusive interview with Charles II before he was restored to the crown.
• William Caxton, the first Englishman to own a printing press, is responsible for many of the inconsistent spellings in the English language.

Of course, Lacey tells stories about all the kings and queens of the three centuries. Richard II died because he went on a hunger strike in prison; he was not assassinated. Charles II really did hide in a tree to escape Puritan soldiers. Mary was hailed as a fair and just queen when she succeeded her brother Edward, but she spent her political capital rather quickly and everyone was happy to see her die.

The Great Tales from History series is fun to read and makes a nice introduction to English history. All public libraries should get Lacey's series.

Lacey, Robert. Great Tales from English History: Joan of Arc, the Princes in the Tower, Bloody Mary, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, and More. Little, Brown & Company, 2004. ISBN 031610924X.

Other volumes:

Great tales from English history : the truth about King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart and more. ISBN: 031610910X

Great tales from English history : Captain Cook, Samuel Johnson, Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Edward the Abdicator, and more. ISBN: 0316114596

Library Outreach Services, London, 1895

I always enjoy finding references to libraries in my pleasure reading. I found the following opening paragraph in the second chapter of The London Yankees: Portraits of American Writers and Artists in England, 1894-1914 by Stanley Weintraub.

Externally, Lancaster Gate had an ambience of comfortable gentility rather than showy fashion. At number 69, for example, lived retired Indian civil administrator Sir Richard Strachey, whose gaunt, precocious son Giles Lytton was often home from public school on sick leave. Every week the van from the circulating library would deliver half a dozen novels to Sir Richard's door, perhaps even the latest title by Bret Harte, or by Pearl Craigie under her well-known pseudonym, "John Oliver Hobbes." Deaf and doddering, Strachey very likely had no idea that Lancaster Gate was being overrun by authors or tainted by scandal by such Americans.

The next paragraph tells the reader that the time is 1895.

I wonder whether the books were for the father or the son or someone else in the house. Also, was delivery service just a benefit of membership in the circulating library or a special arrangement? Did someone have to have a doctor's signature to get delivery? It must not have been an uncommon service, for the library had a van.

One of the current ideas that is being batted around is that public libraries should send out their books by mail (like Netflix) or deliver more to homes. It seems to be an older idea than we thought.

Will There Be Books on the Colorado Rockies?

With their sweep of the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League Playoffs last night (this morning), the Colorado Rockies have won 21 of their last 22 games. In doing so, they surprised much of the baseball world, as they had been written off for the season. Because that level of winning is the stuff of legends, expect to see books on the Colorado Rockies 2007 season by next spring. If they win the World Series, there may be some instant publishing. Sports writers from the Denver media will take this opportunity for some windfall profits.

I see only one book about the Rockies aimed at adults in the current SWAN catalog (our Chicago suburbs consortium), and there is only one copy of that 1994 title, Mile High Madness: A Year with the Colorado Rockies by Bob Kravitz. There are, of course, more copies in Coloado, according to Worldcat. I also see that some profit minded people are putting their copies for sale on EBay.

There are several books aimed at young readers available. Children's librarians should put them on display to catch the eyes of young fans.

The Rockies now have eight days off before the World Series begins. The concern of some fans is that they will lose momentum. These fans may take some comfort in the statistic that teams with that many days off have won the World Series seven out of ten times.

No Fines in Libraries

Aaron Schmidt has posted a piece about libraries not charging overdue fines but using other means to get items returned. There are been some interesting comments added by other librarians. He has now also set up a wiki for libraries to add their names to the no fines list. It will be interesting to see how long the list grows.

I have always wished we would get away from overdue fines. It costs us good will and our circulation staff have better things to do than argue over insignificant amounts of money.

I also think we should not insist that less in demand books come back so quickly. Too many of our books spend too much time on our shelves. I'd like to see the books off the shelves and in readers hands more of the time. We could keep more of our older books if more of them were out. Longer loan periods for these books might be a good move for libraries and readers.

Pontoon by Garrison Keillor

If you like Garrison Keillor's monologues on his radio program Prairie Home Companion, you will like his newest novel Pontoon. It is very funny, and like those monologues, the story takes place in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. It includes a few characters that radio listeners will recognize. The most familiar is Pastor Ingqvist of the Lutheran Church, who has to worry about a visit from 24 agnostic Lutheran ministers from Denmark at the same time he is trying to help a dysfunctional family with an nontraditional celebration of death. Fans will also know Dorothy, who is waiting tables at the Chatterbox Cafe, and Clint Bunsen, who helps the pastor haul some donated champagne, French cheese, and shrimp back to the church. Fans will also recognize the statue of the Unknown Norwegian, the Whippets baseball team, and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery.

If you are puzzled by the title, just let me say that there is a boat in the plot. It is mentioned about half way through the book and reappears near the end. Knowing this does not spoil the ending. You can not imagine what's going to happen. The plot also involves a wedding that is not really a wedding and a funeral that is not really a funeral.

Keillor must have had a lot of fun writing Pontoon. It's as much fun to read.

Keillor, Garrison. Pontoon. Viking, 2007. ISBN 9780670063567

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

Ideology has always trumped precedence in the rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States, according to Jeffrey Toobin in The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. The law does not change and necessitate new decisions. What changes are the judges. To get the decisions you want, you need to put your judges on the bench.

Toobin is a story teller with a great subject, nine people who are appointed to the highest court for life. If there is a hero to the story, it is Sandra Day O'Connor, who is appointed as first woman on the court by President Ronald Reagan. She is a lifelong moderate Republican, an Arizona friend of William Renquist, whom she eclipses in power. As the swing vote during much of her tenure, she is the most influential of justices. She always seeks to find the will of the American public's political center, not a strict interpretation of law. Her biggest mistake is her vote in Bush v. Gore. She discovers that Bush has no concern for the rule of law and the political center. His power comes from the extreme right, whom she abhors. Her traditional Republican Party has ceased to exist, and she blames Bush.

In telling the story, Toobin sprinkles the serious matter with some amusing details. I never knew that justices get to decorate their offices with paintings and sculpture from the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art. David Souter eats an apple and a cup of yogurt every day for lunch. Clarence Thomas got through an entire term without asking any questions.

A key point that Toobin makes is that the Bush administration has put more effort into focusing on the political viewpoints of its appointments that any previous administration. There is no pretense that recent appointments will weigh the merits of cases. There is to be no straying from the right wing position. Now neither reasoning nor public opinion really matter.

Readers will learn much about all the justices appointed in the past forty five years. Toobin seems to admire most of them. The Nine would be a great discussion book. There are bound to be readers who disagree.

Toobin, Jeffrey. The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. Doubleday, 2007. ISBN 0385516401

Illinois Blue Book, 2005-2006: It's Time Has Passed

Today, my library received the Illinois Blue Book, 2005-2006. If you have noticed that it is already October 2007, you see the problem. This is an out of date directory when you get it. It always has been.

Perhaps this book is really intended as a historical reference item or collectors item and not as a directory at all. It is printed on nice glossy paper and the binding is stitched. The cover is dark blue with gold emblem, lettering, and stripes. Though it is no larger than many novels, it weighs twice as much (estimate). There must be half a pound of lead in the ink.

So, why is it full of possibly out of date addresses and phone numbers? It also tells what governmental departments have to spend in 2006. If you want to know Illinois legislative committee assignments of two years ago, this is your source.

There are some helpful sections in the back of the volume. All the legislators since 1819 are named, as are all the governors and other elected officials. There is also basic information on the counties, a copy of the Illinois constitution, and pictures of all the statues around the capitol.

It is interesting to learn from the chronology that Disco Demolition Night at Comisky Park in Chicago, July 12, 1979, is one of the highlights of the state's history.

Why do we still get this book? The information is all available on the Illinois Secretary of State's website. (It would be more useful and searchable if it were in HTML instead on PDF format.) State officials of Illinois are always pleading that revenue is short, denying funding to useful projects. The state library has been strapped for funds for years, as have all the regional library systems. I suggest that all the money spent to produce and distribute this heavy, rarely used book could be better spent.

Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memoirs

Before looking at Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memoirs, I knew little about the actress. After looking at it, I know more about her public persona, but she is still a mystery to me. The book has many photos, some being family snapshots, but she seems always to be acting a role. I am unable to solve the riddle of her personality.

According to the compiler of this book, Marlene Dietrich kept everything, including letters, telegrams, playbills, and photographs. The actress claimed that she had every dress, blouse, cape, shoe, hat, and accessory she used on stage or in a film. When she died, her estate opened six storage units in London, Paris, New York, and California, for which she spent thousands of dollars annually in rent, and donated her personal possessions to the FilmMuseum in Berlin. This book is a selective catalog of those items. Through family photos, movie stills, displays of artifacts, and comments of her friends, this big museum book gives fans an archaeological look at the life and career of the legendary actress.

There are some especially interesting sections of the book. After watching Ken Burn's documentary The War, I was struck by the twenty plus pages of photos showing her visiting and entertaining American troops in Italy. Seeing her in uniform contrasts sharply with the elegant and sophisticated attire in most of the book.

Dietrich fans will appreciate this attractive book, which may suggest a trip to the museum in Berlin.

Naudet, Jean-Jacques, compiler. Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories, from the Marlene Dietrich Collection of the FilmMuseum Berlin. Knopf, 2001. 262p. ISBN 0375405348

The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film, Based on the Lost Interviews from the Official Lucasfilm Archives by J. W. Rin

How many books about Star Wars do we need? At least one more, that being The Making of Star Wars by J. W. Rinzler. Based on four boxes full of interviews 1975 and 1978, which are now called the "lost interviews" because they had been put in the Lucas archives and forgotten, The Making of Star Wars is a thick, very detailed account that movie fans will enjoy.

The book starts at the beginning with an account of how George Lucas first conceived of Star Wars and how his ideas changed through his many handwritten drafts. Among the illustrations are photos of pages from the drafts, written with pencil on lined notebook paper. It is a wonder the story ever gelled. The early drafts were far different than the scripts issued for shooting. Lucas had ideas about certain scenes instead firm ideas of a story. Lots of ideas that reappeared in later movies were dropped. All the names changed.

Early in the development, the central character is Captain Annikin Starkiller. When Han Solo first appears, he is described as 150 years old. The droids were originally construction workers. There is a minor character named Skywalker.

The book includes many drawings showing how costumes, creatures, and sets evolved, and there are photos from the sets showing the cast as they work. What's funny to see is that when all the stormtroopers remove their helmets, they have huge amounts of hair. It was the 1970s.

At 314 oversize pages with small font text, this wonderful book takes time to read. Libraries should give readers extended loans.


Rinzler, J. W. The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film, Based on the Lost Interviews from the Official Lucasfilm Archives. Ballantine Books, 2007. ISBN 9780345477613.

God Grew Tired of Us: A Memoir by John Bul Dau

John Bul Dau was naked when he ran out of his village after 2 a.m. on a night in 1987. According to the author in his memoir God Grew Tired of Us, all Dinka children of southern Sudan sleep naked and there was no time to find clothes and dress in the dark when the Djellabas attacked. He ran eastward into the bush with a man he thought was his father, but he learned when they stopped that the man was a neighbor. They nearly died several times on their march to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Thirteen year old Dau was naked most of the way.

There was much nakedness among the Lost Boys of Sudan in the initial months before they received international aid. Many boys had run away in the night like Dau. Others bartered their clothes away for food. Some who had kept their clothes wore them until there was nothing left. As bad as nakedness was, it was only one of the problems for the Dinkas, who were being hunted down by the northern Sudanese. Even in the relative safety of the refugee camps, there was terrible heat, disease, and hunger.

If God Grew Tired of Us stopped at the point Dau reached Ethiopia, it would be a shocking, but not insightful book. Things get worse before they get better, but Dau claims that he always had hope, even when he jumped in a crocodile rich river to escape Ethiopian rebels. He and his friends continually find ways to stay alive. The book is mostly upbeat. I can not explain the title, as Dau always seems to think tomorrow will be a better day. He may have adopted the title to align it with the documentary by the same name in which he appears.

After years in various refugee camps, where he learns to write and read, Dau is resettled in Syracuse, New York, where he is sponsored by a local Presbyterian church. They furnish an apartment with three other Lost Boys, teach him American customs, and give him rides to his work or school day or night.

Not all of his American experiences are positive. Some people think he is a potential terrorist or resent him taking jobs and federal aid. He has his bicycle stolen five times. He takes this all in stride. After you have seen people killed by the Djellabas or nearly starved to death, the ugliness of some American behaviors seem hardly noteworthy to Dau.

In the last part of the book, Dau tells about returning to Sudan to see his family after nineteen years and about his plans for the future, which include the clinic he is building for the Dinkas. In this part he both defends and criticizes American culture and foreign policy.

God Grew Tired of Us is an engaging book that may tell many reader an important story that they missed in the news. Many public libraries should add the book.

Dau, John Bul. God Grew Tired of Us. National Geographic, 2007. ISBN 9781426201141

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

By now I should have read or listened to In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson's entertaining journey across the island/country/continent of Australia. The book has been around for seven years, during which several people have said, "Hey, mate, give it a go!" I had already enjoyed A Walk in the Woods, his difficult hike along the Appalachian Trail, which in a bizarre way made me want to try the trail, too.

However, I had also tried to read I'm a Stranger Here Myself, his trip around the U.S., which I found irksome. In that book, I felt that he belittled the clerks, waitresses, and other small town folk he met. I only read a couple of chapters in before I gave it up. Now I wonder whether it was really so bad or whether I was in a bad mood. Maybe I stopped too soon. Maybe he was having a bad time.

I had no problems with In a Sunburned Country. Within minutes of starting to listen to it on audio book, read by the author himself, I was laughing out loud about some witty observations about the enormity of the land down under. Perhaps it is a crazy place because of the ill-conceived way in which it was colonized, Bryson poses, as he muses on its history. As a listener I was impressed not only by his wit but also by the fact that he had done his homework.

Bryson does find it a problem getting everywhere he wants to go, for the distances are so great. He and his various companions rent a series of sometimes less than ideal vehicles. He also at odd times decides "It's a pretty day, I think I'll walk," which of course leads to sunburn and the great need for several rounds of beer. Some wild dogs scare him pretty badly, and the flies can be maddening.

I like that he goes into every museum that he finds and reports on the wonders therein. It is just what I would do. There are some pretty strange things presented with great skill by the museum professionals in the country. Oh, I wish I could go to Australia.

I should mention poisonous creatures. Bryson finds that there are more in Australia than anywhere else in the world. Snakes, spiders, fish, worms, and so on. He is always watching for them.

There are lots of copies of this book in libraries, so you can probably find one pretty quickly. Enjoy yourself. Prepare to laugh.

Bryson, Bill. In a Sunburned Country. Broadway Books, 2000. ISBN 0767903862; Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio, p2000. 10 compact discs, 055350259X.

Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill by Gretchen Rubin

Author Gretchen Rubin wrote this entertaining book for readers who want to know something but not everything about Winston Churchill. Its forty chapters, some quite short, are essays, quizzes, and lists that present various views of the famous British prime minister about whom many huge books are written. Some essays are like Opposing Viewpoint books, giving evidence for contrary assertions, such "Churchill was an alcoholic" and "Churchill was not an alcoholic." The result is an engaging portrait of the man Rubin says was the real James Bond. I will include Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill in the biography readers' advisory guide that I am writing because Rubin has broken out of the big book biography mold with this creatively organized book. It might be described as "biography lite" but she really did capture the essential life in her small book, which should appeal to many busy readers. More libraries should have it. The author has also written a similar book about President Kennedy, which is also under-represented in libraries.

Rubin, Gretchen. Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life. Ballantine Books, 2003. 307p. ISBN 0345450477.

Two University of Texas Grads in Reference

It is not often in a far northerly library to find two graduates of the University of Texas library school in one library. For the next month or so, Brent Lipinski is joining us in the public services department at Thomas Ford to answer questions at our reference desk, while we search for a new reference librarian.

Brent started at Thomas Ford in 1998 when he was still in high school. Most of his time with us has been spent at the circulation desk, checking thousands upon thousands of items for the our clients. He has also set up meeting rooms, shelved books, and kept us in good humor with his infectious personality.

Brent is the one on the left with hair. He graduated in 2007. My degree was issued in 1978. According to his degree he is really an information scientist with some library classes, but he seems to have a good grasp on everything reference. It is good to have him around again.

Hook 'em Horns!

Technology Competencies and Training for Libraries by Sarah Houghton-Jan

It has been my intention to review Technology Competencies and Training for Libraries by Sarah Houghton-Jan when I finish reading the report for a couple of weeks. The problem is I have no idea if I will ever actually finish reading. Sarah's paragraphs are full of statements and questions that act like electrical charges on my brain, and I start thinking about my library and many possibilities to help the staff better serve our clients. I usually only get a couple of pages read at a sitting. Sometimes I only get through a couple of paragraphs. I am enjoying the process. Maybe I do not want to finish.

In logical fashion Sarah starts with the question of what technical competencies are. Instead of just offering a simple definition, she prompts and assists librarians to come up with definitions that suit their own needs. She follows with reasons why the librarians should even care. The crime, she asserts, is that libraries often do not expect enough from their employees, when if only they would ask for more and then help educate them, they would be happier. The goal is to equalize service for the public and foster a culture of learning in the staff.

This is one of the questions (paraphrased) that particularly sparked my thoughts: what should library clients know and does this influence what staff should know?

I remember that when my libraries first started offering public computers we expected much more from the public than from the staff. We had statements in user agreements saying that the clients were responsible for knowing computer programs and that little instruction was offered. Staff might help turn the computers on or put paper into the copiers. The attitude seemed to be that staff did not have time to help with computers. The underlying facts was that most staff members at the time had no idea how to help.

I think the staffs in my libraries quickly realized that the above unhelpful attitude was contrary to our mission, and we quickly found time for individual assistance/instruction. We started taking classes and attending workshops from which we learned to give our own classes to the public.

At Thomas Ford Memorial Library, we have now been teaching our Beginning Internet class for over ten years. There was a slight dip in attendance a few years ago, but registrations have increased again recently. I think the need to use computers has nearly reached everyone now. Not everyone is happy with that, but they have to turn somewhere, and the public library is where they turn. In the past two weeks in our "Book a Librarian" program, I have helped several people who had been resisting computers for years. A couple of them said to me that they did not really want to learn but felt they had to do it.

So getting back to Sarah's Technology Competencies and Training for Libraries. It is good for library professional and support staff to meet competencies. It may be especially helpful to get reluctant staff up to speed because they can empathize and be more patient with reluctant clients better some technical whizzes.

The latter part of Sarah's report details how through staff participation to create a technology competencies document and start meeting its objectives. It looks very helpful.

Technology Competencies and Training for Libraries looks like an item that ought to be in lots of libraries, but there are only 53 identified through Worldcat. Maybe many copies are still in the hands of the original purchasers, who are studying them - like me. I suspect a lot of cash strapped libraries are reluctant to part with $63 and postage. I would like to see ALA sell this report for half the price (while still paying Sarah for all her effort). They might sell many more copies.

I see a few additional copies hidden under the records of Library Technology Reports [1976 to] in our consortium catalog. You have to already know its there to look there. I think it would be found by more librarians if treated like a book.

73 pages printed as a serial, this work might be 120 to 150 pages if published as a book.

I do promise to finish soon and get our copy into the collection so others can borrow it. Soon. Really.

Houghton-Jan, Sarah. Technology Competencies and Training for Libraries. ALA Techsource, March/April 2007. ISSN 0024-2586. Phone orders, 1-800-545-2433, press 5.

Chanel: Her Life, Her World, and the Woman Behind the Legend She Herself Created by Edmonde Charles-Roux

This is an alert. As I continue to work on my book about biographies, I find great older titles that might be in danger of being withdrawn from libraries. Chanel by Edmonde Charles-Roux is a prime example. It is as good a read today as 32 years ago. According to Worldcat, there are still 643 copies in libraries. If you have it, don't withdraw it. It will be in my book. Here is a first draft of it's entry.

Charles-Roux, Edmonde. Chanel: Her Life, Her World, and the Woman Behind the Legend She Herself Created. Translated from the French by Nancy Amphoux. Knopf, 1975. 380p. ISBN 0394476131.

Why has there been no television miniseries about Coco Chanel? Her life reads like a racy French novel. She not only created perfumes, the first modern women's bathing suit, and the first little black dress, she also convinced women to throw away corsets, shorten their skirts, and wear costume jewelry without apology. She met royalty and knew all of Europe's most famous fashion designers. Former editor of French Vogue Edmonde Charles-Roux also reveals she kept shocking secrets until her death in 1971. Truly biography that reads like fiction.

Subjects: Chanel, Coco; Fashion Designers; Twentieth Century; Women.

Story Line: Celebrity Biography; Great Achievement; Rags to Riches; Romance.

Now try:?

I have not yet decided what books to recommend to readers who enjoyed Chanel. Have any suggestions?

Tiger Cubs at the Brookfield Zoo

I only noticed yesterday that Blogger now has an easy way to load videos, so I am testing it with this short showing the two tiger cubs at the Brookfield Zoo.

The cubs were in the den until just about ten days ago. They already weigh 75 pounds each, but they still are very much kittens.

I am typing as the video loads. It is taking a while on DSL. I am glad I only chose the 33 second clip and not the longer one to load.

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman

In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman spends a year in Ghana seeking understanding of herself as the descendant of slaves. Not knowing from where in Africa her ancestors came, she chooses Ghana because it was a center for the slave trade with several key ports. She expects to bond with the people among whom she is going to live, as she thinks their lives have a common heritage. She instead finds she is always considered a stranger, just the kind of person who might be sold into slavery.

When the Portuguese first came to Ghana, just before Columbus sailed to America, they brought slaves "harvested" along the western coast of Africa to Ghana to trade for gold and other items. Slavery had long been a component of African life, as tribes captured and traded members of other tribes. Only later would the ports to ship slaves be built in the country. Hartman's descriptions of the history of the trade, the reducing of lives to commodities, is shocking, even though we have heard much of it time and time again. Every man, woman, and child is measured against quantities of tobacco, sugar, coffee, copper pots, or brass bracelets.

In Lose Your Mother, Hartman longs to be embraced by the Ghanaians as a sister, but she finds that they are suspicious of her. A few welcome rich Americans for the money they bring, but many cannot understand why they come, for to be the child of a slave is to their thinking shameful. There is also an underlying sense of guilt for having ancestors who traded slaves.

Hartman is a great writer. Her thought-provoking chapters are essays on various aspects of the slave trading past and the depressed present in Africa. Lose Your Mother is on the surface a travel memoir, but deeper down, it is a sometimes angry meditation on slavery and its legacy. It should be in more libraries than it is.

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. ISBN 0374270821.

Doctors without Borders in Chicago

Doctors without Borders 025
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

Lisa, who served as a nurse on a six month mission for Medecins Sans Frontieres in the southern area of the Sudan, demonstrated how medicines were kept cold until time to use them in a refugee camp. MSF, known in the U.S. as Doctors Without Borders, buys drugs locally if possible, but often the organization has to ship the drugs in and deliver them packed to stay cold. Yellow fever, cholera, measles, and meningitis are among the inoculations MSF staff give regularly.

Bonnie and I took an informative 45-minute tour of the demonstration camp, which told what and why MSF works in refugee camps throughout the world. Of course, we could only imagine the true state of things, as it was a beautiful warm day in Chicago in Grant Park. We had no tropical rain, mud, blistering heat, horrible stench from latrines or dirty people, swarms of insects, or fear that we would be attacked in the night. Currently there are 33 million people in refugee camps around the world.

You can find more information on the MSF-USA website. Books about the organization include Hope in Hell by Dan Bortolotti and Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Like the legendary circus that it depicts, the novel Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is an entertainment. It is a quick paced story set in the Depression Era with a memorable climax and a lot of historical detail. What it lacks, however, is believability.

A couple of things bother me. The first is that when Jacob returns home for his parents funeral, the will is read very quickly and the bank takes everything almost immediately. The support network of church people and his father's veterinary clients is apparent one day and disappears the next. The bank and the community would have been better with Jacob taking over his father's veterinary practice. I think the whole set up is improbable.

The second thing that bothers me is Jacob's actions are almost completely predictable. He disregards all danger, falls for the beautiful woman (a character without any depth), fights the bad guys, etc. There is a template for this character in many other "young man faced with hardship" stories. The bad guys are also cookie cutter characters. Jacob's friend Walter is the only character in the primary story that I really liked.

I do, however, like the alternate story of Jacob at 90 or 93 (he can't remember his age). Again, he is a bit predictable but he seems more believable. I can imagine people actually facing his problems. His eventual fate is a clever twist to the story.

The best part of the book is all the circus life description. It made me wonder about the history of circuses. Did owners often withhold pay? Was there a hierarchy among the circus family? Did circuses have orchestras? What were the living conditions for humans and animals? Were the men always so drunk? How many circuses were run out of town? Some readers may ask for some nonfiction books to see how accurate Water for Elephants is.

Gruen, Sara. Water for Elephants. Algonquin Books, 2006. ISBN 1565124995.

Solas (Alone), a film in Spanish directed by Benito Zambrano

In the film Solas, everyone is in some way alone.

Maria (played by Ana Fernandez) is a thin young woman who has come to a city to escape her family. Denied college by her father (women should remain at home), she has no marketable skills, so she cleans houses and lives in a rundown apartment in a bad neighborhood.

Maria's mother (Maria Galiana) is mostly alone. She has come into the city to attend to her husband in the hospital. Even when he is well, she is mostly alone, for he is an emotionally cold figure. She stays with Maria, who mostly abandons her to sit in the flat alone.

Maria's neighbor Vecino (Carlos Alvarez-Novoa) is a widower who walks his dog to the grocery daily. He identifies Maria's mother to be a kind, listening woman, and pursues a doomed friendship.

The plot sounds rather hopeless, but Solas is not a common film. It takes time to reveal the true character of its cast and never forces any conventions on the audience. I really liked how the resolution was so surprising yet right.

Fans of Ingmar Bergman will notice some similarities and enjoy this beautiful film. More libraries should add this 1999 Spanish film, which won 35 international awards, to their DVD collections.

Chas Addams: a Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis

I continue to work on my readers' advisory guide to biography. This is one of the books that I have enjoyed most so far. Not many libraries in my area have it, but they should. It will definitely be in my guide.

New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams was not a person to stop rumors. Let the public believe he slept in a coffin, owned his own guillotine, and dropped eyeballs into martinis. He cultivated his aura by wearing antique clothes, driving classic cars, and cracking morbid jokes. Did he really laugh at funerals? Did he really have love affairs with actresses? Yes and Yes.

In Chas Addams: A Cartoonist's Life, biographer Linda H. Davis looks behind the Addams legends. She tells how he always drew a variety of cartoons, but the morbid ones got all of the public attention. She also describes his high life in New York, where he hung out with celebrities and wooed actresses. Best of all, she includes several dozen classic Addams cartoons.

Readers who enjoy this book will also like Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse by Douglas M. Parker. Though Nash was more of a family man. both could be wickedly funny. Book books are admiring accounts of funny men who entertained Americans for decades.

Davis, Linda H. Chas Addams: A Cartoonist's Life. Random House, 2006. 382p. ISBN 0679463259.

Photography Books by Art Shay

Last week Bonnie and I saw an extensive exhibit of the photographs of Chicago photojournalist Art Shay at the Chicago Historical Museum. The exhibit, which takes up a large section of the second floor, includes works from Shay's days with Life magazine in the late 1940s to a few recent photographs. Most of the work was from the 1950s and 1960s and almost all of it was black and white.

We looked at a small book that the museum had to go along with the exhibit, but it was very disappointing. It had only a sampling of the many photos. The museum shop also had a reduced size version of Nelson Algren's Chicago by Shay. I knew that there had to be better volumes than these.

I picked three to reserve from various libraries in my library's consortium, which together do show many, though still not all, of the photos.

The first is the original edition of Nelson Algren's Chicago. The first part of the exhibit featured the many photos of Algren and his haunts that Shay took while on an assignment for Life magazine in the early 1950s. While some of the photos are humorous, some are sad, especially the scenes of drug addicts and alcoholics. Life never ran the photo story because some of these images were considered beyond the mainstream acceptability. It was the 1950s.

Spread across pages 2 and 3 is a great photo shot on a Sunday morning on Madison Street, also called Skid Row. It is framed by a car window and shows a variety of street characters going about their business. The mood reminds me of A Sunday on La Grand Jatte by Georges Seurat.

I was struck by the burning of the street garbage on Maxwell Street, shown on page 43. It looks like 1900, not 1950. Can there have really been such places in 1950?


The idea behind the collection of photos in Couples by Art Shay is that there are visual pairs in every image. From the striking cover a reader might image that meant romantic couples, but that is not the case. It could be a pair of pigs or water towers, but most are people.

The cover image is also on page 6. It makes me think of a scene in the movie Bull Durham. Shay took the picture as part of a publicity campaign for a play.

This book includes a lot of non-Algren photos. Most were not in the exhibit, but I like them anyway. On page 35 are two rather frightened looking National Guardsmen in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention. On page 107 is a photo of boy who has drawn himself into his coat so he appears to he headless and armless. On page 85 telephone linemen are up on telephone poles playing catch with a ball.

The museum exhibit featured a display of Shay's photos taken with secret cameras hidden in books, briefcases, handbags, and newspapers. He was able to get photos in court rooms, jails, and other places that cameras were forbidden. I am sure he used a hidden camera to take the photo on page 89 of the autopsies of two nurses killed by Richard Speck.

Album for an Age is a book to read after seeing the larger sized photography books. The reproductions are smaller and not glossy, which is a bit disappointing. Shay, however, tells stories of what the pictures depict and how he took them. A real fan of photography will find the book essential, as will people who are interested in the history of Chicago and its people.

This book also includes some celebrity photos, like the ones in the later part of the exhibit at the museum. Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, and Ernest Hemingway are included, as is a group shot of Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack.

If you are in the Chicago area, I recommend the exhibit to you. If not, check out some of Art Shay's books.