30 December 2010

Random Thoughts for a New Decade AND The Monster of Florence!

Random thoughts for a new decade...


  • In the next year no ten year-old will have spent a second in the 20th Century. The United States has been at war your entire life if you are 17 years old.


  • The Stanford women’s basketball coach is quoted this week: “This was a real important game for our team. I’m really proud of how everyone prepared. Everyone really knew what we needed them to do.”

She could have added “And they really came out and really did it.”

  • Let’s say you are one of those people thoroughly tired of constant power outages. Let’s say you go out and purchase a home generator. I was one of those people. Once we had our generator installed we stopped having occasion to use it. It always seems to work that way.

Same goes for umbrellas, firewood, and flashlight batteries. You’ll only need these if you don’t have them. This is really how the world really works. Really!

  • In the past year various speakers modified the word “unique” and this must stop in 2011. Unique is one of a kind. You can be Number One. You can’t be Very Number One.


  • Take literally. If the box is literally full of writhing snakes you mean one of two things: The box is full of snakes, in which case you don’t have to add the word literally; or you mean it was AS IF the box was full of writhing snakes, in which case you do not mean literally full of snakes. Got it? The mind boggles at this point in time.


  • Once again we remind you that “at this point in time” is irritatingly overstated. “At this time” is enough. This reminder brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.


  • Now, those newscasters who use the adverb “now” to emphasize how “live” they are must cease this in the New Year. Now I’ll hold my breath until now goes away. Really.


  • On NPR this morning I heard a reporter say that defeated Senate candidate Christine O’Donnel “was refuting FBI claims” she misused campaign funds. No she didn’t. To refute is to prove something false or erroneous. She didn’t refute the claims; she denied them.


  • While you are wondering at that, wonder at this: The Feds are being urged to allow increased shooting of sea lions from land or boat near Bonneville Dam in Washington. I say save the salmon: eat the rich (with a nod to P.J. O’Rourke’s book of the same name). That will also save fish.


Turning to literature, I have a book to recommend for fans of serial killer literature, tales set in Italy, and mysteries without resolution. “The Monster of Florence, A True Story” was written by two journalists, one Italian and one American, who themselves eventually came under suspicion for involvement in a series of gruesome murders.

Douglas Preston (the American) and Mario Spezi (the Italian) call their book a “true story” I’d imagine because it is impossible to know where the story is true, and where it’s fiction. The authors detail decades of investigative reporting. They uncover self-serving bureaucratic nonsense. They assess questionable evidence derived from mishandled police investigations. Both writers are fairly sure who is the Monster of Florence, but can’t finally prove anything. The police are not interested in their conclusions, and in fact have accused Spezi of being the murderer himself, and Preston of interfering in the ongoing investigation, such as it is.

Spezi spent months in prison. Preston has been effectively banned from returning to Italy by threat of arrest. He explains in an interview, “having seen the arbitrary exercise of judicial power in Italy firsthand, I’m not inclined to take the risk of going back.”

That’s Italy for you: a really, really, interesting place to fail to solve a bloody bunch of unsolved murders.


NOTES:

Slate discusses “literally”

There’s literally a blog on literally, not recently updated but fun.

“The Monster of Florence, A True Story” by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi. Grand Central Publishing paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780446581271.

Interview with Douglas Preston.

Preston's home pages...Author website.

23 December 2010

Bill Bryson has written a lot of books. He is funny and informative, in recent years more informative than funny, and that’s OK.

Seven years ago he seemed to cap off a lifetime of non-fiction works with “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” basically science from your airplane window; at least that’s where the thought first came to him. What ARE those white things we call clouds?

He had covered a lot already – England, the English tongue, the Continent, America in general and the Appalachian Trail in particular, Australia, autobiography, you name it. Then he did it again – another huge and not short history of some aspects of, well, private life. Bryson’s latest book, “At Home.”

Home, for the Brysons, is a Victorian-era “former Church of England rectory in a village of tranquil anonymity in Norfolk, in the easternmost part of England.”

We read our way through The Hall, The Kitchen, The Scullery and Larder, The Fuse Box (entire chapter on Fuse Box), Drawing Room, Dining Room, down to Cellar, out to Garden, into Plum Room, up The Stairs to Bedroom, Bathroom, Dressing Room, Nursery and finally, the Attic, where the book both begins and ends.

“I had occasion to go up into the attic to look for the source of a slow but mysterious drip,” Bryson writes. “When I did finally flop into the dusty gloom and clambered to my feet, I was surprised to find a secret door, not visible from anywhere outside the house, in an external wall.”

Bryson tries to understand the attic door and everything else in the house. “Houses aren't refuges from history,” he says. “They are where history ends up.”

“‘Have you ever noticed,’ Brian (a local archaeologist) said as we stepped into the church-yard (next door) how country churches nearly always seem to be sinking into the ground? Well, it isn’t because the church is sinking... It’s because the churchyard has risen. How many people do you suppose are buried here?’”

The answer, arrived at after a bit of calculation and estimation, was twenty thousand burials in that one churchyard. No wonder the church appeared to be “in a slight depression, like a weight placed on a cushion.”

You will learn about the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, immediately known to all as the Crystal Palace in London. Bryson describes the civil servant who conceived of it, and the deaf Duke who impulsively hired his gardener to design and build it. Add in glass making and glass taxes. We’re still in Chapter One.

Bryson’s own manse is “a more modest edifice... designed by one Edward Tull of Aylsham, an architect fascinatingly devoid of conventional talent (as we shall see) for a young clergyman of good breeding named Thomas John Gordon Marsham.”

With this book and a couple glasses of wine you can bore nearby loved ones with amusing stories: Origins of the mousetrap; dangers of nineteenth century paints; invention of cast-iron bathtubs: Hey Joselyn! What? Did you know that “porcelain enamel is in fact neither porcelain nor enamel, but (in essence) a type of glass”? The wool spinning problem. Child labor. Reverend Marsham’s relationship with his housekeeper, Miss Worm. I could go on; Bryson does.

After 450 densely packed pages Bryson returns to the attic (“It turned out to be a slipped tile that was allowing rain through.”). From a table-top sized secret landing outside he reflects, “One of the things not visible from our rooftop is how much energy and other inputs we require now to provide us with the ease and convenience that we have all come to expect in our lives. It’s a lot – a shocking amount. Of the total energy produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in just the last twenty years. Disproportionately, it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction.”

He ends “At Home” with this thought: “The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.”


NOTES:

Here’s how they figured out the number of burials: “A country parish like this has an average of 250 people in it, which translates into roughly a thousand adult deaths per century, plus a few thousand more poor souls that didn’t make it to maturity. Multiply that by the number of centuries that the church has been there and you can see that what you have here is not eighty or a hundred burials, but probably something more on the order of, say, twenty thousand... That’s a lot of mass, needless to say. It’s why the ground has risen three feet.”

“At Home, A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson. Doubleday hard cover $28.95. ISBN 9780767919388.

Wikipedia on Bryson

Bryson on Bryson and another Bryson on Bryson

Bryson quotes...

Random House maintains a home page for Bill Bryson.

Probably the most authentic home page for the author.

16 December 2010

The Human Library.... and Afghanistan

Visit the library, rent a human... what a concept! It’s not often I come across an idea that actually appears to be new... yet, as usual, this idea is not new at all. The first recorded instance of a so-called Human Library took place about ten years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The idea is we all have stories to share. What better place to meet and spin tales than your local library or bookstore?

In Copenhagen, the idea was to “break down prejudice by bringing people of different backgrounds together for (person-to-person) conversation.” Other venues in other places have copied this concept and expanded it.

Most recently I read about a Human Library in the online news aggregator Slate, which reported that “libraries in Toronto are trying to shake things up a bit. They've stocked their shelves with something new: people.”

In Toronto, librarian Anne Marie Aikens said her event this past November drew more than 200 people who “rented” for a half-hour each a police officer, a comedian, a sex-worker-turned-club-owner, a model and survivor of cancer, homelessness and poverty, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and a 19 year-old man with cerebral palsy.

Aikens told a local reporter, “With the Human Library it’s a one-on-one experience and that kind of storytelling... does harken back to centuries and centuries ago when a story was the only way to learn. It's an old technology.”

She added, “A good portion of users heard about it from social media. In the least personal, most mediated way, they found a way to have a very personal experience.”

Funny she should say that, because as soon as I heard about the Human Library I went over to Facebook and searched for Human Libraries. I found them in Norfolk, England; Wroclaw, Poland; Terni, Italy; Tucson, Arizona; and Lismore, Australia.

Let’s try this in Mendocino! Put a name tag and bar code on my chest, and remember to return me to the loan desk when you’re finished conversing.

* * * * *

On another subject altogether: This is the week our government talks publicly about plans for the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Which brings to mind a book I just finished, “The Afghan Campaign” by historian and novelist Steven Pressfield.

It turns out that the Macedonian general Alexander, “The Great” to history, spent three years trying to pacify the same stony soil we currently are fighting over. He didn’t succeed, either, and in the end left “fully a fifth of his army... to keep the country from reverting to insurgency,” according to an historical note at the beginning of the novel.

Alexander extricated himself by making an alliance with a powerful warlord and taking as wife the warlord’s daughter. Alexander’s forts stretched over the land, but despite victories, Alexander never permanently subdued the region. He was forced to fight a tribal, guerrilla war against insurgents who would not join in traditional battles. The brutal and mysterious terrain, as always, favored local inhabitants.

“The Afghan Campaign” tells this story through the adventures of several of Alexander’s soldiers, and in the process we learn about the people of what is now Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. The tale is chillingly similar to what the US is trying to do now, and what Britain, the Soviet Union, and others failed to do.

If you’d like a ground level view of how tribal life and warfare really works, look no farther than “The Afghan Campaign.” It’s set more than 2,300 years ago, but it’s fresh as a wound, and no more comfortable.



NOTES:

The Toronto news story...

For more details about the Human Library http://humanlibrary.org/

The Slate magazine...

“The Afghan Campaign” by Steven Pressfield. Broadway Books paperback $14.95. ISBN  0767922387.

Meet the author and his blogs...

Another note on EBooks...

From an article in Bookselling This Week ...
Some bookstores are hosting digital petting zoos to introduce e-book options. Gallery Bookshop & Bookwinkle’s Children’s Books in Mendocino, California, combined a petting zoo with a holiday party. “We had a computer set up and were showing customers how to buy e-books from our website,” said owner Christie Olson Day. “We also had preloaded books on an iPad, iPod Touch, Sony Reader, and laptop.”
Olson Day’s aim was to demonstrate to customers not only how to buy e-books, but also how e-books can serve the needs specific to their neighborhood. “We’re out in the boonies and don’t have reliable wireless. So we highlighted that you can read Google eBooks offline. That’s really important to people here.”
Olson Day said that customers “like the idea that we’re in the e-book game and they’re rooting for us, but not many are falling in love with reading digitally.” More evidence, she said, “that print and e-books have a long future coexisting together.”
However, she believes that during the flood of publicity surrounding the launch of Google eBooks one important message was lost or confused. “Customers have heard the fact that Google eBooks are good for the indies, but they’ve missed the fact that the need to buy them from us,” Olson Day said. “You’ve got to figure that for every one person who bothered to ask how this is good for us, there are still one hundred out there who don’t get it. So we’re publicizing that if they want to support their independent bookstore they need to buy their e-books from our site.”

09 December 2010

Democracy comes to Ebooks -- at last!

Big changes for independent booksellers this week as Google turned on their Ebooks service and made it available to all booksellers, in all formats except Amazon’s proprietary Kindle book reader.

The implications of this are truly huge – in one swoop the face of bookselling changed forever. And mostly for the good, as far as I can see.

What this means to you is that if you’ve ever wanted to read an entire book on any electronic device at all – your laptop, smartphone, Nook, Sony E Reader, IPad, name it, you now have access to more than 400,000 books for purchase from more than 4,000 publisher, plus another two million titles – yes, two million – in the public domain, these last at no cost to you whatsoever.

Of course, ink on paper is not going away. Don’t fret. It’s just one more way to read.

If you’d like to take a look for yourself, google “google books” or more specifically direct your browser here  and look around. On the first page you will see a variety of full-color book jackets and links to all the rest. Readers can access electronic books directly from Google, or use the talents and suggestions of a favorite bookstore and order the same books from them.

All of these Google Ebooks are available from any device connected to the Internet. Browse, choose, pay if required, download, and begin reading. Since your book resides in the “cloud,” not on any particular computer, you can break off and continue reading on the same or any other available computer or phone.

For example, you might download to your computer a copy of “The Best Spiritual Writing 2010" edited by Pico Iyer and Philip Zalesky. Maybe at home you have time to read the introduction and the first essay. Later in the day, at lunchtime, you resume reading for a half hour – to do that you log in on whatever computer is in front of you. Later that evening you want to read again, this time on your wife’s new IPad. Log in and that book and any others you’ve download will be waiting for you. Google remembers what page you were reading. Preferences for type size and line spacing are preserved. As time goes on you begin to appreciate Google’s free and unlimited storage space.

You can read offline on most devices, except your home computer. Google’s working on that, too.

From what I have heard and seen, independent booksellers are excited to offer Ebooks to readers who previously had to search elsewhere for them.

Many readers, of course, are cautious. One wrote, “I'm not a huge fan of Ebooks. Few reasons, one of them is I just don't read enough, I couldn't justify the cost of buying a dedicated device. Also, I'm one of those people who still buys CDs, because I like to have the physical copy on my shelf.”

Another reader said, “Ebooks that can't be given away to a grandchild 50 years from now are not a deal. That is my largest issue with them. I shouldn't have to ‘hack’ an e-book format to use it ‘like a book’ in 5 or 50 years.”

Another said, “If it's a book I figure I'll only read once, I typically go for a hard copy that I can then give to someone else.”

On the Lifehacker site someone named CV posted: “Physical books are conversation starters. E-book readers? Not so much. I will strike up conversations with total strangers if I see them holding a book that's intriguing. It's similar at home (mine or someone else's). You can look at someone's bookcase and figure out a lot about a person...

“I have one shelf full of travel guidebooks to places I have been. Sure, the electronic versions are great while you're out on the street (looking at a smartphone or iPod doesn't tip anyone that you're a tourist), however, there's a satisfaction of occasionally glancing at that shelf which triggers memories of those trips. Those are things you can't replace with electronic books.”

CV concluded with this thought: “I would love to have electronic copies of all of my cookbooks. That would come in handy for searching.”

Of course, right now there are some gotchas, glitches, and shortcomings. But it’s a start, and kudos to Google for helping democratize the emerging universe of electronic books.


NOTES:

All this is very new, and there are shortcomings. For example, what should a reader do when the price of an Ebook on the Google site differs from the price on a favorite bookseller’s site? Or worse, when an Ebook featured on Google is nowhere to be found inside a bookseller site? This last happened to me just now, and it’s frustrating. But I trust these kinds of things will be fixed soon.

If you’d like Google’s help figuring all this out...

Here are links to some of the early crop of articles on Google’s new service:

Mashable...    Bloomberg...  Christian Science Monitor...

Fast Company...   Literary Agent Andy Ross...   Bookselling This Week...

YouTube videos:
(Independent Bookstore McClean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Minnesota) and Ink, Pulp & Caffeine...

Lifehacker...  

New York Times: “The Google e-bookstore is an outgrowth of the Google books project, an effort that began in 2004 to scan all 130 million books in the world, by Google's estimate. Scott Dougall, Google's director for product management, said the company had scanned about 15 million books so far.”

02 December 2010

Home Again

Vacation is when I have time to read, especially when vacation takes place on the slow-moving isles of Aloha. Tony, you say, you are retired and all, so what are you talking about, “vacation”?

Since the late 14th century English has used the word “vacation” to mean “freedom or release from some activity or occupation.” This kind of freedom is difficult to maintain, I’ve found. Leave the back door unlocked and Life walks in with jobs of work that no one gets paid to do. Get the groceries, clean the garage, fill the driveway potholes –  “do the do” as Joselyn says.

I prefer to visualize the underlying Latin word “vacare” which translates to “be empty, free, or at leisure.” That I can do. As long as I don’t join another non-profit Board.

When in the state of “vacare” I have uninterrupted time to read big books for big pleasure. On this “vacare-ation” I spent quality time with several such, all worthy of your precious time.

I started with “Night Soldiers” by Alan Furst, then moved on to Steven Pressfield’s “The Afghan Campaign,” and finished with the new Bill Bryson brick, “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.”

“Night Soldiers” was a great place to begin. It took me away from the sighing waves and basking green sea turtles to a more difficult world, a world about to suffer World War. When I arrived at the final pages I sighed with an audible “wow” of pleasure, relief, excitement, satisfaction; wishing, of course, that the book could have gone on much longer than 456 pages.

Furst calls “Night Soldiers” “a panoramic spy novel” probably because it covers many pre-war years and a vast swath of territory, from Siberia to Brooklyn. The first sentence:

“In Bulgaria, in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia.”

The ensuing story takes Khristo from his village on the Danube to Moscow, where he is trained by the Soviets to be a spy and a soldier. He fights in revolutionary Spain, is captured in France, finds perilous freedom in Paris, and finally arrives in America. We share consciousness with Khristo as he gradually figures out his place in the world.

Early in the book a Soviet recruiter befriends Khristo: “He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. ‘...Do not waste your time with grief. It is a great flaw in our character, our Slavic nature, to do that. We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain... Here, in this town, it will go on. You will not survive it. They murdered your brother; they must now presume you to be their mortal enemy, very troubling to keep an eye on...”

“Night Soldiers”, first published in 1988, may be the best of the uniformly excellent Alan Furst novels. It’s not as singularly focused as some of his others. This book goes to more places, with more characters and more adventures, than most of his other books. There is time here to consider the old Ottoman empire and postwar America, too.

If Alan Furst sounds interesting, you could well start with “Night Soldiers.” It’s the first of Furst’s spy/intrigue/historical novels, setting up the qualities of time, tone and place for the dozen or so that have so far followed. Happily for readers, some of the characters introduced here reappear in later books.

As for Bill Bryson and Steven Pressfield... well, I’m back from vacation, or vacare, and I’ll get around to these guys in future essays.

NOTES:

The Online Etymology Dictionary

Alan Furst’s “near history” novels:

Night Soldiers (1988) Random House paperback $15. ISBN 9780375760006.
Dark Star (1991)
The Polish Officer (1995)
The World at Night (1996)
Red Gold (1999)
Kingdom of Shadows (2000)
Blood of Victory (2003)
Dark Voyage (2004)
The Foreign Correspondent (2006)
The Spies of Warsaw (2008)
Spies of the Balkans (2010)