__blackink__whitepages__ rt Questions 1-35 are archived at blackink_whitepages. Questions 36-65 are archived at blackink_whitepages_ Questions 66-88 are archived at _blackink_whitepages_ Questions 89-112 are archived at __blackink_whitepages_ Questions 113-134 are archived at __blackink_whitepages__ Current standings; 1. lostgirl = 188 2. jane = 142 3. thorn = 06 4. cocoon =04 5. amy costs nada = 03 Question 135 Cleverly conceived and slyly written, this survey of monsters is not content merely to parade the usual suspects -- the fretful dead or the giant recluses of the deep sea. Instead, this book leads us on a safari through the many manifestations of our idea of the monstrous. I have seldom read a book that so satisfyingly achieves such an ambitious goal. "To be a monster," writes the author, "is to be an omen." He points out that the word "monster" derives from a Latin root meaning "to warn." Hence his subtitle's emphasis on fear, our troublesome primate combination of herd-think and anxiety that quickly metamorphoses the other -- the unknown -- into something ghastly and threatening. He quotes Nietzsche's famous line: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." Consequently, he examines not only Frankenstein's monster and vampires and ghosts, but also racists, torturers and serial killers; he takes us into xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia and warmongering. "One will search in vain through this book to find a single compelling definition of monster," he writes. "That's not because I forgot to include one, but because I don't think there is one." He explores all sorts of historical and psychological terrain, deliberately seeking a confrontation with every monster in our nasty little minds. The book's antique title positions him in the tradition of comprehensive personal essayists, a la Robert Burton; even his endnotes are unpredictably broad and flavored with outrage and humor. The result is a confident and appealing authorial presence. A philosophy professor at Columbia College Chicago, he ranges easily from the deadly charisma of Leopold and Loeb to the enthusiastic demon-hunting of Augustine and Aquinas. It's great fun to accompany him on this trek. Only a wide-ranging mind could work into a single book Freud's theories about Medusa and castration and the way in which the feisty biblical Satan resembles the good cop/bad cop theology of Zoroastrianism. Although he doesn't treat the topic lightly, one of the more amusing sections in his book addresses Christianity's carnival of rationalizations and back flips around the question of monsters; medieval Christians believed in whole arks of them. Do these creatures demonstrate a supposedly benevolent creator's attention deficit, they wondered, or do monsters serve as what he nicely describes as "living billboards for God's sublime creativity and awe-inspiring authority"? But he doesn't spend all his time among dusty texts. He also aims his spotlight at numerous movies, examining the dehumanizing racism behind such films as "The Birth of a Nation" and "300" or even the implications of the unchained id in "Forbidden Planet." He peers into the sobering back story behind "Godzilla." He demonstrates how recent movies have transformed Grendel in the Beowulf story from a ravening beast into a victim of oppression. Not surprisingly, this author of a superb chronicle of natural history museums ("Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads") proves adept at explaining Darwinian evolution, too. Yes, even natural selection shows up in his unnatural history. He smoothly explains why genetic monsters (melodramatic, dead-end mistakes of nature such as two-headed babies) preoccupied Darwin and his colleagues. "The year 1838 was the turning point for Darwin," he writes. "Before that, he thought of monsters as a reasonable catalyst for evolution, but after the discovery of natural selection he rejected the role of monsters." Darwin and Freud are only two of the many characters whose connection with monsters got them invited to his party. Others are much more alarming. You will encounter fantastic tales of penis-stealing witches and hard-headed accounts of the incestuous Austrian rapist Josef Fritzl. He brings in the camera-swallowing artist Stelarc and the performance artist Orlan, who undergoes plastic surgery onstage. Then along comes the fascinating 16th-century Frenchman from whom he borrows his title: Ambroise Paré, author of "On Monsters and Marvels," a transitional work that sought to bring medicine out of the Dark Ages. He garnishes these enlightening pages with many photographs and illustrations, including his own graceful drawings of such figures as the biblical Behemoth, the murderer John Wayne Gacy and the dog-headed cannibal Saint Christopher. He is that sort of writer -- able to get his hands on all kinds of gourmet ingredients, offhandedly scenting the air with erudition and then casually tossing in his own drawings just to add the last touch of spice. His new book is a feast. (Adapted from a review by Michael Sims, whose books include "Apollo's Fire" and a recent companion book to the National Geographic Channel series "In the Womb.") For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100729 ... jane On Monsters Stephen T. Asma not only does this book look cool, i think i would really enjoy the natural history museum book as well. i like that he doesn't just focus on mythical monsters, but also contemporary sociopaths or serial killers. it can be difficult but also i think very rewarding to have such a multifaceted subject matter. 100729 ... rt +3=145 jane! there is a fascinating interview with him on the latest PRI's "to the best of our knowledge" podcast. Question 136 Ida Joner is a sweet girl, adored by her mother Helga. She loves animals, and is looking forward to her tenth birthday. One day she rides out on her yellow bike to buy some sweets. When she fails to return 35 minutes after she should have, Helga starts to worry. She phones around, but there is no word, and eventually she calls the police. Still no news the following day, a local search is organised, with hundreds of local volunteers. However, nothing comes of it. Ida Joner and her yellow bicycle seem to have vanished into thin air. This author seems to write two different kinds of novels: sensitive procedurals focusing on simple, everyday-crimes crimes (such as DON'T LOOK BACK and CALLING OUT FOR YOU), and psychological thrillers based on original and twisted conceits (like WHEN THE DEVIL HOLDS THE CANDLE). This book is of the former type. It deals with a simple, unflashy crime, one that could (and does) happen anywhere. This sad simplicity adds to the strange power of her novels, with their achingly realistic crimes, and their achingly realistic victims, their relatives and neighbours. If there is one thing that makes her stand out most it is her compassion, for every character: victim, policeman, even murderer. It is the emotional sensitivity of her prose, the immense power she has of evoking empathy for the sorriest of people. Her victims are painfully normal, as are her killers; those mentally less-well off (a common feature in her novels) are generally gentle and above all noble. She has such a natural style, her emotional frankness and simplicity can sometimes be hard to read. I feel much more tarnished (in a good way!) after reading her novels than I do those full of spilled guts. Another common thread in her novels is crimes which arise by accident, unfortunate confluences of events. Her criminals are often as much victims of circumstance as anyone else, are often good and normal but for that one act that distinguishes them from other people: they are, for whatever reason, responsible for killing someone. There's little malice in the crimes of this book, which makes its events hard to know what to do with, and certainly hard to condemn. This seems to me to be a more realistic portrayal of how real crimes occur, and a more thought-provoking one. Chance puts human failings and behaviour on show in all their sad glory. This book is a powerful and impressive novel. Sensitive and probing, it delves deeply into the minds and lives of its characters. She holds back as much as possible about the philosophical, charismatic but enigmatic Konrad Sejer, so he retains that air of mystery about him, and he carries the book well to its inevitable conclusion, with it's bitter final punch. She is a Norwegian author of crime fiction, often known there as the "Norwegian queen of crime." She lives in Oslo. She was initially a poet, with her first collection published in 1974 when she was just 20. It won the Tarjei Vesaas' Debutant Prize. She is the author of the internationally successful Inspector Konrad Sejer series of crime novels, which have been translated into over 16 languages. She won the Glass key award for her novel Don't Look Back, which also won the Riverton Prize, and she was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger in 2005 for Calling Out For You. For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100729 ... rt karin fossum, black seconds Question 137 While reading this book I sporadically paused to check my iPhone — whenever its ping signaled the arrival of a new e-mail message. I hated to turn away from the author's elegant meditation on our obsessive connectivity and its effect on our brains and our very way of life. But I did anyway. He suggests that evolutionary programming may be partly responsible for the drive that has many of us constantly checking our digital screens. We are wired by nature, he notes, to pay attention to new stimuli, thereby helping us to respond quickly to predators or to nab a potential meal. The biochemical effect of the iPhone ping, in fact, might be injecting my brain with what one scientist calls a “dopamine squirt.” In other words, marketers have told us we must be connected all the time, and our brains have done the rest. The author worries that our homes, the traditional shelter from the crowd, have been invaded to the point where we may be in danger of no longer connecting deeply with our families, our books and our thoughts. But the author, a former staff ­writer at The Washington Post who has written extensively on media and technology, is not simply an earnest foreteller of doom. He is well aware that human beings are always capable of gaining more than they lose with every new technology. It has been 25 years since the publication of Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” with its dire warning of television’s potential to erode not only public discourse but thinking itself. In Postman’s wake, we now have both Fox News, which most days represents his worst nightmare, and long-form works of art like “The Wire,” which afford us a perch to see how the world works and how we are all connected — in the same way that great storytellers and thinkers have been doing since the beginning of recorded history. Personally, I would not trade “The Wire” to get rid of Glenn Beck. Some may disagree. He knows that we will learn to cope with constant connectivity. It’s just a matter of how. His book asks us to begin to think about behaviors that may still as yet be unexamined. It should surprise no student of history that this moment in time — when many of us feel as if we’re teetering on the edge of a brand-new technological cliff — can also be seen as a familiar human problem. He reminds us of when Socrates, the greatest of all oral communicators, was freaking out over “the very latest communications technology, written language based on an alphabet” (though as he concedes, “writing wasn’t completely new”). He believed that scrolls would erode thought by permitting people to forget what they had learned because they’d be able to look things up, that “they wouldn’t feel the need to ‘remember it from the inside, completely on their own.’ ” Worse, writing wouldn’t “allow ideas to flow freely and change in real time, the way they do in the mind during oral exchange.” Or try to imagine the fears of the 15th-century Italian scholar who saw Gutenberg’s printing press mostly as a license to erode seriousness and to libel others. He wrote: “Because now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write merely for the sake of entertainment. . . . And even when they write something worthwhile they twist it and corrupt it to the point where it would be much better to do without such books.” He spends too much time describing the techno bind that we find ourselves in today and that we already know so well. But for the most part his ruminations are penetrating, his language clear and strong, and his historical references are restorative. As a salve for those who are perhaps prematurely mourning the death of paper, he writes of his preference for jotting down ideas in a Moleskine notebook, a “seemingly anachronistic tool” that he feels is essential to his well-being. Most writers still love paper. Some things are irreplaceable, and he explains why. His notebook allows him to “pull ideas not only out of my mind but out of the ethereal digital dimension and give them material presence and stability. Yes, you exist,” the notebook reminds us, “you are worthy of this world.” (Adapted from a review by Laurie Winer for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100730 ... jane HAMLET’S BLACKBERRY: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age William Powers in many forms, i am still very much a purist. in my art, in writing - i prefer the more organic and analog mediums. i was having this conversation with some artists at a meetup, and explaining why i prefer the analog way as opposed to the digital art route. one of those reasons - and a big one - is the smells. i love the smell of my paint, and of the linseed oil. it reminds me of history, and how so many artists through the years have used the same tools that i am using in this age. it's a beautiful connection with our ancestors. and i have never seen the wire, so i would be happy to trade it to get rid of glenn beck. 100730 ... rt +3=148 jane! loved this response...totally agree with you...you should see the moleskin i keep in my pocket...stained by dirt, coffee, wine, and blood, but pure evidence that what i think: is real and saved and can be held in the hands. 100730 ... rt Question 138 It’s early afternoon and a group of us - 15 in all - have set out for a hike in the woods. We climb steadily along a path shaded by birches and poplars. The air is warm and juniper-scented. Though we’ve just had lunch, some of us wander off to munch a juicy leaf, nosh a bit of bark, and generally gourmandize the scenery. We don’t think anything of this. Most of us are goats. The hillside we ramble is the property of the novelist of such books as “Lick Creek,’’ and “Birds in Fall’, 46, and his wife, photographer Dona Ann McAdams, 55, native New Yorkers who left their urban digs for an 1800 farmhouse and 75 acres in southwestern Vermont. They continue to ply their respective crafts, but as the author explains in a new book, it’s the twin routines of tending 11 Nubian dairy goats and making cheese from the milk that frames their schedules. This book is his extended meditation on how the couple’s encounter with pastoralism has offered them a fresh perspective on life and work. There’s a sense of calm and order here that feels almost monastic (in fact, there’s a Carthusian charterhouse nearby). The dairying is a labor of love, not a real business. He sees the little herd of goats as a connection to a remote, collective human past. “When you live with animals who directly feed you,’’ he says, “you begin to feel what humans felt for millennia: an elemental connection to the land, a deep sense of place, a connection to a larger cosmology. That’s the way we developed as humans, as one animal among others.’’ He and McAdams bought the farmhouse in 1998 but didn’t live there full time until the goats arrived six years later. That served as an excuse to make a permanent break with the city. “Once the does kidded and were lactating, we made our first batch of cheese,’’ He says. These were faiselles, smallish tapered cylinders of moist, unsalted curds. The day we visit, a batch is draining over the kitchen’s old porcelain double sink. We watch as he deftly removes three cheeses from their perforated cups, sets them on a wooden board, rolls two in fresh herbs, the third in a light coating of cracked black pepper. The process for making faiselles, or chevre, which is salted and a bit drier, is remarkably simple once you have the milk (raw is best). The results are spectacular: sweetly lactic and delicately delicious in a way you don’t expect. During a visit to a cheese-making family in the French Pyrenees, he also learned to use goat milk to make a firm, ripened, mountain-type cheese called tomme. Ripened cheeses call for considerably more skill and time. The couple makes six each week, two at a time, from Memorial Day, when the does are newly in milk, to Columbus Day, when the moms are dried off to give them a rest. “Each tomme contains some morning and some evening milk - about 10 gallons in all,’’ he explains, “though some say the best tommes are made from a single milking.’’ Once molded, pressed, repeatedly turned, and salted (he describes the process in the book), new wheels are set on unfinished board shelving in a screened-off corner of the fieldstone cellar. Over several months they’ll put up a rind and begin to take on the hue of tawny port. At four months, the tommes are tasty; at a year they’re redolent with aromas of fresh-cut hay and complex, farmy notes reminiscent of reserve gruyere. Cheeses made from unpasteurized milk can’t be sold in the United States until they’ve been aged for 60 days, so the couple’s fresh chevres are consumed at home. Their tommes, however, were a big hit in New York at the restaurant Artisanal, which began buying and serving them in 2007. Then the couple moved to Italy when he received the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Rome Prize for his writing, and the relationship with Artisanal ended. Today, most of the tomme production is used as barter with Clear Brook Farm in Shaftsbury, where the cheese is for sale with the farm’s organic produce. “We’ve got a lot of credits,’’ he says, a trace of ruefulness in his voice. He and McAdams grow much of their own food on the land. Back on the trail, which he refers to as “the salad bar,’’ we wonder whether all that tasty browse doesn’t harbor some danger for the goats. He calls the girls by name and knows all their quirks. “You read that things like acorns or wilted cherry leaves may be bad for them, but the goats seem pretty picky. And, you know, it’s all that exotic browse that informs the cheese.’’ (Adapted from a review by Stephen Meuse for The Boston Globe) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100731 ... rt "Goat Song" by Brad Kessler Question 139 Sometimes, it seems as if a man would rather struggle into a pair of pantyhose than read a novel by a woman, but everyone might want to take a look at this book. Its title is misleading, perhaps purposefully so; it's really about travel and the frailty of our own identities. We walk in a dream, but most of us are too numb to notice. The author doesn't write about this condition abstractly; she doesn't set herself up as a prophetess intoning, "Sleepers, awake!" She's just pointing out that most of us snore through our lives, and that's on a good day. Falling in love is a convenient device to make us feel alive, but actually it only deepens our dreams. One thing that can wake us up is moving to an unfamiliar place. Yvonne is a widow in her 50s. Her husband has been dead for about two years, and anyone who's lived through this process will recognize the timing as a stroke of genius on the author's part. For the first year after the death of a spouse, you endure great suffering, but with the mistaken understanding that after a year or so you'll feel better. Then the second year comes, and it's worse, but you tell yourself you must be feeling better, and by the end of that year, you're comatose, though telling everyone you've recovered. Yvonne, numb and mistaking that numbness for feeling fine, journeys to Turkey. She's going to meet her son, Matthew, his fiancee and her family on a chartered yacht for a short Mediterranean cruise. When she traveled to Turkey years ago with her husband on their honeymoon, they visited the small town of Datça and the seaside settlement of Knidos. She loved those places then and hopes to finger some of these old threads of happiness. She's been in mourning long enough; she yearns to retrieve some of her old identity, which has been fraying lately. Everyone she knows assures her that she and her husband were an ideal couple, but as a mother she batted .500. While Matthew grew up bristling with accomplishments, her daughter, Aurelia, wreaked havoc, was in and out of rehab and is a great creator of general unhappiness. Yvonne is also a teacher, and there she seems to have hit a wall. After a recent class, one of her students wrote her a venomous note: "You gave the exact same lecture WORD for WORD twice this week." But who tabulates weaknesses at a time like this? Yvonne feels okay. She still looks good. "At first glance, she looked younger than her fifty-three years. She tried not to be vain about this, but she was not un-proud." If God were grading her, she'd probably get a B+. Those who have traveled will probably recognize some of what happens to this flimsy little widow. In Datça, Yvonne has rented a large, impersonal house. There's an unnervingly sturdy hook in the ceiling above the bed. And in another bedroom there's a piece of equipment she's never seen before. And a book she would never dream of reading. And a framed photograph under the couch of a naked lady tied up with a ribbon. The woman who introduces herself to Yvonne as the landlord's wife is not the same woman as the one in the photograph. All this is nothing, really! If her husband were still alive, and they were young and laughing and together and impervious, this might be amusing, something to talk about back home. Then things happen. Yvonne opens a window and forgets to close it. She drives an unfamiliar stretch of road, unwisely. She doesn't know Turkish and can't read the signs. She can't even say "thank you" correctly. She explores Datça and sees that "the beach was filthy. Small plastic bags, gelatinous in the sun, had been deposited by the tide on the strand." She has nine days until the yacht comes to pick her up. She drives to Knidos, which has just one restaurant, with a waiter who keeps giving her dirty looks, but the ocean is beautiful, and -- again -- she first saw it on her honeymoon, when she was young and dumb. She befriends an attractive Turkish couple and an endearing 9-year-old who haunts the beach and speaks no English. He seems to like her as much as she likes him, but in the largest and smallest senses, she doesn't know what she's doing. The waiter can scowl as much as he likes; Yvonne has accepted by now that some people detest her on sight. But isn't that true of all of us? There's nothing for it but to go forward, whether we know where we're going or not. But Yvonne is bad news, even if she doesn't know it, like a carrier in a typhoid epidemic. I've talked about only the first 20 pages or so. Anything more would give away the plot, which is both intricate and simple. That plot, as I've said, has nothing to do with gender. (Nor does the fact that the author is married to Dave Eggers impinge on this novel in any way.) The novel is somber, seductive, reflective, unsettling. All our lives are journeys, come to think of it. Hopefully, we shed some of our ignorance along the way. She writes -- so beautifully! -- about this process. (Adapted from a review by Carolyn See for The Washington Post) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100801 ... jane The Lovers Vendela Vida another journey/slice of life book. i can dig it. it's certainly not anything that i have had to experience, but grief is such an intricate and simple subject. it's so multifaceted and diverse. everybody has experienced loss and grief in their lives on some level. i wonder if it would be difficult to otherwise relate to the character. 100802 ... rt +3=151 jane! your response as always is excellent and much appreciated. Question 140 Prompted by chronic pelvic pain, this novelist decided to explore the relationship between mind and body. The result was this book. He tells us that, for a long time, he suffered from pelvic pain. He had to get out of bed several times a night to go to the loo. He thought he might have a problem with his prostate or his bladder. This is how he describes his pain: "a general smouldering tension throughout the abdomen, a sharp jab in the perineum, an electric shock darting down the inside of the thighs, an ache in the small of the back, a shivery twinge in the penis itself." He talks to his friend Carlo, a urologist. Carlo suggests an operation. He also suggests pills. But the pills make Parks constipated. He stops taking them. Result: "Normal bowel movements. Normal pains. It seemed like progress." He finds himself lying in bed, "rigid and angry". He's angry with the doctor, and with life in general. "My body seemed alien and malignant. We couldn't get comfortable together." At this point, one imagines what the rest of the book will look like – he submits to the doctor, has the operation, and then several more operations. He looks back over his life as he feels it slipping away. As mortality looms, his memories take on the weight of poignance – and so on. But this is not that type of book. He has tests. The tests are vague and inconclusive. The pain does not go away. So he decides to think about the pain. Maybe it's all in his head. He tells us about his hospital appointments in detail; there's a scene in which he tries, and tries, and tries, to wee into a test tube. He has various examinations. At this point, the reader is seriously hoping, for his sake but also for the sake of the book, that the problem is in his head, and not in his flesh. He goes to India and while he's there decides to see an Indian doctor. "There is a tussle in your mind," says the doctor. The pain is "blocked vata". What happens next is a lovely, well-told story, an investigation into the relationship between mind and body, and a joy to read for anyone with hypochondriac tendencies. The author, an inveterate reader of literary books, wonders if Thomas Hardy's pelvic pain was psychosomatic. Yes, possibly it was. In 1880, Hardy wasn't getting on with his wife. They flitted around, moving from Dorset to London and back again. And then: the pelvic pain. Hardy's wife became his carer. They settled in Dorset. The pain sorted his life out. And what about Mussolini? He suffered bouts of stomach pain, often after he'd comitted acts of political brutality. Doctors suspected an ulcer. But when he died, an autopsy revealed... nothing. His stomach was fine. He ponders these matters, but still his terrible pains continue. "I was becoming withdrawn," he says. "I was losing interest in intimacy." Even the characters in his novels were displaying the same symptoms – "manic and withdrawn". And then he discovers a book on the internet, called A Headache in the Pelvis. Written by two Californian doctors, it suggests that he might be suffering from nothing more than muscle tension. Can this be true? Can decades of agony and malaise be caused by sitting on your bottom and clenching your muscles? Yes, apparently. About now, he has his spiritual breakthrough. He realises that, as a writer, he hardly ever lives in the moment – up to now, he's spent the vast majority of his time thinking about how to translate his experiences into words. He's been living in the past, and in the future, but never quite in the present. And this has caused his entire body to become rigid with tension. "I yanked on my socks as if determined to thrust my toes right through them. I tied my shoes as if intent on snapping the laces." He's tense when he shaves, when he eats, when he grips the steering wheel. So he starts to meditate. He realises his problem; it's almost impossible to make his mind relax, because it's full of words. But he tries and tries. He meditates and exercises. He spends time at a retreat. Gradually, he clears his mind. The pain in his pelvis disappears. It wasn't cancer. It wasn't a bladder infection. But it wasn't nothing. It was the anxiety of the sedentary westerner who sits on his bottom for hours on end, racking his brains and tapping a keyboard. A simple story, then, but very well told. He takes many detours through the worlds of literature and art. He tells us about Coleridge and his neuroses. He meets a strange old American guru called John Coleman. He is a conscientious and expert companion whom it is hard not to like. And, if you spend your time sitting on your bottom, rigid with tension, and you've been feeling a lot of aches and pains lately, you'll love his message. It is: relax. Sit still. Stop worrying. (Adapted from a review in The Guardian) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100802 ... rt Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still Question 141 The phrase ''heart of darkness'' occurs only once, as far as I can tell, in this novel. When it does, it falls from the mouth of Orleanna Price, a Baptist missionary's wife who uses it to describe not the Belgian Congo, where she, her husband and their four daughters were posted in 1959, but the state of her marriage in those days and the condition of what she calls ''the country once known as Orleanna Wharton,'' wholly occupied back then by Nathan Price, aforesaid husband and man of God. Joseph Conrad's great novella flickers behind her use of that phrase, and yet it doesn't. Orleanna is not a quoting woman, and for the quoting man in the family, her strident husband, there can be only one source -- the Bible, unambiguous and entire, even in a land that demonstrates daily the suppleness of language. ''Tata Jesus is bangala!'' he shouts during his African sermons. It never occurs to him that in Kikongo, a language in which meaning hangs on intonation, bangala may mean '''precious and dear,'' but it also means the poisonwood tree -- a virulent local plant -- when spoken in the flat accent of an American zealot. The Prices are Nathan and Orleanna and their daughters: Ruth May, the youngest; Rachel, the oldest, a pale blond Mrs. Malaprop of a teen-ager; and the twins, Leah and Adah. Both twins are gifted, but Adah suffers from hemiplegia, which leaves her limping and nearly speechless. The female members of the family narrate the novel in turn. Orleanna does so in retrospect, from her later years on Sanderling Island, off the coast of Georgia. The girls, however, tell their story from the Congo as it happens, on the precipice of events, like an epistolary novel written from a place with no postal service and no hope of pen pals. Nathan Price narrates nothing. And yet his certitude -- and the literal-minded ferocity with which he expresses it -- is the altar around which these women arrange themselves. We already know his story, the author implies. Most of what we have always heard, she suggests, are stories told by men like him. This book thus belongs to the women, and it is a story about the loss of one faith and the discovery of another, for each woman according to her kind. As Adah, so bright, so willing to torque the mother tongue, puts it, ''One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.'' The Prices travel from Bethlehem, Ga., to a village called Kilanga on the Kwilu River in the summer of 1959, just a few months before Patrice Lumumba becomes Prime Minister of the newly independent Republic of the Congo -- not long, therefore, before he is arrested and murdered with the complicity of the United States and its President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose photograph Orleanna hangs in the kitchen hut behind their mud house: ''I'd cut it out of a magazine and nailed it over the plank counter where I kneaded the bread. . . . I remember every detail of him: the clear-rimmed glasses and spotted tie, the broad smile, the grandfatherly bald head like a warm, bright light bulb. He looked so trustworthy and kind. A beacon from home, reminding me of our purpose.'' The irony in Orleanna's words is the same irony she uses to describe the early days of her marriage, when there was still room for laughter in her husband's evangelical calling, before her pregnancies embarrassed him, before he returned from World War II a different man -- a man who planned ''to save more souls than had perished on the road from Bataan.'' Nathan Price escaped that road by sheer luck, and knowing it curled his heart ''like a piece of hard shoe leather.'' In Conrad's novella, the heart of darkness is both Kurtz's despoiled purpose and the terrain in which that purpose is worked. In this novel, the heart of darkness belongs only to men like Nathan Price and a local pilot named Eeben Axelroot, a figure from Graham Greene who shuttles spooklike in and out of Kilanga. The Congo is a hard place for the Price women, and its people are unfathomable at first, but Kilanga contains no Conradian darkness. Army ants, drought, hookworm, hunger, pestilential rain, diseases and still more diseases and green mamba snakes, yes, but no darkness. What all the Price women discover -- all except Rachel, ''whose only hopes for the year were a sweet-16 party and a pink mohair twin set'' -- is the near-perfect adaptation of the Congolese to the harsh conditions of their existence, a fittedness that is beautiful in itself. With that knowledge comes the discovery of the Prices' own profound ignorance. Once the comedy of colliding cultures ends, the tragedy begins. As Leah says: ''Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. Especially here.'' The Congo permeates the book and yet this is a novel that is just as much about America, a portrait, in absentia, of the nation that sent the Prices to save the souls of a people for whom it felt only contempt, people who already, in the words of a more experienced missionary, ''have a world of God's grace in their lives, along with a dose of hardship that can kill a person entirely.'' The Congolese are not savages who need saving, the Price women find, and there is nothing passive in their tolerance of missionaries. They take the Americans' message literally -- elections are good, Jesus too -- and expose its contradictions by holding an election in church to decide whether or not Jesus shall be the personal god of Kilanga. Jesus loses. And yet, for all its portraiture of place, its reflexive political vitriol, its passionate condemnation of Nathan Price, the book is ultimately a novel of character, a narrative shaped by keen-eyed women contemplating themselves and one another and a village whose familiarity it takes a tragedy to discover. Rachel is the epitome of America's material culture, a cunning, brainless girl who parodies television commercials and says of Eeben Axelroot, ''I'm willing to be a philanderist for peace, but a lady can only go so far where perspiration odor is concerned.'' Ruth May, the baby, is the innocent whose words betray the guilty; she is the catalyst that splits the Price family apart. When Orleanna speaks of the Congo, many years later, she does so by addressing Ruth May, whose questioning eyes watch over Orleanna's life with more compassion than ever fell from the burning gaze of her husband's God. These are precious creatures, but none are as precious to the reader as Leah and Adah, the twin and the niwt, as Adah calls herself, referring to her backward condition. Limping, nearly silent, Adah is a verbal gymnast, a dedicated diarist, a profound skeptic. Her father, she reports, probably interpreted her twisted newborn state ''as God's Christmas bonus to one of His worthier employees.'' Adah's wit bristles throughout this novel; it is wit of a kind that Leah, a tomboy who eagerly seeks her father's approval, would never use. Leah's, instead, is an entirely ethical understanding. The novel turns on several axes, and one of them is Leah's struggle to rebalance herself morally when she finally realizes exactly who her father is. Once she had said, ''My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldiers, while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.'' But when the armor fell, she saw that Nathan Price's ''blue eyes with their left-sided squint, weakened by the war, had a vacant look. His large reddish ears repelled me. My father was a simple, ugly man.'' All the Prices adapt to the Congo, in their way, but Adah and Leah are carried farthest in their adaptation. Rachel accomplishes this by not adapting at all. ''The way I see Africa,'' she says, ''you don't have to like it but you sure have to admit it's out there. You have your way of thinking and it has its, and never the train ye shall meet!'' For Adah, adaptation comes in the form of unforgiving self-discovery, the realization that ''even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.'' Leah, the conscience of this striking novel, is forever measuring the distance she must travel before her adaptation is made perfect. It was so when her father owned her, in her mother's words, ''like a plot of land,'' and it is still so in her maturity -- wed, so to speak, to the continent. In the end, she explains: ''I am the un-missionary, as Adah would say, beginning each day on my knees, asking to be converted. Forgive me, Africa, according to the multitudes of thy mercies.'' (Adapted from a review by Verlyn Klinkenborg for the NY Times) For three points, name the author, her novel, and give a personal response... 100803 ... jane THE POISONWOOD BIBLE By Barbara Kingsolver i've heard of this one many times, and felt i should read it. but after reading this review i'm not sure. i like the character studies and the idea of characters so dynamic, and the revelations that come about for them. but there is something about the setting that rubs me the wrong way, and i'm not sure what it is. 100803 ... rt +3=154 jane! Question 142 In his remarkable Pulitzer Prize-­winning book, “The Beak of the Finch,” this author followed Peter and Rosemary Grant, biologists who had spent years studying birds in the Galápagos Islands. Their work showed that finches evolve rapidly in response to changes in the food supply, a discovery that ran counter to Darwin’s idea that natural selection operates only very slowly. Weiner’s portrait of this scientific couple worked well as a narrative portal to that story of evolutionary biology. In his new book, he makes similar use of another brilliant theoretical scientist, the English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, a tireless proselytizer for radical life extension. But unlike the Grants, de Grey emerges on the page as someone who can be taken only in small doses. “Medievally thin and pale,” as Weiner puts it, with a luxuriant beard that recalls “Father Time before his hair turned gray” or “Timothy Leary unbound,” he is given to provocative statements that can turn into sermons. Nevertheless, with de Grey as his main character, he explores the fractured, fuzzy science and pseudoscience of immortality. “This is a good time to be a mortal,” he writes, noting that life expectancy in the developed world is about 80 years, and improving. Yet evolution has equipped us with bodies and instincts designed only to get us to a reproductive age and not beyond. “We get old because our ancestors died young,” he writes. “We get old because old age had so little weight in the scales of evolution; because there were never enough Old Ones around to count for much in the scales.” The first half of life is orderly, a miracle of “detailed harmonious unfolding” beginning with the embryo. What comes after our reproductive years is “more like the random crumpling of what had been neatly folded origami, or the erosion of stone. The withering of the roses in the bowl is as drunken and disorderly as their blossoming was regular and precise.” De Grey, in the vernacular of science, is a “skin out” person, someone who studies life whole. Naturalists, ecologists, field biologists and evolutionary biologists are in this category, whereas “skin in” people pursue cellular phenomena, “gadgets and widgets that are too small to see through a microscope,” he writes. The dichotomy is captured in Francis Crick’s scolding of Stephen Jay Gould: “The trouble with you evolutionary biologists is that you are always asking ‘why’ before you understand ‘how.’ ” As he describes it, the inspiration for de Grey’s scientific quest for immortality came in a flash one sleepless night: “The evolutionary theory of aging predicts chaos. And chaos is just what you see at the cellular and molecular level, and what you will always see. But what these troubles all have in common is that they fill the aging body with junk. Maybe we can just clean up all the scree and rubble that gathers in our aging bodies.” The beauty of this view is that “curing” aging requires no special knowledge of design, or any understanding of just how the cellular junk got there in the first place. It only requires that we get rid of it. As de Grey sees it, there are seven types of cellular junk, the gerontological equivalent of the seven deadly sins. They include “cross links” that gum up the machinery and glue cells to one another and mitochondria that fail with age. Then there is junk within cells and junk in the spaces between cells, along with cells that no longer work but hang around and cells that die and poison cells around them. And then there are old cells that acquire dangerous mutations and give rise to cancer. His strength as a writer is his ability to flesh out these complex theories without losing the reader. De Grey’s dream of conquering death may seem far-fetched and unreal, but Big Pharma is already at work on some of these ideas — the first cream that overcomes cross-links, which cause our skin to stiffen and wrinkle, will be a blockbuster. Fortunately, this book is not all about Aubrey de Grey. He writes engagingly about other researchers and their work in the field: on so-called Methuselah mutants, creatures that live much longer than the rest of their species; genes like Sir2 (Silent Information Regulator 2), which may be responsible for some of the life-extending effects of extremely calorie-restricted diets; and related proteins, known as sirtuins. That work led to the discovery of resveratrol, a compound in the skin of grapes that can activate sirtuins and prolong a lab animal’s life. But as he points out, there is a big problem with immortality. Traditionally, we have viewed our lives as unfolding in stages: Shakespeare’s seven ages of man capture our progression from infant to schoolboy to lover to soldier to justice to clown, ending finally in “second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Immortality could wind up being a terrible stasis. “A huge part of the action and the drama in the seven ages comes from the sense of an ending, the knowledge that all these ages must have an end,” he writes. We might live forever in a state of unending boredom. And the technology might benefit the wrong people: “If biologists could have done for the dictators of the 20th century what they can now do for roundworms and flies — double their life span — then Mao Zedong might still be alive.” As a young physician caught up in the early years of the H.I.V. epidemic, I was struck by my patients’ will to live, even as their quality of life became miserable and when loved ones and caregivers would urge the patient to let go. I thought it remarkable that patients never asked me to help end their lives (and found it strange that Dr. Kevorkian managed to encounter so many who did). My patients were dying young and felt cheated out of their best years. They did not want immortality, just the chance to live the life span that their peers could expect. What de Grey and other immortalists seem to have lost sight of is that simply living a full life span is a laudable goal. Partial success in extending life might simply extend the years of infirmity and suffering — something that to some degree is already happening in the West. He brings his insightful book to a close with this thought: “The trouble with immortality is endless. The thought of it brings us into contact with problems of time itself — with shapeless problems we have never grasped and may never put into words. Our ability to exist in time may require our being mortal, although we can’t understand that any more than the fish can understand water. What we call the stream of consciousness may depend upon mortality in ways that we can hardly glimpse.” Even if writers become immortal, books must end, and it is by reaching the end that the reader can sit back and find meaning in the journey. This book is a great trip. (Adapted from a review by Abraham Verghese, a professor and senior associate chairman in the department of internal medicine at Stanford University. His most recent book is the novel “Cutting for Stone.”) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100804 ... jane LONG FOR THIS WORLD: The Strange Science of Immortality By Jonathan Weiner k, did i already recommend this documentary to you? flight_from_death: the quest for immortality (www.flightfromdeath.com) i think you would like it. i've seen it several times and each time retain some new fascinating piece of information about culture and their fixation on immortality (and consequently, mortality). 100804 ... rt +3=157 jane! you did tell me about that film a while ago and i put it on my queue but its availability reads unknown...still. is subrey de gray in it? this dude is intense. he thinks one day we will achieve immortality. 100804 ... rt Question 143 Ostensibly, the central characters in this author's seventh novel, are a husband and wife named Thomas Bradshaw and Tonie Swann. Also ostensibly, the novel’s plot follows the year Thomas leaves the work force to take care of their daughter and his wife returns to a full-time job. But it soon becomes apparent that the novel is not exactly about these two individuals, nor is it overly concerned with the “Mr. Mom” circumstances newly introduced into their lives. What the book is about, however, is hard to say. The author who won Britain’s prestigious Whitbread Prize for her debut novel, “Saving Agnes,” is a first-rate writer, caustically intelligent and sharply observant. Perhaps best known here for her 2007 novel “Arlington Park,” which chronicles a day in the lives of a group of mothers outside London, she is also the author of the motherhood memoir “A Life’s Work,” though neither of these books is about the hilarity of diaper blowouts or grade-school antics. Instead, they concern adult women’s sometimes desperate and furious struggles to retain their identities after having children. In this book as in “Arlington Park,” she rotates among a large cast of characters, writing in a close third person not just about Thomas and Tonie but about several others in their orbit, including their respective sets of parents; their young daughter, Alexa; Thomas’s two brothers; the brothers’ wives; and the Polish lodger who lives with Thomas and Tonie and works as a housekeeper at a nearby hospital. She is talented enough to persuasively inhabit all these points of view. She imagines Alexa Bradshaw as an 8-year-old who loves the amethyst in the gemstone exhibit at the local museum and “wants her mother to think that she is a girl who smiles in her sleep.” Meanwhile, Alexa’s equally believable paternal grandfather is so stubborn that although he’s thirsty he refuses tea with his wife in order to punish her for returning home 45 minutes late. “He wants to be located in the maze of his own rigidity and offered something,” she writes of the dynamic between the Bradshaw grandparents. “That is the test, as it has always been.” Indeed, her gift for switching perspectives is so complete that when a particularly yippy dog made its appearance I found myself simultaneously wondering if she would dip into its consciousness, hoping she wouldn’t and being confident that she could. (For the record, she refrains.) And yet if each chapter is a close-to-­perfect capsule of character development and verisimilitude, the cumulative effect is surprisingly muted. The further the book progresses, the more arbitrary her choices seem. Why do we see Thomas’s sister-in-law tensely giving her older daughter an allowance when her two other children are only peripheral figures? Why is there a scene in which Tonie is mildly scolded by a boss who doesn’t appear before or after the scolding? And why do we read about Alexa at play with a friend who proves to be of no consequence? Even when a character is in a personally significant situation (after being sick for three weeks, Thomas’s brother is told by a doctor that he has “a patch” on his lung), her tendency is to jump away from the suspense of the moment and return to it after the drama has been resolved, the energy of the episode has dissipated or both. Many chapters are short, some as short as two pages, and eventually I found myself wondering if she had determined their protagonists by simply rolling a set of dice. The sense of randomness is reinforced by the inclusion of one chapter written, with no explanation, in the style of a play. I hoped, of course, that the haphazardness would add up to something I hadn’t seen coming and, to be fair, the book concludes with two twists, one of them especially distressing. But they aren’t enough to tie up the novel’s disparate threads. Nevertheless, if the book is disappointing in its totality, it still offers many pleasures. Pretty much every page gleams with her darkly humorous powers of observation: “At 25 Howard was already rich and losing his hair, two things that seemed to go together, though he has never become as rich as Thomas expected him to be, nor as bald either.” When Tonie, herself a professor and department head, is at a party being lectured by various men with bad social skills, he writes, “By now it is almost sexual, her desire to be penetrated by a question, but nobody asks her one.” (Fans will recognize Tonie as the author's prototypical female: harsh and smart, simultaneously hungry and ­detached.) Adapted from a review by Curtis Sittenfeld, whose most recent novel is “American Wife.” For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100804 ... rt rachel cusk, "the bradshaw variations" Question 144 In the late fall of 2009, bluefin tuna came inshore along the New Jersey coast and began to crash the surface of the ocean, chasing bait. For days, fast, open fishing boats played run-and-gun with them across the waters near Deal and Asbury Park, not 30 miles from New York City as the gannet flies. These were not giant bluefin, the 1,000-pound bullet trains so prized by the Japanese that they might sell for $100,000 or more. Those are almost gone now, as this author points out in his important and stimulating new book, which takes as its subject the global fisheries market and the relationship humans have with tuna, cod, sea bass and salmon. Giant bluefin tuna have been overharvested here and abroad as they travel north and south, east and west, heedless of international borders or treaties, their population hovering on the brink of total collapse. These tuna were instead their progeny’s progeny, fish of merely 75 or 150 pounds, the shape of huge, iridescent footballs. They are graceful as ballet dancers, and as strong, some of “the wildest things in the world,” as he calls them. A fishing guide I know well was out there and got a client close enough to a small pod of tuna to cast to it. The client got his fish, which is his own story. And a few hours later, my friend, driving north through Brooklyn with five pounds of ruby­-red tuna belly resting on ice in the back of his car, called me to ask if I had any soy sauce. I was newly installed as the restaurant critic of The New York Times and had spent the previous few months on a surreptitious tour of some of the city’s best restaurants. I had been eating stupendously well. But nothing I had eaten that summer and fall prepared me for the taste of this tuna that late afternoon, for the intense blast of flavor and rich, creamy fattiness delivered by a cut of truly fresh otoro — supreme tuna belly, in the parlance of the sushi bar — not yet four hours old. Nothing I had ever eaten could have. The bluefin tuna you get at restaurants, even the best ones, has been flash-frozen and thawed, is days — or weeks — old, has traveled thousands and thousands of miles. In a bite of that absolutely fresh tuna from New Jersey, I experienced a taste of truly wild food, a majestic flavor, something incredibly rare. And as it melted on my tongue and receded into memory, I felt guilt and doubt and fear. Will my children, who demurred in eating the fish that day, ever have a chance to eat bluefin tuna? Will their children? Will anyone? Should they? What are we really to do with these fish? The author, a journalist who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, has constructed a book that, even as it lays out the grim and complicated facts of common seas ravaged by separate nations, also manages to sound a few hopeful and exciting notes about the future of fish, and with it, the future of civilizations in thrall to the bounty of the sea. The point of the book comes down to the push and pull of our desire to eat wild fish, and the promise and fear of consuming the farmed variety. As he follows his four species, and our pursuit of them, farther and farther out into the ocean, he posits the sense of privilege we should feel in consuming wild fish, along with the necessity of aquaculture. Along the way, he raises real-life ethical questions of the sort to haunt a diner’s dreams, the kind of questions that will not be easily answered by looking at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s seafood-watch card. In truth, he shows, there is rarely such a thing as a good wild fish for any of us to eat, at least not if all of us eat it. Combining on-the-ground and on-the-ocean reporting from the Yukon to Greece, from the waters of Long Island Sound to the Mekong Delta, along with accounts of some stirring fishing trips, he makes a powerful argument: We must, moving forward, manage our oceans so that the fish we eat can exist both in aquacultural settings and within the ecosystems of wild oceans. Wild fish were once everywhere, of course, in such numbers as to astound. (And still, he reports, the current global catch of wild fish measures 170 billion pounds a year, “the equivalent in weight to the entire human population of China.”) Wild fish seemed to be, as he puts it, “a crop, harvested from the sea, that magically grew itself back every year. A crop that never required planting.” Once, he writes, as many as 100 million Atlantic salmon larvae hatched every year in the upper reaches of the Connecticut River and eventually made their way south to Long Island Sound, and north from there to Greenland before returning to the Berkshire foothills to spawn. Dams, overfishing and more dams still have taken their grim toll on their descendants. Today, every piece of Atlantic salmon you’ll find at your local supermarket or fishmonger, smoked into lox, wrapped around mock crabmeat, or lying flat and orange against crushed ice, is farmed. As he explains clearly and well, the process by which that farming is undertaken threatens the future of what wild salmon remain here and in the Pacific. The amount of wild fish needed to feed farmed salmon, the threat of farmed salmon escaping and crossbreeding with wild salmon stocks, the rise of pollution from the farms themselves — when it comes to the business of domesticating salmon, he writes, “we should have chosen something else.” Of course we did choose something else, some of us. That fish is sea bass — branzino, as it’s mostly called on restaurant menus now — a species that once thrived in the wild along the coast of Europe, throughout the Mediterranean Sea and through the Strait of Gibraltar, along the western coasts of Portugal, Spain and France, north to England. No more, though the farmed version is a success story of ample proportions, as anyone who spends more nights than not in white-tablecloth restaurants can tell you. His accounting of the 2,000-year process of learning to farm sea bass, “one that involved the efforts of ancient Roman fishermen, modern Italian poachers, French and Dutch nutritionists, a Greek marine biologist turned entrepreneur, and an Israeli endocrinologist,” reads in parts like the treatment for a Hollywood film, a toga epic in fishy smell-o-vision. And cod? As he writes, it fueled the American economy in its early days, and good parts of the European one, too. A five-foot wooden carving of the fish hangs from the ceiling in the Massachusetts State House, to celebrate its place in the region’s history. But industrial fishing of these tremendous and once common animals, by fishermen the world over, has led to terribly depleted stocks and closed fishing grounds — and, he reports, to a turn toward wild Alaskan pollock to fill our desire for firm, white-fleshed fish to make fish sticks and battered-fish sandwiches, and from there toward farmed Vietnamese tra and African tilapia. These shifts, of course, come with their own nightmares and possibilities, their own showcases of human frailty in the face of commerce, greed and hunger. His reporting lays these out with care. The story of the bluefin tuna, meanwhile, is one of the great tragedies of the modern age. This magnificent creature, once mostly shunned by the world’s cooks and diners for its bloody flesh unsuitable for human consumption, now teeters almost on the edge of extinction, principally because the world’s nations cannot agree to the one measure that will guarantee its future: a total ban on its commercial harvest, in all waters. “The passion to save bluefin is as strong as the one to kill them,” he writes, “and these dual passions are often contained within the body of a single fisherman.” This book is a marvelous exploration of that contradiction, one that is reflected in the stance and behavior of all nations that fish. It is a necessary book for anyone truly interested in what we take from the sea to eat, and how, and why. (Adapted from a review for the NY Times by Sam Sifton, a restaurant critic.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100805 ... jane FOUR FISH The Future of the Last Wild Food Paul Greenberg i'm sure the same thing could be said about so many different varieties of food - a tomato right off the vine is always such a delicacy compared to one that has been sitting in a grocery store for however long (and certainly filled with chemicals). fresh herbs vs. dried herbs - that one's a given. the concept is intriguing in general, though, i had never considered that meat would be the same, particularly fish. 100805 ... rt +3=160 jane! i love fish. Question 145 "I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."
      This author knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions. The names of the writers who beat out her for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, she made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room--jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white--and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: "Colooooooor Struuckkkk!" Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived. By all accounts, she could walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a few stories later, leave them so completely charmed that they often found themselves offering to help her in any way they could. Gamely accepting such offers--and employing her own talent and scrappiness--she became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned more than 30 years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays. Growing up in a culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, she had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought to "squinch" her rambunctious spirit, she recalled. Her mother, on the other hand, urged her and her seven siblings to "jump at de sun." she explained, "We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground." Her idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end, though, when her mother died in 1904. Zora was only 13 years old. "That hour began my wanderings," she later wrote. "Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit." She had a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor, and "the gift," as one friend put it, "of walking into hearts." She used these talents--and dozens more--to elbow her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, befriending such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters. Though she rarely drank, fellow writer Sterling Brown recalled, "When she was there, she was the party." Another friend remembered her apartment--furnished by donations she solicited from friends--as a spirited "open house" for artists. All this socializing didn't keep her from her work, though. She would sometimes write in her bedroom while the party went on in the living room. By 1935, --she graduated from Barnard College in 1928--and published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel (Jonah's Gourd Vine) and a well-received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men). But the late 1930s and early '40s marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Caribbean Voodoo practices, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942, she finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who's Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948. (Adapted from a bio written by Valerie Boyd) For three points, name this author and give a personal response... 100806 ... jane Zora Neale Hurston i was supposed to read her autobiography, "dust tracks on a road," for a gender & sexuality class at nyu. that was back when i did zero homework and somehow scraped by getting B's. needless to say, now i kind of wish i had read it. she seems like a spectacular woman. 100806 ... jane p.s. the name Zora is awesome. 100806 ... rt +3=163 jane! it was fun texting you. see you on innerviews. Question 146 Set in New York over four days between Christmas and New Year's, this debut novel takes the reader on a dizzying journey of teenage sex, drugs, and violence. Moving at breakneck speed and filled with interchangeable characters, the novel reads like a collision between MTV and "Cops." At the center of the story is White Mike, a philosophical private school dropout who now sells drugs to New York's richest and most spoiled kids. All the money in the world cannot save White Mike and his friends and customers from loneliness, anger, and frustration. Despite these strong emotions, or perhaps because they are overcome by them, his characters seem empty and two-dimensional. This shallowness, however, further conveys the motif of hopelessness. The young men and women who populate the book are seemingly adrift in New York City. Their parents are notably absent, leaving them with huge empty apartments and unlimited access to funds. The reader can only guess why most of these characters feel and act as desperate as they do (although parental neglect surely plays a part). It is unclear whether this tale is an indictment of a certain socioeconomic class in America or of post Generation X teenagers. Either way, he seems to be saying that threats of destruction by America's youth, both inwardly and outwardly directed, cannot be dismissed lightly. White Mike, the central character, while the most developed, is still an enigma. Mike never does drugs himself but he has no qualms about selling them to others. Quietly rebellious and subtly poetic, he remains distant from the fatalistic world he observes (and contributes to). The death of his cousin, however, propels him into a scene of unbelievable violence, a scene to which he is unwittingly linked. Yet it is his distance, fueled by loss, that in the end gives him the greatest chance of both physical and emotional survival. White Mike's intelligence and cynicism will undoubtedly lead to comparisons with Holden Caulfield, a parallel that is both inaccurate and unnecessary. His central figure is both less original and less developed, and McDonell's story is vastly different from Salinger's. However, he too, has created a character at once frustrating and sympathetic: a young man challenging himself by challenging the system he finds himself a part of yet finds hypocritical and damaging. And like Salinger, he never fully discloses the intellectual potential or the emotional damage of his protagonist. The vulnerabilities of his characters are apparent, but the source of these vulnerabilities is not. Just as the parents are absent, so is the history of each character. We do learn something about White Mike. We learn the loss he suffers with his mother's death, his frustration with his education, the distance between him and his father, and his loyalty to the few people he deems worthy. About the other characters, we know only that they are handsome and beautiful and privileged, but we do not know why they kill or why they begin taking the intense, eponymous drug "twelve." Perhaps this lack of disclosure is intentional on his part. More likely, it is the sign of a young and inexperienced writer. This book is a frightening tale of trauma and emptiness written with an impressive sharpness and ferocity. Only 17 when he wrote this brisk but powerful novel, this author is off to a great start to what promises to be a successful and interesting literary career. Note: The novel was adapted into a screenplay and made into a film which was critically acclaimed at Sundance. (Adapted from a review by Sarah Rachel Egelman) For three points, name the young author, his novel, and give a personal response... 100809 ... jane TWELVE Nick McDonell although holden caulfield didn't seem to resonate until the reviewer mentioned it, the first thing i thought of were characters by bret easton ellis. american_psycho: the vapidity of 80s new york, with late-twentysomethings booming rich beyond their wildest dreams, caught up in drugs and everything material. and the same mystery surrounding the origins of the characters' motivations. and 17 years old! impressive! 100809 ... rt +3 =166 jane! i've always dreamed about living in hotels in nyc. 100809 ... rt Question 147 This book is the account of one year the author spent exploring her own back yard and woods. She follows the seasons, investigating Winter, Spring, Summer, then Fall. Her descriptions of a preying mantis eating her mate during sex, a tree filled with lights, a water bug eating a frog, and grasshoppers becoming locusts are graphic and even horrific. Her examinations of pond water under a microscope are meticulous. Her observations are often scientific and accompanied by remembrances of biological studies or strange bits of relevant information, like the wave particle theory. This book, however, isn’t foremost concerned with these scientific details. It’s concerned with the act of observation itself. She is teaching us to see. She wants us to be totally immersed in the present, because some day soon “we die and are put in the earth forever” (Jack Gilbert). It’s difficult to annotate this book without referencing her in every sentence – that’s because she teaches us to observe by opening her own mind and sharing what she’s seen. In particular, the writer reading her narrative can see how her earthy observations translate to philosophy and then to literature. For example: “The point I want to make about the snakeskin is that, when I found it, it was whole and tied in a knot¦ The knot had no beginning Intently, then, I traced the knot’s lump around with a finger: it was continuous. I couldn’t untie it any more than I could untie a doughnut¦ Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a Slinky The power we seek, too, seems to be a continuous loop. I have always been sympathetic with the early notion of a divine power that exists in a particular place, or that travels about over the face of the earth as a man might wander – and when he is “there” he is surely not here. You can shake the hand of the man you meet in the woods; but the spirit seems to roll along like the mythical hoop snake with its tail in its mouth This is the hoop of flame that shoots the rapids in the creek or spins across the dizzy meadows; this is the arsonist of the sunny woods: catch it if you can.” The pilgrim shouldn’t stand at a distance from life and dictate an overarching philosophy that finitely pulls all the corners of the world together. In the world’s intricacy there’s chaos. The chaos theory wasn’t public knowledge when this book was written, but she subscribes to the same principles. The Water Words Dictionary defines the chaos theory as: the theory that “any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter how small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict its future behavior.” Her world, built on narrowly defined animal behaviors and an understanding of God, still has unpredictable ends that are often cruel and seemingly “unjust,” but are just as often miraculous. The open-eyed pilgrim will be surprised by life again and again – in one moment someone will eat her mate and in the next a baby will float downstream, on its back, scratching his belly in the sun. She is clear that nature isn’t the only observatory available for discovering more about nature, God, and ourselves, but I agree with her – it’s my favorite. Her precise accountings of species or bark or bacteria are sometimes a bit boring, but in the end the payoff is big. We see the gothic, yet beautiful, world her bizarre anecdotes and odd facts create only when our full concentration is on the present moment. In this book she gives the best definition of innocence that I’ve ever read, and I think the maintenance of our innocence is key to the kind of observation the book promotes: “What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.” Because of this, a good writer cannot stand before a story and say, “so be it.” The story has its own life and its own chaos. We can only stand unself-consciously in it, not above it or near it, and record what we find there. Some common threads will surface of their own accord. (Adapted from a review by Camille Renshaw) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100810 ... jane Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard wow, this in so many ways reminds me of my own childhood, and of gifts_of_unknown_things...very much the latter. that we are inevitably tied to our habitats without necessarily being conscious of it, but to be conscious of it, to work with the ties we have, can help us in reaching some level of enlightenment that far too many have traded in for false idols. 100810 ... rt +3=169 jane! i love what you said. Qustion 148 A father's intimate look at his daughter'sdeveloping mind from birth to age three. Unlike any other time in our lives, we remember almost nothing from our first three years. As infants, not only are we like the proverbial blank slate, but our memories are like Teflon: nothing sticks. In this beautifully written memoir of his daughter's first three years, the author combines his vivid observations with a synthesis of developmental theory, re-creating what that time, lost to the memory of adults, is like from a child's perspective. In his book, the author, a psychologist and novelist, attempts to get inside his daughter Athena's head as she acquires all the faculties that make us human, including social skills, language, morality, and a sense of self. Written with a father's tenderness and a novelist's empathy and style, this unique book taps into a parent's wonder at the processes of psychological development. Funny, touching, and fascinating, this book will reveal the extraordinary journey into personhood that children make during the momentous first three years of life. For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100811 ... jane A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind Charles Fernyhough i always wonder about infant studies, and how they subconsciously affect the subject. it sounds like a sweet book, though. 100811 ... rt +3=172 jane! Question 149 A house can shape a book. It can shelter whatever – or whoever – a writer moves into it. Think of William Fiennes's recent memoir (The Music Room) about the Oxfordshire castle in which he grew up (also a portrait of his epileptic brother) or Julie Myerson's Home, an investigation into all the people who ever lived in her house in south London. Both books are haunted; in them, place is a key to people (or vice versa). At first, I assumed this book belonged on this bookshelf. It purports to be about the author's relationship with her father and describes itself as "a biography of an English acre". But there is a difference. On a single acre of land, in the Hambleton Hills in Yorkshire, on the western edge of the North York Moors, there is no house. There is a chapel. Her father was a sculptor. He built the chapel in 1957, five miles from Oswaldkirk, where his family lived. His daughter discovers he first saw this plot of land as a 16-year-old on 6 June 1944 – D-Day. He dedicated the chapel to the memory of three Ampleforth boys (he had become the school's art master) who died during the second world war. The chapel, his daughter believes, was to some extent founded on a survivor's guilt. For the reader, the chapel sounds romantic, but it was more complex  for the family. As she writes: "Every time I visit, it snags the heart so violently that I'm left disorientated by the force of emotion… the land has always been a place full of dread and fear for me. It was a central piece of the mythology that sustained my family and it came to represent everything that failed." For 44 years, her father mowed the grass outside the chapel. But he was unable to give, it seems, comparably loving attention to his children. Yet do not expect the family failures to be dwelt upon. As the daughter of a Catholic, she knows when to avoid the confessional. It is the admirable, frustrating thing about the book that she is a tiny figure in its landscape. What, instead, she gives us is a startling, willed, one-off book, a memorial to her father that is in its own way every bit as eccentric as his chapel. What she sets out to do is to look at the acre of land "in the middle of nowhere", with scholarly zest, until it becomes no longer a nowhere but a somewhere, known and minutely understood. She is an exemplary guide. She goes back to the Iron Age. She brings Robert Bruce back to bellicose life. She contemplates a nearby Cistercian monastery. She describes sheep and is especially good on the way they graze like "thousands of conscientious park keepers" and even get into our language ("on tenterhooks" is a reference to the stretching of woven wool). Nor does she stop at sheep. The moths around the chapel earn pages to themselves. Her greatest achievement is to work a single acre to produce a more general portrait of England. But I couldn't help feeling that the endeavour often takes her further from the particular focus of her father, in spite of her intentions. She sees the plot as her father would have done but also in ways he wouldn't. Perhaps this is necessary oneupwomanship. Or perhaps she needs to ensure he does not dominate. She is undeceived by her father's romanticism about landscape and is hard on romantics generally. But at the end, she finds a brave alternative to romanticism, launching into the skies herself. She books into the local gliding club and is finally aloft, 2,500 feet up, glimpsing the plot as she goes. As she glides, it occurs to me that her book is not merely equivalent to her father's chapel, but also resembles the patchworks her mother once stitched by hand. It is painstaking, motley, unpredictable. You are kept on tenterhooks (and, for the first time, know what that means). Above all, she questions what belonging is and discovers that it is  about "commitment rather than possession". Nor does she forget that everything, including belonging, is subject to change. Not long before her father died, she calmly reports, the angels were stolen from the chapel's exterior buttresses. (Adapted from a review in The Guardian) For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100812 ... jane The Plot: A Biography of an English Acre by Madeleine Bunting i wouldn't have thought i'd be interested in something like this at first glance. but after reading the review, i love the intricacies of her study (once again reminding me of mary roach), and at the same time a sincerity and examination of family ties and what our upbringing means in context with our habitats. 100812 ... rt +3=175 jane! a sense of place is such a basic human need. our homes are who we are. 100813 ... rt Question 150 This author's eleventh novel is announced by its publisher as “an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville,” a figure perhaps a bit cerebral for one of this author’s brass-band burlesques of literature and history. But this book grabs its subject and marches down Main Street playing full out, provoking a reader’s delighted applause and — as is often the case with this exuberant novelist — a small measure of exasperation. The author's Olivier de Garmont is born, like the author of “Democracy in America,” into a family of Norman nobles in 1805. His grandfather — again, like the real Tocqueville’s — has lost his head to the guillotine; Olivier’s parents are lucky to have escaped it. The family makes a small comeback when the Bourbons are restored to the throne, but in 1831, a year after the July Revolution, Olivier, a rising young lawyer, decides to push off to America. He declares himself to be in an “impossible position” politically, since he’s one of those “liberal modern men” who are nevertheless “nobles still” and thus blameworthy. Aside from all else, his mother thinks it’s wise for him to leave the country. And so arrangements are made for him to conduct a study of America’s penal system for the new French regime he so dislikes. The real Tocqueville traveled to the United States for the same limited, original purpose, accompanied by Gustave de Beaumont, a social equal only three years older than himself. Olivier, by contrast, boards the Havre (Tocqueville’s very ship) with an entirely different sort of companion. Parrot, his feisty English secretary, is almost 50 and has the kind of dizzying, Dickensian résumé that often qualifies a character for employment in one of the author's books. To simplify things, vastly: Parrot is a former printer’s devil who long ago learned engraving from the mysterious Mr. Watkins, who would seem to have perished at the fiery end of a forgery scheme involving Parrot’s own father. At 12, Parrot passed into the control of the Marquis de Tilbot, a one-armed counter­revolutionary Frenchman whom the boy saved from starvation on the English moors. (Tilbot is, it should be noted, the author’s latest improvisation on Dickens’s Abel Magwitch, whom the author transformed into Jack Maggs, the eponymous hero of his crackerjack 1998 novel.) Tilbot carried young Parrot off to Australia and years later brought him back to re-royaled Paris, where he became the older man’s servant and spy. It is in this capacity that Parrot goes off to America, to look after and report on Olivier for the young lawyer’s mother, the Countess de Garmont, with whom Tilbot is in love. The real Tocqueville is described by his biographer Hugh Brogan as having been “cross-grained, refined, severely intellectual, private.” The author doubles the worst of these ingredients to create, in Olivier, a pompous, febrile, tantrum-prone twit, a master Parrot refers to as “Lord Migraine.” Olivier is abstractly liberal but consumingly elitist; his servant boils with ambition and resentment. A socialist and unbeliever, Parrot imagines his own mind to be “a mighty garden wild with weeds,” and himself a man “subject to the laws of Newton but not to those of kings.” He is being cruelly transplanted to a new world whose democratic opportunities he cannot seize: “I read Tom Paine by candlelight, but for 18 hours a day I was a vassal.” He is, however, able to bring along his volatile mistress, Mathilde, a portrait artist who hates the aristocrats she flatters in paint. Tormented by the hours of the voyage that Olivier spends sitting for her, Parrot tosses the resulting canvas over the Havre’s starboard side. Both men first discover America among their fellow passengers. The most confident of these is Mr. Peek, president of the Bank of New York, who urges Olivier to “play the democrat” and stop offending Yankee sensibilities by sending Parrot below deck. Peek also holds forth on the character and position of American lawyers — a matter Tocqueville looked into as well. (When it comes to such parallel observations, Carey acknowledges that scholars “will detect, squirreled away among the thatch of sentences, distinctive threads, necklaces of words that were clearly made by the great man himself.”) Even before disembarking in New York, Olivier has decided to expand his project beyond penology and write a book about all things American. He dictates a letter to his mother, through Parrot, telling her that “when the wave of democracy breaks over our heads, it will be best we know how to bend it to our ends rather than be broken by its weight.” He sees Americans as “caterpillars” forever shedding one existence for another. Their snobbishness and democratic affectations, their wish to be admired, their enthusiasm for clubs and associations, and their tendency toward religious fervor all enter his gaze. Soon enough he is even using and italicizing their expressions: “I would leave for my vacation by stagecoach.” Like most of hhis inventive, maximalist entertainments, this book is replete with expressed feeling, if too wittily contrived for actual passion. The story is told in the alternating voices of its two main characters, and it’s hard to say where the emotional focus finally lies. Master and servant bump along through fits of contempt and pity and occasional affection, without ever really fusing or fully breaking apart. Olivier’s belief that Parrot has made him “the object of a strange and savage love” is an aristocrat’s delusion. Parrot’s teeming emotions are always finding someone and something else to spill onto, and the novel keeps throwing fresh excitement and frustration his way. No regular reader of this author will be surprised when Mr. Watkins, the engraver last seen almost 40 years earlier while on fire, shows up in New York; or when Parrot begins helping him assemble and sell a collection of his work called “The Birds of America.” Sentence for sentence, his writing remains matchlessly robust. Sailors cling “to the rigging like soft fruit in a storm,” while inside a dark parlor old ladies sit “wetting their hairy chins with stout.” But as the book’s bravura paragraphs grow into chapters, the author seems unable to decide whether it’s “Democracy in America” or “Martin Chuzzlewit” or, once more, “Great Expectations” he’d like to inflate and transform. The local units of invention rarely disappoint, but if Tocqueville were to survey the book’s overall imaginative structure, he might recommend a stronger sort of federalism to the enormous literary talent presiding here. (Adapted from a review by Thomas Mallon, whose novels include “Fellow Travelers” and “Bandbox.” His most recent book is “Yours Ever: People and Their Letters.”) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100813 ... jane PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA Peter Carey i love de tocqueville. i quote him all the time from this short essay out of "democracy in america". it's called, "Why Americans are so Restless in the Midst of their Prosperity." i had to read it in high school but i am still so amazed at how applicable it is in these contemporary times. the most prominent part of it that i think is fascinating is the idea that, the closer we get to equality, the more we will notice infinitely smaller things about us that are different. that people want to categorize themselves so they can assemble some sort of social hierarchy. 100813 ... rt +3=178 jane! carey has such a grasp on america. 100815 ... rt This author had the kind of childhood that aspiring memoirists dream of: He spent time in a mental hospital, did a stint with an uptight foster family and lived in a group home. But his new foray into personal narrative isn’t a predictable tour through a tragic past—it’s a motormouthed explanation of how that past led to his adulthood as an obsessive consumer of pop culture and a writer for The Onion’s A.V. Club. In this journey from troubled youth to successful critic, the author’s guides and life lessons come in the form of movies, books and songs. He frames his account of losing his virginity (and his girlfriend’s subsequent abortion) with the Ben Folds ballad “Brick,” justifies his trips to a Madison whorehouse by way of Steely Dan and compares the director of his childhood group home to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. His references are certainly relatable, but also somewhat limiting, forcing a messy autobiography into an overly neat series of riffs and analogies. When he can’t sum an experience up with the help of a song or a script, he shifts into a self-lacerating funnyman mode, laughing at his traumas and belittling himself. “Some folks have a genius for reinvention, but I’m stuck with my one crappy personality,” he writes, seemingly begging us to contradict him. Throughout the book, he mixes startling earnestness with extreme bitterness, and the results are more uncomfortable than funny. As is often the case with memoirs about intense formative experiences, most of the momentum here lies in the book’s early chapters. It’s fairly entertaining to read about the author’s short-lived work on an obscure movie-review TV show, and his rise through the ranks of The Onion will undoubtedly delight fans. But the cynicism that works so well in Rabin’s work on A.V. Club turns out to be less of an asset when he’s writing about himself.—(Adapted from a review by Eryn Loeb) The author's pop life THE MEMORY: His mom REMINDS HIM OF…: Little Edie from Grey Gardens THE MEMORY: His success at The Onion REMINDS HIM OF…: Eminem’s path to glory in 8 Mile THE MEMORY: A bout of depression, followed by a road trip REMINDS HIM OF…: The Magnetic Fields’ Charm of the Highway Strip For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100815 ... rt nathan rabin/ the big rewind Question 151 This author was a 21-year-old student at Yale when, as a class project, she designed a memorial honoring Vietnam veterans. When a competition for such a monument was announced, she submitted her design and stunned the world when it was selected as the winner from among 1400 entrants. With the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., her career path had been charted. She would pursue her art and architecture simultaneously and produce one famous creation after another from her small studio in New York. Nearly twenty years later, Lin has added another creative element to her professional portfolio—that of author. Being a high profile person who is admittedly shy, she has resisted going public with a book until now. When asked, “Why now?” She says, “I’ve been seen through a lot of interviews and then a documentary by someone else (A Strong Clear Vision). I completely respected the filmmaker. I saw it as ‘her art.’ But it made me feel like, as an artist, I needed to shape a book that would be really encompassing of what my work is.” She also has an audience in mind. “I deliberately went with Simon and Schuster because I almost wanted to walk out of the art/architectural monotype world. I wanted to have a dialogue with a larger public.” In her book, she has documented eighteen of her works through sketches, photographs and her original notes relating to each project. She artistically weaves her lecture notes and personal essays through the pages of this attractive coffee table book. Describing her book, she says, “I guess it’s autobiographical, but it’s really about an artist’s process. It’s not a literal self-portrait, it’s an abstract.” The book, she says, describes one artist’s very specific approach to her work. Ask her “Who are you?” “How do you want to present yourself?” and she will reply, “I’m an artist! I see myself as an artist who happens to love buildings.” While she considers architecture an art form, too, she says, “I tend to think of it as designing around someone else. I’m making it for other people. When you make art, you basically can do whatever you want, which is actually harder for me. Art is about who you are and what you want to do. I think when there are no rules or limitations, it’s actually more difficult.” She is also a professional who resists the big business scene. She explains, “I don’t want to spend my life running a huge firm. That means I’ve had to turn down interesting architectural projects because I can only work on one or two at a given time.” But the projects she does take on are prominent, indeed. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial classified her as an expert designer of monuments even before she graduated. In 1988, she agreed to design the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. And three years later, she created the concept for the Women’s Table to commemorate women students at Yale. In 1991, she decided that she did not want to be typecast as a builder of memorials and she has turned down all further such requests. Despite the fact that she has designed two major American monuments, she says, “I am not a political artist.” Her pieces definitely provoke thought, but she endeavors to create places in which to think without trying to dictate what to think. “I like to present factual information and allow each viewer to come away with their own conclusions.” She uses the Women’s Table as an example. “Obviously, nothing can be completely non-biased or without a point, but with the Women’s Table, I’m just presenting numbers of women enrolled in Yale. It starts with zeros, because there was a time when women weren’t allowed at Yale. Little by little you see the numbers go from single digits to double digits to triple digits. You begin to see the emergence of women, not just physically at Yale, but in a way, in society.” She continues, “The Vietnam Memorial is the same way. It’s chronological with names and then it’s basically up to you to come to your own conclusion—to come to your own peace. You should not come to the apex of that piece and find a really strong statement of what you should have to think.” She does see herself an environmentalist, however. She says, “I try to use natural and recycled materials in my artworks.” She also considers the natural backdrop in her designs. “I think part of my philosophy is that whether it’s an art or architecture, I’m trying to make us very aware of the beauty of the natural world in hopes that we will value it and take care of it in a way better than we have.” An important part of her book is her description of the magic that happens during the process of the design. She explains that she doesn’t just ponder the physical site, when contemplating a project, but the cultural site, as well. She uses the Wave Field at the FXB Aerospace Engineering Building at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as an example. She says, “I began reading about fluid dynamics and flight turbulence and I talked to the professors of the aerospace engineering department there, just trying to get an idea of what went on in the building. And then, boom! One day I just opened a book, saw this image of a stokes water wave—a natural occurring wave—and knew that was what the piece was going to be about. You can only do so much analytic research and then I shut that side of me down and flip it and allow the true intuitive side to take over. You have to have faith in the magic. You cannot find a reason for everything you make, but that doesn’t make it less thoughtful. It’s very complex how we think. I like that. I like the mystery of creativity.” People wonder how an artist who freely uses words like magic and intuition to describe her creative process would choose what seems like a restrictive, limiting word for her book title. She explains, “It is about opposites. It’s a contradiction. Everyone looks at boundaries as a division and what I’m after is the boundary line—the space between two things. I see myself existing on the boundary line and it’s that line that begins to take on dimensionality. I feel I exist on the boundaries somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private, east and west. I’m always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces.” While she writes detailed descriptions of her work as part of the design process, she has never before written for the public. She says, “This is my first book of projects and I wanted that first book to also involve my writing because it is so much an integral part of how I make my work. Writing helps clarify what I’m going to do.” But it doesn’t always come easy for her. According to her, “Writing this book was hard—probably harder than anything I’ve done. I’m in love with writing. It’s very critical to me in my process. I think my design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was chosen because of my descriptive narrative, but it took me longer to write the essay than it did to create the design.” The book introduces the woman beyond the monuments that have brought her so much acclaim. Herein, you will get to know the Chinese-American woman, the daughter, the environmentalist as well as the architect and the artist. What is on the horizon for her? “I want to make a few more buildings that are good, make a few more sculptures that I think are good, raise my family and just maintain. But my absolute dream is to do more for the environment—to see this little pet dream of mine on extinction and bio-diversity come into being.” She ends the book with her ideas about her last memorial. She writes, “I retired from the monument business after the Women’s Table, not wanting to be typecast, but there is one last memorial I would like to create. This memorial would focus on the most important issue for me while growing up and to this day: the environment and man’s relationship to it.” Her dream of a final monument would actually involve six physical sites designed to monitor the health of the planet as well as a satellite link. She envisions markers at Yellowstone, Antarctica, Tibet, Africa, the Amazon and one that monitors the ocean floor. A mighty dream, indeed. But as she says, “The environment is really a part of my life and my work. I think that everyone in a little way can help out and that we all should.” (Adapted from a review by Patricia Fry, the author of A Writer’s Guide to Magazine Articles for Book Promotion and Profit (Matilija Press, 2000). For three points, name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100816 ... jane Boundaries Maya Lin i really enjoy this kind of multifaceted reflection (sketches, lecture notes, etc. ) it's that same sort of scrapbooked feeling i like about griffin_and_sabine. :) 100816 ... rt +3=181 jane! i love her use of waves in the landscape. Question 152 Nobody much talks about the homeless in Los Angeles. My hunch is that there's a kind of collective denial: in this, the most illimitable – and yet curiously individuated – of megalopolises, the homeowners tend to assume that being without one can't be that bad; after all, the weather's always good – there's benches, and 70-odd miles of white sand beach. The homeless – they can just hang out, then stroll the boulevards; while those who're saddled with the upkeep of mile after mile of Tudor revival, Spanish Mission, and Art Deco have to feel the acid burning through their duodenums, while the oil price hikes, and they sit, marooned, for hour after hour on the Harbour Freeway. But it ain't true – this is floor covering for a city, rolled out across a desert, and at night, the temperature plummets. You see the results of this in the skin of the homeless, which is annealed by day then chilled by night, until their faces are as tanned as hides. In the darkness they huddle beneath the freeway overpasses, then when the sun rises, like lizards, they emerge to sop up the heat. I saw a lot of the homeless in Los Angeles – because I spent the entire week I was there on the streets, travelling at 3mph. I walked from LAX to Downtown, via the Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw, West Adams and South Central. I walked from Downtown to Hollywood, via Echo Park, Wilshire Boulevard, Fairfax and Melrose. I walked through Beverly Hills to Culver City, then back again. On Saturday – a rest day – I merely trolled through Hollywood, then headed up through Runyon Canyon Park to Mulholland Drive, then back down through Laurel Canyon. Then on the last, and longest, day I walked from Sunset Boulevard to Santa Monica, then along the coast to Venice, around Marina del Rey, then past the Ballona Wetlands and back to the airport. It was my longest urban walking tour to date – especially given that there was a London leg from my house to Heathrow via Pinewood Studios as well – and I couldn't possibly do justice to the experience in 8,000 words – let alone 800. You'll have to wait for the book: which – once it's written – will doubtless soon be a major motion picture, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing me (albeit with a body double for the walking sequences). In the meantime, let me offer you this little teaser: on the final leg of the walk, leaving the humping marina behind, I set off along Lincoln Boulevard, past hoggish Harley-Davidson dealerships, cut-price waxing salons, and young men twirling enormous cardboard arrows to advertise real estate. The sun squeezed my ear between its finger rays, and the exhaust of a thousand Escalades blatted into my face, while the paving slapped my soles. Then, horror of horrors, the sidewalk gave out, and I was in the middle of a dark wood of asphalt. Luckily, a Virgil appeared to guide me through the auto-purgatory; to wit: John, who was fit and compact, with steel-grey hair, a yellow vest, khaki shorts and a leather rucksack. He'd been into Venice to do a little shopping, and now he was walking home. Yes, walking. "I do it all the time," he said as we moved along the verge at a brisk canter. "The thing is, the pedestrian always has the right of way in California – the car drivers know that, so if they do hit you they drive off, because they'll be in big trouble." John lived in a house at the end of the bluff that rose up above the wetlands: "I've been here 27 years," he told me. "When I came this was a toxic swamp, but the developers who built Loyola Village had to clean it up as part of the deal. I think they've done a pretty good job." They had, the wetlands looked reassuringly wet: a green-and-blue jewel glittering in the mucky concrete of LA. Of course, Ballona has its own strange psychic currents: the discovery of ancient Native American burial sites is blamed by Angelenos for the hex that's been visited on various developers over the decades; among them Howard Hughes, who based his aircraft company here in the 1930s, constructing a two-mile-long airstrip (the longest in the world), and building the infamous Spruce Goose, a giant seaplane that only flew once, with Hughes himself at the controls. John and I parted at the bluffs, where he took to a trail and I to the sidewalk – which had reappeared. At least, I think it was me who plodded on past motels and gas stations and golf courses to the airport. It might've been Leonardo DiCaprio – after all, he played Howard Hughes in Scorsese's The Aviator; but then, I suppose the stunts were a little more interesting than nearly being mowed down by traffic. And while Hughes may've become phobic about cutting his hair and fingernails, he wasn't truly homeless – he just looked like a dosser. (This was an essay from The Independant written by the author promoting his latest book) For three points, name the author, his newest book, and give a personal response... 100817 ... jane Walking to Hollywood (PsychoGeography - Down and out in Beverly Hills) Will Self i think that's right? i'm assuming his book is about urban walking tours, or just walking around urban areas. i'm not really sure. but i like his writing style. i can attest to the fact that walking to work has made me feel more connected with my neighborhood and my city in general. i wish everyone could afford to live within walking distance of their daily occupations. 100817 ... rt +3=184 jane! walking the streets of nyc is one of my favorite things to do. Question 153 Reading a handwritten article about handwriting, in a 21st-century magazine, is like listening to your great-great-grandfather shout in the middle of a crowded multiplex about the incomparable glories of vaudeville and the lost art of wearing hats in public. And yet, somehow, here we are. Certain vestigial urges have been awakened, deep in the muscles of my fingers and wrists, by this book, a paean to the now nearly defunct barbarism of dragging ink trails across paper. (I’ve switched to print, for the reasons we always end up switching to print: My handwriting, set against a neat field of type, looks like a giant mess of alien runes, and my keyboard-weakened fingers tend to cramp up after a couple of sentences.) The author, a nun-educated “scriptomaniac,” lovingly traces the history of handwriting, from its ancient birth to its imminent demise. She rounds up some fascinating arcana: that a typical pencil can draw a line 35 miles long; that Confederate soldiers boiled rusty nails in vinegar during an ink shortage; that the Coca-Cola logo, now an icon of scriptographic fanciness, was once probably just “a typical bookkeeper’s hand”; and that “cacography” (poor handwriting) costs American businesses roughly $200 million a year. The book’s margins are crowded with illustrative photos: the author's own earnest third-grade penmanship exercises, the clotted page of a Dickens manuscript (his handwriting was so difficult that teams of compositors had to go to ridiculous lengths to decipher it). To demonstrate the utilitarian depths to which our culture has fallen, she sets a handwritten bill from 1743 London—a gorgeously gratuitous explosion of swirling filigree—against a soulless modern printout from Comcast. Handwriting, today, is artisanal—an emblem of slowness in an impatient world. Eighteenth-century writing masters recommended practicing penmanship for six to twelve hours a day, a degree of attention we tend to lavish only on keys and screens. And while we shouldn’t let our nostalgia get out of hand—people, after all, have been predicting handwriting’s decline since the invention of typewriters—it’s hard not to feel the occasional spasm of regret. Handwriting makes one’s relationship to words intensely personal. It manages to blend, mystically, the pure abstraction of thought with the physical here and now—accidents of pen, ink, hand, grain, scent, biography. In sixth grade, when I was very fat, my handwriting became so tiny my teacher used to make a big show of grading my papers with a magnifying glass; that same year I started habitually replacing the first letter of my last name with the logo of my favorite baseball team, the Oakland A’s, and engineered a signature so ridiculously stylized and “adult” that other kids would huddle around my desk and ask me to write their names the same way—all of which history comes alive every time I handwrite a word. I still revert to handwriting whenever I’m having trouble writing something. It’s the form in which my mind has existed most purely in the world, and I still get a little thrill seeing a page of it. As Robert Graves once suggested, “a true poet’s handwriting corresponds with his inimitable personal rhythm.” Print, on the other hand, is ruthlessly democratic: It equates all of our thoughts, no matter how different. (Adapted from a NY Times Magazine review by Sam Anderson) For three points,name the author, her book, and give a personal response... 100818 ... jane Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting Kitty Burns Florey wow! i think i'd really like to read this. i have a dog-eared handwriting analysis book that i've used since high school. it still contains tons of handwriting samples from friends, and interesting characters from professors and the like. also reminds me of those rudyard kipling stories about how we got our alphabet. my favorites. 100818 ... jane they are "how the first letter was written" and "how the alphabet was made" from the Just_So_Stories (R. Kipling) 100818 ... rt +3=187 jane! kipling was a genuis. Question 154 He is the author of three previous novels and a memoir. This book, according to the "About the Author" page at the back, "is either his fourth novel or his second memoir." That phrase is meant to sound humorous and, at the least, is clever. It is also hauntingly thought-provoking. Here is the deal: The book is a novel. You know, a made-up story. Except it is a novel about an author who writes a novel that he then decides to market as a memoir. You know, a narrative based on real-life occurrences. Read as just another novel in a publishing world that offers thousands for sale annually, the book is good, but probably a passing fancy. Read as a novel that incorporates real people (authors, editors, literary agents) in real-life situations but contains obvious fictions, the book is a first-rate satire. Read as a novel that grapples with the precarious boundaries between real-life fiction and fake-life memoir, the book is an intellectual powerhouse, with some laugh-out-loud passages mixed in. Narrated in the first person by aspiring novelist Ian Minot, the book offers a far-fetched yet somehow credible plot of ambition and revenge gone astray. Ian is a capable writer of fictional short stories. Agents and editors find the stories too small, without dramatic tension. He wonders whether his move from Indiana to New York City has been futile. His modest inheritance is about to run out, his coffee shop barista job will not pay all the bills, his Romanian-born girlfriend might surpass him as a skilled writer, and he lacks the self-confidence to turn his life around. Ian is angry about a best-selling memoir by a thug named Blade Markham. The writing seems forced, and the story of Blade's life seems so obviously phony. Why is anybody reading the book, Ian wonders. Why is life so unfair? A customer who patronizes the coffeehouse regularly is reading Blade's memoir. The sight of the customer reading such obvious fraudulent words angers Ian. The anger expressed by Ian to the customer, oddly, becomes the basis of conversations between the two men. The conversations lead to the planning of a masterfully constructed fraud intended to embarrass the book publishing industry beyond redemption. Because so many memoirs have been falsified in real life, Langer has been granted the liberty to prey on the familiar as he constructs his convoluted plot. Everybody who already inhabits the realm of books professionally seems certain to appreciate the thinly disguised characters and the skepticism bordering on cynicism about truth in publishing. For those whose only link to the book publishing industry is as a reader, this book will quite likely serve as a mind-expanding romp along the border between fiction and fact. (Adapted from a review by Steve Weinberg, the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.) For three points, name the author, his book, and give a personal response... 100819 ... jane The Thieves of Manhattan Adam Langer at first it didn't really capture my fancy, you know, it kind of read like a boring documentary. but the idea of a plot to embarrass the publishing industry sounds pretty exciting; i might be into that :) 100819 ... rt +3=190 jane! the publishing industry has been embarrassed before. congratulations jane. you have moved back into first place. 100819 what's it to you? who go blather from