Even an Ostrich Needs a Nest: Where Birds Begin by Irene Kelly

Deep in winter, there are many empty nests in our trees. Most that we see wedged into bare branches of our neighborhood trees are circular structures of twigs, what many people think of first when thinking of bird nests. We don't often consider how large and small birds in countries around the world sometimes need something different. In her colorful and entertaining book aimed at younger readers, Even an Ostrich Needs a Nest: Where Birds Begin, author and illustrator Irene Kelly draws our attention to the diverse world of nests and the birds that make them.

Though I have spent years watching nature documentaries on public television, I discovered new information about bird behaviors in this book aimed at young naturalists. I never knew the advantage of pointed eggs; Kelly says that they will not roll away like rounder eggs, which is important to birds who lay their eggs on sheer cliffs. I also never knew about Gila woodpeckers willingly sharing their saguaros with elf owls and western blind snakes; the three species benefit from a clever security arrangement. Jacanas float nests on lakes while horned coots build islands for their nests. Kelly tells about forty unique nesting habits, featuring birds from every continent. She also suggests ways to attract birds to your yard by providing nesting materials.

Even an Ostrich Needs a Nest: Where Birds Begin is just the kind of book that children who like nature study and big people who still think like kids will enjoy.

Kelly, Irene. Even an Ostrich Needs a Nest: Where Birds Begin. Holiday House, 2009. ISBN 9780823421022

Face to Face with Elephants by Beverly and Dereck Joubert

We have been watching Beverly and Dereck Joubert in African wildlife documentaries for decades. Articles by the dedicated couple of nature photographers also have appear in National Geographic and other periodicals. Bonnie discovered that they also wrote some wildlife books for children, including Face to Face with Elephants.

Being face to face with an elephant is not where you really want to be, unless you are a crazy wildlife photographer. While elephants will mostly ignore humans in vehicles, allowing for great photographs of these awesome animals, sounds and flashes will upset them. Being large and equipped with long sharp tusks, they can be very dangerous. They can easily turn over a Land Rover. The Jouberts are not crazy and try to respect the space of the elephants, but elephants are somewhat unpredictable. They tell about being charged and slammed by a matriarch at the beginning of Face to Face with Elephants. As you would expect, they got an amazing close-up photo out of the incident. See page 4. I like the caption: "When this elephant came at us out of nowhere, I knew we were going down!"

My favorite photo in the book is on page 7. A group of elephants is wading into a shallow pond on a sunny day. The fun for me is in trying to count them. If you count eyes, there are seven. Count tusks and there are nine, including the baby without tusks. Look for trunks, and you will find thirteen.

With beautiful photographs, stories about elephant encounters, and important information about elephant conservation, Face to Face with Elephants should be in all public and school libraries, along with the Jouberts' book Face to Face with Lions.

Joubert, Beverly. Face to Face with Elephants. National Geographic, 2008. ISBN 9781426303265.

Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford by Julia Fox

Why does Julia Fox use the word "infamous" in the title of her book Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford? As described by Fox, the sister-in-law of Henry VIII's second wife seemed to have been just a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. She mostly did as she was expected. Her parents aspired to have her marry well, so she was sent to serve Henry's first wife, Catherine of Aragon. There she met and married George Boleyn. When Henry broke his bonds with Catherine and the Roman Catholic Church, he married Anne Boleyn, George's sister. Jane only did as expected in serving her sister-in-law, prospering with her new family while Henry's beneficence lasted. When Anne and George lost their heads for treason against their king, Jane miraculously survived to live temporarily in reduced circumstances until she reentered court to serve Henry's third, fourth, and fifth wives. In the service of fifth wife Catherine Howard, she was condemned for keeping the queen's secrets (what ladies were expected to do) when her ultimate allegiance should have been to the king. In Fox's account, Jane's sole misstep was not retiring to the country to live in obscurity when she had a chance.

Only in the epilogue to Jane Boleyn, after the subject's beheading, do readers learn origin of her "infamous" character. According to Fox, royal historians needing to spin history to favor both the queens and the king used Jane as a scapegoat, recasting her as a manipulating woman who designed both Anne Boleyn's and Catherine Howard's falls. Using original sources, Fox found no condemnation of Jane in her lifetime.

Why should we be interested in a sideline character? Jane Boleyn may not have been in charge or even able to control her own fate, but she was close to events that changed the politics and culture of Great Britain. She saw much that would impress any subject of the realm. She was present at banquets, weddings, coronations, births, and trials, as well as in the bedchambers in times of infidelity. Fox describes many of these in great detail.

What I do not understand is the contrite execution speeches of men and women losing their heads. Each condemned person standing before an executioner confessed and asked God's blessing for their righteous king. Perhaps the witness reports should not really be believed. I kept waiting for someone to say that the king should rot in Hell. Many people died so that Henry could have his many wives and claim many great houses and estates. With each death the royal treasure grew.

Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford is a moving story of injustice which will interest many fans of English history. The audiobook is particularly entertaining.

Fox, Julia. Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford. Ballantine Books, 2007. ISBN 9780345485410

10 compact discs. Books on Tape, 2008. ISBN 9781415946503

Forty Years of Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water Album

Why don't you write me,
A letter would brighten
My loneliest evening.

Architects may come and
Architects may go and
Never change your point of view.
When I run dry,
I stop awhile and think of you.

I'd rather be a forest than street.
Yes I would.
If I only could,
I surely would.

Jubilation,
She loves me again,
I fall on the floor and I'm laughing.

Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know that you've been eager to fly now.
Hey let your honesty shine, shine, shine.
Da-n-da-da-n da-n-da-da
Like it shines on me.

Sail on, silvergirl,
Sail on by.
Your time has come to shine.
All your dreams are on their way.

In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains.

I'm taking a day off audiobooks to listen to this favorite old album.

Alexandra: A Film by Alexander Sokurov

Alexandra is not the kind of film that you ever see being produced in Hollywood. There is almost no action and only a very subtle story line. Because the setting is so foreign and unsettling, however, I found it riveting.

The situation is never really explained, and the location is never identified. Viewers have to piece together clues from the film with their own knowledge of world events. The film is in Russian by a Russian director, so the soldiers must be Russians, and the land that they are occupying is probably Chechnya. Liner notes verify this, but in a sense it does not matter. There is a dearth of identifying marks of any kind, so the soldiers could be any soldiers stuck in any foreign land where they are not wanted. They spend most of their time in a camp outside a heavily bombed city. Everything is camouflaged - tents, tanks, uniforms - even the bench outside the tents - but security seems very lax. The soldiers themselves are mostly skinny boys with nothing to do except punch each other and hope someone will bring some cigarettes and cookies from the market.

The story is that one of the officers invites his grandmother, whom he has not seen in seven years, to visit him at the battlefront. She is brought to his camp via an old boxcar on a somewhat camouflaged train. Soldiers have to lift her up and down from the boxcar and later into a military transport vehicle to get her to camp, where there is really nothing for her to do, except wander. There is also nearly nothing to see but shades of olive and brown.

The grandmother is played by a very famous Russian opera star Galina Vishnavskaya. In this film, however, she is far from glamorous, as in very plain clothes she carries her small bag around in the dust and heat. At the market she meets angry men and sympathetic women. One woman, who had been a teacher in better days, offers her hospitality. This woman's red hat is the only relief from olive and brown in the film.

So, what's Alexandra about? It seems to me very much in the Cinéma Verité tradition, like films from France and Italy just after World War II. The idea is just to show things as they are. I also suspect it is criticism of military occupation of foreign lands, but that may just be what I want to think. Someone with more knowledge of Russian-Chechen relations might see something different. I suspect an American audience would end up thinking about Iraq and Afghanistan. I am sure it would be a provocative film to show for a discussion group.

Alexandra. Cinema Guild, 2009. ISBN 9780781512923

Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by Edna O'Brien

If this were the early nineteenth century and I was living in Great Britain or on the European continent, I would add these admonitions to my Do-Not-Do List:

• Do not lend money to Lord Byron.
• Do not sell Lord Byron anything on credit.
• Do not rile Lord Byron in a drinking establishment.
• Do not mention Lord Byron's foot in his presence.
• Do not invite Lord Byron into my house.
• Do not under any conditions introduce Lord Byron to my wife or daughter or son.

If I were female, I would add:

• Do not send Lord Byron any confidential letters. (He shares them with gossips and quotes them in poems.)
• Do not expect any child support from Lord Byron.

I have obviously been reading about poet George Gordon Byron, known as Lord Byron, one of history's most outrageous characters. The book is Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life by novelist Edna O'Brien. I chose to read it after hearing O'Brien discuss her book on the Biography Podcast and getting a recommendation from Annie at the library.

Each reading of a book is a conversation between an author and a reader. I think of this because I do not agree with one of the reviewers' quotes on the back cover of the book. John Banville says that O'Brien's compact biography of Byron is admiring. That is not how I perceive it at all. I felt initially that she was highly critical, though never condemning. A closer look shows that she really just tells the story with all its glorious and sordid details. She lets readers make their own judgments. Banville and I read expecting and seeing a different book.

Readers may want to keep notes to identify all of Byron's romantic affairs and how they reappear in his autobiographical poetry, which is the focus of O'Brien's book. The biography also reveals how strained the poet's relations were with Percy and Mary Shelley and that John Keats and Byron despised each other. How could we have ever imagined that "Bryon, Shelley, Keats" (which I have heard as "Byron, Kelly, and Sheets") was a brotherhood?

Byron in Love is an entertaining introduction to the poet, which should be in most public library collections.

O'Brien, Edna. Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life. W. W. Norton, 2009. ISBN 9780393070118

Corvus: A Life with Birds

Crows, rooks, magpies, and ravens belong to the corvids, a family of birds that many people dislike for their jet black feathers, reputation for theft, and scavenging of carrion. Thought to be portents of evil, they have been used by poets, storytellers, and filmmakers to add suspense to their works. In some communities they have been shot, poisoned, and trapped as vermin. Few are ever raised as pets. Believing the corvids have been unfairly vilified, Scottish bird rescuer Esther Woolfson tells about adopting injured birds in Corvus: A Life with Birds.

Woolfson did not set out to become a corvid friend and advocate. Neighbors who knew that the author had a variety of indoor birds as well as a dovecott full of pigeons brought her abandoned chicks and injured adults found in their yards. Loving birds, despite misgivings, she took in these birds. Because most could never be reintroduced to the wild, her adoptions became life commitments. Luckily for her, she found her rook Chicken, her crow Ziki, and her magpie Spike to be good companions. They tore up papers, dug holes in walls, and splattered the carpets when excited, but Woolfson has never minded cleaning. Dogs can be as hard on a house. By dedicating specific rooms to birds, the author feels she has maintained a relatively normal home enriched with animal friends.

In Corvus: A Life with Birds, the author mixes her amusing stories and species insights with cultural and environmental history. Readers also get a nice tour of the countryside around Aberdeen, Scotland. Ornithological information may challenge some readers but Woolfson draws them in with her entertaining accounts of her bird encounters. For public and academic libraries.

Woolfson, Esther. Corvus: A Life with Birds. Counterpoint, 2009. ISBN 9781582434773

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by David Bianculli

Comic folksingers Tom and Dick Smothers really are brothers, though Tom is actually the older of the two. They did once have a chicken as a sort of pet, but it wasn't really Tom's. Their mother was quite challenged to raise her family (Tom, Dick, and Sherry) after her husband died in the closing weeks of World War II without ever even seeing his daughter. She loved them all, but in financial straights, she sent them off to live with relatives when she ran out of money. It was natural that the mischievous boys (Tom being the protective older brother) would try music and comedy together. In Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, television critic David Bianculli recounts how Tom and Dick matured professionally and politically while testing the limits of censorship.

Dangerously Funny works well as both a coming of age biography and as history of the 1960s. It tells how the brothers became the people they would remain after their three groundbreaking seasons on network television, 1967-1969. It also goes into great detail about the production of the shows and the struggles with CBS censors and the executives in charge of the censors. Just getting some of their guests onto television was an achievement, especially breaking the network ban of showing political folksinger Pete Seeger.

I enjoyed remembering Pat Paulsen's run for U.S. President, Mason William's guitar masterpiece "Classical Gas," the silly but politically-charged skits, and my favorite rock groups, such as Simon and Garfunkel, the Association and the Doors. What I realize now is that many of the rock groups became my favorites after I saw them on the Comedy Hour, which tried to feature little-known groups with new songs just being released. Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, the Who, and the Turtles got their first major national television exposure on the brothers' show. The Beatles sent their films of "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" to be premiered in the U.S. on their show. Folksingers Judy Collins, Donovan, and Joan Baez were also featured.

The last part of the book muses on the impact the Smothers Brothers had long after their firing by CBS. Their methods have been replicated on many shows, including Saturday Night Live. Also, the talent they fostered has flourished, including Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, John Hartford, and David Steinberg.

Readers interested television, music, or the political climate of the 1960s will enjoy this tribute to a landmark television show.

Bianculli, David. Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. 2009. Simon & Schuster. 392p. ISBN 9781439101162.

The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation by Nancy Rubin Stuart

Since reading Cokie Roberts' Founding Mothers and Ladies of Liberty, I have wanted to know more about Mercy Otis Warren, who was secretly writing poems and plays for the patriotic cause that were printed anonymously in colonial newspapers. I learned from Roberts that Warren was a friend of Abigail Adams and Martha Washington, wife of a prominent Plymouth patriot, prolific letter writer, and author of an early history of the American Revolution. Finally, I have learned more about her in The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation by Nancy Rubin Stuart.

Warren's pen was not really very secret. John Adams, Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, her brother James Otis, and, of course, her husband James Warren knew what she was writing, as did others. In the early days of the American Revolution there was a fellowship of rebels, all wanting to break away from England's rule. These men depended on their wives to run their businesses and families while they met in congresses and fought in battles. They were at the time open to Warren's writings helping their cause. Later, when the war was won and they split on how to run a new country, they were not all so willing to receive advice from a woman. Ironically, Mercy Otis Warren was the first to suggest that the Constitution needed a bill of rights for individuals and states to keep the federal government from becoming dictatorial. She never got credit for this idea in her lifetime.

Warren's friendship and correspondence with John and Abigail Adams is a central thread to the narrative. The friends parted decisively on the issue of the strength of the federal government, and Warren was appalled by Adams' sponsorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The thirty-five year effort to write and publish Warren's History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution is another thread. Warren and John Adams exchanged many angry letters over her presentation in her book of his role in the Revolution. The fate of Warren's five sons and her close relationship with her husband are two other subplots. Readers wanting to know more about the role of women in the American Revolution or about how an early American woman dealt with tragedy will enjoy this detailed life story.

Stuart, Nancy Rubin. The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation. Beacon Press, 2008. ISBN 9780807055168

Saving the Ghost of the Mountain: An Expedition Among Snow Leopards in Mongolia with text by Sy Montgomery and photographs by Nic Bishop

Tom McCarthy has one of the coolest jobs. The American from Vancouver, Washington is a wildlife biologist dedicated to studying and protecting snow leopards in Mongolia's Altai Mountains. We get to learn about his work when we travel with a team of researchers in Saving the Ghost of the Mountain: An Expedition Among Snow Leopards in Mongolia with text by Sy Montgomery and photographs by Nic Bishop.

It is easy to imagine you are really in Mongolia as you read Saving the Ghost of the Mountain, for Montgomery and Bishop show the way, introducing us to the Mongolian people that they meet and depicting isolated camps on the plains below rugged mountains. They also describe the hard climbs up the mountains to search for signs of snow leopards and their prey. They search for "signs" because actual sightings of snow leopards are very rare. That's why the big cats are called "ghosts" by the locals.

Saving the Ghost of the Mountain is classified as a children's book, but adults who enjoy nature books should not miss it. The text could easily be an article in National Geographic, and the photographs are stunning. It is actually more fun to read than most NG articles, as we learn how to erect a ger (a sort of Mongolian tent), about analyzing snow leopard scat, and about setting camera traps to photograph the cats. Nothing about this book is exclusively for kids. It is a great addition to any library.

I'm now checking out Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea by the same authors.

Montgomery, Sy. Saving the Ghost of the Mountain: An Expedition Among Snow Leopards in Mongolia. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2009. ISBN 9780618916450.

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson

What happens when you miss a bus that results in your missing a plane, leaving you in New Zealand for an extra week? To answer that question you need to read Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson.

To call Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All a memoir seems a bit simplistic, though Thompson's romance and life with Seven, her Maori husband, is the core of the narrative. I might call it a personal historical essay, for Thompson includes a history of Maori-European colonial relations in the context of the history of Pacific explorations further set within world history. She adds the story of her mother's family's settlement in the Minnesota territory where the Sioux and other American tribes were removed from their lands by the "lesser" genocide of cultural erasure. The result is a meditation on racial dominance made very personal by thoughts about the futures of her half-Maori sons. Though always short on cash, she and Seven are endowing them with a fortune in family history.

As a reader, I was charmed and enthralled. As a reference librarian, I appreciate the glossary and bibliography. Being both, I wish there was an index making it easier to find what she said about various ship captains and Pacific islands. As a reader again, I recommend it to my friends who enjoy a good story.

Thompson, Christina. Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All. Bloomsbury, 2008. ISBN 9781596911260

Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped by Jim Ottaviani

I've read another illustrated science biography by Jim Ottaviani, and again I've enjoyed the graphical telling of a complicated story. This time the subject is physicist Niels Bohr who won a Nobel Prize in 1922 for describing the structure of the atom. Ottaviani points out in Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped that scientists later proved Bohr's picture of the atom was incomplete; his work was at least good enough to get other scientists, many of whom he fostered, to get it right later. In fact, his son Aage won a Nobel Prize for revising the anatomy and physics of his father's atom. Bohr's discoveries led to developing atomic energy and atomic weapons, neither of which initially seemed feasible to him.

Despite being like a comic book, Suspended in Language is not an easy read. There are many mathematical formulas and unfamiliar scientific terms, which may require the reader to pull out reference books. The reader can enjoy the story in ignorance of the science, but it is worthwhile making an effort to grasp the points about which Bohr and Einstein were in disagreement.

The most gripping part of the story involves Bohr's remaining in Denmark long into World War II before escaping to the West. German soldiers kept him under house arrest in his home for years, allowing other scientists to come visit. What he said to a German colleague who was working on bomb development is not known and still debated. He arrived in the West too late to be of help to either the British or American atomic bomb programs. He urged President Roosevelt to share all of the Manhattan project discoveries with other nations to prevent an arms race.

Ottaviana portrays Bohr as a congenial scientist, always ready to collaborate, who involved his wife in his correspondences, and who drew his son Aage into his experiments. He had a sense of humor, being a founder of the Journal of Jocular Physics, a short-lived publication that apparently brought much laughter to scientists working to solve the riddles of quantum physics. Suspended in Language is a good introduction to a major twentieth century scientist and the world he helped create.

Ottaviani, Jim. Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped. G. T. Labs, 2004. ISBN 0966010655

Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner by Kristen Schaffer

2009 was the 100th anniversary of the Plan of Chicago, an influential document written by architect Daniel H. Burnham for the Commercial Club of Chicago. Groups around the region used the anniversary to launch projects and present programs throughout the year. I was aware all year and watched a documentary on Burnham on December 29. Inspired, I borrowed Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner by Kristen Schaffer from the library on December 30. I quickly finished the big photo book on January 1 wanting to plan a tour of Pittsburgh, New York, and Washington, D.C. as well as revisit buildings in Chicago.

My desire is stoked by the gorgeous photos in Schaffer's book. The interiors of buildings, such as the Rookery in Chicago, the Society for Savings in Cleveland, and Union Station in Washington, are grand. I like all the marble and inlaid stonework, beautiful woods, and use of natural light. The exteriors are stately, orderly, somewhat reassuring. Beauty was a prime object in Burnham's work; he thought that it would well serve the commerce of his clients. Schaffer discusses in her text how Burnham has been often criticized for reflecting past architecture and not being more modern, but that's what I like about him even 100 years later. Many of the steel and glass buildings built since appear so cold and lack any master builder's touch. Any kid with Legos could do as well. Actually, colorful Lego structures look better.

Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner is an architecture book and not much of a biography. A few facts about his life and stories about his professional challenges are included. Get Burnham of Chicago by Thomas S. Hines or Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen to learn about Burnham's life.

Schaffer, Kristen. Daniel H. Burnham: Visionary Architect and Planner. Rizzoli, 2003. ISBN 0847825337

Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame by Zev Chafets

According to author Zev Chafets, the trustees of the National Baseball Hall of Fame mean well, but they like change in small doses. They take their cues from conservative Singer Sewing Machine heiress Jane Forbes Clark, who also controls much of what goes own in her rural community, Cooperstown, New York, a place that clings to its past. Chafets is less kind to the journalists and veterans committees who vote players into the Hall of Fame. In the author's view, the men of the media (almost all male and some with little real knowledge of the game) are petty and self-important. An "HoF" beside a retired player's name means "popular with journalists" more than "great player." In Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Chafets explains how the Hall of Fame became so out of touch and the impact this situation is having on baseball.

A big stumbling block is that there have never been good rules for admission and that the rules keep changing. Not only have the journalists had their chance to elect (and reject) players, various small veterans committees have added overlooked players, often the friends of the members of the committees. Some not-so-great players have gained plaques beside the immortals as a result.

Each year a representative of the Baseball Writers Association of America sends out ballots listing eligible players, who have been retired five years after playing ten years or more. Electors are asked to consider what is known as Rule 5:

Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contribution to the team(s) on which the player played.

The "integrity, sportsmanship, character" portion of the charge is of particular trouble these days. In olden times, without 24-hour news and the Internet, it was possible for voters to ignore the bad behavior of Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Grover Cleveland Alexander, etc. and know there would not be a great outcry from critics. With the precident that Pete Rose has already been banned from baseball for gambling and thus from the Hall of Fame, it is possible that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, both suspected of steroid use, will not be elected. Many journalists have already been saying that they will not vote for "cheaters." Admitted enhancing substance user Mark McGuire who once looked a likely inductee is getting insufficient votes. Unfriendly-to-journalists players like Dave Parker have been passed over. Chafets says the situation is a mess.

Chafets discusses the severe drop in the number of black players in the major leagues, the shunning of player's union leader Marvin Miller by the Hall of Fame, and the money retired players can earn from endorsements once they are elected. The book also tells about the long overdue election of Negro League players to the Hall.

If there are book discussion groups that focus on sports books, this is a good candidate for their consideration. I can imagine many hot debates, just like on sports talk radio.

Chafets, Zev. Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Bloomsbury, 2009. ISBN 978159615459

Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship by Denise Chong

Though born and raised in Hunan like Mao Zedong, Lu Decheng (1963- ) grew to despise the veneration of the late Communist leader. As a child and young man, under the influence of his free-thinking grandmother, he blamed Mao and the Communist Party for the death of his mother, the hardships of his life, and the distrust of people in his community. His father, employers, teachers, and neighbors chided him for his displays of disrespect, warning him of dire consequences. Their efforts only angered him more. When Chinese students demanding democracy gathered on Tiananmen Square in 1989, he had to be there. Biographer Denise Chong examines how defiant courage develops in a frightened community in Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship.

I like that in Egg on Mao, we have a biography of a person who is not really famous in our culture. Even in China, Lu Decheng is mostly known by a few optimists still dreaming of democracy, as the Chinese government tries to maintain a silence over the events of 1989. Through chapters alternating time before and after the incident in which Lu and two friends pelted the large portrait of Mao on Tiananmen Square with paint filled eggs, Chong recounts the life of a poor, under-educated bus mechanic in love with a young woman and wanting to give his daughter a better life.

With this new book, Canadian author Chong further establishes her interest in the recent history of East Asia. Her previous books are The Concubine's Children, a family memoir set in China and British Columbia, and The Girl in the Picture, the story of the Vietnamese woman who as a child was seen worldwide naked and burned by napalm. In all of these books, Chong takes Western readers inside Oriental societies to see the results of tradition and oppression. With the forecast that China will be the dominant power in the twenty-first century, Egg on Mao belongs in libraries everywhere.

Chong, Denise. Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship. 2009. Counterpoint. 249p. ISBN 9781582435473.

Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street

The first book I read in 2009 was Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis and the next to last title that I completed before the ball fell at Times Square was Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street, a big colorful photo book about PBS's flagship children's program. Too old to have watched Sesame Street as a child myself, I fell in love with the program while a stay-at-home parent, spending hours with my daughter Laura in her preschool years. My being hooked was just what the producers intended. Much of the content was written to appeal on several levels to bring children and adults to the experience together. Children learn better when supported by their parents.

It took me a week to get through the 303 oversized pages of Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street. There is a lot of informative text with the many pictures of muppets, cast members, and sets. There are also filmstrips from animations and marked-up scripts to examine. With so much on many of the pages, I am sure to have missed some interesting bits. The layout is a bit chaotic. I particularly enjoyed reading about all the cast members and muppeteers and about the acrobatics of shooting scenes. I passed on lots of tidbits to our holiday guests while they were here. Now everyone knows that Oscar was orange in early episodes and that Cookie Monster gets real cookies from a neighborhood grocery. (Notice I did not say Cookie Monster "eats" for he has no hole in his mouth. Crumbs escape to the side.) I also found the pages about adapting Sesame Street to other cultures fascinating.

Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street is a less critical book than that by Michael Davis; the latter should be consulted by readers wanting to know about the fights with Congress, struggles in the Children's Workshop, and personal problems of the cast and muppeteers. The new book includes a lot of topics not addressed in Davis's "Complete History." "Complete" is a word that should never be used in book titles.

This huge book is worth adjusting shelves to make it fit in libraries everywhere.

Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street. Black Dog & Leventhal, 2009. ISBN 9781579126384

Biography Beat, January 2010

Biography and Autobiography only Nonfiction Genre in Top Ten Genres

In an article in Publishers' Weekly concerning the impact of the economy on book sales between January and September 2009, a chart shows the top ten genres in sales. "Biography and Autobiography" is the only nonfiction heading on the chart. If I read the chart correctly, about 3 out of every 100 books sold are biographical. See "Women Cutting Book Purchases" from December 21, 2009.

Centennials and Bicentennials and Such

2010 can not compare with 2009 for its big name biography bicentennials. 1809 was the year of birth for Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Felix Mendelssohn. The person most likely to be widely celebrated from the births of 1810 is Frederic Chopin. Circus master P. T. Barnum is a distant second. Readers interested in women's rights may seek books about Margaret Fuller, born May 23, 1810.

Jacques Cousteau, Mother Teresa, and Bonnie and Clyde were all born in 1910. All have fairly recent biographies.

Scottish reform theologian John Knox was born in 1510.

Biography Picks for the First Quarter of 2010

Winter is usually a slower period for all publishing than fall or spring, and 2010 will be no exception. There are, however, a few biographies and memoirs that interest me.

Mark Twain: Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years by Michael Sheldon

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A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova

Mrs. Adams in Winter: A Journey in the Last Days of Napoleon by Michael O'Brien

Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone by Nadine Cohodas

Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough

Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend by James H. Hirsch