Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography by Pierre Assouline

Bonnie and I went to the Art Institute of Chicago this weekend to see a fantastic exhibit of European tapestries that the museum has been restoring for nearly two decades. While we were there, we went down to the photography galleries to see an exhibit of Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs. It was actually a little disappointing, as there were only a few photos there. One of those was of a bicyclist going past a spiral staircase, which made me think of Aaron Schmidt and his love of bicycles.

In the gift shop, we found stacks of books to go with all the exhibits, including Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography by Pierre Assouline, a book that is included in my forthcoming guide to biography Real Lives Revealed. Assouline recounts the Cartier-Bresson's development from a painter to a photographer who made very composed, artist images and then to a photojournalist who was dedicated to showing the world as it really was. During the middle part of the twentieth century, at a time when photography was not so easy to share as it is today, he was often a witness with a camera, showing newspaper and magazine readers what was happening in distant corners of the globe. The book has been out a few years, but is still a good acquisition if your library has readers interested in photography, art, or twentieth century events.

Assouline, Pierre. Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography. Thames & Hudson, 2005. 280p. ISBN 9780500512234.

Progress Report on Real Lives Revealed

I can relax a little bit now, as I have submitted all the content of Real Lives Revealed except the indexes, which I finish after I see galleys with page numbers. I created the subject index without the page numbers over the last five days. It was an interesting exercise that uncovered some inconsistencies that I corrected. For instance, I had called Jane Goodall a "primatologist" while calling Diane Fossey a "zoologist." I had used both "clergy" and "clergymen." I had used "England" where I should have used "Great Britain" and vise versa. I had applied "Civil Rights" where I really meant "Racial Discrimination." I corrected the chapters and resubmitted them. It is all much tighter now.

With the subject index in a spreadsheet done for now, my next project is merging the titles, the authors, and the "now try" titles into a massive author/title index.

In the meantime, I hope to blog a bit more, including some biography alerts.

Who Will Be the Next Generation of Biographers?

As I have continued to work on my book about biography readers' advisory, I have become increasingly aware that the community of professional biographers is quickly aging. Many of them are in their sixties, seventies, and even older. I can identify only a few authors with three or more books that can be considered biographical who are under fifty years old.

I surmised that biography was a profession for later in life, which it is for some authors. Perhaps reflecting on someone else's life is comforting as one foresees the end of one's own life only a few decades away. The evidence does not, however, bear this out.

Peter Ackroyd was 32 when he wrote his first biography.

Stephen Ambrose was 26.

A. Scott Berg was 29.

David Herbert Donald was 28.

Joseph J. Ellis was 30.

Antonia Fraser was 37.

Doris Kearnes Goodwin was 33.

J. Randy Taraborrelli was 29.

I could go on. Most had three biographies by the time they reached fifty.

I only see Douglas Brinkley, Ross King, and Ben Macintyre in the under fifty crowd with three or more books that could be considered as biographies.

So, who will write biographies in the future? There may be some openings. Know how to write?

Happy Days Are Here Again: The Book is Submitted

Today is a great day for many reasons. First, the nation is celebrating an historic election. Second, the Thomas Ford Memorial Library is open again with a new teen area and a better placement of the reference desk. Third, I have submitted my book Real Lives Revealed to Libraries Unlimited.

About the book submission. I really felt a sense of wonder when I composed the table of contents on Monday night. Even though it was still a collection of electronic files, the book suddenly seemed solid and complete.

None of the achievements is really complete. President-elect Barack Obama has many challenges ahead. My library still has a number of furniture, collection, and policy decisions to make after our remodeling. I have more work on the book.

I will be spending the next couple of weeks finishing appendices. There will certainly be some rewrites, and, at some point when I have a galley, I will have the task of completing the index. Still, it seems a great and momentous day.

Celebration

Yellow Leaves
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

Today
I drive through a shower of bright leaves
Falling
Swirling
Like a rain of confetti
A celebration

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

The Whereabouts of ricklibrarian

The late hours of a Saturday night seem like a good time to briefly resurface. For the last several months, I have been focused on the writing of Real Lives Revealed for Libraries Unlimited, which will be a readers' advisory guide to biography. As a result, I have said very little here. It is not that I have not had anything to say, and I am sure that once the project is done, there will be a flood of postings, so stay tuned.

I attended a very interesting meeting of reference librarians at the Grande Prairie Public Library in Hazel Crest, Illinois a few weeks ago. Katherine Ingram of the Elmhurst Public Library and I demonstrated ENCORE, a catalog overlay for Innovative library catalogs. Actually, ENCORE might work for other vendor catalogs, too, but I do not remember. I was actually more interested in the general discussion afterwards in which reference librarians talked about putting more of their traditional reference materials into circulation, loaning their new magazines, and organizing collections without Dewey decimals. The librarians in the south suburbs of Chicago are trying hard to meet the needs of their clients.

At Thomas Ford we are rearranging to give our teens more area in a better space. To do that, we have heavily weeded our magazine and reference collections, moved some reference books to circulating, and moved the rest of the reference books into our tall shelving units instead of the low one that take prime library real estate. We are still committed to reference, and I think the books might actually get better use closer to the circulating books on shelves at eye level instead of below. We might move our desk, too. Stay tuned.

Another issue at my library is what to do about our microfilm. It is just sitting, again in valuable space. Also, our service representative has informed us that the supplies for our reader printer have been discontinued. He is urging us to buy a new unit, but I think it might just sit unused. We have enough supplies to last several years at current usage. He is right that we will have to do something sometime, but I think we can wait and see if new options appear.

I am surrounded by a lively group of librarians at Thomas Ford and it is fun going to work everyday right now, as we are changing our newsletter, our marketing, our programming, and our collections. I promise to comment more at a latter date.

In the meantime, I am learning more everyday about the fascinating genre of biography. I have written the second drafts of six of twelve chapters at this point. There are currently 605 book profiles that recommend three to seven other books in the guide. They began looking like the entries in Sarah Cords' Real Story, but she has expanded her book profiles for her upcoming guide to investigative narrative nonfiction, and I am trying to keep up. Anyone who enjoys reading should be able to find something new to read. I am eager to finish and see the book in print. So, very little blogging for awhile.

I will resurface soon.

P. S. I have a new Toyota Corolla which shows what gas mileage I am getting as I drive. I have been using it as biofeedback to control my speed and acceleration. I have improved from 29.5 mpg to 33.4 mpg. Watch out if you see me. I might be going slightly slower but I'm getting where I want to go.

Jamie's Great Display for Banned Books Week

Jamie's Great Display
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

Jamie Kallio at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library put this great Banned Books Week display up a week ago. What everyone commented on was her thinking to use the drawers to stand up books. We also noticed as the week went by that the books displayed in the drawers were being chosen more frequently than books on the rest of the display. Jamie has now changed the way we display forever.

The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903 by Roger I. Abrams

Don't judge a book by its cover. I picked up The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903 by Roger I. Abrams hoping to get a light, entertaining account of the fabled beginnings of the fall classic. I got much more than I expected.

It takes a bit of reading before actually getting to the profiles of the players and accounts of the eight games in Abrams book. The author's real focus is the world of the World Series, which in this case was specifically Boston and Pittsburgh and by extension all of America and any country from which an immigrant might have come. The "Fanatics" is not just tacked on to the end of the title. Abrams looks deeply into who attended the games and supported the sport. Before and between the game stories are sections about the rise of the Brahmin class in Boston and how it differed from Yankee culture, the Irish working class, the industrialization of Pittsburgh, migrations from southern and eastern Europe, the pogroms of Czarist Russia, and other assorted topics.

Highlighted in the story is the group of devoted fans led by Nuf Ced McGreevy, owner of the Third Base Saloon. McGreevy and his friends traveled from Boston to Pittsburgh to root for the Boston Americans. While in the steel city, they hired bands to march around downtown to boisterously proclaim their allegiance and to accompany the team from its hotel to the field before games. At the end of the book, in accounting for what became of the major personalities after the series, Abrams reveals that McGreevy donated his baseball memorabilia collection from his saloon to the Boston Public Library, and the saloon itself was turned into a library branch.

The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903 will appeal more to readers who like history than average sports fans. For those willing to dip into the past, it is an interesting approach to learning about an era.

Abrams, Roger I. The First World Series and the Baseball Fanatics of 1903. Northeastern University Press, 2003. ISBN 1555535615

Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson by Frances Clayton Gray and Yanick Rice Lamb

As I research and write my book on biography, I continue to find great stories that I did not know. Here is a draft of an entry for a book about tennis star Althea Gibson. Your library should get this book if it does not own it.

Gray, Frances Clayton, and Lamb, Yanick Rice.

Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson. John Wiley & Sons, 2004. 244p. ISBN 0471471658.

At five feet eleven inches tall, tennis player Althea Gibson (1927-2003), a sharecropper's daughter, was a dominant presence on the tennis court. Between 1942 and 1949, she excelled in the all black American Tennis Association, but she was ineligible to play in the all white United States Lawn Tennis Association. In 1950, Gibson applied to play in the U.S. Open and would have been denied had revered champion Alice Marble not written a public letter calling for Gibson to get her chance. Authors Frances Clayton Gray and Yanick Rice Lamb report that Gibson lost her first USLTA match but came back to eventually win championships at the U.S. Open, French Open, and Wimbledon. The authors chronicle the life of an amazing athlete who also played basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters and became a professional golfer.

Subjects: African Americans; Gibson, Althea; Teen Reads; Tennis Players; Women.

Now try: Gibson won several doubles championships at Wimbledon. In one of those matches she was paired with a Jewish partner, Angela Buxton. Bruce Schoenfeld reports how the two shunned players became good friends in The Match: Althea Gibson and Angel Buxton: How Two Outsiders - One Black, the Other Jewish - Forged a Friendship and Made Sports History. Gibson’s presence in professional tennis paved the way for Arthur Ashe, who recounted his career in Days of Grace: A Memoir. After tennis, Gibson joined the ladies golf tour. David L. Hudson, Jr. recounts the history of the ladies tour and profiles some key players in his Women in Golf: The Players, the History, and the Future of the Sport.

Thoughts on Biography and Mortality and Baseball

I have been deeply involved with biographical books for months now. As I write up my assessments of these books, I include the lifespan of the subjects, usually in the (birth year-death year) form. It is a quick way of indicating the historical era of the subject and will be useful for my chronology in the appendix.

After months of looking at (1806-1861) and (1564-1616) and (1898-1937) and more, I have begun to measure my life against the subjects. It reminds me of watching baseball's home run hitters of today pass stars of the past on the all-time home run list. Manny Ramirez has passed Ted Williams and Willie McCovey and is bearing down on Jimmie Foxx and Mickey Mantle. It is the same with me and the cultural figures in the chapter that I am now writing.

Here is where I stand against a selection of cultural figures from the past:

• Eudora Welty - 92
• Michelangelo Buonarrati - 89
• Dr. Seuss - 87
• Washington Irving - 76
• William Faulkner - 65
• George Eliot - 61
• Anne Bradstreet - 60
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - 60
• Charles Dickens - 58
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 55
• Woody Guthrie - 55
• Rudolf Nureyev - 55
• Paul Gaughan - 54
  
• ricklibrarian - 54
• Mary Shelley - 53
• Frank Zappa - 53
  
• William Shakespeare - 52
• Frida Kahlo - 47
  
• Oscar Wilde - 46
  
• George Bellows - 43
• Johannes Vermeer - 43
• Margaret Wise Brown - 42
• Franz Kafka - 40
• Frederic Chopin - 39
  
• George Gerswhin - 39
• Felix Mendelssohn - 38
• Vincent Van Gogh - 37
  
• Percy B. Shelley - 29

I am quickly bearing down on Guthrie, Nureyev, and Browning. The Arts and Humanities Research Council should be alerted to send their reporters to cover the chase.

I noticed in the sports chapter that I just finished that I have already passed Babe Ruth and am in range of catching Vince Lombardi.

Seriously, sitting at 54, I view anyone who died before 80 as dying young. I think my own wishes are effecting my thinking.

Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America by Leon Dash

As I write my book on readers' advisory, I try to include books that many libraries own and that are fairly current. In a way, I am working toward the conservation of some titles, hoping they won't get weeded too soon. Here is a draft review of a book that I want to keep in circulation.

Dash, Leon.
Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America. Basic Books, 1996. 279p. ISBN 0465070922.

Rosa Lee Cunningham (1936-1995) had spent about fifty years in the housing projects of Washington, D.C., when journalist Leon Dash asked to shadow her. For four years, he watched her manage her home and followed her on errands: bailing children out of jail, attending funerals, and visiting drug treatment centers. At the end of this book, Cunningham dies of AIDS. Using his observations, Dash wrote about Cunningham and the lives of the desperately poor in a series of prize-winning articles for the Washington Post, which he expanded into this candid biography.

Subjects: African Americans; Civil Rights; Cunningham, Rosa Lee; Drug Addicts; Poor; Teen Reads; Washington, D.C.

Now try: In A Welfare Mother, Susan Sheehan writes about Carmen Santana, a Puerto Rican mother who income did not meet her expenses. This eye-opening book, which was expanded from an article in The New Yorker, refutes prevailing ideas about women "on the dole" wanting to be there. Alex Kotlowitz follows the life of two boys to show the difficulty of escaping the slums of Chicago in There Are No Children Here. Beverly Lowry tells how one woman escaped poverty in Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker (see this chapter).

Historical Biography on Audiobooks and in Large Print

I am putting the finishing touches on a first draft of a chapter on historical biography for my book on biography readers' advisory. One of the thing that I have been doing is checking the availability of audiobooks and large print for titles that I review. With the growing demand from an aging population and from people inclined to audio, it is helpful knowing what is available.

How you view the current situation depends on whether you view glasses as half empty or half full. Of the 71 historical biography titles in the chapter, 18 are available as unabridged audiobooks, either cassette tapes or compact discs. You may say, "See how the audiobook industry has grown! 25 percent of these popular books are in audio." If you have recently had clients expecting everything in audio, you may be disappointed.

Large print is definitely lagging. Only 9 of the 71 titles are available in large type. This might be understandable, as many of the historical biographies are lengthy. These books produced in large print might be mighty hefty. Elderly readers might not be able to hold them.

Six of the most well-known books are available in both audio and large print.

The report can be tempered with some good news for the certifiably visually handicapped. Worldcat shows another six or seven of these titles available as recording for the blind and dyslexic. I do not note these in my chapter because they are not available commercially of to the general public.

I hope the state of audiobook availability is better in fiction. Who knows?

WorldCat Is the Place to Identify Audiobooks

Client requests for audio versions of books has increased in libraries over the past five or ten years. In my library, when asked for an audiobook, I always check our consortium's catalog first; if my library or another member library in our system owns the wanted audiobook, it is simple to place a reserve. If no member owns an audio version of a book, the next question has often been whether such audiobook truly exists. In the past, I have often searched Amazon, a habit I developed when I noticed links to editions on title records. Now, I have changed my ways.

As I am adding titles to the book that I am writing about readers' advisory for biography, I am trying to identify when audiobooks are available. Of course, this is getting more complicated as the formats multiply. Sticking to cassettes and compact discs because they are more likely to be available through interlibrary loan, I am finding that WorldCat is the easiest and most reliable source of audiobook information.

As I completed a chapter about Scientific Biography, I ran a test against Worldcat, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble websites to see which identified the most unabridged audiobooks. Here are some of my findings:

Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen

• WorldCat - CDs from both BBC and Audio Partners
• Amazon - CDs from Audio Partner
• Barnes & Noble - CDs from BBC

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

• WorldCat - CDs from HarperCollins and Recorded Books, cassettes from HarperCollins
• Amazon - CDs from HarperCollins
• Barnes & Noble - CDs from HarperCollins, cassettes from HarperCollins

The Day Donny Herbert Work Up by Rich Blake

• WorldCat - CDs from Books on Tape
• Amazon - nothing
• Barnes & Noble - nothing

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

• WorldCat - CDs from Tantor Media
• Amazon - CDs from Tantor Media
• Barnes & Noble - CDs from Tantor Media

Crashing Through by Robert Kurson

• WorldCat - CDs and cassettes from Books on Tape
• Amazon - only abridged CD from Random House
• Barnes & Noble - only abridged CD from Random House

Longitude by Dava Sobel

• WorldCat - CDs from Books on Tape and Random House, cassettes from Books on Tape
• Amazon - unabridged cassettes from Macmillan
• Barnes & Noble - only abridged cassettes from Macmillan

This pattern continued through my test. Amazon and Barnes & Noble rarely identify all the editions that are cited on WorldCat. WorldCat also identifies some audiobooks that are not generally available, i.e. recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic which are restricted to clients with special needs.

So, WorldCat is the spot for the audiobook identifications. Knowing that editions exist, they can then either by purchased or perhaps borrowed form holding libraries.

Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry

I have always enjoyed reading about other cultures and foreign countries. The appeal is to learn about or experience a different time and place. That is not what I expected to find in a book titled Books: A Memoir, Larry McMurtry's latest work of nonfiction. How different could a bookseller's life be than a librarian's life? Very different, it turns out.

The book as physical object is much more important to the antiquarian bookseller. McMurtry is always concerned with editions, conditions, and inscriptions. Is there a dust jacket? Who has owned this book? What is it worth in dollars and cents? As a librarian, I just want an attractive copy that someone will borrow, not a first edition with proper markings.

As a public librarian, I need to acquire books that will appeal to various members of the community. While not every book is going to appeal to multitudes, I do want to see each go out several times with some regularity. As a bookseller, McMurtry only has to find one person to buy each book. Of course, that is not always easy. He describes numerous books that he kept in stock for decades before either selling it to a customer or throwing it into a big sale to another bookseller.

If McMurtry is correct, antiquarian booksellers sell more to other booksellers than to customers. They seem more like collectors than business people sometimes. Many seem to have a strong love of books that warps their profit instinct. Many of the colleagues that McMurtry describes have gone out of business.

I do recognize a common concern in McMurtry's statement on page 249:

The bane of large secondhand book dealers is that junk inevitably seeps in, and the iron rule is that good books do not pull bad books up: bad books pull good books down.

Amen. Our shelves look so much better after a good weeding, and the good books become easier to find.

I thought that Books: A Memoir started kind of slowly. It seems so strange at first to have such very short chapters with lots of empty pages between chapters. When he opens a shop, the narrative really seems to take off, as he has many odd stories to tell.

Recommended for readers who like quirky, opinionated books.

McMurtry, Larry. Books: A Memoir. Simon & Schuster, 2008. ISBN 9781416583349

How to Do Biography: A Primer by Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton has put out another book about the writing of biography. Last year he published Biography: A Brief History. This year he has issued a practical guide for the writing and selling of biography to publishers called How to Do Biography: A Primer. Some topics that first time writers might not expect in this book include how to get permissions to quote from documents and how to prepare to defend a book from challenges by offended parties.

Believing that biographers do need to have a sense of the history of the genre, Hamilton covers a little of the same ground that he covered in his previous book. "Real life depiction has always been controversial," says the author. A good biography focuses not on facts and incidents but on character reputations. If the subject or family and friends are living, an honest biography is certain to offend. Shakespeare knew this and stuck to historical plays when depicting monarchs, trying not to land in jail or to lose his head.

Hamilton offers good advice about writer focus:

Asking yourself who, ultimately, will be interested in, or willing to read, the life you're recounting should be your constant concern. When biographies fail to spark interest, become tedious or unsatisfying, it is usually because the biographer had lost his commitment to engage the reader and is taking the audience for granted, by getting too self-absorbed in the life he is depicting. Never forget or neglect the reader!

We should all remember that. Hamilton's book, which includes a chapter on the responsibilities of the memoir writer, should be popular in many public and college libraries.

Hamilton, Nigel. How to Do Biography: A Primer. Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN 9780674027961.

On a Road in Africa by Kim Doner

Though I have not finished many adult books lately, I am enjoying the children's books that Bonnie and Laura have been bringing home. Yesterday, I found a very colorful book with a story told in verse called On a Road in Africa by Kim Doner by my pillow. I am always pleased to find a book about Africa. Doner's book tells about the work day of an animal rescue worker in Nairobi, Kenya. The verse is witty and the artwork shows a diversity of people and wildlife, just as you would expect in Kenya.

Kenya has had so many problems lately, with its contested election, the riots that followed, AIDS, and poverty. It is refreshing to see a lighter view with a hopeful message, offering a vision for the way life ought to be in that beautiful land. If enough children can believe in friendship, perhaps it can become true.

Even the end panels are well used in this attractive book. There you will find English words and Swahili translations. Get the book and read it right before you turn off the light. Lala salama.

Doner, Kim. On a Road in Africa. Tricycle Press, 2008. ISBN 9781582462301

Bryson's Dictionary for Writer and Editors by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson says in his introduction to Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors that he has been writing for over thirty years. In that time he has had to look up a lot of words to see 1) how to spell them, 2) whether they mean what he thinks they mean, and 3) how to make them plural. He has also needed to identify many people and places. Being industrious and always thinking about another book to publish, he has kept all his research and created this unusual reference book with an abundance of small facts.

As a reference librarian, I do not really see an advantage to using Bryson's book over other works, such a the American Heritage Dictionary, but it is fun. (Of course, I actually find using the American Heritage Dictionary fun.) Occasionally, Bryson editorializes a little, such as letting you know that he thinks "snuck" is going to replace "sneaked," but he does not really try to be humorous in this work. Mostly, I just like seeing what words gave Bryson trouble. He too at some point had to look up "phenomenon" to check the vowels (I almost added extra syllables. I have sometime said "phenomenonanon.") If he has had to look up all these words, his accomplishments seem infinitely greater. Perhaps prospective writers can look at this book and say, "If Bill can overcome all this and write well, maybe I can, too."

Bryson, Bill. Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Broadway Books, 2008. ISBN 9780767922692

The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories by Max Apple

I am a big Max Apple fan. I have been ever since I read The Oranging of America and Other Stories back in 1976 when he was a professor at Rice University in Houston. I was living in Texas at the time, too, and enjoyed how he set some of his entertaining stories in places that I knew, like the Astrodome. I also really enjoyed his memoirs of growing up Jewish in Grand Rapids, Michigan I Love Gootie: My Grandmother's Story and Roommates: My Grandfather's Story. Understandably, I was excited to learn about The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories, his first story collection in twenty years.

Apple continues to know where I go. I started the collection while on vacation in Saugatuck, Michigan. Bonnie and I went up to Muskegon one day to see some museums and old houses. The next morning I discovered "Indian Giver," an Apple story set in Muskegon of all places. I had seen the tourist sites. Apple took me to the junkyards where men were trying to practice their religious faiths while making a living off used auto parts and scrap metal.

In a larger sense, Apple knows where we all go. His stories take place at basketball games, pharmaceutical conventions, playgrounds, stereo stores, hotel lobbies, and the local Home Depot. These are common places but his characters are extraordinary. They always seem to have unique problems that somehow beautifully reveal universal themes. There are a couple of stories set in nursing homes, "Strawberry Shortcake" and "Adventures in Dementia," that will connect with many readers. Again, Apple knows where we go or may be going sometime soon.

The title story takes the reader back to Texas to a college town where a Jewish family is temporarily living across the street from a fraternity house. What the teenage son sees out his window shocks him. The story is brilliant and the last paragraph is a classic twist that I will say no more about.

I find that few people seem to know about Apple. I look really smart when I introduce his books to story readers. Try his books and then spread the word.

Apple, Max. The Jew of Home Depot and Other Stories. John Hopkins University Press, 2008. ISBN 9780801887383

Most Checked Out Biographies at Thomas Ford, 1999-2008

I am weeding lots of books this summer. When I ran a report of our biography section, I sorted it by number of checkouts. I was slightly surprised by the results. I knew the top two books would be at the top but I did not realize that the third and fourth books were that popular. I think book discussion groups may have influenced this list. I also notice that eight of the ten books are memoirs. The two books that are third person accounts about historical figures utilize letters and diaries heavily.

Here's the list, based on January 1999 to date (the length of time our library system has used its current vendor):

1. John Adams by David McCullough (57)

2. It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong (55)

3. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride (52)

4. The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls (49)

(tie) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (49)

6. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (38)

7. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott (37)

8. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel (36)

9. Population - 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time by Michael Perry (35)

(tie) The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raise 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less by Terry Ryan (35)

The checkouts include when our copies were loaned to other libraries, but they do not show when our readers got the same titles through interlibrary loan. I assume the two balance out, i. e. that our copies have gone to other libraries as much as other libraries' copies have come into our library.

I am obviously not deleting these books.

I'd be interested in learning what the top circulating biographies are in your library, too.