Filed under: art & entertainment
Soviet textiles : designing the modern utopia : selected from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection / Pamela Jill Kachurin.
Boston : MFA Publications ; New York : Trade distribution : Distributed Art Publishers/D.A.P., c2006. [MCL call number: 746.0947 K11s 2006; one copy, one hold]
Oh, it’s so easy to understand the pull of the Soviet dream of a workers paradise when looking at the cream of socialist-realist art/propaganda. Handsome tractors surging across uniformly fruitful fields, little stylized children in geometric smocks playing ball, gracefully belching smokestacks; all are repeated in bright, modern colors across expanses of plain, honest cotton fabric. The world depicted here is productive and prosperous. Children have time for play as well as learning, adults find joy in shared work; and no one knows want or cold or psychological despair.
In the brief period from about 1927 to 1933, Soviet designers engaged in a bold experiment — rather than continue to produce the floral patterns that had always been popular, they designed fabrics featuring collective farms and factories and their generous product, and other modern ideals. The notion was that these assertively socialist textiles, provided for everyday use, would help to radicalize and educate the population at large. Soviet Textiles provides a terse, cogent history of this movement, its origins, and its demise — gracefully illustrated, of course, with images of an idealized art deco cotton utopia on nearly every page.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Photobooth / Babbette Hines.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.
[MCL call number: 779.2 H662p 2002; one copy, one hold]
I’m not sure I have much to say about Photobooth — though I can describe it, and I will shortly — the main reason for mentioning it here is simply that it is lovely and surprising and you are many of you very likely to miss it unless you have it pointed out.
You’ve been to a photobooth; everyone has. It’s a big box, as big, perhaps, as a car. You slide into it (maybe you jam yourself in with several of your closest friends), decide which color of curtain you’d like behind you, feed your quarters into the slot, and sit, pose, or mug while the box flashes at you once for each pose. Then you clamber out and wait impatiently for roughly two minutes while the box processes your negatives, prints them, and finally ejects a thin strip of pictures. They are probably over- or underexposed, blurry, or unflattering in some way. The paper is wet. They’re cheap, entertaining, useful, and eminently ephemeral.
Babbette Hines collects other people’s photobooth pictures, and Photobooth is an exhibit of her collection. They cover roughly 200 pages. Some are shown front and back to show notes people wrote on them, some are set in frames or pasted on to cards bearing messages. They show babies, lovers, holiday-makers, soldiers and sailors, friends, and single individuals. Some are serious, some are silly, some are poignant. Some look as though they are meant to grace a passport or other official document, some were clearly taken only for amusement, some are completely inscrutable as to intent.
You must get this book, because you must see these pictures.
* * *
Or you could get this one:
American photobooth / Näkki Goranin ; foreword by David Haberstich.
New York : W. W. Norton & Co., c2008.
[MCL call number: 779.2 G661a 2008; five copies, no holds]
It has a smidge fewer photobooth pictures, but it begins with a much more substantive introductory chapter, with a technical and historical discussion of the invention of the photobooth and its development as a commercial enterprise. The author, Näkki Goranin, is herself an photobooth artist, and several of her self-portraits are included in the book.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The forgotten arts and crafts / John Seymour.
New York : Dorling Kindersley, 2001.
[MCL call number: 745.5 S519f 2001; five copies, no holds]
One side effect of a curious mind is that it can be difficult to shake off idle questions. How do you properly thatch a roof? Were there once different kinds of thimbles for different sewing tasks? Is there a non-electric ancestor to the vacuum cleaner? But there is hope if your idly questioning mind inclines this particular way — these and many similar questions can be answered by consulting John Seymour’s The Forgotten Arts and Crafts.
In straightforward prose and clear illustrations, Seymour explains how things used to be made and repaired, who did the work, and a bit about their daily experiences. The book includes traditional arts, crafts and homemade products primarily from the western Europe and the cultures it has spawned, but this narrow focus allows for greater depth – for example, there are two pages on boot and shoemaking, and an additional two pages on clog making. And there’s a nice sidebar in the clog section about clogs made entirely of wood (with no leather upper part), and how they were called sabots in France, which gave rise to the word “sabotage,” because a clog is a handy weapon when you’re an oppressed worker. Well, Seymour doesn’t put it exactly like that, but you see what I mean.
The Forgotten Arts and Crafts is nice to leaf through, but it might also prove useful if you really do have a question like “what sort of tools might one use to make large quantities of butter by hand?” And there is an index, as well as an detailed table of contents and lots of arresting illustrations, so you should be able to find what you need in short order.
* * *
If you need to know more about the workings of mundane technology, with a more modern bent, you would do well to consult David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work, which explains the how of everything from simple machines to the space shuttle.
Filed under: art & entertainment
The dawn of the color photograph : Albert Kahn’s archives of the planet / David Okuefuna.
Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2008.
[MCL call number: 779.092 K12o 2008: six copies, no holds]
In the first few years of the 20th century, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented autochrome photography, a simple, inexpensive method for making color photographs with a standard glass-negative camera (the sort used by professionals at the time). The autochrome was a radical development — other color photography techniques existed, but they were expensive, complicated, and/or cumbersome.
Inspired in part by this technological development, French banker, pacifist, and philanthropist Albert Kahn conceived of an ambitious project — he recruited and financed professional photographers, provided them with autochrome plates and other equipment, and sent them around the world to photograph everyday life. From 1908 through the 1930s, these photographers recorded world events, wars (most notably the First World War), political change, religious practice, commonplace cultural events, national festivals, people at work, and of course the landscape of houses, streets, neighborhoods, cities, agricultural land, and the natural world. The project was named The Archives of the Planet, and eventually grew to more than 72,000 images.
The Archive’s photographers traveled far and wide, to teeny villages as well as important cities in nearly every corner of the world, and their work captures a world that is roughly a century old. European imperialism, the massive bombing campaigns of the Second World War, the spread of Western popular culture, industrialization, the Cold War, pollution, globalization and many other forces have made changes both to our cultural and physical geography. The Dawn of the Color Photograph collects hundreds of these pictures and presents them in a geographical arrangement, with David Okuefuna’s meticulous captions showing not only where and what is portrayed in each image, but often explaining how history has treated the buildings, cities, cultural traditions, and communities captured therein. It’s easier to understand what’s in the pictures with this bit of explication — at times Okuefuna reads quite a lot into the images, making assessments of people’s state of mind from their expressions, for example, but on the whole his captions are helpful and illustrative.
But the pictures themselves are frankly astonishing. The autochrome process* produces very different images than the color photographs we’re used to. The images are muted and romantic looking; a bit grainy. Even scenes that are brightly lit with full sunlight do not seem harsh – colors meld a little, and look more harmonious than they generally do in life. Autochromes require a long exposure time, so some of the images are clearly posed – and those that are not often include blurred shapes where people or animals moved during the exposure. The strange colors and long exposure combine to give the photographs a well-put-together look, a bit like theater promotion stills or fashion magazine shots. And yet most of the images are startlingly natural looking. The majority capture scenes of life as it is lived — marketplaces, people at work, street scenes — most of these seem as natural as they would captured in a fraction of a modern second by an amateur with a Brownie or an iPhone.
I looked through The Dawn of the Color Photograph several times before I felt ready to write about it. The first time, I simply flipped through and looked at the pictures. The second time, I read the introduction and the essays at the beginning of each chapter, and looked at the photographs more carefully. The third time, I went through the whole book and read each photograph caption. The fourth time, I flipped through again and revisited the images which had struck me most. I am not sure that I am done; I’m not sure I have seen even a substantial part of what is available to see in this collection of images. These pictures are very energetic and lifelike, and even though the people are mostly dead, many of the buildings and communities are scattered or destroyed, and the world is unalterably changed by time and other forces, these people and places do not seem gone. They seem real, alive, present. The people seem human, their cultures important, their habits interesting, their perspectives valuable. I think this is the magic that Albert Kahn was hoping to create.
* * *
* There is an appendix explaining the technical aspects of the autochrome process, which helps illuminate why the images look the way they do — and of course it’s also interesting because autochromes work so very differently than the photographic processes we typically use today.
Filed under: science
Rats : observations on the history and habitat of the city’s most unwanted inhabitants / Robert Sullivan.
New York : Bloomsbury : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2004.
[MCL call number: 599.352 S951r 2004; 14 copies, no holds]
Rats are bad. They inhabit our nightmares. In fairy tales and children’s books, rats are often cast in an evil light, in the company of wolves, crows, vultures, bears, cobras, and other scary animals. They are night-dwellers, their teeth are sharp and nasty, they infest ships and tenements and scavenge humanity’s leavings, they’re skittery when we startle them but vicious when their backs are against a wall; they are dangerous, they’re vermin, they don’t share our interests and we cannot have any kind of meaningful communion with them. These are the lessons of our culture. Rats are bad.
But human culture has more than folklore, more than tradition and street smarts and history. We have also science. The core methodology of western science is the trajectory of hypothesis, careful observation or test, and reasoned analysis. It is difficult to shake the fear, the nightmares, and the fairy tales about rats, but if we can do so, and follow this relaxation of basic emotional response with methodical examination, we may learn to understand rats a bit, predict their actions, appreciate their virtues, and maybe even modify our own systems to accommodate rats a bit better while still meeting our own needs.
And this is what Robert Sullivan set out to do. He spent a year observing the rats indigenous to a particular alley in lower Manhattan at night, while during the day he researched rat biology and natural history, rats’ impact in New York and other cities, rat extermination, and other rat-related topics. This makes for more of a history and less of a scientific study, but it is still true that Sullivan began with the premise that he should do his best to observe first, and analyze and judge second.
In the long run, the story is sadder than it is hopeful. Reading the first few chapters, Sullivan’s observations in the alley inspired in me a respect for rats and their abilities, their strengths. Sullivan’s diary of rat observations were like those of a naturalist in the wild — careful, methodical notations of events. He recorded patterns and attempted to identify individuals. When the rats did something he hadn’t seen before, he considered the environment around them and looked for rationales for their behavior, all the while trying to think like a rat might — or at least trying not to think only like a human. But Sullivan’s record of his observations is only part of the book: another significant portion of the text reports Sullivan’s interviews with professional exterminators and municipal rat control authorities. I found this depressing. Reading Sullivan’s reports of scores of conversations with people whose careers focus on killing rats, I began to teeter between sympathy for the hapless rodents (who, after all, are nocturnal scavengers because it is their nature, not because they are actually evil or vicious or sent by an enemy to vex humans), and a sort of generalized civic interest in their eradication from cities, for the benefit of urban humanity and to create a more harmonious urban ecosystem. Not a pleasant fence to find oneself sitting on.
Anyone fascinated, interested, or horrified by rats should find something in Sullivan’s text to pique their interest — but if you, like most people, already have a conception of rats as bad vermin, or as cuddly pets, beware that neither side wins in this narrative. Rats are shown as fascinating, even noble wild creatures; they are also shown as dangerous pests who will bite children’s faces as they sleep.
* * *
If you are looking for an book that takes a different line about rats, a book that casts them as intelligent creatures with a meaningful social network and complex interactions with the world around them, you can hardly do better than the children’s classic Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O’Brien (many publishers, 1971-present). It is the story of a widow mouse with a sick child who seeks the help of a community of super smart, super scary rats who live in a bramble bush. Mrs. Frisby’s husband had known these rats; they had all escaped from a National Institute of Mental Health laboratory together after several years of experiments. These experiments, and their results, are an important feature of the story — the rats and their mouse friends are bigger, stronger, smarter, and more long-lived than other rats and mice, because of their time at NIMH. So they’re not just rats, they’re special rats. But I’ll tell you, when I read this book as a child, I came away feeling sure that rats were more complex and admirable than I’d previously thought. And after reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, I was plenty pissed off that humans are so often too lazy to find a way to do genetic research without torturing rats and mice.
Filed under: technology
The fruit hunters : a story of nature, adventure, commerce and obsession / Adam Leith Gollner.
New York : Scribner, c2008.
[MCL call number: 641.34 G626f 2008; 13 copies, no holds;
also in audiobook format at: CD- 641.34 G626f; five copies, no holds]
Probably all of you have encountered a mysterious fruit at some time in your lives. Perhaps you met it in the produce section of an grocery store specializing in imports from afar, perhaps you ate it while traveling abroad or even just in another part of your own country. Perhaps you’ve never eaten this fruit; you’ve only read about it and wondered what it might be like to actually taste it.
Adam Leith Gollner traveled widely, ate every new fruit he could find, and scouted out scientists and farmers and weirdos who are obsessed with fruit — and recorded his experiences in The Fruit Hunters. It’s not really a book about fruit; it’s about people and fruit. In talking about the people, he has to talk about the fruits, of course, so you get some of both; but it’s the fruit crazies, the obsessives, the true believers who are really the focus. These people’s stories are so varied and bizarre that it’s hard to characterize them, but here’s a terse sampling of a few of the remarkable fruits and fruit-lovers you’ll find in Gollner’s text:
Fruitarians eat only fruit: for increased health, to build a closer communion with God, or to maintain a connection to primeval man. Some vary the fruit-only rule by eating a “caveman diet;” fruits and air-dried raw meat. Others eat fruits and mineralized rock dust. But all maintain that eating a diet overwhelmingly composed of fruit is the best, the purest, the most compelling. Gollner visits several fruitarians and dines with them, while discussing spirituality, the practice of traveling around the world following the ripening cycle of durian fruit (see below), and other topics.
Gary Snyder, an apple grower in Wenatchee, Washington, has invented a fruit product called the Grapple. This horrifying concoction begins as a Gala or Fuji apple, which is then permeated throughout with artificial grape flavoring. It’s available in blister packs of four at big box stores, and in some places, pre-sliced in baggies. Gollner visits Snyder and tours his facility, though the secret method for turning apples into Grapples is not revealed.
Eat a miracle fruit, a berry grows in the sub-tropics, and everything — seriously, everything — you put in your mouth for the next couple of hours will taste sweet. Gollner meets fruit people around the world who grow the berries themselves and are willing to share a few with him, but in the U.S. they’re almost unknown. The berries contain a protein called miraculin, which acts as a short-term befuddler for taste buds, making sour things taste sweet. Miraculin is banned by the FDA, very possibly due to secret pressure from sugar company lobbyists.
The durian is renowned as the foulest-smelling fruit on earth. Durians are famously banned from the subway system in Singapore, and they are unwelcome in many refined public places, such as fancy hotels, throughout Asia. And yet the durian is a beloved fruit in its home territory, and fruit tourists seek it out. Durian-scented condoms, Gollner reports, are popular in Indonesia.
The Fruit Hunters acts a bit like a history of fruit, but Gollner is a journalist and it shows. His writing style is informative while still a bit breezy, and the book is something like a very long lifestyle piece of the sort you might find in a highbrow magazine or newspaper. The facts-and-figures addict in me was a little frustrated at times, but on the whole I found the book quite captivating. And The Fruit Hunters easily passed one of the tests I use to see if I should review a book here in Duck Duck Book — while reading it, I often found myself wanting to read bits and pieces out loud to anyone who happened to be around, or sometimes, to a friend or colleague who I thought would enjoy a specific anecdote or factoid.
Filed under: technology
New York’s forgotten substations : the power behind the subway / Christopher Payne.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2002.
[MCL call number: 625.4 P346n 2002; two copies, no holds]
Does it not seem that everything about a big city’s subway system should be underground? All the machinery and all the mechanisms to control the subway surely ought to fit neatly below the streets, as the stations and tunnels do. Even the transit system control room that sometimes features in action films is in a windowless room and therefore, filmgoers imagine, is probably underground along with all the other subway infrastructure.
But not everything that makes the trains go fits under the earth. Notwithstanding suburban lines and stations that are wholly aboveground, the power that electrifies the third rail or the overhead wire has to come from somewhere — usually somewhere well away from the tunnels and the tracks. In New York City, the subway system was built with strategically placed power substations near each line. In each one, electrical power from generating stations around the region was converted from high voltage alternating current to low voltage direct current, which ran the trains. In the early 20th century, each of these substations was filled with giant round machines called rotary converters, as well as a quantity of other mechanical equipment like switches, busses, gauges, and breakers.
These substations have now been taken out of service, or had their equipment replaced with more modern technology — but in the late 1990s as the last manual substations were being scrapped, photographer Christopher Payne visited as many as he could, and took pictures of the buildings and their equipment. In this slim volume, some substations are shown with modern electronic equipment side by side with out-of-date manual equipment. Some are disused hulks filled with crumbling machinery, weeds, and peeling paint. Some photographs focus on the incredible workmanship and decorative detail in utilitarian structures like cast iron staircases, window frames, and building facades. All of Payne’s pictures highlight the inherent beauty of the machines and their environment.
Payne introduces his photographs with a series of short essays on the history of New York City’s transit substations, the machines they employed, the methods of their operation, and the basics of how they worked. The essays are supported by dozens of historical and contemporary photographs of substation buildings and workers running the power conversion machinery, and many diagrams explaining the layout of the machinery and the principles by which it operated. Payne’s history and technical explanations are fantastically clear, and his own photographs are both beautiful and interesting. So you should find the book educational, if you want to learn more about the power that runs the trains; and should also find it engaging, if you are interested in the beauty that can be found in practical things.
Filed under: history & geography
Chaining Oregon : surveying the public lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855 / by Kay Atwood.
Blacksburg, VA : McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, 2008.
[MCL call number: 917.9504 A887c 2008; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
When the United States expanded west, it was a major element of public policy to encourage settlers to go out there and carve their names into the land. Farming, ranching, and even mining all marked the territory as belonging to settlers — and land controlled by settlers was more American, in a cultural sense as well as a political one. Measuring the land, marking boundaries, and drawing maps showing what was there and who controlled each piece were important foundational steps that helped transform what was seen as wild space into a civilized, productive, and law-abiding nation. The first U.S. maps elucidating land ownership were drawn by draftsmen working for the General Land Office (later absorbed by the Bureau of Land Management), and they worked from measurements and notes taken by surveyors. The first surveyors in what is now Oregon and Washington began their work in 1851 after the passage of the Oregon Donation Land Act.
Land surveyors in the 1850s did much the same sort of work surveyors do now — except that these first surveyors in the Oregon and Washington territories were the pioneers of mapping in our region. If you look at a modern map showing land use and ownership in any part of Oregon or Washington, you’ll see properties measured with lines that were originally drawn by General Land Office surveyors in the 1850s. And here’s how they did it: they took basic (though often delicate) mechanical measuring equipment out into the valleys and the wilderness and measured. Teams of about five to eight men surveyed by hand, mostly in the rain and mud, often working from dawn till dusk. They walked survey lines in an area twelve to sixty miles wide from the southern end of the Puget Sound south to the California border in the space of five years. Chaining Oregon is a history of this project. Kay Atwood carefully and clearly explains the scientific and institutional history of the first surveys of the Oregon Territory — the bureaucracy, the technical challenges, local and national politics, the difficulties of weather and staffing and getting paid, and interactions between settlers and Oregon’s Surveyor General — while at the same time sharing relevant pieces of the broader history of Oregon.
In addition to their work of measuring and describing the land, surveyors kept detailed journals of their field work. These journals included notes about the weather, names of people they met or lodged with, conversations they had, meals they ate, and so on, as well as subjects more germane to the work, like where fences were, the quality of the soils, and the prevailing species of timber in forested areas. The bits more clearly connected to the work of surveying often show up on the maps — for example, a great swath of what is now east Portland is described on the map of Township 1N Range 1E Willamette Meridian as: “Land gently rolling soil good rate clay loam / Timber Fir a little Maple Cedar and Hemlock.” Atwood uses the whole range of information in the surveyor’s field notes (not just the businesslike parts), as well as the first survey maps and the correspondence and other records of the office of Oregon’s Surveyor General to build the core of a riveting history of a specific part of the Pacific Northwest’s past. She connects her basic source material to other documentation of life and civilization in early Oregon, and to secondary histories of the region and its people, but her most remarkable achievement is that she has made a largely technical story read like a completely human one.
The men who did the actual work, and those who administered it, are Atwood’s chief characters. The places they traveled and the land they described are also important to her story. Atwood did not set out to relate any of the many other interesting stories that are secondary to this central thread — the development of urban centers in Oregon, for example, or the struggles settlers faced when their individual situations did not neatly line up with federal land claim regulations. But she does make modest reflection on many of these other stories an important part of her narrative. Her descriptions of daily life in the towns of Oregon City, Portland, and Jacksonville are vivid. She clearly explains local and national party politics (normally an exceedingly confusing topic) in so far as they affected the project of surveying Oregon. And Atwood’s quotes from surveyors’ field notes about physical features of a specific spot are often followed by a brief but careful discussion of how white settlers had already irrevocably changed that piece land, and how this affected the lifeways and future prospects of the Indians who already lived there.
Many readers, even those interested in Oregon’s history, might expect a history of the state’s first land surveys to be dry and uninteresting. Perhaps other histories of surveying projects are indeed dry, but Chaining Oregon is engaging and clear, and reading it invites further study of many interesting facets of our region’s past and the people and events that shaped it.
Chaining Oregon is supplemented by extensive endnotes, a thorough if somewhat dry bibliography, and an index. As usual, I think the index is only minimally useful — it has almost no entries for surveying equipment and techniques, and neglects to provide access points for memorable subjects that are secondary to the narrative but which are so often the parts readers will remember later. However, the index provides adequate access to proper nouns and it is better than nothing.
* * *
The University of Oregon Map and Aerial Photography Library has a lovely collection of General Land Office maps of Oregon on its website. You can’t view the maps online; instead you have to download them. But they’re pretty small files and it doesn’t take too long for them to download.
The Portland Planning Bureau has the two earliest General Land Office maps showing the townships were central Portland is now, in pdf form, as a part of its collection of online historic resources. Township 1N Range 1E is the map I quoted from above; Township 1S Range 1E shows the area south of what is now SE Stark St. (which used to be called Baseline Road, because it follows the Willamette Baseline!).
Since you’re reading this, I’m fairly sure you’re interested in books and information — and more particularly, that you appreciate recommendations about what to read next or thoughts about why a book, an article, or a film is interesting, how it connects to the rest of the world of literature, what it promises, and whether these promises are delivered on. You must, or why would you be reading Duck Duck Book? And so. I am pleased to recommend that you visit another couple of places where you can get suggestions about what to read and why: Multnomah County Library’s two new blogs, News Notes and An Embarrassment of Riches.
(Before I get one step further I must disclaim: as you know I work at Multnomah County Library as a reference librarian. So I’m biased in favor of these two blogs. And further, I am one of the authors of News Notes, which makes me even more biased in its favor. Now that I have confessed, I will go on to describe the joys of reading about reading in these particular spots, and you may judge the size of the grain of salt you need to take with my enthusiasm.)
News Notes recommends books and other diversions inspired by current news stories — sometimes providing an avenue for background research or suggesting reading that can help you put the news in context — and sometimes offering more of a stream-of-consciousness beginning with a bit of news, and moving on to whatever comes next in the mind of a librarian.
An Embarrassment of Riches is something of a free-for-all — it opens a little window into the minds of dozens of library staff people who share intelligent observations about a broad range of literature. As its authors say, An Embarrassment of Riches alerts readers to “the best of what the library has to offer.”
Take a look at both; my guess is that you’ll find some surprises.
Edward R. Murrow and the birth of broadcast journalism / Bob Edwards.
New York : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004.
[MCL call number: B-Mu968e 2004; 4 copies, no holds;
also in audio format at CD- B-Mu968e; five copies, no holds]
In 1937, when Edward Murrow first arrived in London to assume his new post as the European Director for CBS, he tried to join the American Foreign Correspondents Association. They refused his application — after all, they were journalists, and everyone in 1937 knew that radio had nothing to do with journalism. Of course if they had a crystal ball, they would likely have rushed to recruit Ed Murrow, who was soon to be radio’s first news star, the man who brought the European war home to American living rooms, live and out loud. (In fact, in 1944, the Foreign Correspondents Association went beyond recruiting and made Murrow their president.)
Bob Edwards’s biography of Murrow focuses largely on Murrow’s professional life, his effect on journalism, and his work as an innovator in both radio and television broadcasting. Murrow is the person, Edwards argues, who created radio news. In those few years between 1937 and 1944, Murrow had led radio news away from a limited venue for 15-minute headline broadcasts to a complex medium of live interviews with powerful people, first-person reporting on current events, and synchronized news and commentary roundups from correspondents in several cities simultaneously.
It is interesting to consider this in light of more recent developments in journalism. In the 1960s and 70s, the “underground press” movement spawned hundreds of independent, low-budget newspapers that published stories and commentary — stories that would never have seen print in the mainstream daily newspapers or on network television. In the 1990s, new software allowed anyone with a computer and an internet connection to publish weblogs on any topic and entirely without editorial or publishing oversight. Each of these two new phenomena carved out space that wasn’t present before, and regardless of the direct impact blogs or the underground press have had on corporate journalism, that space still exists. And, both bloggers and journalists of the underground press have inspired real scorn among their fellows in the mainstream media world — they’re not real journalists, they don’t follow professional standards, they shouldn’t be allowed press credentials, and similar complaints.
The book satisfies on other levels too, though Edwards’s description of Murrow’s personal life, family history, and other private details are terse. These features are provided in service to the story of Murrow the professional man. For example, Edwards explains that when Murrow was fresh out of college, he worked as president of the National Student Federation of America (NSFA), and then assistant to the director of the Institute of International Education (IIE). Stories of this part of Murrow’s career help to explain his overall commitment to his values, and his unwillingness to compromise except under specific, strategic conditions.
For example, while at the NSFA, Murrow recruited historically black colleges to membership in the organization, and held a racially integrated convention in Atlanta. When he worked for the IIE, Murrow started an exchange program that brought American college students Soviet Moscow for summer courses, and coordinated a relocation project that matched German scholars displaced by Nazi politics with American universities willing to hire them as professors and researchers. These are interesting stories, but their job in Edwards’s book is not merely to educate and entertain. They show that Murrow was a man who strove to create opportunities to make his work as an educator also do service to his political and ethical ideals. These are the qualities, Edwards argues, that made Murrow a great journalist, and that gave him the tools to shape an emerging medium.
Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism has a modest index and a short bibliography. The book itself is quite short, and very readable. It might make a nice companion on a trip, or a good choice to read on a quiet afternoon alone. I read it on my commute to work, on the bus, where it sped my journey, diverted me from the flow of conversation around me, and, on one occasion, even made me almost miss my stop.
Filed under: art & entertainment
One thousand years of manga / Brigitte Koyama-Richard ; [translated from the French by David Radzinowicz].
Paris : Flammarion ; [New York] : distributed in North America by Rizzoli International Publications, c2007.
[MCL call number: 741.5952 K88o 2007; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
If you pick up a brand-new Japanese comic book and read it, my guess is that you are more likely to enjoy the story, the writing, or the art than you are to consider its historical antecedents.
If I am wrong, or if my pointing this out inspires you to explore the history of manga, Brigitte Koyama-Richard is at your service. Koyama-Richard traces manga’s roots back to the magnificent story scrolls painted 800 to 1,000 years ago exclusively for the enjoyment of elite audiences, through the establishment of printmaking as a popular art, the “golden age of caricature” and the opening of Japan to the west in the 1800s, the rise of the comic strip in the early 1900s, the work of the highly influential writer/artist Tezuka Osamu, and finally, contemporary Japanese comics.
Throughout this tour of artistic formats, political and technological developments, and cultural change, Koyama-Richard provides comparisons between the Japanese artworks that are her main focus, and well-known examples of European art that are contemporary to them. These comparisons are helpful for western readers who are ignorant of the existence and significance of major Japanese works, allowing a gentle introduction that encourages a developing understanding of the significance and context of seminal Japanese cultural icons — from treasures of history like the thousand year old scroll Choju jinbutsu giga (Frolicking Animals and People), to modern masterpieces like Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy).
A large percentage of the text in One Thousand Years of Manga is in its carefully written picture captions, which provide bits of history, biography, and thoughtful criticism of the images that appear on nearly every page. But the essays explaining each chapter in manga’s long history are clear and interesting as well, and the pictures — reproductions of scrolls, paintings, prints, comic strips, books, sketches, and many other incredible artworks — are incredible.
At the back of the book are a series of interviews with manga artists, a short essay about western influences on Japanese comics, a glossary of Japanese terms used in the book, a very brief overview of historical Japanese political eras, a biographical glossary of artists, a manga chronology, some selected manga statistics from Japan, and a bilingual bibliography. Even with all this magnificent endmatter, there is no index; but the book is well organized enough that it is hardly to be missed.
Filed under: comix
Incognegro [comic book] / written by Mat Johnson ; art by Warren Pleece ; lettered by Clem Robins.
New York : Vertigo, DC Comics, c2008.
[MCL call number: GN JOHNSON; eight copies, no holds]
Over time, racism and white supremacy have given us many stories that white people like to forget, and people of color can’t help but remember. One very horrific example from the United States’s own history is the story of the lynching of thousands of people of color, mostly African-American men, mostly in the south, and nearly always with the tacit consent of law enforcement and the pillars of the local community.
Lynching was common as dirt in the 1920s, and perpetrators nearly always went free. The white press largely ignored news of lynchings, but Black newspapers often reported on it. Incognegro is set in this context: light-skinned Zane Pinchback, a writer for the New Holland Herald (an African American newspaper based in Harlem) uses his ability to pass for white to attend lynchings and report on them first-hand in his “Incognegro” column. As the comic opens, Pinchback is expressing intense frustration with his success that is not success. He wants to participate in the literary and artistic flowering he’s surrounded by every day in 1920’s Harlem — and although everyone who’s anyone (and lots of folks who are no one in particular) reads “Incognegro,” no one has heard of Zane Pinchback.
During a confrontation on this question with his editor, Pinchback learns that his brother has been arrested for the murder of a white woman in a small Mississippi town, and he agrees to go incognegro one more time to cover the story and try to save his brother’s life. And then the shit really hits the fan. Excellent detective/reporter skills, feats of stupid bravery, the brotherhood of man, happenstance, and straightforward luck help Pinchback to survive an intense couple of days, several plot twists, a bullet wound, and lots of chit chat with racists, Klansmen, and town fathers. Incognegro is a real page-turner, with beautifully expressive art and a completely human (though of course also ghastly) story.
Filed under: technology
Manhole covers / Mimi Melnick ; photographs by Robert A. Melnick ; foreword by Allan Sekula.
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1994.
[MCL call number: 628.24 M527m 1994; one copy, no holds]
Have you ever looked down while crossing the street, and been shocked by the venerable age, or even the simple artistic grace of a manhole cover? They’re on nearly every city street. Some are plain, but intriguing because they are marked with the names of long-departed utility companies or municipalities; others are elegant works of art illustrated with flowers and geometric designs. Some are more pedestrian, covered with simple grids, plain over-all patterns of dots, or radial designs. But once you start to really see them you are likely to find a wide variety of different designs and patterns.
One reason is that although they are walked on and driven over every day, manhole covers are made of cast iron, and are incredibly heavy and durable. So they can have very long lives. Another is that utility companies, businesses, and local governments have had different rules about what manhole covers should and shouldn’t be like over time, and when the rules and fashions change, so do the new manhole covers. It is now generally required that manhole covers be marked with the name of the company or agency that operates whatever it is they provide access to. But, a hundred years ago, they were more likely to be marked with the name of the foundry where they were made.
Mimi Melnick and Richard A. Melnick’s book of photographs of manhole covers offers an engaging tour of manhole covers in many cities in the United States — it is not a comprehensive survey by any means, but there is much to savor in their selection of portraits. (Manhole Covers could be improved by an index to the locations in which each photograph was taken, but even though I am fervently devoted to the importance of indexes, I found that this oversight was quickly forgotten as I leafed through the book.) Mimi Melnick’s introductory essay traces the history of manhole covers, their manufacture, and their role in the infrastructure of American cities, and the 121 pages of manhole cover photographs that follow may well start you on the habit of looking down as you walk.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Self portrait in a velvet dress : Frida’s wardrobe : fashion from the Museo Frida Kahlo / [editors, Denise Rosenzweig, Magdalena Rosenzweig].
San Francisco, CA : Chronicle Books, 2008.
[MCL call number: 759.972 K12s 2008; three copies, one hold]
Frida Kahlo’s house, the Casa Azul, is now a museum. It is the house where Kahlo was born, and it is where she died. Kahlo’s husband, Diego Rivera, stipulated that her bedroom and bathroom should not be opened until fifty years after her death. So the rooms were locked and their contents left in place until 2004. When the museum’s staff finally entered Kahlo’s rooms, they found nearly 150 articles of clothing, dozens of household linens, a goodly collection of orthopedic equipment and hospital miscellanea, dozens of bottles of cosmetics and medicine, and a huge lithograph showing human embryonic development.
Kahlo’s clothes were the most notable prize. They were not so much a wardrobe in the normal sense as they were a collection — although it is certainly true that she wore these clothes, rather than collecting them as mere objects. And this makes the collection, and the book about it, feel rather strange. On the one hand, a museum devoted to a great personage is almost guaranteed to make relics out of any mundane object associated with that person, and the reverence with which this is done can border on the ridiculous. On the other hand, it is clear that Kahlo herself valued her wardrobe as more than simply a collection of garments to cover her nakedness and keep her warm. There is no doubt that part of what makes Frida Kahlo such an icon is that her attitude toward dress, style, art, and personal presentation was so enigmatic. Of course we would celebrate and carefully examine her clothing, now that we can. They have so much to say to us about
Kahlo as a person, and as an artist.
A large portion of Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress is taken up with Marta Turok’s essay on the ethnic roots of Frida Kahlo’s wardrobe. Turok discusses the sources of Kahlo’s clothes in different regions of Mexico, Guatemala, and examines what dressing chiefly in folk costume meant in Kahlo’s Mexico. This section contains many facing page illustrations: on one page, a photograph showing Kahlo wearing an article of clothing, or a reproduction of one of her paintings in which it figured; on the page opposite, a photograph of the item (or a similar one) after museum staff entered Kahlo’s rooms to observe and catalog her personal things. Other essays discuss Kahlo’s style of dress, the discoveries museum staff made the day they opened Kahlo’s rooms, and the restoration of the clothing and objects found there.
Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress is like a biography of Kahlo, with an emphasis on a specific part of her approach to the world: it is about Kahlo’s blouses, her shoes, her skirts, her belts, her scarves; and the way she used them to create a specific presentation of “Frida Kahlo” to her self, her family, her friends, and the public. Of course the book is beautiful; it’s full of lovely photographs of beautiful objects, it has the glitter of Kahlo’s fame and the sharp taste of her public tragedies. But it is also interesting as an exploration of a slender but important piece of a powerful artist’s creative vision, and the tools she employed to practice it.
Filed under: art & entertainment
Unbuilt America : forgotten architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the space age : a book / by Alison Sky and Michelle Stone ; introd. by George R. Collins.
New York : McGraw-Hill, c1976.
[MCL call number: 720.973 S629u; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]
Architects are planners — they are not traditionally responsible for doing the work of organizing and carrying out construction of their designs. In the course of their training and professional lives, most architects have designed buildings, monuments, or even whole cities that have never been built. Unbuilt America collects more than 200 designs that remain in the idea stage, each with illustrations and a description written by the architect, a contemporary critic, or a later historian.
The book’s contents are heavy with unbuilt creations of the 1960s and 1970s, for example: General Electric’s undersea community Bottom-Fix (page 100), Bruce Goff’s design for a Cowboy Hall of Fame shaped like a pile of horseshoes around a stake (page 106-107), James Lambeth’s hillside passive-solar village (page 158), Claes Oldenburg’s Design for a Tunnel Entrance in the Shape of a Nose (page 196), and several fascinating designs for structures celebrating the United States bicentennial (pages 248-261). But older unrealized plans are included too, notably Jacques J. B. Benedict’s Summer Capitol for President Wilson (pages 42-43), Frank Hemle and Harvey Wiley Corbett’s Restoration of King Solomon’s Temple and Citadel (pages 128-131), and Robert Stacy-Judd’s plans for cityscapes based on ancient Mayan architecture (235-237). All in all, it is an intriguing orientation to a series of curious and beautiful buildings and city plans.
Filed under: history & geography
You are here : personal geographies and other maps of the imagination / Katharine Harmon.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, c2004.
[MCL call number: 912 H288y 2004; three copies, no holds]
A map is a compelling thing, and it does not have to be true in scientific terms to give powerful testimony. It is relatively common for novels to begin with a map, showing something like the neighborhood in which the murder occurred, or the geography of a fairyland. And we encounter nongeographical and other conceptual maps regularly in other places too — the zodiac that is sometimes featured on Chinese restaurant paper placemats, or the diagram of the path to clarity displayed in Church of Scientology storefronts.
You need a map to understand the geography of a completely imaginary place, especially if you’re not the imaginer. Here are some examples from my own cultural influences: What if I want more information about the assets of the four countries of Oz? How can I get a feel for the lake in which the Swallows and Amazons sailed, see where Christopher Robin and Pooh had their adventures, or find out that Professor Plum did it in the library, with the candlestick? I need a map.
Diagrams of human anatomy, religious maps showing the dangers of loose morals and the benefits of a virtuous life, battle maps, and even those Family Circus cartoons showing little Billy’s path all around the house and yard in one afternoon are still more examples of imaginative maps revealing shapes and relationships in much the same way as traditional “real” maps show national interests, property, routes of travel, and weather predictions.
In You Are Here, Katharine Harmon has collected scores of maps and map-like representations of ideas, feelings, states of being, relationships, time, and more. Each chapter collects maps on a particular theme, with an introductory essay by a different writer. Some of the book’s examples are very clearly maps; others require some suspension of disbelief, some allowance for creative license. Some are in fact self-conscious works of art; others were created for humorous purposes, to teach, to inspire, or to convince others of a deeply held belief. Here are some of the maps I found most notable:
- “Falls of Eternal Despair,” a map showing the river of death as it slides off the plain of sin and wretchedness over the waterfall into the depths of hell. (page 44)
- “Map of Americana,” a 1929 map by illustrator John Held, Jr. shows the 48 contiguous states as vast central area thinly populated with gas stations, hot dogs, and opportunities to purchase orange drink, surrounded on all sides by a dense ring of rum runners and bootleggers. (page 84)
- “Surrealist Map of the World,” another 1929 map showing the countries of the world, centered on the pacific, but with Ireland dwarfing the island of Britain, a giant Easter Island looming over a teeny Australia, just two cities marked (Paris and Constantinople), and no sign of the contiguous United States. (page 118)
- A map of Los Angeles with cartoon faces showing affluence, the unemployment rate, urban stresses, and the proportional representation of race in each part of town. (page 138)
- A nice lithographic-style poster of a restaurant table surrounded with the evocatively lettered names of the various components of a meal, two friends, their chairs, napkins, meals, drinks, conversation, and warm feelings of friendship. (page 134)
Filed under: history & geography
Archaeology in Washington / Ruth Kirk and Richard D. Daugherty.
Seattle : University of Washington Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 979.7 K59a 2007; two copies, no holds]
It’s not always obvious at first, but there is a lot hidden in any inhabited land to show evidence of the people who have lived there over time. The area now occupied by the state of Washington is large, and it has supported human communities for many thousands of years. The exact range of time is a matter of some dispute, since scientists have competing theories about how people arrived there, and many indigenous peoples maintain that they have lived in their homelands from the beginning of time. But regardless of whether archaeological exploration in Washington can reveal traces of human habitation stretching back 14,000, or 20,000, or uncountable years, there is no doubt that there is plenty of evidence to show that people have been there, and have made an impact on the land.
Archaeology in Washington provides a friendly, sensible introduction to archaeological sites in the state, as well as to the state’s history of archaeological exploration, controversy, and accomplishment. One interesting story relayed in the book is the discovery and excavation of the Manis mastodon. In 1977, a couple living in the northern Olympic Peninsula began excavating a mucky portion of their land with a backhoe, with the intention of creating a pond where migrating water birds could rest. When Emanuel Manis dug up a pair of what seemed to be tree trunk sections from about six feet below the original surface of the site, he and his wife Clare Manis noticed the broken tips of the two chunks were white at the tips. They realized the chunks could be tusks, and called the an archaeologist at Washington State University who happened to be working on an excavation at another site on the peninsula. Seven years of excavation work later, bones of three mastodons had been recovered, along with seeds, bits of wood, other animal remains, and various human tools. Clare Manis eventually donated the site to the National Archaeological Conservancy.
Overall, Archaeology in Washington has the mainstream, open minded sort of bias familiar to readers of well-written American middle school text books — information is presented clearly, in a logical order that is meant to encourage the acquisition of knowledge, nearly every page contains at least one beautiful and useful photograph or illustration, the bibliography is helpful and the index decent, and although the writers definitely present their own perspective in subtle ways, matters of scientific and political debate are laid out in a more or less objective fashion that allows readers to mostly make up their own minds. You don’t have to know anything much about archaeology, or about Washington’s human past to understand this book, but you should know quite a bit about both when you have finished reading it, and it is interesting just to leaf through and look at the pictures.
Filed under: fiction
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]
Filed under: art & entertainment
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.
Filed under: history & geography
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.
Filed under: science
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.
Filed under: art & entertainment
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.
Filed under: history & geography
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.
Filed under: history & geography
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.
Filed under: history & geography
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).
Filed under: fiction
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.
