Duck Duck Book

First class : legendary ocean liner voyages around the world / Gérard Piouffre.
New York : Vendome Press, c2009.
[MCL call number: 910.45 P662f 2009 ; three copies, no holds]

I have travelled by ship, a teeny tiny bit — not entirely surprising, really, since I have lived within 100 miles of the ocean for my entire life — but I’ve never been on a proper cruise.  The times when I have slept on a ship, it hasn’t been the most pleasant experience.  The engines were loud, the ship was crowded, the seas were a little rough, the ship’s appointments were less than desirable, or the trip was so long through a dark night that I was just plain bored.

But still, I thrill a bit to the romance of ocean travel.  Shuffleboard and deck chairs, lavish dinners on heavy china, a library with shelves that have little rails on them to keep the books in; it doesn’t sound so bad.  I don’t mean I want to take a trip aboard a modern megaship, or one of those special cruises where you get to hang out with Garrison Keillor; no, the cruise of my dreams is one that takes place in a bygone era when cruise fashions only came in natural fibers and when nothing on the ship was made of plastic; a time when you had to travel by ship, because airplanes were unavailable or reserved for daredevils with bottomless pockets.  I am sure that if I were actually transported to the past to take an early twentieth century cruise I would waste no time in finding all kinds of fault with the operation, but since that’s impossible, I’m happy to daydream a bit with a nice picture book.

And First Class is a nice picture book.  Individual chapters describe and feature photographs of voyages in different parts of the world, with a focus on the period between about 1890 and 1940.  The essays that accompany the photographs are just meaty enough to give a sense of the history of the journeys well-off folks once took on ocean liners — and the pictures are beautiful.

* * *

If your’e truly charmed by this book, you might want to check out its companion:

First class : legendary train journeys around the world / Patrick Poivre d’Arvor.
New York : Vendome Press, c2007.
[MCL call number: 910.4 P757f 2007; two copies, one hold]

I haven’t examined it, but my guess is that it also provides a pleasant and interesting diversion.

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!).

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)

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.

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 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.

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).

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.

Among the righteous : lost stories from the Holocaust’s long reach into Arab lands / Robert Satloff.
New York : PublicAffairs, c2006.
[MCL call number: 940.5318 S253a 2006; 5 copies, no holds]

Robert Satloff begins his introduction to Among the Righteous by stating the central question of his project: Did any Arabs save any Jews during the Holocaust?  It is a difficult question, considering the long history of animosity between the two groups, and especially considering the history of political developments in North Africa and the Middle East after World War II.  Not one of the people recognized as rescuers of Jews by Yad Veshem (Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust), Satloff explains, is Arab. 

In some ways this is not surprising — might it not be difficult for the descendents of an Arab hero to claim publicly that she or he had saved Jews, given the contemporary political climate?  And then it is also shocking, since there are many stories of people unexpectedly taking considerable risks to help Jews in other places under Nazi, Vichy, or Axis control.  Is the absence of Arabs among the number of recognized “Righteous” due to the state of Israel’s reluctance to recognize Arab individuals in this way, or to a lack of Arabs willing to participate in recognition of that sort and from that quarter?  Or is it conceivable that no Arab helped or saved any Jew during the Holocaust?

Among the Righteous is more than just the story of Satloff’s search for an Arab who saved a Jew during the Holocaust.  Satloff provides a history of the progress of the war in North Africa — the Axis occupations of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya; slave labor camps along the nascent Trans-Saharan railway line (roughly parallel to the border between modern Morocco and Algeria, the political situation of Arabs and Jews in French-controlled (and then Vichy-controlled) North Africa, and the general state of relations between Jews and Arabs in the region.  Two chapters detail Arab participation in the persecution of Jews during the war, and Arab efforts to moderate or alleviate that persecution — from documented sources and orally reported stories.

But as promised, Satloff also sleuths along the trail of several promising stories of Arabs who helped Jews, and the tale of these investigations is fascinating — even a bit adventure-story-ish.  Satloff appears in small North African cities and earnestly interviews strangers about their long-ago neighbors or dead relatives; convinces powerful friends to introduce him to government officials and others who might ease his access to documentary evidence, exchanges emails with elderly Holocaust survivors about their experiences during the war, slogs through archives, and takes his family on at least one weekend drive into the desert to hunt out the location of a slave labor camp.

The investigation of possible Arab saviors, the wartime history of the North African region, and the stories of the fates and actions of Jewish and Arab North Africans during the period combine to paint a compelling picture, and it is certainly an interesting place to begin a study of the region and its history.

London under London / Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman.
London : J. Murray, 1985.
[MCL call number: 942.1 T789L; one copy, no holds]

London is a very old city.  Romans founded Londinium just shy of two thousand years ago, and there has been something of a settlement ever since. Every period in the city’s history has seen efforts by the powerful, the wealthy, and the creative to build the city better and more interesting — and because there is only so much space in a city, sometimes that meant building underground.

Of course, everyone has heard of the London Underground — the system of subway trains — but if you stop to think for a moment, you can imagine a lot of other stuff under there too. Sewers, utility conduits, catacombs, access tunnels, subterranean waterways, secret government sub-basements, and so on. Trench and Hillman lead readers on an exploration of a wide variety of underground wonders, providing a goodly number of illuminating photographs, maps, and diagrams along the way. Of particular interest are chapters on subterranean London during World War II (pages 11-21), the city’s underground defenses (pages 193-203), and “Smothered Streams and Strangled Rivers” (pages 23-53).

The book’s main text is followed by a gazetteer (which gives readers helpful tips about how to visit the different underground sites profiled in the book) and a modest index.

* * *

London Under London‘s chapter on underground rivers may put some of you in mind of a book I discussed a few years ago, N. J. Barton’s The Lost Rivers of London (Phoenix House, 1962, and Historical Publications, 1992; reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 20) and then mentioned again in a review of Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room in Duck Duck Book number 44.

The 8:55 to Baghdad / Andrew Eames.
Woodstock, NY : Overlook Press, 2005.
[MCL call number: 915.6 E12e 2005; 6 copies, no holds]

After her divorce from her first husband in 1928, Agatha Christie did a surprising thing.  With her daughter safely installed in a boarding school, she boarded a train and made the long journey from London to Baghdad.  After this point, she spent a major portion of each year in the Middle East, especially after she married her second husband, an archaeologist whose work took him to Iraq every year.

Andrew Eames, a travel writer, undertook to re-create Christie’s journey in 2002, just before the United States and its “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq.  On his way through Europe and the Middle East, Eames stopped in a dozen or so cities, where he investigated for traces of Christie, engaged in some light archaeological tourism, and just wandered around a bit, talking to people, looking at marketplaces and rivers and the local architecture, and reflecting on the differences between how each spot seemed to him and what it must have been like in the 1920s when Christie first traveled through.  An eloquent biography of Christie’s life in Iraq, and generally during the period after 1928, is offered in pieces throughout the book, but many other subjects enter the narrative as well: a history of Yugoslavian nationalist politics, musings on the importance of religion to the Syrian city of Aleppo, an account of the skirmishes between various countries for control of the (now Italian) city of Trieste, and many other distracting questions.

Eames’ writing is particularly poetic; if the book were one or two hundred pages instead of an imposing 390, I would recommend that all of you read it out loud, rather than silently in your own heads.  Descriptions of the mundane elements of the world going about its daily business are rendered vivid and heartbreaking in Eames’ prose.  For example, from pages 56-57:

“The last part of the journey from Venice [to Trieste] had proved to be easily the most scenic.  With the power of the sun beginning to wane, I drew back the curtains and was thus able to witness the giant shoulder of limestone karst known as the Carso emerge from the distance and charge like a bull across the Venetian plain, forcing the railway to crowd fearfully to the edge of the land.  Meanwhile the view out of the other window pretended nothing was happening, persisting with a slide show of peaceful blue images of the flat Adriatic, littered with becalmed yachts, and the distant Croatian shore.”

Armchair travelers will enjoy this vivid story, especially those who appreciate a bit of history with their story-of-going-to-an-exotic-foreign-place.  Anyone with a slight interest in Agatha Christie, the history of railway travel, or Iraqi archaeology may find the book a mild but pleasant education.  But all readers who appreciate thoughtful, eloquent prose should find themselves captivated by Eames’ artful telling of this smoothly disjointed story.

Lewis and Clark through Indian eyes / edited by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. ; with
Marc Jaffe.
New York : Knopf, 2006.
[MCL call number: 978.02 L673 2006; six copies, two holds]

As an undergraduate, I studied history.  Although I had several excellent teachers, I never settled into the discipline.  I had no real quarrel with the ideals or practices of historians, and no clear argument with the way it was taught, but I could not stand the company of my fellow students.  They wanted to Know What Happened.  They were certain that an examination of the available facts of any historical subject would lead them to The Truth.  I doubt anyone had told them they would find this complete truth, but they were somehow sure it was waiting for them just before the final examination, easily attainable for  any diligent student, and just as easy to assimilate into one’s bank of knowledge.

This view that it is simple to understand the past is, unfortunately, somewhat widely held.  People go to the movies, and then they think they have seen the truth about the Kennedy assassination or the revolt on the ship Amistad — and maybe they have seen the truth, but they haven’t seen the entire truth.  The whole truth doesn’t fit into a nice, easy package, because every story has as many versions as there are people affected by it.

Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes gives room for a few of the many stories about the travels of the Corps of Discovery in the early 1800s.  Nine eminent Indian authors were provided with an initial question: What impact, good or  bad, immediate or long-range, did the Indians experience from the Lewis and Clark expedition?  Their essays present very different stories about Lewis and Clark’s journey and their purpose, the American project of western expansion, U.S. treaties with tribes, the loss of Indian languages, the creation and erosion of Indian Reservations, modern tribal and intertribal cultural practices, and many other subjects. 

Because the essays have different authors, and because the editor allowed so much creative room, the nine pieces are very different in content, style, and tone.  Some are personal stories, some read like mainstream historical accounts, some are intensely spiritual, some are humorous, and some are righteously angry.  Taken together, they are refreshing, surprising, and humbling — especially for readers who, like me, were taught as children to unabashedly revere Lewis and Clark, their actions, their purpose, and their accomplishments.

The Salish people and the Lewis and Clark Expedition / Salish-Pend d’Oreille Culture Committee and Elders Cultural Advisory Council, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. 
Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, c2005.
[MCL call number: 970.1 S167 2005; two copies, no holds]

In the last few years, there has been a lot of fuss about Lewis and Clark, surrounding the 200th anniversary of their famous expedition from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River.  Here in Oregon, we have no doubt had a greater portion of Lewis and Clark excitement than other places, because the story has been taught here as one of local relevance for many generations. 

Unsurprisingly, the story taught to Oregon schoolchildren, and the one being commemorated now as a part of the Corps of Discovery’s 200th anniversary is almost entirely told from the perspective of the expedition’s members and their bosses in the White House, with very little consideration given to the point of view of the people whom Lewis, Clark, and their colleagues encountered in their journey. 

The great- great-grandparents of the Salish people of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes met Lewis and Clark and their expedition in September, 1805, and in this book elders and members of the tribe share their community’s history, memories, and analysis of their encounter with Lewis and Clark’s expedition.  The book opens with an account of tribal history that places the events of September 1805 into a larger context.  There are many elements to this history — tribal origin stories, elders’ accounting of Salish dealings with their Indian neighbors over many centuries and their analysis of Salish relations with the United States government, and a history of the Bitterroot Valley and Salish-Pend d’Oreille place names in the valley. 

The second section of the book is devoted to testimony, stories, and histories of Salish interactions with Lewis and Clark — including several stories of serious inter-cultural misunderstanding.  For example, Salish people assumed that the strangers were in mourning because their hair was cut short.  They thought the white people must be suffering from cold, because their skin was so pink.  And when the expedition members were offered gifts of food and robes to sit on, they refused the food and threw the robes over their shoulders, both of which were interpreted as gestures of rudeness and insult.  This section also discusses Salish history after 1805, with an overview of how the Salish and other Indian people dealt with the changes that came with white settlement of Montana, the General Allotment Act of 1887 (which opened tribal and reservation lands to white settlement), and the urbanization of the Missoula area.

The combination of brief essays written by modern tribal historians, oral history accounts and traditional stories from elders and other tribal members, documentary sources, and interpretive and documentary illustrations (chiefly paintings and photographs) works nicely to make The Salish People an intellectual resource as well as an enjoyable, accessible read.

Biographies of tribal elders and contributors, a guide to written  Salish, and a list of archival sources are appended to the main text, and are followed by a bibliography and index. 

Cities of the world : a history in maps / Peter Whitfield. 
Berkeley : University of California Press, c2005.
[MCL call number: 911 W595c 2005; two copies, one hold]
 
On the wall of the staff lunch room at my place of employment there is a large, framed map, a bird's-eye view of the city of Portland.  Looking at it, it is easy to imagine one's self standing at a vista high in the (then) rural West Hills on a clear day, gazing out to the east with the river and the city below, and Mt. Tabor, Mt. Hood, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Adams in the distance.  The map, published in 1881, describes a very different city from our present metropolis, but there are many features besides the water and the mountains that remain recognizable to modern residents.

Whitield's book reproduces about 75 ancient, or merely old, maps of cities around the world — though sadly none are of Portland.  Each is accompanied by a page-long history of the city, presenting highlights of its urban development, cultural importance, and economic and political influence.  The maps are beautiful, and are well-complemented by Whitfield's essays.  Slightly more than half of the maps in the book are of European cities; slightly less than half represent cites of the other continents.  The maps are followed by a brief bibliography and an index.

The Kalapuyans : a sourcebook on the Indians of the Willamette Valley / by Harold Mackey ; with a new afterward [sic.] from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and an updated bibliography. 
Salem, Or. : Mission Mill Museum Association ; Grande Ronde, OR : The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, c2004.
979.5004 M157k 2004; two copies, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

This slim volume reproduces primary source material on the history of the Kalapuya people, discusses archaeological evidence about their pre-historic past, and briefly touches on the cultural and political conditions under which the Kalapuya lived in the period beginning with their contact with white settlers (the early 1800s) through their removal to reservations (c1850s) and the first fifty years or so of reservation life. Mackey presents the book to readers, in his introduction, as a plug for the gap in material available to teachers who wish to fulfill Oregon's requirement that the grade school curriculum include material about the history of our state's native peoples.  The Kalapuyans is not written for elementary school students to read themselves; but could easily function as a sourcebook for teachers developing classroom materials.

Many original documents are reproduced in full, or quoted at length in The Kalapuyans, some of which are not published elsewhere.  I found the transcripts of the 1851 treaty negotiations at Champoeg to be especially interesting, because they show so clearly the racism and condescension of the U.S. representatives.  The U.S. negotiators make a lot of cloying references to "Your great father in Washington" and make many promises of the care with which this great father will tend to the needs of the Kalapuya people.  Since we know by now that this was all hogwash, it's bitter to read, and some of the exchanges are most poignant. 

The Kalapuyans includes very little discussion of the recent history of the Kalapuya or the other tribes and bands which now make up the various Oregon confederated tribes, though a new afterword fills a small part of this void. (Further details of the history of the Kalapuya people can be found on the webpages of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde.  Both tribes have excellent cultural resources available online, including maps, historic photographs, and information about current cultural activities.)

The first edition of The Kalapuyans was published in the 1970s:

The Kalapuyans : a sourcebook on the Indians of the Willamette Valley / by Harold Mackey. 
Salem, Or. : Mission Mill Museum Association, [1974]
[MCL call number: 970.1 M1553k; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

I have not examined this earlier volume, but the bulk of its content appears to be the same (though it lacks the afterword mentioned above).

[thanks, Sara]

Shared lives / Lyndall Gordon. 
New York : Norton, 1992.
[MCL call number: B-Go656s; one copy, no holds]

Shared Lives is a memoir of friendship, specifically of the friendships between biographer Lyndall Gordon and three of her close friends from childhood, all of whom died before their middle age.  The genesis of this friendship is in the insular, middle class community of immigrant Jews in 1950s Cape Town, South Africa.

The story is presented chronologically, from the four girls' childhood through their adolescence and into their adulthood.  We are introduced to the girls and their families, friends, their school, and the tightly knit world of white Jewish immigrants where they live.  Social restrictions, schoolwork, leisure time, travel, celebrations, and the elements of community life that most affect young girls are described in detail.  Family relationships and the social dynamics of school life are paramount in this part of the story. 

As the girls grow older, their lives broaden.  They become involved in politics, they have romances, and they focus also on weightier family responsibilities, serious academic study, and the world of work.  Eventually each of them follows her own path into adulthood — for Gordon it is marriage, a move to the United States and eventually Great Britain, graduate school, motherhood, and an academic career of her own. 

I was almost done with the book when I realized that the structure with which Gordon forms her story has another level, beyond the frame of the journey of friendship over the years.  Shared Lives begins with the girls' childhood.  This world does not include any understanding of the realities of life for other South Africans (or indeed, for anyone else at all) because at a young age, the four girls did not themselves comprehend a life beyond the ones they lived.  As they grow up, they follow their own interests outside of the circumscribed middle class Jewish society of 1950s Cape Town.  New responsibilities and social expectations begin to require them to interact with a wider world. 

But the story of the changes from girlhood to adolescence to adulthood is accompanied by the story of the four friends' increasing understanding of their own culture, and of South African society and politics.  Each has a different view of these things, and of course different restrictions and opportunities are available to each woman.  Their similarities and differences create many opportunities for discussion of the choices they've made about how to interact with the racist society in which they were raised, their differing levels of compliance with social propriety and expectations for women of their cultural background, religion, and class, their willingness to break rules or not, and their compromises for the sake of work, love, and family.  Shared Lives is a beautiful, warm story, and its focus on the entire span of friendships between a group of women is interesting and heartening.  Although it is in some ways a very sad story, I found that reading Shared Lives left me feeling encouraged and rather hopeful.

Gordon's Vindication : A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft is also excellent, and was reviewed in Duck Duck Book number 31.

The world of the Kalapuya : a native people of western Oregon / Judy Rycraft Juntunen, May D. Dasch, Ann Bennett Rogers ; illustrations by Lenore Ooyevaar, Don Boucher. 
Philomath, Or. : Benton County Historical Society and Museum, c2005.
[MCL call number: 979.5004 J95w 2005; 23 copies, no holds; two copies reference only at Central Library]

Recently I got a question at the reference desk: who were the people who lived in Portland’s West Hills before white people settled this part of Oregon?  The question was passed to me by the librarian I was relieving in the Literature & History room.  She is fairly new, and although she had assembled an excellent array of sources within a few minutes, the answers she found were somewhat contradictory and she was wondering if we had a standard source we refer to for this no doubt frequent question.

Hmm.   I would think this would be a frequent question too, but in fact, it is not.  And I knew of no standard source.  Neither did the other librarian (a twenty year veteran) who arrived on shift with me.  We spent a good hour checking and double-checking to make sure we gave our patron an accurate and reasonably complete answer — that the Tualatin group of Kalapuya Indians lived in the  southern end of the West Hills, near the Tualatin River, but that Chinook Indians of various bands also lived near Portland and possibly in the northern part of the West Hills.

There are many books about the history of native peoples of the Pacific Northwest.  There are encyclopedias, histories, anthropological analyses, oral histories, collections of photographs, linguistic tomes, and accounts of wars.  But almost all are thin on the history of the indigenous people of the Willamette Valley before white settlers took over, because the Kalapuya people who lived here did not have a writing system and the overwhelming majority of them were dead before they acquired literacy through assimilation and modernization, or before anyone else cared to write their stories.  I mean really the overwhelming majority — estimates are that there were just shy of 15,000 Kalapuya in 1750, but only 600 or so by 1840. 

However, a labor of love that has been many years in production has finally been published: The World of the Kalapuya collects the fragments that are known of the pre-settlement culture and history of the Kalapuya.  The book is arranged in short chapters by topic (language, basketry, travel, etc.), nicely illustrated with line drawings, maps, photographs, and charts, and appended with a bibliography and a very serviceable index.  The text is thorough, but simply and clearly written — I would recommend it to interested readers and researchers above the age of 9 or so, though the book is not written explicitly for young people.   Anyone with a moderate interest in the history of the Willamette Valley or the history of the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest should find The World of the Kalapuya useful and interesting.

Burnside, a community : a photographic history of Portland’s skid row / [compiled] by Kathleen Ryan ; text by Mark Beach.
Portland, Or. : Coast to Coast Books, c1979.
[MCL call number: 979.549 B967; one copy, no holds; one copy reference only at Central Library]

Like many central city districts, the neighborhood north of West Burnside and close to downtown Portland has seen a lot of change in its history. It has had many names — The North End, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Skid Row, Old Town — sheltered many communities, and served many roles in the life of the city. Burnside, a Community is a photographic record of the neighborhood during the late 1970s, with attention to the people who lived and worked there, and their view of the district’s history.

The photographs were originally part of a public exhibition, and their arrangement in the book feels a bit haphazard. The first few pages show historic photographs from the 19th and early twentieth centuries, and reproductions of old maps of the neighborhood. Most of the rest of the book is filled with contemporary (c. 1979) photographs of people, businesses, residences, and street scenes.

Restaurateurs and small businesspeople, people living with homelessness, sex workers, missionaries, the cop on the beat, families, the public craft market, and outdoor tableaux of all kinds are depicted. Each photograph has a brief, folksy caption, and some subjects are treated detail — for example, the section illustrating the Japanese and Japanese-American community includes contemporary and historic photographs and a map (page 25) showing the businesses, institutions, and residences of the Burnside-area Japanese community before it was decimated by forced internment of Oregonians of Japanese descent in 1942.

Burnside, a Community has a very 1970s feel to it, which kind of adds to its historical appeal, now that several decades have passed.

A walking tour of historic Jewish Portland with people that lived there / Polina Olsen. 
Portland, Or. : Smart Talk Publications, c2004.
[MCL call number: 979.549 O52w 2004a; 11 copies, no holds; three copies reference only at Central, Hillsdale, and Hollywood Libraries]

Before the city’s misguided first attempt at the miracle of urban renewal, there was a thriving immigrant neighborhood in South Portland.  The few square miles south of downtown were home to many working class folks, and to new immigrants from Russia, Greece, Italy, Ireland, and China and their descendants.  South Portland was also the nucleus of the city’s Jewish community and contained five synagogues, a public library with a small Yiddish-language collection, a shopping district, and several neighborhood social and cultural organizations.  Now this part of town is divided into bits and pieces by the development of Interstate 5, Highway 26, Barbur Blvd., and Naito Parkway — and much of the neighborhood was razed altogether to make room for the South Auditorium Urban Renewal Project in the 60s. 

But Olsen’s guide shows us the infrastructure of old South Portland that remains today.  A Walking Tour of Historic Jewish Portland leads readers through a brief tour of 14 buildings and parks in the area just south of SW Arthur St.  Each stop is illustrated with a modern-day photograph, a brief description, and with memories from three “Tour Guides” — Norman Berlant, Leo Greenstein, and Gussie Reinhardt, all of whom grew up in the neighborhood. 

It’s the personal stories that really set this wee guide apart.  I’ve walked through this part of South Portland many times (even, once, on school field trip with an Oregon Historical Society-led walking tour), but reading Reinhardt’s description of the ball games on her street (p. 10), or Greenstein’s fond memories of the public library (p. 12) made the community here seem alive and vibrant to me, even though the old neighborhood is gone and its destruction is among the saddest and most shameful of our city’s stories.

World shores and beaches : a descriptive and historical guide to 50 coastal treasures / Mary Ellen Snodgrass.
Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland, c2005.
[MCL call number: 910.9146 S673w 2005; two copies, no holds]

World Shores and Beaches is a reference guide to coastal areas around the world. This book has that thrilling quality of all great reference books: when World Shores and Beaches is the book you need, nothing else will do. Wondering about the archaeological work that has been done in Acapulco? Interested in the mythology of Kaho’Olawe, Hawai’i? Fascinated by pearl diving in Dubai? Urgent for a quick fix of info about the state of the natural environment in Phuket, Thailand? Go no further, this book can help.

World Shores and Beaches gives a terse but eloquent description of the mythology, history, archeology, and ecology of the beaches described, together with information about current coastal activities, and contact information for groups and individuals who involved in tending or protecting each area. A short bibliography follows each entry, and the main text is followed by a glossary, a general bibliography, an appendix of books & films that provide information on beaches and shores, and a very thorough index.

Snodgrass has written countless other fascinating reference works, including the Encyclopedia of Kitchen History (New York : Fitzroy Dearborn, c2004), World Epidemics : A Cultural Chronology of Disease From Prehistory to the Era of SARS (Jefferson, N.C. : McFarland & Co., c2003), and An Illustrated Dictionary of Little-Known Words From Literary Classics (Santa Barbara, Calif. : ABC-CLIO, c1995). The breadth of her work makes it seem like she’d be a fascinating dinner companion, don’t you think?

A short history of Portland / Gordon DeMarco.
San Francisco, Calif. : Lexikos, c1990.
[MCL call number: 979.549 D372s; seven copies, no holds; two copies reference only at Central Library]

DeMarco’s history begins with a brief discussion of the communities and culture of the American Indians who lived in the communities that pre-date our city, then moves on to explore the influence of white people here before the Portland was established, the founding of the city, the character of immigration from other parts of the U.S. and from abroad, the politically and socially turbulent years of the early twentieth century and through the 1970s, and finally the state Portland found itself in during the 1980s, when the book was written.

A Short History of Portland is indeed short.  It is written in an accessible, friendly style, has plenty of illustrations, and takes something of a progressive view of our city’s past.  Certainly it is one of the few books of local civic history to consider the history of indigenous people worth more than a tangential mention.  The book has an unsatisfying index, but a useful bibliography.

DeMarco deserves to be more well-known than he is, at least because he had some interesting ideas.  One of his major writing projects was the production of a series of radical left mystery novels featuring tough guy and thoroughly red private dick Riley Kovachs.  The three novels, October Heat (San Francisco : Germinal Press, 1979), The Canvas Prison (San Francisco, Calif. : Germinal Press, 1982), and Frisco Blues (London : Pluto, 1985), are full of run-ins with lefty celebs (Charlie Chaplain, Frances Farmer), film noir dialogue, rooting for the underdog, and a fair amount of senseless violence.  They are not brilliant fiction, but definitely they’re worth reading if you’re yearning to meet a hard-boiled detective who was on the ground during the San Francisco general strike. 

DeMarco also wrote A Short History of Los Angeles (San Francisco, Calif. : Lexikos, c1988), which I haven’t read but I’m sure is useful and not boring.

In booklist number 5 I reviewed a big heavy reference book called the Encyclopedia of Chicago, edited by James R. Grossman (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004).  The Chicago Historical Society has made the material in the book available on its webpage — as far as I can tell the entire text is reproduced in the website, and there are many interactive features that are only available there.  It’s certainly worth a looksee if you’re interested in Chicago history, culture, politics, infrastructure, or daily life. 

The Chicago Historical Society has a number of other online projects that present digitized and purpose-created electronic resources on various topics in Chicago history — the great fire, teenager culture in the city, and Haymarket are some that jumped out at me.  The index to these resources is online.

The roads of the Romans / Romolo Augusto Staccioli.
Los Angeles : J. Paul Getty Museum, c2003.
[MCL call number: 937 S775r 2003; two copies, no holds]

This is a small history of Roman roads, beginning with roads the ancient Romans built in their home city, with each succeeding chapter discussing roadwork further away from the capital — first roads outside the city, then consular roads, then roads to distant parts of the empire.  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really read the book; I just looked at the plentiful color pictures.  They’re nice.  If you’re interested in the subject, take a look.  As far as I can tell, it’s one of the few books devoted to Roman roads.

The freedom : shadows and hallucinations in occupied Iraq / Christian Parenti ; photographs by Teru Kuwayama.
New York : New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, c2004.
[MCL call number: 956.70443 P228f 2004; seven copies, 31 holds]

In the library, we’re keeping The Freedom in the wrong place.  It’s with the books on modern Iraqi political history, for the period after 1991 — but I’d say it belongs at 915.670443, geography of Iraq for the same period, which is where travel narratives are kept.  Or maybe it should go in 070.5670443, with books on journalism about Iraq.  I begin my review with this cataloging quibble because I’m afraid that the book will be mis-classified in general, as a work chiefly of history or political analysis.  This is a book of stories, not a structured history.  Also, it does not, as all history books should, have an index. 

Parenti records observations from his journeys to Iraq, and puts them into a framework that includes political and social analysis and stories told to him by other people.  He discusses Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority, US soldiers, resistance fighters, journalists, Falujah, Abu Ghraib prison, Iraqi survivors and bereaved people, US reconstruction contracts, graft and waste, and many other subjects.

The Freedom owes a debt to the works that came before it.  Reading the book I was reminded of other works of personalized reportage and storytelling, in particular, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Joe Sacco’s comics reporting (especially Palestine and Safe Area Goradze), and Ross McElwee’s great film Sherman’s March.  The Freedom is very much Parenti’s own story, and it records what he saw and experienced in Iraq, what he thinks and feels about being there, and how he thinks his experiences fit into a larger political and social context.  This is not to say that only readers who are interested in Parenti himself will enjoy the book or find it useful, but it is true that his perspective is very much in evidence in his prose.

There are problems with Parenti’s familiar style.  Not once in the entire book does he use Saddam Hussein’s full name — he is always simply “Saddam.”  This particular choice grated on me so much that I really hated the first 20 or so pages of the book — or at least I spent those 20 pages on a roller coaster that involved gritting my teeth with each first-name-only “Saddam,” then relaxing as I read the rest of the language, settling into the story and forming a visual picture in my mind, and then snapping up out of my reverie with the next George W. Bush-like stand-alone “Saddam.”  My readers may feel that I am simply picking nits, but this is only intended as an example.  My estimation is that there are other examples of a slip into informality that will grate on some readers of The Freedom, and I mention it as a warning to those who are, like me, perhaps inclined to fussiness. 

But small irritations do not stop me from recommending The Freedom as an evocative, intense, and useful story.  On the whole, Parenti’s writing is effective and his storytelling is exceptional.  Some of what makes a great story is just that it is worth telling, and that is surely true here; but some is also the teller’s skill in relating just the right elements in just the right way, as Parenti does in this book.

The Eastern origins of Western civilization / John M. Hobson.
Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University Press, c2004.
[MCL call number: 909.09821 H684e 2004; one copy, one hold]

I am recommending this book merely on the strength of its subject matter (though the particular copy I have on my desk at the moment has a very nice binding as well).  I haven’t read The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization yet, and the main reason is that it’s pages are densely packed with small type and it presents itself as very scholarly.  In short, it looks a bit dry, and that’s holding me back despite the topic.

Hobson, a British academic, challenges the mythology that it’s the white people who invented everything, built everything, thought of everything, and organized everything worthwhile in the world.  He begins with a history of Islamic, African, Chinese, and other Eastern technological, scientific, and industrial developments during the period 500-1800.  Next is a discussion of the origins of Western ideas about where our cultures’ ideas came from, then an analysis of why it was an advantage for the West to be a late bloomer, and finally, Hobson disucsses what he terms the “twin myths” of the rational Western liberal-democratic state and the divide between Western and Eastern civilization.

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?  Well, if you read it, I’d love to hear what you think.