Duck Duck Book

The latke who couldn’t stop screaming : a Christmas story / by Lemony Snicket ; illustrations by Lisa Brown.
San Francisco : McSweeny’s Books ; c2007.
[MCL call number: j Holiday SNICKET; 17 copies, no holds]

Sometimes it is difficult to review a book with only words as tools. This book is short enough that if you were here, I could read it aloud to you, showing the pictures along the way like any good parent, babysitter, auntie, or children’s librarian. You would laugh, you might cry, and you would definitely learn some basic facts about the miracle of Hanukkah and how frustrating it is to be misunderstood.

But since this is not possible, perhaps you will take my very terse introduction to heart, seek out the book, and read it aloud to someone you know. Or ask them to read it to you.

[thanks, Markrid]

Berlin Games : how the Nazis stole the Olympic dream / Guy Walters.
New York : William Morrow, c2006.
[MCL call number: 796.48 W235b 2006; one copy, two holds]

In the spring of 1931, twenty powerful men made their way to Barcelona for a meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Their task was to decide which city would host the 1936 Olympic Games. Four were under serious consideration: Rome, Budapest, Barcelona, and Berlin. Italian members demurred that Rome was not ready to host the games in 1936, and the Hungarian representative voiced support for holding the games in Berlin. When the votes were finally counted (gathering them took several weeks, as many representatives voted by mail or telegram), Berlin was the clear winner, with 43 of 59 votes cast for the German capital.

In 1936, Spain held a general election, which resulted in the formation of a left-wing Popular Front government. The new Spanish government was sharply opposed to the politics and policies of Nazi Germany, and forbid Spanish athletes from participating in the Berlin Olympics — so they organized an alternative festival, to be held in Barcelona: the People’s Olympic Games. The People’s Olympics were planned for July 19-26, but a few short days before the games were to commence right-wing Nationalists, who controlled most of the Spanish army, began the rebellion that became the Spanish Civil War. By July 19, they held several cities and fighting had broken out across the country. The war was to last three years. Mexico and the Soviet Union were the only countries to come to the aid of Republican Spain, although tens of thousands of leftists from around the world traveled to Spain to fight against General Francisco Franco and the Nationalists, as international volunteers.

I initially turned to Guy Walters’s history of the 1936 Berlin Olympics to learn more about the People’s Olympics. Who planned them? Was any part of the festival salvaged? What countries hoped to participate? What happened to foreign athletes who were already in Spain when the war broke out? Walters answers these questions, but his larger project of relating the history of the Nazi games is worthy of attention as well.

Like most Olympic festivals, Berlin’s was a major national endeavor. Vast sports complexes were erected, armies of young translators were trained, and towns along the route visiting athletes took to the games were prettied up. But the young regime had an awfully big chip on its shoulder too — after all, the 1916 Olympics had been slated for Berlin, only to be cancelled by the IOC after World War I lost its gentlemanly edge with Germany’s introduction of mustard gas as a weapon. The German establishment needed this Olympics to come off perfectly to show how much the country had changed. And so, German prosperity was highlighted — butter and other foods were hoarded in advance so there would be plenty for the athletes and international visitors. The sharp edges of Nazi policies about racial purity were softened up temporarily, for show. Jewish athletes who had been forced out of participating in German sport under the Nazis were compelled to compete for their country, to prove that Germany was playing fair. A few weeks before the games began, Sinti and Roma people in the Berlin area were rounded up and placed in a special camp in a suburb. Homeless people and beggars were cleared from the city’s streets, and more than two thousand prostitutes and women working in the edges of the sex trade were forcibly examined for venereal disease.

Distasteful as this sounds, no doubt the stories of other nations’ Olympic preparations are nearly as shameful. What contrasts the 1936 Olympics from others is the German government’s neat takeover of the entire administration of the games from the International Olympic Committee.

Here’s a taste of the intrigue: in early 1936, it looked as though the two front runners for the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize were Barron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, and Carl von Ossietsky, an anti-Nazi journalist who was then languishing in a German forced labor camp. One of Germany’s representatives to the IOC attempted to use the influence of the IOC to pressure the Nobel committee to award the prize to Coubertin, and bribed the financially stricken Coubertin to formally endorse the Berlin games. Walters says on page 145: “Not only were the games being organised by the regime, but they were also being run according to Nazi rules and not those of the IOC. Four thousand athletes would shortly be attending a celebration not only of sport, but of fascism.” (Despite the German IOC members’ machinations, the peace prize was eventually awarded to Ossietzky, in December 1936, well after the games were over.)

Walters tells many other tales of this very politicized Olympiad — of athletes, government ministers, sports officials, businessmen, human rights activists, journalists, intellectuals, and the glitterati, and their role in the actual events of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the public debate that accompanied it.

The text of Berlin Games is followed by a collection of incredibly readable endnotes, a thorough bibliography, and an excellent and helpful index.

Greetings from Portland / Mary L. Martin & Kirby Brumfield.
Atglen, PA : Schiffer Pub. Ltd., c2007.
[MCL call number: 979.549 M382g 2007; 20 copies, no holds; two copies reference only at Central Library]

If you are a collector, or a public librarian, or a generalist bookseller, you are certainly familiar with the sort of books published especially for people who collect things. Recent versions of this type of book display lavish illustrations from someone’s collection of whatever-it-is, with price estimates and minimal information about each object’s date of origin, history, and perhaps its context. For people interested in history, collectors’ books are inherently frustrating for the things they deliberately leave out, as well as for their rather casual attitude to the responsibility of citing sources for information — it is expected that the author and/or publisher of a book for collectors is such an authority that readers need no other information than their pronouncement of an object’s definition, its cultural context, its historical significance, and of course, its current value.

Greetings from Portland is a collectors’ book of postcards, and although it is lovely and fascinating, like its brethren it offers little to no information about when each postcard was made, where it would have been sold, or anything else about the history of each object. Many of the captions describing postcards include historical bits and pieces such as the date the bridge in the picture was finished, but these details are spare and unsatisfying. To be fair, the book’s preface does include some instruction on dating postcards (pages 4-5), but since most of the advice is about the information on the address-and-stamp side of the cards, it’s not much help to folks who are simply enjoying the book.

So, if you’re really reading this for my critical opinion, you should know: I’m interested in Greetings from Portland because of its subject rather than simply because of the medium it describes. I do happen to think that postcards provide a particularly interesting angle on the history of the places they portray, but it is still true that it’s essentially the Portland bit that compels me to examine this book about postcards. And I am frustrated by the book’s relative lack of historical context for the cards it portrays.

The view on the past in Greetings from Portland is awfully varied — the book is arranged thematically in chapters showing postcards of fashionable houses, Portland roses and rose gardens, schools, churches, schools, hospitals, parks, statutes, hotels, bridges, harbor traffic, government and commercial buildings, the stockyards, Union Station, street scenes and city views, and the Rose Festival. Several chapters are devoted to peculiarities of the Rose City such as the old Forestry Building (”World’s Largest Log Cabin”), The Grotto, and Council Crest Amusement Park. And there are a few chapters showing of postcards that aren’t of Portland at all — one covers the bounty of Oregon’s fields, orchards, and pastures (pages 87-93), and two chapters display postcards of places luckier Portlanders might have once visited on day trips (pages 103-113). The postcards are mostly in radiant, unlikely-looking full color (thanks to the hand-tinting they so often employed), and are reproduced at nearly their original size.

And the images themselves are beautiful. On page 43, a southbound passenger train makes its way off the east end of the Steel Bridge, its elegant curve along the track accentuating the heavy, graceful lines of the bridge. On page 79, a view from the east bank of the Willamette shows the old public market building with, amazingly, six small seaplanes resting peacefully in the river, all facing west and apparently unaffected by the current. On page 127, a thrillingly gothic portrait of SW 5th Ave. features artificially gloomy streets and glowering dark clouds penetrated by a gleaming full moon. Hundreds of other postcards show the River City in a glory its real past no doubt never quite attained, with blue skies, stately houses, exuberant pink roses, and shapely modern industry gleaming from every page.

Greetings from Portland has no index or bibliography, though as I mentioned it does have an introduction with some advice about how to date postcards.

* * *

Greetings from Portland is but one of a whole series of city-themed postcard collecting books published by Schiffer Publishing, all with titles beginning “Greetings from. . .” Unfortunately, Multnomah County Library only owns this one. But, readers with an interest in postcards may also wish to consult Gideon Bosker and Jonathan Nichols’s Greetings from Oregon (Portland, OR : Graphic Arts Center Pub. Co., c1987; reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 45). It, too, is lovely.

The bone woman : a forensic anthropologist’s search for truth in the mass graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo / Clea Koff.
New York : Random House, c2004.
[MCL call number: 599.9 K78b 2004; four copies, no holds;
also in Spanish under the title El lenguaje de los huesos: S- 599.9 K78L 2004; three copies, no holds]

I have never had a serious desire to be a doctor, but I must admit that since childhood I’ve been fascinated by forensic medicine. It seems so amazing that someone with the right training and experience can cut apart a deceased person’s body, look at their insides, test their tissues and fluids, and come away several hours later with a clear idea of what exactly caused the person to die. But how much more fascinating is it that forensic anthropologists can do the same when the person’s body has been reduced, more or less, to nothing but a skeleton?

Clea Koff was a student forensic anthropologist working on her master’s degree at the University of Arizona and doing field work at the Pima County, Arizona Medical Examiner’s Office when she had the opportunity to travel to Rwanda to work for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal examining the evidence in mass graves left after the Rwandan genocide. Koff jumped at the chance, and after two missions for the Tribunal in Rwanda, she joined four more in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. In each place, Koff and her colleagues worked sixty-hour or longer weeks in awkward, sometimes dangerous conditions with poor supplies and patchy institutional support, coaxing little bits of people’s stories from their bones, bodies, clothing, personal possessions, and surroundings.

The dead, their relatives, their killers, and the horrible circumstances that allow people to draw lines and rise up wholesale against their neighbors are always present in Koff’s narrative; as is Koff’s own struggle with the tension between her broad responsibility as special kind of human rights worker and her role as a scientist, a servant of truth and discovery. But in many ways it is a beautiful story, too. The search for answers is an important part of what makes us human, and Koff takes that quest seriously. She considers scientific, social, historical, philosophical, and political questions as she hones her vocation so that it will add value, satisfaction, and meaning not just to her own life, but also, at least a tiny bit, to the lives of others as well.

The Bone Woman has an appendix listing completed and commenced trials that used evidence from the missions described in the book, which is interesting but on the whole rather dry and unsatisfying. Unfortunately, there is no index, and no bibliography.

Bird’s eye views : historic lithographs of North American cities / John W. Reps.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c1998.
[MCL call number: 769 R425b 1998; one copy, no holds;
one copy reference only at Central Library]

In the nineteenth century, there was an enduring fashion for prints showing cities and towns. From the early 1800s to the early 1900s, as many as 2,400 American towns were immortalized in prints showing industry, progress, order, and civilization, with nice bits of park scattered through the middle and prosperous farm- or rangeland outside. Many of these views show towns and cities from an imaginary point high in the air, presenting the city from its most attractive angle. John W. Reps’s Bird’s Eye Views reproduces 100 or so panoramic views of cities and towns from across the United States and Canada, all of them beautiful, and each one thoroughly annotated with information about the contents of each print and the context in which it was made. After two introductory essays (one on the history of viewmaking, one on the development of urban communities), the prints are presented in four chapters organized by geography.

Many of the bird’s eye view prints of western cities emphasize their geometrical street layouts: Salt Lake City, Prescott, San Jose, and San Diego are all shown with orderly square city blocks of identical size dominating the visual field. Port cities’ waterways are often in the foreground of their portraits: two different prints show Seattle from an imaginary point high above Elliott Bay, with wharves in the foreground, humming with activity from countless ships and trains; while an 1876 view of New York City places Manhattan Island in the center of the picture, stretching from Battery Park right at the viewer’s fingertips all the way along the island to the newly minted Central Park, with the Hudson and East Rivers full to bursting with busy ships. If the city is really famous for just one thing, that might be the focus of an artist’s design: Washington, DC is shown in two views in which the United States Capitol dominates so much that the rest of the city might as well not even be there, and a third in which it is clearly the largest and most important component of the urban landscape (especially since the Washington Monument is shown only half-built).

If a city has railroad yards, port facilities, or smoke-belching factories, they are highlighted to show industry and progress. If it boasts a beautiful sea coast, a graceful arching river, or white-capped mountain views, they will be shown to their full magnificence. If there are many lovely buildings, the bird’s eye view may be surrounded with little portraits of the most noted structures to indicate the heights of culture and seriousness the city has attained. Although these views of towns and cities were not typically produced as advertisements for city governments or real estate developers, they certainly do shout loud and clearly, “Look at this beautiful place! It’s clean! It’s prosperous! It has everything you could want and more — and see, we can prove it!”

Although Bird’s Eye Views is really very large for a commercially published book (33 x 38 cm when closed), the lithographs are reproduced at much smaller than their original size. No doubt this was unavoidable, but it is incredibly frustrating, since part of the charm of the prints is their incredible detail. If you would like to see a selection of city and town bird’s eye views in a format that allows you to examine them more closely (albeit without Reps’s helpful annotations), you might want to visit Panoramic Maps : 1847-1929 at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project (Washington, DC : Geography & Map Division, Library of Congress, 2007). Many of the lithographs in Bird’s Eye Views are also part of the Library of Congress’s digital collection, and I’ve provided links to digital copies of the lithographs mentioned above, when the views were available there.

The Portland red guide : sites & stories of our radical past / by Michael Munk.
Portland, Or. : Ooligan Press, 2007.
[MCL call number: 979.549 M966p 2007; 22 copies, no holds;
one copy reference only at Central Library]

I have a great love for my hometown, Portland, Oregon. It is a pedestrian sort of city in many ways, and its glamour is a little faint when compared to really fabled places — cities that have starred in films and been the inspiration for renowned works of literature. But, part of why I love Portland is that I am connected to it. I live here, and I am a part of its history. I remember businesses that are long gone, houses and neighborhoods that have been replaced with parking lots or road infrastructure, streets that once had different names, and parks that used to be sketchy but are now squeaky clean. However, my own memories go back only thirty years or so, and though Portland is a young city by most measures, thirty years is not so much of its history.

So I need a little help if I want to be truly well-versed in the details of what the buildings used to hold, why the parks and streets have the names they do, and what the neighborhoods were once like before everything changed. The Portland Red Guide is one place to go for help in this quest. Michael Munk spent dozens of years researching Portland’s history for tiny jewels — terse little stories of personalities, organizations, and institutions; of strikes and parties, criminal trials and cultural events; of parks, storefronts and streetcorners — all located simultaneously in the physical, historical, and cultural landscape of the city.

One quite startling thing The Portland Red Guide illustrates is the number of intact, surviving buildings and streetscapes that once hosted a slice of radical history. Pictures really bring this home: Lownsdale Square (between SW 3rd and 4th Aves. and across from the Multnomah County Courthouse) is shown in several historic photographs as the location of public meetings of Portland’s branch of the Communist Party; a beautiful 1950’s-era street scene shows the gay bar The Harbor Club (at 736 SW 1st Ave., in a building that is still with us); and houses once lived in by Portland’s most noted radical daughters, Dr. Marie Equi and Louise Bryant (at 1423 SW Hall and 2226 NE 53rd Ave., respectively) still stand and look downright normal in their photographs.

Munk divides Portland’s history into six chronological periods (from the late 19th century through Halloween, 2006), and for each he provides a brief introduction; a list of people, places, institutions and events; a map situating them in the city; and a selection of photographs. The book closes with an excellent bibliography of books on Portland’s history and an index.

* * *

I have discussed many other books, websites, and films that consider elements of Portland’s history. Gordon DeMarco’s A Short History of Portland (Lexikos, 1990, reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 22) and the Oregon Historical Society’s Oregon History Project (reviewed in number 4) provide general views of the city’s past, but most of the others focus on specific topics:

Portland’s neighborhoods and communities are the focus of Cornerstones of Community: Buildings of Portland’s African American History (Bosco-Milligan Foundation, 1995, reviewed in number 47), A Walking Tour of Jewish Portland With the People That Lived There (by Polina Olsen, Smart Talk Publications, c2004, reviewed in number 28), Burnside, a Community (by Kathleen Ryan and Mark Beach, Coast to Coast Books, c1979, reviewed in number 29), Portland’s Little Red Book of Stairs (by Stefana Young, Coobus Press, c1996, reviewed in number 18), and the film Imagining Home: Stories of Columbia Villa (Sue Arbuthnot and Richard Wilhelm, 2005, announced in number 7).

Local architectural history can be found in the regional study Space, Style, and Structure: Building in Northwest America (edited by Thomas Vaughan and Virginia Guest Ferriday, Oregon Historical Society, 1974) and in Last of the Homemade Buildings (by Virginia Guest Ferriday, Mark Pub. Co., 1984, both reviewed in number 43), which focuses on a very small but glamorous group of buildings in downtown Portland.

The history of the Kalapuya people, indigenous inhabitants of the Willamette Valley area, is detailed in The World of the Kalapuya (by Judy Rycraft Juntunen et al., Benton County History Society and Museum, c2005, reviewed in number 31) and in Harold Mackey’s The Kalapuyans (The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, c2004, reviewed in number 33).

Elements of Portland’s hip hop and punk scenes are explored in the films Small City Big Hip Hop (Opio Media LLC, [2005], announced in number 23) and Northwest Passage (ID/ODD Productions, 2007, announced in number 42).

The Rose City’s notable trees are described and celebrated in the guide Trees of Greater Portland (by Phyllis C. Reynolds and Elizabeth F. Dimon, Timber Press, c1993, reviewed in number 16), while details of our gray winters, volcanic fallout, and famously warm and lovely Augusts are recorded in Raymond R. Hatton’s Portland, Oregon Weather and Climate: A Historical Perspective (Geographical Books, c2005, reviewed in number 37).

Ed Goldberg’s Dead Air (Berkeley Prime Crime, 1998, reviewed in number 22) is a mystery novel, not a factual history, but its setting among the staff of a local community-supported radio station makes it interesting for aficionados of local radical history even though it is fictional. And, the nearly-forgotten B-movie Portland Exposé (DVD published by Kit Parker double features / VCI Entertainment, 2006, reviewed in number 41), also fiction, explores another major chunk of our cultural past — corruption and organized crime.

Tintin : the complete companion / Michael Farr.
San Francisco : Last Gasp, c2002.
[MCL call number: 741.59493 H545f 2002; 6 copies, 2 holds]

When I was a kid, my older brothers set the standard for comics-reading. They were dedicated, they were opinionated, and of course they were older than me so I spent a good deal of time trying to be like them. One brother read mostly superheroes: Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, and the Batman; the other generally preferred war and horror comics: Sgt. Rock, House of Horror, and Tales from the Crypt. I diligently read their hand-me-downs, even though most of the time I couldn’t quite see what the thrill was, except that I really liked Daredevil and anything with a girl superhero. However, I was never fully satisfied with superheroes, G.I. Joe, and horror stories, so when I could get to the bookstore that sold used comics for 10 cents a piece I bought Archie, Betty & Veronica, Richie Rich, and 50s-vintage Katy Keene, brothers be damned.

But we all read Tintin. I read all the Tintins I could get my hands on, and I read them as many times as I could. I borrowed them, begged them for presents, and occasionally when I was unusually wealthy, I bought one for myself.

We knew that Tintin and his author/cartoonist Hergé were Belgian, although I always thought Tintin himself had a sort of English flavor. I don’t recall ever once thinking about how Tintin was created, or wondering whether there were any substantive differences between the French-language originals and the translations I read. Little did I know, not only have these and many other Tintin-related questions been seriously studied, but there are enough people firmly dedicated to this work that they have a special name: Tintinoligists.

In Tintin: The Complete Companion, Tintinoligist Michael Farr endeavors to tell the story behind the creation of each and every one of the Tintin books. Farr focuses partly on Hergé’s life; partly on analysis of the Tintin stories as literature and the story of Hergé’s source material for characters, plots, and images; and partly on the history of Tintin publishing. Although Farr’s prose is a little uneven, this combination of subjects makes very interesting reading, especially for anyone familiar with some of the Tintin books. In particular, the juxtaposition of finished Tintin panels and clippings from Hergé’s extensive source files sheds clear light on how the comics were made.

For example, page 32 is entirely taken up with a photograph of the Chanin Building in Chicago, reproduced, the caption says, in the periodical Le Crapouillot. Page 33 shows two versions of the scene Tintin in America when Tintin slips out the window and balances on the teensiest ledge on the outside of a building to escape detection, to listen in on the bad guys’ conversation — the black and white panel from 1932, and the color version from 1945. The book is filled with similar comparisons of source material to finished product: airplanes, automobiles, trains, ships, clothing and jewelry, religious artifacts, exotic fruit, whiskey bottles, city skylines, street scenes, houses, machinery, working harbors, and even people who were the physical models for characters in Tintin’s adventures. The story of how each book was created, the details of the transformation of early books from black and white to color and all the books from French to various translations, and the bits of Hergé’s biography are all interesting, but the evidence showing Hergé’s incredible commitment to accuracy in all the details of illustration is what I found most fascinating.

Each of Farr’s chapters discusses one or two books, and as you have by now gathered, each is liberally illustrated with panels from the early newspaper strip, the revised color edition that came out later, and source photographs and clippings from Hergé’s extensive picture files. Tintin: The Complete Companion has a modest index, but no other supplemental material. In fact, it suffers rather sharply from the lack of any bibliography of Tintinology or Tintin comic books. Despite this lack, I recommend it highly, especially for fond readers of Tintin.

Hillside letters A to Z : a guide to hometown landmarks / Evelyn Corning.
Missoula, Mont. : Mountain Press Pub. Co., 2007.
[MCL call number: 917.304 C818h 2007; two copies, no holds]

In 1905, students at the University of California at Berkeley spent two days building a giant concrete letter “C” on the side of a hill facing the university campus. This was the United States’s first hillside letter, and it was followed in the same year by the University of Utah’s “U,” and then by Brigham Young University’s “Y” in 1906. Now there are hundreds. Hillside Letters A to Z introduces readers to the quirky history of these giant initials, and provides a kind of gazetteer to letters across the U.S.

Most letters were built out of school or community pride, but Corning reports a few unusual letter stories. In 1916, boys from Elko High School in Elko, Nevada built a 120 by 204′ “E” to memorialize an Elko High teacher who had died from hypothermia following a hiking accident. Other letters are more interesting for the rivalry they have inspired. The “O” at University of Oregon, is a good example:

“The O was stolen so many times over the years by the students of Oregon State University in Corvallis, just north [sic] of Eugene, that in the early 1950s it was reconstructed of concrete and wood. Unable to remove it, the students of Oregon State dynamited it in 1952 and again in 1953. By 1957, the students at the University of Oregon felt the Oregon State students had ‘contaminated’ their emblem to such an extent that they burned their own letter, and the following year they built a metal O embedded in concrete. Soon afterwards the Oregon State students cut the O into sections and took it to their campus in Corvallis. After several months it was returned, reassembled, and reinstalled, only to be stolen again. The last time anyone at the University of Oregon can remember seeing their O was in 1972.” (page 15)

Other letters have less dramatic stories, but Corning makes their histories interesting also, and photographs illustrating the different letters are particularly charming. The alphabetical directory of hillside letters that makes up the main part of the book is supplemented by a map of letter locations, an introduction relating the history of the hillside letter phenomenon and explaining different construction techniques, an index listing letters by state, and an excellent bibliography.

Ancient Rome on five denarii a day / Philip Matyszak.
London : Thames & Hudson, 2007.
[MCL call number: 937 M445a 2007; three copies, no holds]

Before Rough Guides and Let’s Go, before Frommer’s and the Michelin Guides, even before Baedekers, people traveled. How they managed it can be quite hard for a modern, first-world person to imagine. Can you picture going from northern Spain to southern Italy by foot, or at sea in a tiny ancient boat with a square sail? Even if you can imagine the toil of the journey, what about the practical concerns of feeding and housing yourself while traveling, avoiding bandits, or communicating with local people in farmhouses, villages, and cities? All of this is very different from a 21st century road trip across the U.S., a journey by night train, or a trans-Atlantic flight. And then, if you’re traveling in the past, when you get there, you’re still not in the modern world!

Rome has been a major tourist destination, on and off, for thousands of years, and if you’d like to fantasize about visiting the place in ancient times, classicist Philip Matyszak can be of help to you. In Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day, he provides modern readers with a travel guide to that city circa 200 A.D. — a guide engineered to help us cross the cultural gap of nearly two millennia. Readers learn how to get themselves safely to Rome, and, once there, how to enjoy and educate themselves, how to fit in socially, and how to avoid trouble.

Practical advice and cultural instruction is interwoven with quotations from Roman diarists, historians, statesmen, letter-writers, and poets. These bits and pieces, though certainly germane to the subject at hand, are not always exactly illustrative. However, they have a certain charm. For example, when introducing the chapter on shopping and the marketplace, Matyszak quotes Horace: “I ask the price of greens and flour and . . . as the sun sets, I’m off home for a dinner of leeks, chickpeas and flatbread” (from Satires 1.6, page 63). I thought this relatively mundane quotation was actually quite evocative, and it made me hungry myself.

Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day is illustrated throughout, and is appended with a map of the city, a nice subject index, and a two-page lexicon of Latin including practical phrases (In quantum parte templum Iovis est? / Where is the temple of Jupiter?), clichés (Vestis virum reddit / Clothes make the man), and even literary references (Deliriant isti Romani / These Romans are crazy).

Emily’s runaway imagination / Beverly Cleary, illustrated by Beth and Joe Krush.
New York, Morrow, 1961.
[MCL call number: j CLEARY; five copies, one hold; one copy reference only at Central Library]

Emily lives in Pitchfork, a tiny town in Yamhill County, Oregon, in the 1920s. As her story begins, she has just received a letter from her cousin Muriel, a girl her own age who lives in Portland and is blessed with a public library to provide her with a copy of Black Beauty. Emily thinks it is punishingly unfair that Pitchfork has no library, from which she might also borrow a copy of Black Beauty, and tells her mother as much. Emily’s mother is not only sympathetic, but proactive, and that very day she writes to the State Library in Salem to inquire about how the citizens of Pitchfork might set up their own library. As the book progresses and Emily has other adventures, the town’s library slowly moves from idea to reality, with the help of Emily, her mother, and many of their friends and neighborhoods.

(As you can imagine, this is a story that makes the heart of any public librarian glad. And perhaps particularly so a public librarian here in Oregon, where rural and small town libraries, like many cultural institutions outside the glare of urban areas, are both strong and weak. And it is worth noting, for those of you who think of her merely as the famed and award-winning author of the Ramona books, that Beverly Cleary is a librarian as well as a writer, so perhaps the storyline is no surprise. But I digress. . .)

Emily is vivacious and energetic, and although she often makes mistakes or confuses things unnecessarily in the course of her many adventures, the turmoil is relatively sedate. There is no terrible upset for her to undo — trouble is sorted out in short order and with the comforting mantle of family and community around her Emily is safe to muddle about until she finds the path she means to take.

And the stories are fast-paced, almost self-contained little novel-ettes in each chapter: Emily helps her mother throw a party for the matrons of the town, she dresses up a plow horse like a graceful steed when her cousin Muriel comes to visit, she drives around with her grandfather in his newfangled automobile, she makes a homely looking custard pie, and so on. This would be a very good book for reading out loud at bedtime — each chapter is substantial and reads almost a separate story, but the tale of the town’s library is always in the background providing a nice sense of continuity, accomplishment, and civic togetherness.

I capture the castle / by Dodie Smith.
New York : St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
[MCL call number: FICTION SMITH; eight copies, one hold;
also in audiobook format at MCL call number CD FICTION SMITH; two copies, no holds]

There is a particular type of novel, the story of genteel poverty, which may be familiar to contemporary readers, but which is not often written now. Generally the actual plot is about something besides poverty — romance, a kind of literary situation comedy, the trials of adolescence, or another medium-weight topic. But a major feature of this particular kind of book is the poverty of the main characters. They are really destitute. They have little or no income, their earning potential is incredibly slight, and although they just manage to have someplace to live, they are having trouble feeding and clothing themselves. Our heroes are people who weren’t always poor, and they’re vaguely guilty about not being able to figure out how to stop being poor. For reasons of family background, education, or profession (which of course boil down to class, more or less), they are expected to be financially comfortable, and their friends and acquaintances are embarrassed to see them in poverty.

Perversely, another feature of this kind of novel is that the intense contrast between the main characters’ potential for wealth and comfort, and their actual dismal poverty makes them seem more unfortunate than people who are socially expected to be poor. They have fallen very far, and everyone (people in the novel, and readers) is supposed to find them sympathetically pitiable for this.

As I said, novels of genteel poverty are not currently in vogue. There are a few nineteenth century American stories with genteel poverty elements — Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott is a familiar one — but the more recent examples I have encountered are all British, and I Capture the Castle, written and set in the 1940s, is one of these.

Cassandra Mortmain is the middle child in her family, and she is a writer. She begins the diary which forms the text of the novel with a sort of mission statement:

“I am writing this journal partly to practice my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel — I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have all been very stiff and self-conscious.” (page 4)

Cassandra and her very odd family are holed up in an antique house built onto a medieval castle, and since they have no money they do not entertain or travel. They are friendly with the local vicar, who is not very heavy-handed on the question of religion, and with the village librarian, who delivers books to her patrons by bicycle.

The family’s quiet, impoverished life is interrupted by the arrival of new neighbors — a pair of American brothers who have inherited the local manor house and attached fortune from their grandfather. The brothers have inherited the role of the Mortmain family’s landlords, and almost immediately Cassandra’s older sister Rose sets out to get the older brother (the one with the money) to marry her. This Jane Austen-style romance plot is surprisingly compatible with the 20th century setting, even as it exposes the family’s sometimes shameful conspiracy to aid Rose’s fortune hunting. In the meantime, Cassandra’s father is researching his second novel — he wrote one 15 or so years earlier, which was very successful and very post-modern. He won’t explain his work to anyone, but his research seems to consist entirely of doing crossword puzzles and reading mystery novels, which confuses and worries his loved ones, who fear he may be going mad.

It is not so difficult to imagine some of the direction of the plot, with this short introduction in hand. There is romance, and romantic trickery. There are several painful scenes of poverty intruding on the family’s ability to eat well, to dress appropriately for social occasions, and generally to rise to their station. There is quite a bit of friendly bohemianism, stimulating intellectual conversation, and distressing adherence to society dictums. It is not so much the plot, though, that drives this novel. The people in the story are compelling, and not just for their oddness — what makes the novel worth reading is that Cassandra remains true to her initial project to practice for writing a novel — her descriptions of events, conversations, and her own observations and feelings are rich and complicated. She gets at the detail without missing the bigger picture and without having to actually recount every single thing that takes place. Cassandra’s narrative exposes the network of events as they occur, to be sure; but the real joy is getting to know the people, their habits, their interests, their desires, their feelings for each other, their limits, and their strengths.

* * *

If you need another slightly romancy early 20th century novel about an intelligent young woman finding a way to master her own destiny, set in the framework of a very similar genteel poverty, you might try Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons.

* * *

Dodie Smith is perhaps most famous for her novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, which is worth reading even if you think you know the whole story from the movie.

Mingering Mike / Dori Hadar ; with a preface by Neil Strauss and an afterword by Jane Livingston.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 741.66 M664m 2007; three copies, no holds]

I am not at all sure how to properly review this book, it is so odd and beautiful and touching.

Mingering Mike is a soul star, an incredibly successful musician with a string of hit albums and sold-out concert tours, who also found time to write, direct, and star in nine films. His career spanned a brief but very active ten years from the late 1960s to the day in 1977 when he laid down his instruments and retired.

But every one of his dozens of records now function more as visual art objects than anything else, because they are all one-of-a-kind, handmade with pencil, cardboard, and marking pens. The grooves are drawn carefully into each record, liner notes are written out in pen, and a few albums even feature home-made shrink wrap covering the whole gorgeous package. Mingering Mike wrote songs too, for sure, and with his cousin The Big “D” he recorded many tunes at home on reel-to-reel tape, with a backbeat provided by one of them pounding on a mattress or phone book. But the circumstances of everyday life made it difficult for Mike to pursue his dreams of focusing on music and performance, while creating the cardboard albums was a creative outlet that fit relatively neatly into his life.

The book functions somewhat like an exhibition catalog — its main contents are reproductions of Mingering Mike’s album covers, 45s, movie posters, and 8-tracks, interspersed with critical essays about Mike’s life and artwork, followed by a complete discography.

The records (to judge by their covers, at least) are widely varied, some serious, some funny, some romantic, and some downright angry. Mingering Mike’s genius is partly in his song titles: “Last Night I Thought I Was Bruce,” “While Waiting for the Bus,” “222 Love Avenue,” “Eat Now and Eat Later,” “3 Footsteps Away from the Altar,” “Do the Nixon” (from the album Boogie Down at the White House), and my favorite, “It’s a Good Thing Mike and Big D Weren’t Here Because They Both Would Have Been Wasted.” And this is not just lightweight pop music — in addition to writing songs and creating albums and films about love, dancing, and having a good time, Mingering Mike also tackled the negative impact of drug abuse in the black community, the toll of the Vietnam War, sickle cell anemia, and many other political and social issues. The albums show Mike as an honest, three-dimensional artist unafraid to speak his piece and bare his soul to his fans. You will be a fan too, once you have a few minutes to get to know his work.

* * *

Mingering Mike has a webpage as well, where you can listen to some of his actual recordings and view many album covers and other pieces of Mingering Mike memorabilia. Even more Mingering Mike recordings are available for the listening at the Vanguard Squad.

Lost : lost and found pet posters from around the world / Ian Phillips.
New York, N.Y. : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 636.0887 P559L 2002; two copies, no holds]

Even if you have never had a pet, are allergic to cats, find dogs uncivilized, and think pet owners are deluding themselves when you hear them describe the close relationships they have with their animal friends, Ian Phillips’s collection of lost and found pet posters could still charm you.  Some of the posters will look familiar, like those you see in your own neighborhood, but others are astonishing for their content.  Some particularly engaging examples include:

•  ”Lost. kitten /  Name.  Kitty / Address: 2227 E Moodie St. / what / kind of / cat.  Half / Siameses.  Half normal.  / color.  black / meows lot.” (this accompanied by a vaguely cat-like and decidedly four-legged creature, with a word balloon proclaiming “meow meow meow meow?”)
•  ”Big black rat escaped. / Reward to finder. / Rats name is Poison.  Please help!”
•  ”Lost female dog / Children crying”

Phillips includes some thoughts on collecting lost pet posters ethically, and a nice set instructions for creating a poster when your own pet is lost.  Lost has no index, though there is a nice guide to the geographic locations where the posters included in the book were collected.

The ode less travelled : unlocking the poet within / Stephen Fry.
New York : Gotham Books, 2006.
[MCL call number: 808.1 F947o 2006; eight copies, no holds]

I have never been a fan of poetry.  I consider this to be a major personal flaw, but it is one that has been difficult for me to overcome.  When I say that I dislike poetry, what I mean is that I don’t enjoy reading it.  I do enjoy poetry as a performance art; or at least I do when it is above the usual level of coffee shop open mic readings.  But I’ve experimented a little bit, and even when I try reading the exact same poems I have enjoyed in performance, I usually find them impenetrable, or even stultifying. 

This is not because I am indifferent to the beauty of language.  Actually, I find great pleasure in reading a well-formed phrase, sentence, argument, or speech; and I am often quite irritated with awkwardly or impatiently written language.  I am interested in words, their meanings, their use, and their quirks.  I like the feel of speaking, or even thinking, certain words and phrases.  And, perhaps most significantly, I am unhappy when I am not spending at least a bit of each day writing, or thinking about what I will write, or reading something I am planning to write about.  But still, I do not like poetry.  Not only do I dislike reading it, but I suspect that the majority of published poetry is actually crap and not worth anyone’s time.  I say “I suspect” because as I believe I have made clear, I don’t read much poetry and so I am hardly eligible to judge the whole corpus of poetic publishing.

However, I recently came across Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled, and saw that it might be a useful tool to help to get over my prejudices regarding poetry.  In his foreword, Fry does not promise to show his readers how to enjoy reading poetry; in fact, he specifically states that his purpose is not to teach poetry appreciation, but instead to instruct in the craft of poetry writing.  But even though it was so clearly not written with my need in mind, I read the book with an earnest desire to take Fry’s tuition.  I paid attention to his basic rule to read every poem out loud (or at least mouth the words to myself), I read his introductions to the various forms, I patiently navigated the many examples of great and terrible poetry he uses to illustrate the history of verse, and I dutifully wrote lines and couplets and eventually whole little stanzas, paying attention to stress and even weaving in rhymes. 

And, while it is true that I managed to make some compositional effort of my own (a selection of my awkward attempts is below) the balance of what I took from the experience of reading the book is heavily weighted towards a greater understanding of the poetic arts, rather than any significant increase in my own technical mastery of them.  Fry did not make a poet of me, but his instructive journey through the major English language poetic forms, their history, and their use, did give me the tools I need to make a more earnest effort to enjoy reading a bit of poetry, should the need arise in the future.

So, I recommend The Ode Less Travelled to readers like me who have trouble with the challenges of reading poetry, or of appreciating it in a satisfying way.  The book will also be useful for budding poets who are seeking an introduction to meter, rhyme, and form, or even as a kind of encyclopedia of the history and structure of English poetry.  But also it is beautifully written, full of engaging illustrative examples, and very funny while still being quite serious.

 * * *

My poetic genius allowed me, with the additional benefit of Fry’s helpful instruction, to come up with such gems as:

Books are for use, librarians all say. 

and:

The laundry flaps on the line in the yard.
I hear the wind rustling through the trees. 

and better still:

Detective Chief Inspector Foyle
wishes he could do more
to help the effort of the war.
It seems he does not know
the good he does each day and night
for Hastings and England
by continuing just to be
as he has always been.

Transit maps of the world / Mark Ovenden.
London : Penguin Books, 2007.
[Multnomah County Library has this book on order; it has not yet been assigned a call number, but my guess is that it will be 912 -- Atlases, maps, charts and plans]

I am a life-long user of public transit. I have had a driver’s license for fifteen years but I am a horrifically un-confident driver and have never owned a car; and one of my earliest memories at age three or so is of a frightening incident on a bus — the door closed on my arm (I wasn’t hurt, just really freaked out and sure I’d never see my mother again, even though she was about a foot away at the time). I don’t exactly love riding the bus or the train, but I definitely find some concrete satisfaction in it — traveling by public transportation gives me time to read and knit and think while in transit; requires that I maintain a moderate level of skill in conversing with strangers who I would never otherwise meet; and allows me to work four miles away from my house without having to drive or bike through city traffic, or brave an hour-long walk every morning and night. My view is that public transit is absolutely essential to city life, and the more effective it can be, the better the city will function. But like many features of urban life and infrastructure, public transit is composed of many complicated facets. One of these is the map that shows where the transit system will take you.

Mark Ovenden’s nearly encyclopedic collection of urban train maps takes a world-wide view, examining maps from cities on six continents. After a terse introduction detailing the history of urban rail transit systems and the maps and diagrams devised to explain them, entries on individual transit systems are arranged in several groups, according to the richness of their history in maps. The first section devotes about four pages each to some of the oldest subway systems, in Berlin, Chicago, London, Madrid, Moscow, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. The rail systems in each of these cities is shown in a dozen or so maps from different periods in its evolution, and in the evolution of its graphic representation. Subsequent sections are devoted to transit systems with shorter histories (or at least with fewer maps reproduced), and the book is appended with a brief section discussing other maps that use the distinctive transit map language of colored lines, usually arranged in forty-five degree angles — such as the map created by fans of the British television series Doctor Who, which shows the Time Lord’s domain in London Underground map style (page 141). The book also includes two helpful indexes (one for geography and one for subjects) and a short, unannotated bibliography.

Of course the main attraction of Transit Maps of the World is its reproductions of maps and diagrams. I found some of the older illustrations particularly charming: a 1958 map of the Moscow Metro with each stop marked by an icon of its grand station entrance (page 29); several early Chicago Transit Authority maps that have west at the top, to accommodate the annoyingly blank expanse of Lake Michigan (page 16); a 1937 map-book cover from the Paris Metro with trains heading out of a tunnel in three-point perspective atop the three-dimensional letters “METROPOLITAIN” (page 38); a stylized 1966 diagram of Barcelona’s Metro showing two subway lines and giant civic landmarks against a stark white background (page 46); and a stylized 1926 map of the (now defunct) Los Angeles Pacific Railroad in the shape of a balloon (page 9).

But some of the considerable charm of the book is more in its reproductions of graphic work than less in the histories and oddities of individual transit systems.  For example, Ovenden explains that every station in Mexico City’s Metro has its own unique emblem (the one shown on page 60 is for Zaragoza station on Line 1, and features a person on a horse) to help illiterate riders identify their destinations more easily. And, when the Berlin Wall went up between in 1961, the city’s U-Bahn (pages 12-15) was divided into two separate systems. Some West Berlin lines went underneath East Berlin, traveling through sealed-off stations, and each city developed maps showing the whole underground train system, but minimizing the graphical impact of the part on the other side of the wall.

Many of the maps are reproduced at so small a scale that their details are hard to decipher, which is unfortunate, but on the whole, Transit Maps of the World is an excellent resource. It is clearly laid out and should be useful for serious readers seeking a narrative of transit map history as well as for map junkies and people who are merely curious. The book’s cover proclaims that it is “The world’s first collection of every urban train map on earth,” which is a bit of an overstatement since many purely aboveground train systems are excluded, but readers should forgive Ovenden for this, since his is indeed the first book to consider transit maps as a group, while discussing their development both as tools for transit users and as achievements in graphic design.

Bookhunter [comic book] / Jason Shiga.
[Portland, OR] : Sparkplug Comic Books, 2007
[Multnomah County Library does not yet have this book, but it has been ordered and should have the call number GN SHIGA; eight copies, one hold]

Imagine that crimes against the library were taken more seriously than they currently are, and you might picture a world in which a crack team of special agents guards the physical and institutional integrity of the Oakland Public Library. In Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter, the library’s police force fills this role amply and well. After an introductory story of a short encounter with a censor (who has stolen all eight copies of The China Lobby in America), Bookhunter follows Agents Bay, Walker, and Finch as they track down an accomplished and slippery rare book thief who has switched out the library’s priceless Caxton bible for a fake.

Bookhunter makes a few erroneous technical assertions that may annoy librarians and other bookish people, but on the whole the world of the library is faithfully articulated in the story, and especially in Shiga’s realistic-cartoon-y drawing style. An early scene follows Agent Bay as he wanders the public and private areas of the Oakland’s Main Library, pondering the methods used by the Caxton thief. The twelve pages of Bay’s quiet library tour are perhaps the most beautiful in the entire book — the circulation desk, the periodicals room, a microfiche reader, the massive 1970s-era catalog in its cardfile, the reading room, the restrooms, the bookmobile; and everywhere patrons, seemingly endless bookstacks, and the gracious spaces that make up the large public rooms of the main library.

The story is action-adventure at its best — the thrill of the chase, the grind of nuts-and-bolts police work, and lovingly related details of setting, personality, and plot make Bookhunter worthy of the attention of comics lovers, library lovers, and undoubtedly many other folk as well.

[thanks, Kristian]

Afrikan alphabets : the story of writing in Afrika / Saki Mafundikwa.
West New York, N.J. : Mark Batty , 2007.
[MCL call number: 411 M187a 2007; two copies, no holds]

People in the West do not think of Africans, particularly those whose cultures are rooted south of the Sahara Desert, as people who have much history of written expression.  Surely if and when African people write they use the languages, or at least the writing systems, of Europe?  Um, not always.  And if you don’t believe me or you’re just interested to see the proof, Saki Mafundikwa’s Afrikan Alphabets should open your eyes. 

Mafundikwa begins with a congenial introduction in which he relates his experience with African writing systems and their use (he is a respected graphic designer and typographer).  Next are four chapters devoted to different alphabetic topics: non-alphabetical information storage systems — pictographs, mnemonic devices, symbolic art objects, symbol writing — are examined in their role as roots of African writing systems, and then historic alphabets, alphabets of the Diaspora, and contemporary African alphabets are illustrated and described. 

Throughout the book alphabets, symbols, characters, and letters are shown in use in literature, on signs, on handcrafted objects, and in artwork as well as in chart form.  The book is highly visual in character and even if you’re not ready to read through the text, there is lots to learn from the illustrations.  The body of the text is followed by an annotated bibliography, a glossary of linguistic and typographical terms, and a basic index.

Rain gardens : managing water sustainably in the garden and designed landscape / Nigel Dunnett and Andy Clayden.
Portland, Or. : Timber Press, 2007.
[MCL call number: 635.95 D923r 2007; eight copies, seven holds]

Here in the maritime Northwest, it rains a lot, for most of the year.  For cities, this causes a lot of problems for water and sewer authorities, for rivers and streams, and of course for wildlife, and eventually for people — because most of the land is paved over with streets and won’t absorb water.  In Portland (and no doubt in other cities and towns in the region), there has been a huge push in the last few years to promote on-site stormwater management — this sounds boring as hell, but in fact what it usually means is turning downspouts into waterfalls and turning gutters into gardens.  This is good for the natural water system (yay!), but it’s also often beautiful, educational, and fun (more yay!).

Cities in other parts of the world have similar stormwater management concerns, of course, and Rain Gardens is a kind of text book for residential, neighborhood, and municipal management of stormwater with rain gardens and other similar systems suitable for temperate climates.  Many topics are addressed — water cycles, the effect of paved surfaces on natural water filtration, the effect of planted surfaces on stormwater, and more.  The only serious complaint I have about the book is that it focuses almost exclusively on commercial and institutional rainwater management projects — in schools, housing complexes, office parks, municipal buildings, and public parks.  Too little attention is paid to stormwater management solutions for small buildings (like houses), and small projects that can be designed and built by amateurs.

However, Rain Gardens is still a practical work.  Case studies of successful rain garden projects are sprinkled throughout the text — including one describing Sutcliffe Park  (pages 126-127), in London’s Borough of Greenwhich, which was redeveloped in 2004 to decrease flood danger in the area, and included the “daylighting” of the once-buried River Quaggy.  A quarter of the book is taken up with a detailed discussion of rain garden design, and the last chapter contains a detailed chart of useful plants.  Rain Gardens is liberally illustrated with photographs and diagrams showing design principles and real-life examples from around northern Europe and North America (including Portland!).  There is a weak index at the back, not useful for much, and a brief and helpful bibliography.

 * * *

Some of you may be reminded, by my mention of the River Quaggy and its ressurection from an underground pipe, of N. J. Barton’s The Lost Rivers of London (Phoenix House, 1962, and Historical Publications, 1992; reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 20), Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room (reviewed in number 44), and Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman’s London Under London (reviewed in number 45).

London theatre : from the Globe to the National / James Roose-Evans.
Oxford : Phaidon, 1977.
[MCL call number: 792.09421 R781L; one copy, no holds]

It is difficult to imagine a city that is more about the theater than London.  At least for those of us steeped in the Western tradition (especially the English language one), there is no place that has a longer history of performance, playwriting, dramatic instruction, and also of censorship.  But there is so much written about the history of London theater; where do you begin?  Interested laypersons would do well to consult James Roose-Evans’ concise and readable history covering the four hundred years from the founding of The Theatre in 1576 to the opening of the new home of the National Theatre in 1976.

Roose-Evans takes readers step by step through the highlights of the art and business of London’s theater world, focusing on institutions, influential actors and managers, theater patrons, audiences, and the political context in which theaters, playwrights, audiences, and actors functioned.  Some of the stories that make up this narrative are particularly evocative of the oddities of the English character — for example, in 1809 John Philip Kemble opened the new Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (the old one had been destroyed in a fire).  In order to help pay the costs of the new building, prices were raised by about ten percent.  On opening night and for more than two months every performance was disrupted by riotous audiences chanting, singing, talking back to the stage, and waving signs and banners demanding a return of the old prices.  After each evening’s performance was finished, rioters would wend their way through the streets to Kemble’s house, where they whooped it up into the wee hours.  Kemble finally relented and lowered prices, and business returned to normal. 

London Theatre contains many such colorful stories, but it will also give readers a good grounding for the scope of the complex history of public performance and the theater in this most theatrical of cities.  The text is followed by a useful biography and an almost completely useless index (if you’re looking for a particular topic, start with the table of contents instead; it is reasonably descriptive and helpful).

The outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place / E.L. Konigsburg.
New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, c2004.
[MCL call number: y KONIGSBUR; 12 copies, no holds;
also in large type at: LGE-TYPE y KONIGSBUR; five copies, no holds]

Margaret Rose Kane has just been rescued from an unpleasant summer camp by her beloved great-uncle Alex — Margaret’s parents are in Peru for the summer working on an architectural dig to see if they still want to be married to each other, and Margaret wasn’t allowed to come.  Anyway, camp was horrible and Margaret is greatly relieved that she’ll spend the rest of her summer with Alex and his brother Morris, who live together in an old house in a neighborhood that has been unfashionable for a long time. 

But now their neighborhood is getting gentrified, and the upwardly mobile folks who are moving in have successfully petitioned the city to remove the beautiful handmade towers the two brothers spent 45 years building in their back yard.  Margaret learns about the towers’ fate shortly after her arrival at her uncles’ house — it’s completely decided; there has already been a hearing where all sides had a chance to argue their positions, and the city has determined that the towers are unsafe (there aren’t even any structural plans showing how they were built!) and a direct violation of the city’s zoning code. 

Margaret really has no idea exactly how she is going to do it, but she is going to save the towers. 

Growing roses organically : your guide to creating an easy-care garden full of fragrance and beauty / Barbara Wilde.
Emmaus, Pa. : Rodale, Inc., c2002.
[MCL call number: 635.933734 W671g 2002; three copies, no  holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

Portland is the city of roses.  The climate here is perfect for growing many kinds of plants, but our mild winters, cool rainy springs, and not-too-hot summers produce beautiful roses.  There are at least two species native to the Willamette Valley (the nootka rose, Rosa nutkana; and the baldhip rose, Rosa gymnocarpa), and Portlanders have been growing, breeding, and celebrating the rose for at least as long as there has been a city here.  The rose is our symbol and probably our favorite plant — the city has an annual rose festival complete with princesses and parades, and there are probably a dozen public rose gardens.  So, roses are familiar.

But when I began to learn about gardening and had to confront the task of pruning the roses that came with my yard, I found out how confusing rose care can be to a novice.  My first problem was figuring out what kind of roses I had.  Were they hybrid teas, species roses, rugosas, polyanthas, or perhaps one of the ancient heirloom types?  Each of these grows and blooms differently, so ideally they each have a specific pruning pattern.  But do gardening books explain how to determine what variety of rose you have in your yard?  Generally they do not.  And furthermore, when I began to look for rose information in books I found a lot of advice I didn’t want to take — garden authors told me to use pesticides and fungicides energetically, to follow specific watering practices, and to fertilize my roses according to a rigid and complex schedule.  Yuck.

Then I found Wilde’s book on organic rose gardening.  Not only does she outline a sensible plan for planting and tending low-maintenance rose plants, Wilde introduces readers to the history of rose culture, and explains the differences between the different types of roses.  The how-to-garden part of the book is followed by a helpful catalog of roses Wilde recommends for organic gardens.  All in all, Growing Roses Organically is practical, instructional, and clear. 

 * * *

Growing Roses Organically was also published in a 2003 edition which seems nearly identical:

Growing beautiful roses : your guide to creating an easy-care garden full of fragrance and color / Barbara Wilde.
Emmaus, PA : Rodale, c2003.
[MCL call number: 635.933734 W671g 2003; seven copies, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

African traditional architecture : an historical and geographical perspective / Susan Denyer ; line drawings by Susan Denyer ; maps by Peter McClure.
New York : Africana Pub. Co., 1978.
[MCL call number: 720.967 D417a 1978: one copy, no holds]

If you ask a person in the United States what a traditional African building looks like, chances are you will get a cursory description of a generic small hut.  It might be round, with some sort of thatching on top, and perhaps there will be a goat nearby or a barely-clothed person leaning in the doorway.  Such a dim picture exposes an ignorance of the diversity of traditional structures in Africa (and of the cultures that might produce buildings).  This might be fine — you can’t expect everyone to have a detailed knowledge of the material folk traditions of all the peoples of the world — but it’s only fine if the person you’ve asked actually understands that their vague description is vague.  That is, the bigger problem is that people often don’t know how little they know.

Fortunately, finding out how little you know about African vernacular architecture is easy when you have access to a book offering an accessible survey of the subject.  Thank goodness for libraries, right?  African Traditional Architecture contains a structured discussion of traditional sub-Saharan African buildings, with sections devoted to rural settlements, cities and towns, sacred and ceremonial buildings, defense, the building process, decoration, house forms, and the impact modernization has had on traditional structures.  The book is liberally illustrated with black and white photographs, maps, diagrams, and drawings, and the main contents are followed by a rather scholarly bibliography and an index.

Jigger, beaker, & glass : drinking around the world / Charles H. Baker, Jr.
Lanham, Md. : Derrydale Press : Distributed by National Book Network, [2001]
[MCL call number: 641.874 B167j 2001; one copy, no holds]

Imagine for a moment that absinthe was still available for legal sale, and you had some, and you wanted to know how to drink it.  You could ask a very old bartender, or a very old drinker, if you could find one of either; but at this point you might have more luck consulting a very old book about liquor and how to drink it.  I would recommend Charles H. Baker’s Jigger, Beaker, & Glass for this sort of project — it provides an astonishing catalog of libations and detailed instructions for making each one, together with a dictionary of cocktail ingredients and a huge amount of commentary and advice. 

Baker’s general advice, in particular, is worth attending to.  Of course the entire book is advice on how to chose liquor, what to mix it with and how to so mix, and of course how to drink your drink once you’ve mixed it.  But he sets aside particular important nuggets in numbered sections, such as this earnest injunction on page 10:

WORDS to the LIQUID WISE No. II, STILL further INSISTING that SHAKER & GLASSES ALWAYS BE CHILLED — ESPECIALLY when MAKING COCKTAILS for a VERY FEW GUESTS
Mixing 2 cocktails in a huge, room-temperature shaker, and pouring them into room-temperature glasses, is careless business.  The ice melts rapidly, dilutes the drink, and the whole mix warms so fast that instead of being really chilled the final outcome is also not far from room temperature. . . . A warm cocktail is like half-way objects in life — neither this nor that, and often a reflection on the judgment and discretion of those present.

Further “WORDS” on the use of Jamaica rum, choosing eggs for cocktails that require them, the spicing of hot drinks, punch terminology and garnishes, a reliable method for dealing with broken cocktail glasses, and other important subjects are peppered throughout the text.

But the bulk of the book is an encyclopedia of recipes for cocktails and other drinks made with liquor.  Hot and cold, complicated and devilishly simple, familiar and exotic, it is hard to characterize the scope and content of Baker’s recipe file.  Some drinks appear on their own:

GIN & QUININE WATER, or “GIN & TONIC” — ORIGINATED to COMBAT FEVERS, REAL or ALLEGED, & which LATER BECAME an ESTABLISHED DRINK in INDIA & the TROPICAL BRITISH EAST, & STILL LATER BECAME ACCEPTED over HERE by AMERICAN HOSTS WHO WANTED to IMPRESS FOLK with HAVING COMBED THE ORIENT
This is merely a gin highball, using dry or old Tom gin — either 1 or 1 1/2 jiggers — and filled up with chilled quinine tonic water.  All Americans, and some Britishers not so hidebound as to insist on brassy, half-warm drinks, added 2 lumps of ice, and a twist of lime peel.  We like the latter style better, but must warn all those who embrace this drink to remember it is a medicine and not primarily a stimulant only.  On more than one occasion we have temporarily showed aberration on this subject, with the result that our ears rang unmercifully and the next day we felt like Ramses II, réchauffé.  We suggest from 2 to 4 drinks of gin and tonic as being plenty for any one sitting.

And others appear in sections with their brethren — such as the “five delicious champagne opportunities” (pages 21-24), seventeen “hot helpers” (hot toddies, more or less, pages 50-60), and eight mint juleps (pages 61-69).  The drink recipes are followed by a section of serious advice (such as how “TO ALLEVIATE APPARENT DEATH from TOXIC POISONINGS, & ESPECIALLY SHOULD, in any HAPPENSTANCE, the QUALITY of the LIQUOR BE SUSPECT,” on page 171), instructions on the equipment necessary for a proper bar, a list defining the various liquors and mixers and providing recipes for many, and a very minimal index.

Truly, Jigger, Beaker, & Glass is a pleasure to read (though it does make a person thirsty) — for its careful and sometimes exotic recipes, for its attention to the details of drink-making, and for its wit.  You could pick up this book without ever intending to mix a cocktail or concoct a punch, and still find it delightful — but if you need the recipe for a Flor de Naranja, Sevillaño (also called a Spanish Orange Flower Cooler, page 35-36), or you are eager to know how to make marigold liqueur (pages 165-66); or if you need careful instruction on the differences between dry gin, Old Tom gin, Holland gin, and sloe gin (pages 185-86), you will find Baker’s book helpful as well as engaging.

 * * *

Jigger, Beaker, & Glass was originally published as volume two of:

The gentleman’s companion … By Charles H. Baker, Jr. …
New York, The Derrydale Press, 1939.
[MCL call number: R- 641 B16g: one copy reference only in two volumes]

Volume one of The Gentleman’s Companion deals with food and is subtitled The Exotic Cookery Book; or, Around the World with Knife, Fork, and Spoon; it is worth a glance as well.

Asmara : Africa’s secret modernist city / Edward Denison, Guang Yu Ren, Naigzy Gebremedhin.
London : Merrell, 2003.
[MCL call number: 720.9635 D396a 2003: two copies, no holds]

Asmara is the capitol of Eritrea, which is a little country on the African side of the Red Sea.  Between the 1890s and the 1940s, Eritrea was part of Italy’s colonial empire, and during that time the city of Asmara was built as a colonial capitol.  It is a smallish and very young city, in a much-ignored nation.  Even though Asmara could hardly be provincial (it is after all, the seat of government!), it seems likely that any cosmopolitan glory it might achieve is likely to forever remain unnoticed by most of the world.

However, since Asmara is a nearly new city, built in the twentieth century by Italian colonists who favored the Modernist tradition, it is a remarkable paradise of futuristic stylishness.  Because Asmara had to be built quickly, experiments with architectural design and ornament were allowed that would have never found favor in stodgy old Europe; and because new buildings were built on clear ground, architects and city planners did not have to work around any pesky existing infrastructure.  Everything was sparkly and new (at least in the wealthy, Italianized parts of town), and stylistic innovation was well-tolerated.

Asmara : Africa’s Secret Modernist City celebrates this Italian-built metropolis, with its clean modern lines, creative use of simple ornament, and stylish integration with the landscape.  Buildings of this tradition, but erected after the Italians lost power (from 1941 to 1991 Eritrea was controlled by Ethiopia, and saw decades of civil war) are also examined.  Unfortunately, the book’s focus doesn’t allow for a very thorough discussion of the “native quarter,” where most ethnic Eritreans lived during the Italian colonial era.  Neither is there much information about how the building of the (originally) Italian city affected Eritreans, or what the usage patterns of the different parts of the city are now. 

It is entirely reasonable for the authors to have limited their scope in this way — it is not their responsibility, after all, to provide a comprehensive history of the city and its culture — but since Asmara has not been written about as much as many other capitols, it is hard to know if readers could easily find this kind of depth elsewhere.  In any case, if you are interested in the cultural history of Asmara and how architecture has impacted life there, you may not find this book very satisfying.

Then again, if you want to see how Modernist architecture as practiced by Italian colonists melded with Eritrean culture and landscape to form the physical backbone of the nation’s principal city — especially if you want to see specific examples of buildings, their interiors, and their neighborhoods, the book may well delight you.

Asmara : Africa’s Secret Modernist City includes a terse introduction to Eritrean political history, and the history of the development of the city of Asmara from the 1890s to the present, focusing on architecture and civic planning.  This introductory section is followed by forty pages of portraits of buildings, arranged chronologically from 1889 to 1991.  The entire book is full of gorgeous photographs, with liberal use of maps, site plans, and architectural drawings to explain design concepts.  A chronology of Eritrean history, a bibliography, and an index follow the main text.

Cornerstones of community : buildings of Portland’s African American history.
Portland, Or. : Bosco-Milligan Foundation, 1995.
[MCL call number: 720.9795 C815; eight copies, no holds; four copies reference only at Central and North Portland Libraries]

Portland is one of the whitest cities in the United States, and its whiteness is a significant feature of its history.  Perhaps because Portlanders of color have always been so outnumbered by their white neighbors, over the years the city has also been very clearly segregated, with broad expanses of the city more or less off-limits to anyone but white folks.  Segregation here has taken different forms at different times, neighborhoods have changed greatly in the city’s 150 year history, and communities are fragile even in their vibrancy — so we don’t always see evidence of the past in streets, houses, and neighborhoods. 

Cornerstones of Community is an attempt to make some of the history of the buildings and neighborhoods of Portland’s African American community more accessible.   It is really more a work of social history than it is of architectural history — buildings and neighborhoods are presented as the context in which history happened, rather than examined as material artifacts in their own right.  The book’s text provides a history of black people in Portland — migration to Portland at different periods, state and local laws restricting black people’s lives, social and religious life, jobs and work opportunities, and political activism — all in light of how they affected home ownership, rental housing, business ownership, and community centers like churches, social clubs, and political organizations.  This history is presented chronologically, and each section is followed with maps showing African American population centers during the period discussed.

The book is appended with a series of maps showing locations of houses, businesses, and community organizations at different periods in Portland’s history — together with a master list of individuals, institutions, and businesses keyed to the maps.  This is perhaps the richest resource Cornerstones of Community offers, but sadly the appendix’s information design sharply limits its usefulness — looking for a person or business is easy, but there is no straightforward way to use the maps to get information about who lived or did business on a particular street at a particular time.  So, the appendix is invaluable if you want to find out some of the many places Dr. DeNorval Unthank and his wife Thelma lived in the many years they fought for fair housing practices, but not so great if you would like to know who the other African Americans noted as living along SE Tibbetts Avenue were. 

However, there is no getting around the fact that no other book — probably no other resource of any kind — tells this particular history.  And it is vital to anyone who wants to understand the history of our city to learn the story of where African American Portlanders have lived and worked, where they have worshiped and where they have spent their leisure hours, and how these places fit into the fabric of the city as a whole.  

Barmi : a Mediterranean city through the ages / Xavier Hernàndez, Pilar Comes ; illustrated by Jordi Ballonga ; translated by Kathleen Leverich.
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
[MCL call number: j 307.709 H557b; one copy, no holds]

Open this picture book and you’ll see a two-page spread showing a tiny walled settlement in a wooded area near a river.  Turn the pages, and you’ll see the settlement grow from wee village to an significant Roman city, then fall into ruin, and then grow again as it becomes an ecclesiastical center, university town, and hub of commerce.  Keep turning the pages and you’ll see star-shaped fortifications grow during the 1600s, factories spread during the 1700s and 1800s, and modern suburbs, roads, and high-rises appear in the 1900s.

Each of these fabulous two-page views of the whole city at different points in history is followed by a terse narrative history of Barmi and its residents, and a few pages illustrating details — plants grown in the region, engineering methods for building bridges and civic buildings, the arrangement of domestic quarters, siege defenses, the operation of a paper mill, 20th century suburban slums, underground infrastructure.

Barmi isn’t a real city; it is an example imagined to represent the typical city in its region.  Their histories, geographical features, and civic infrastructure are collapsed into one tool for explicating the whole scope of how cities evolved on the northwestern edge of the Mediterranean over 2,400 years.  The focus is on the city fabric, and its physical context — political history, social changes, and religious trends are all present, but the place itself is the real story.

[thanks, Jamie]

 * * *

Barmi is part of a series, which includes at least three other books: Lebek : A City of Northern Europe Through the Ages (by Xavier Hernàndez,  Houghton Mifflin, 1991, also in Hungarian and Italian), San Rafael : A Central American City Through the Ages (by Xavier Hernàndez, Houghton Mifflin, 1992), and Umm El Madayan : An Islamic City Through the Ages (by Abderrahman Ayoub, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1994, also in Italian and Japanese).  Barmi was also published in Spanish and French.  The illustrations in the series are precise and intensely detailed, and the books’ ability to instruct with pictures reminds me of nothing so much as David Macaulay’s famous practical explanations of architecture, construction methods, and the uses of buildings in his books Cathedral : The Story of its Construction (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), City : A Story of Roman Planning and Construction (Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Pyramid (Houghton Mifflin, 1975), Castle (Hougton Mifflin, 1977), etc.

Life turns man up and down : high life, useful advice, and mad English : African market literature / selected and introduced by Kurt Thometz.
New York : Pantheon Books, c2001.
[MCL call number: 820.8 L722 2001; two copies, no holds]

If you had access to a time machine and were able to visit the great market town of Onitsha, Nigeria sometime between the Second World War and the late 1960s, you would have seen for sale a wide array of locally written and produced pamphlets and short books: instructional texts and self-help guides, romances, historical accounts of important events, and cautionary tales.  These pamphlets were written and published locally, and the entertainment and information they provide is tailored to a community of readers in a society where widespread literacy was a new phenomenon. Kurt Thometz has collected 18 pamphlets (three are complete; the remainder are excerpts) together for readers who do not have access either to a time machine or the rare library of African market literature. 

The collection is readable for many reasons — as a document of history, for instruction in morals and good conduct, as an exercise in understanding Nigerian culture, or simply as entertainment.  The pamphlets are perhaps most notable for the rich and striking descriptive language they employ — some of this beauty of language has no doubt to do with the fact that Nigerian English is its own creature, with vocabulary, syntax, rhythms, and literary conventions distinct from those of other forms of English.  But it also seems likely that the newness of the enterprise of publishing popular literature in Onitsha had its effect on pamphlet language.  This awkwardly elegant English is evident in titles:

• Money Hard to Get but Easy to Spend (page 105)
• How to Avoid Corner Corner Love and Win Good Love From Girls (page 131)
• Drunkards Believe Bar as Heaven (page 125)
• Mabel the Sweet Honey That Poured Away (page 151)

in front matter:

• “The Adventures of The Four Stars dedicated to Samuel A. Okponku And International guy whom I chance to meet during the brief writing.  He says: ‘A quittes never wins, a winner never quiter’. That is to say, ‘Once a Radical Star, always a Star.’” (page 245)
• “This very short but highly amusing drama called ‘The Statements of Hitler Before The World War’ is intended to entertain you much anywhere you may be: whether in office, or market, or workshop or house or in journey.” (page 295)

and of course in text:

• “The breakneck speed, was terrific.  It was a bottle neck type of a run, rearing the fatal full-stop of the speedometre.” (in Rosemary and the Taxi Driver, page 21)
• “Since the world has broken into pieces, truth is not said again.  If you ask a little boy a question, he will not tell you the truth, instead he tells you lies.  The same thing with little girls.  When little boys and girls could give up the truth, then imagine the degree of lies with grown ups.” (in Man Has No Rest in His Life, page 51)
• “You could see a parcel on the street and call it a bundle of money, when you open it, it becomes a box of sickness and bad luck.” (in No Condition is Permanent, page 82)

But beyond the special qualities of Onitsha market literature English, the pamphlets collected here are just good, and varied, reading: a play about Hitler on the eve of World War II, a highly erotic novella about a woman gone wrong, a polemic against drinking in bars, a spiritual tract advising caution in all aspects of life (for “things are not what they seem, and life you see, is nothing but an empty dream”), and a Wild West-style adventure story are among the contents.  Life Turns Man Up and Down is the kind of book you should have handy to read on your bus commute, at the beach on a summer weekend, or in bed before you go to sleep.  Its contents are doom-saying and optimistic, sober and ridiculous, humorous and thoughtful.

A prefatory chapter provides context for the collection with a description of the Onitsha market, a terse introduction to 20th century Nigerian political history, an account of the legacy of traditional and international slavery, a brief discussion of Nigerian English, and finally an account of the beginnings of Ontisha’s popular publishing industry.  Thometz’s afterword explains the provenance of the particular pamphlets reproduced in the book, and his own interest in the study of this body of literature.  There is no index, but the text is followed by a reader’s guide to the study of Nigerian market literature, and a bibliography of the works in the anthology.