Coming to My Senses by Alyssa Harad

Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride
by Alyssa Harad

Author Alyssa Harad is a perfumista and a contributor to Perfume-Smellin' Things, one of the perfume blogs I regularly read. In Coming to My Senses, Harad recounts her first year of perfume obsession, which just so happens to be the year leading up to her wedding.

I like perfume. I'm not fluent in the language, nor am I confident in my taste, but I'm interested in moving beyond blog-reading and effortless sampling. So I really am an ideal reader for this book.

Coming to My Senses begins with Harad's awakening to first the language of perfume lovers and then to the perfumes themselves. I enjoyed following Harad on her voyage of olfactory discovery. I loved the details, her openness, her descriptions. Harad begins to write about being a bride about a third of the way through the book. It's at that point that I worry that I'll lose interest in the narrative. As much as I like Harad by this point, I'm not sure that I want to know about her wedding-planning. I worry that it will take away from what I think is the real focus of the memoir. Luckily, Harad manages to remain true to the theme of discovery and perfume both reflecting and enhancing life despite discussing wedding preparation (and a friend's sex change). Strangely enough, though, one of my favorite parts of Coming to My Senses revolves around Harad's bridal shower.

When Harad writes about a particular perfume she doesn't always mention it by name. I understand why (she explains why in her author's note¹), but I can't help feeling a bit disappointed. Because I'm still learning about perfume and its myriad nuances, I'd find it so helpful to know exactly which perfume Harad was referencing at any given time. In any case, I enjoyed Harad's writing (especially the more contemplative passages) and her honesty. Coming to My Senses also inspired me to overcome my fear of snooty salespeople and visit a perfume boutique last time I went into New York City. I've also ordered a bunch of samples to try out at home.

One last not-directly-book-related comment -
Harad's author website, promoted in her author's note as where she'll give readers "the latest, updated scoop" (vii), is underwhelming. It has a blog with one post dated June 26, 2012 surrounded by an architecture with lots of intriguing, but empty rooms. Even the Upcoming Events page is out of date. The more I explored the site, the more disappointed I became. I wonder why the publisher's PR people would put together the site and not maintain it (the book only came out last month) and I wonder why Harad agreed to it. One nice, long blog post is worse than none.

1. I have provided the names of the perfumes featured when I felt it was crucial to the telling of the story. However, in some cases I preferred to leave the names out and keep the emphasis on the description of their scents and the emotions they evoked at the moment. Doing so allowed me to avoid recommending perfumes that may be discontinued or reformulated by the time this book is published" (vii).

disclosure: I received a review copy of Coming to My Senses from Viking via NetGalley.

Dungeons & Desktops by Matt Barton

Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games
by Matt Barton

I haven't read Dungeons and Desktops, but it comes recommended by Russell, who has it checked out of our public library.  He's already foisted the book off on my gamer father.

As is painfully obvious from its subtitle, Dungeons and Desktops explores the history of the CPRG genre. Lest other gamers feel left out, the book does discuss console games and MMOs and how they are related to CPRGs.

Barton is an English professor by trade and Russell reports that Dungeons and Desktops is well-written, easy, engaging read. In addition to being informative, the book brought back lots of good memories of playing the games it discusses. He also appreciated that Barton fills out the story of the games, describing how the games were designed and who designed them.

Holy acronyms, Batman! (and lots more in the book)
CRPG: computer role-playing game.
MMO: massively multiplayer online [game].

Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale

Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady
by Kate Summerscale

Until the introduction of the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857, divorce was a privilege granted only to England's elite requiring as it did a private act of Parliament. In 1958 the newly created Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes began to grant divorces to couples where adultery (in the case of the wife) or multiple "matrimonial offences" (in the case of the husband) could be verified.

In Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace Summerscale turns her lens to one of the most titillating of the court's early divorce proceedings, the suit of Henry Oliver Robinson against his wife Isabella (and one Dr. Edward Lane) on the grounds of adultery, which began on Monday, June 14, 1858. The chief piece of evidence in the case was Isabella's diary, long passages of which were read during the trial and excerpted in the press to the scandalized public's great delight.

Though the press no doubt loved the fodder provided by the spate of divorce proceedings, it was not necessarily in favor of the new court and the relative ease with which couples were receiving divorces. The Saturday Review insisted that,

in the interests of the greatest happiness of the many, [...] a judicial separation should be granted only in the "gravest emergency": "a married couple should endure a very considerable amount of discomfort, incompatibility, personal suffering, and distress, and yet should continue to live together as man and wife." (217)

Women were expected the bear the brunt of that personal suffering. A custody battle decided in 1858 by the Court of Chancery yielded this insightful comment from Vice-Chancellor Kindersley:

I believe it is the common case that very few wives do consider sufficiently their solemn obligation of obedience and submission to their husbands' wishes, even though they be capricious. However harsh, however cruel the husband may be, it does not justify the wife's want of that due submission to the husband, which is her duty both by the law of God and by the law of man. (196)

These quotes¹ really do show how much times have changed.

Fascinated as I am by Victorian social mores, I was intrigued by the premise of Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace and was thoroughly engrossed while reading it. I heartily recommend it to people interested in the Victorian period, gender studies, legal history, social change, and even archives. While I think that some lovers of historic fiction may enjoy Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace, I'm sure others will dislike it simply because it doesn't read like a novel.

Isabella Robinson was trapped in a loveless marriage to a man whose work often took him away from the home for long periods of time.  Profoundly unhappy, she channeled all her energy into remaining composed in front of company, expressing her true feelings and desires only to her diary.

Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace is not a simple presentation of Isabella's story as told in her diary (1850-1855). Summerscale uses the diary, the Robinson divorce suit, and the public reaction to each to give a fuller picture of Isabella's life and the world in which she lived. Of course, that's not to say that there is a dearth of juicy, adulturous thought and action, whether real or imagined.

1. And this one, which I couldn't bear to leave out, considering the fact that this blog is facilitating the "culpable neglect" of my "most important [wifely] duties":
   

   She who is faithfully employed in discharging the various duties of a wife and daughter, a mother and friend," according to Thomas Broadhurst's popular manual Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind and Conduct of Life (1810), "is far more usefully occupied than one who, to the culpable neglect of the most important obligations, is daily absorbed by philosophic and literary speculations, or soaring aloft amidst the enchanted regions of fiction and romance. (82-83)

disclosure: I received a review copy of Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace from Bloomsbury via NetGalley.

Mrs. Beeton's

For comfort reading and in preparation for One of our Thursdays is Missing, the sixth installment in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, I've been rereading the earlier books. At the moment I'm on The Well of Lost Plots (book #3), which like all the other Thursday Next books is full of literary references. I was absolutely tickled to come across multiple references to Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (unfortunately incorrectly cited as "Mrs. Beeton's Complete Housekeeper").¹ The mentions didn't mean much to me during my earlier readings, but we're big fans of Mrs. Beeton's at my new place of employment. My coworker even has a Mrs. Beeton's apron like the one pictured here.

Isabella Beeton (nee Mayson) was the Martha Stewart of her day² and Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) was her magnum opus (1000+ pages). For the contemporary reader Mrs. Beeton's is a window into the middle-class Victorian home. While the text is heavy on cookery, it also provides advice on any number of topics relevant to the mistress of the house (who is likened to the commander of the army). Readers learn how many and what type of servants one need employ based on one's income, what to feed an invalid, how to diagnose and treat thrush, the logistics of serving dinner la Russe, and myriad other things.

The original Mrs. Beeton's is out of copyright so the text of the book is widely available on the internet. MrsBeeton.com has a nice layout.

1. Here's the first one: "I went downstairs and explained to obb the rudiments of cooking, which were as alien to it as having a name. Fortunately I found an old copy of Mrs. Beeton's Complete Housekeeper, which I told obb to study, half jokingly, as research. Three hours later it had roasted a perfect leg of lamb with all the trimmings. I had discovered one thing about Generics already: dull and uninteresting they may be -- but they learn fast" (p. 13 of my British edition).
2. I cringed at that cliche even as I typed it.

The Possessed

I was intrigued by The Possessed when it was featured in Powell's Review-a-Day in May. I put it on my mental list of books to feature on the student services blog. Strangely enough our library has since acquired two copies of the book.

The Possessed by Elif Batuman

I stopped believing that "theory" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed? (22)

Elif Batuman went to college intending to study linguistics in the belief that "learn[ing] the raw mechanism of language, the pure form itself" (10) would inform her development into a novelist. Her introduction to the Russian language inspired a fascination with Russianness, which eventually landed her in a PhD program studying the form of the Russian novel. Batuman has yet to publish a novel, but she's had great success as an essayist in large part due to her ability to make both literary theory and staid academic life accessible to a broad readership.

The Possessed is a book that defies genre classification: it's a travelogue and an intellectual coming of age tale with a healthy dose of literary criticism and dry humor. Some of the essays contained within The Possessed have appeared, in slightly different form, in Harper's Magazine, n+1, and The New Yorker, but when read together they become an ecclectic, cohesive whole.

The book's title is taken from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel Demons, the title of which had previously been translated as "The Possessed." In the book's final essay, Batuman admits that Demons "haunts [her] like a prophetic dream" (255) and then shows just how much certain things that happen between the students in her graduate program parallel the events of the novel. While the titular essay isn't the most entertaining in the book, it's a perfect illustration of The Possessed's theme: the intersection between life and literature.

Park Guell

Park Güell: Gaudí's Utopia
by Jose Maria Carandell, Pere Vivas Ortiz (photographer)

Uncharacteristically, I didn't give many books as presents this holiday season. I did pick up this gem for my father, though. When my parents visited Barcelona last year my dad became smitten with Parc Güell (oh the photos he took!).

I decided that Park Güell: Gaudí's Utopia would be a perfect gift for him. It's a nice size (not a coffee table book, but one you can easily hold in your hands), enough (but not too much) text, and the photographs are absolutely gorgeous. It's out of print, but I was able to find a like-new copy for a decent price. (he loved it!)

On a side note - I discovered The Gaudí Key by Esteban Martin and Andreu Carranza while searching for book ideas for my dad. I requested a copy through BookMooch, which arrived recently. I'm sure I'll get around to reading it at some point.

7 december

My father had a friend and business associate named Phil who used to give the best holiday gifts. Rather than desk trinkets or gourmet goodies he'd find interesting and unique books, which he'd present with an attached ribbon bookmark that had his name on it. Books like Politically Correct Bedtime Stories. I always looked forward to seeing what gem he'd find for us. While I (obviously) was not the intended recipient of his business gifts, I treasured them. In fact I actually have one of his books (The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy by E D Hirsch) here in our apartment.

This fall, I saw the following book in a catalog. I was intrigued by it right away, but it took me a bit to realize why. It's the kind of book I think Phil might have chosen for his holiday gifting. Maybe he did...

An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn't by William Wilson

When it was originally published in 1987, An Incomplete Education became a surprise bestseller. Now this instant classic has been completely updated, outfitted with a whole new arsenal of indispensable knowledge on global affairs, popular culture, economic trends, scientific principles, and modern arts. Here's your chance to brush up on all those subjects you slept through in school, reacquaint yourself with all the facts you once knew (then promptly forgot), catch up on major developments in the world today, and become the Renaissance man or woman you always knew you could be!

As delightful as it is illuminating, An Incomplete Education packs ten thousand years of culture into a single superbly readable volume. This is a book to celebrate, to share, to give and receive, to pore over and browse through, and to return to again and again. (this is just the first and last paragraphs of the very long publisher's blurb)

3 december

Last month I heard the author being interviewed about this book on NPR (Morning Edition interview). While cancer usually isn't a topic I'd enjoy reading about I thought the book sounded fascinating and I immediately thought of two people I'd recommend it to.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with — and perished from — for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception.

Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out war against cancer. The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee's own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive — and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Loneliness

I'll admit that historically I have not always read my Chicago alumni magazine regularly, but lately I have been. The most recent issue included an article about professor John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist whose research has lately been focused on loneliness.

So often the research being done at universities seems disconnected from everyday life (at least to those not involved in the research or knowledgeable about the field), Cacioppo's research on loneliness is not.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John Cacioppo

University of Chicago social neuroscientist John T. Cacioppo unveils his pioneering research on the startling effects of loneliness: a sense of isolation or social rejection disrupts not only our thinking abilities and will power but also our immune systems, and can be as damaging as obesity or smoking. A blend of biological and social science, this book demonstrates that, as individuals and as a society, we have everything to gain, and everything to lose, in how well or how poorly we manage our need for social bonds.

97 Orchard

While browsing through the library's list of recent acquisitions for ideas for September's book of the month, I came across one that sounded absolutely fascinating...

97 Orchard by Jane Ziegelman
An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement

Today 97 Orchard Street is the site of New York City's Tenement Museum. For many years, though, it was but one of the thousands of tenements housing working-class immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

97 Orchard tells the story of five families who lived at that address between 1863 and 1935, focusing specifically on their culinary lives. While 97 Orchard is more about the foods eaten in the Lower East Side than the families themselves, it is still a fascinating read.

How various immigrant groups were subsumed into and helped to redefine American culture is the overarching theme of 97 Orchard. By using food as the means to explore the topic, author Jane Ziegelman highlights the relationship between our culinary heritage and American identity.

For more information on the book and its subject, listen to Guy Raz of NPR's All Things Considered, interview the author or visit the Tenement Museum's virtual tour of 97 Orchard Street.

Paradise Beneath her Feet

It's book-of-the-month time for the student services blog...

Paradise Beneath Her Feet* by Isobel Coleman

Subtitled "how women are transforming the Middle East," Paradise Beneath Her Feet has as its focus Islamic feminism and its proponents. Its author, Isobel Coleman, is a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations where she is director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program.

While many would argue that secularization is the only sure means for achieving gender equality in the Middle East, many men and women throughout the Islamic world are working for women’s rights within the religion rather than trying to dislodge it. By seeking progressive interpretations of Islamic texts, they are able to use Islam as a force for women’s empowerment.

In Paradise Beneath Her Feet, Coleman first lays a groundwork for understanding women’s issues in the Middle East. She outlines the importance of women’s empowerment, the rise of Islamism within the region, and the tensions inherent in any attempt to modernize. After describing the genesis of Islamic feminism, Coleman focuses on the work of female activists in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. She concludes this scholarly but readable book on a positive note recognizing that cultural change is slow but inevitable.

While Paradise Beneath Her Feet does not seem to discuss how Islamic feminism will affect the non-Muslim women living in these countries, it is still a useful introduction to this brand of activism.

*On pages xxvi and xxvii Coleman discusses how the hadith (a saying of Muhammad or a report about something he did) that inspired the title can and has been interpreted in a number of different ways both pro- and anti-gender equity.

watching Book TV

Russell is a big fan of Book TV (a program that airs on C-SPAN2 on the weekends). I don't always watch with him as the series focus is almost always non-fiction (and more often than not concerned by politics and/or history). Sometimes, though, I do watch.

This morning one of the topics is what sounds like a really interesting book:
The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power by Melanie Phillips.

Here's the program blurb:
London's Daily Mail columnist explains how she believes the Western world has fallen into a soft totalitarianism by distorting truths, renewing hatred of Jews, and allowing rationality and science to dominate over spirituality and faith. The cult of Barack Obama, she says, is the greatest example of soft totalitarianism in the U.S. The event is at American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

The blurb makes it sound like Phillips is essentially polemical, but listening to her speak, she's not.
Her main concern seems to be with objective truth and with the fact that the collective opinion in the West on the topics she addresses in the book (among them global warming) is not based on provable facts. More significantly her concern is that debate on any of these topics is suppressed, that any difference of opinion ends in name-calling and demonization.

In any case, it sounds like The World Turned Upside Down would be a fascinating, thought-provoking read. We'll try to get our hands on a copy.

bookclubbing in April (2 of 2)

Second selection for my online bookclub...

Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish by Tom Shachtman

Rumspringa is a book that Tom Shactman wrote following his work on the documentary Devil's Playground. I haven't seen the documentary yet, but it seems like Rumspringa has a much broader focus.

I definitely think that Schachtman strays a bit too far from the subject of rumspringa. I found the book fascinating and I'm glad that through it I was able to learn more about Amish culture in general, but it wasn't really what I expected. To some extent, though, maybe he really does stay on topic. The subtitle is "to be or not to be Amish" and all of the things he writes about (church governance, rates of abuse, etc) may actually play into an individual's decision of whether or not to formally join the church.

To some extent Rumspringa was eye-opening. What really surprised me was how many of the Amish work outside the community (and I don't mean in the tourist shops/restaurants), people who stay in the church but work in factories. I knew that some of them had to work outside the home/farm, but I guess I expected that they'd be working in places that operated under the restrictions the must follow at home. I suppose this ties into the way that non-Amish Americans idealize the Amish. I think non-Amish, who don't live in areas with Amish, think that the Amish are much more isolated than they actually are.

The other thing I wasn't really aware of was that there were different rules for people living in different areas/districts. I guess I assumed that all Old Order would follow the same set of rules, and the less strict orders would each have their own consistent set of rules. I can only imagine how frustrating it would be to know that your cousin who lives in the next county can use some tool that you yourself were reprimanded for owning.

I found Schachtman's narrative style problematic. Though he makes great use of personal stories, they are not told chronologically or all at one. Rumspringa is organized topically and bits and pieces of the stories are used when they help illustrate a point the author is trying to make about the topic at hand. Every time Schachtman wanted to discuss one of the characters again he had to remind us who that person was. Because we only saw bits and pieces of these individuals' lives spread out over the various chapters I found it hard to really connect with any one of them. And I imagine that if you read the book over the course of a longish period of time you would have quite a bit of difficulty remembering individual characters. I also found myself wanting to skim when Schachtman spent too much time on the non-personal story parts.

One final comment: One of the ladies in my other book club has read quite a lot about the Amish. I talked to her a bit about Amish and the way they are portrayed in fiction and I found something that she said very interesting. She reads quite a bit of Christian fiction and one of the things that she said was that in many of the books published by the main Christian publishers the protagonist becomes involved with a Mennonite (female character meets and Mennonite man then lives happily ever after with him within a Mennonite community). She thinks that the Christian publishers, who will use Amish settings because they draw in readers, see the Amish faith as not exactly the brand of Christianity that they want to promote to their readers and that the Mennonite faith is a more acceptable compromise. Interesting.

bookclubbing in April (1 of 2)

Under the Sabers by Tanya Biank

Subtitled "The Unwritten Code of Army Wives", Under the Sabers looks at the culture of Army spouses by focusing specifically on the lives of four women whose husbands are stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Author Tanya Biank is a journalist and Army brat who reveals only at the end of the book that she too is an Army wife. Under the Sabers was inspired by a rash of spousal murders involving individuals stationed at Fort Bragg. Those murders made Biank want to look more closely at the relationships between military men and their wives (was there something inherent in army life that could have led to the murders?). While Under the Sabers is not about the murders, its action takes place during that same time period and Biank does incorporate them into the book (one of the main characters is one of the murder victims and the other murders are mentioned when they occur).

They way Biank writes about the characters (characters probably isn't the best word as the individuals whose lives are chronicled in Under the Sabers are real, live people, but it'll do) makes it very easy for readers to become invested in them (I got teary-eyed when one of the husbands died in action even though I knew it was coming). That being said, it's hard to tell how true-to-life the depictions are. That Biank treats the murdered woman with the same level of detail as the other women despite never having talked to her makes one wonder just how much of what Biank wrote is "real". Also how much were the stories sanitized in order to get buy-in from the individual women (whose real names are used in the book)?

Only one member of the group had seen the Lifetime television show inspired by the book (Army Wives) and only after reading Under the Sabers. She reported that the characters seemed to be inspired by the individuals in the books, but that in the tv show they are all friends.

During our discussion we found ourselves straying from the book and talking more generally about military life and culture as experienced by us or those close to us. The one part of the book that we dwelt on the most was the death of Gary Shane (son of one of the four women). We understood that the death itself was inexplicable, but we were curious about what Biank wasn't saying about Gary Shane's family.

The Floating Brothel

Nonfiction for the student services blog this month...

The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts
by Sian Rees

The convict ship Lady Julia set sail from England in 1789. Its cargo was a bevy of “disorderly girls”, unemployed women reduced to petty thievery or prostitution, who had been sentenced to “Transportation to Parts Beyond the Seas.” These women were destined for Sydney Cove in New South Wales to provide companionship and children for the many male convicts already peopling the area.

Ostensibly the true story of the voyage, The Floating Brothel is also a work of imagination. Rees admits that the primary sources available to her were limited and that she relied heavily on probably-unreliable diaries of one of the ship’s crew. That being said, she does a fantastic job of bringing the 18th century to life for her readers. And, while The The Floating Brothel is not as salacious as its title suggests, it is a fascinating read.

Friday Find #12

I'd heard about this book last month, but was reminded about it again today.

After reading all the dire predictions* of Taiga (courtesy of a thread on the ExLibris listserv), I was cheered to see How Librarians Can Save The World (an an NPR review of This Book is Overdue) shared by one of my friends on FaceBook.

Below is the publisher's blurb, but there's also an excerpt from This Book is Overdue available on the NPR site underneath Heller McAlpin's review.

This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
by Marilyn Johnson

Buried in info? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper and discs, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librarians They want to help. They're not selling a thing. And librarians know best how to beat a path through the googolplex sources of information available to us, writes Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book, The Dead Beat, breathed merry life into the obituary-writing profession.
This Book is Overdue is a romp through the ranks of information professionals and a revelation for readers burned out on the cliches and stereotyping of librarians. Blunt and obscenely funny bloggers spill their stories in these pages, as do a tattooed, hard-partying children's librarian; a fresh-scrubbed Catholic couple who teach missionaries to use computers; a blue-haired radical who uses her smartphone to help guide street protestors; a plethora of voluptuous avatars and cybrarians; the quiet, law-abiding librarians gagged by the FBI; and a boxing archivist. These are just a few of the visionaries Johnson captures here, pragmatic idealists who fuse the tools of the digital age with their love for the written word and the enduring values of free speech, open access, and scout-badge-quality assistance to anyone in need.
Those who predicted the death of libraries forgot to consider that in the automated maze of contemporary life, none of us--neither the experts nor the hopelessly baffled--can get along without human help. And not just any help--we need librarians, who won't charge us by the question or roll their eyes, no matter what we ask. Who are they? What do they know? And how quickly can they save us from being buried by the digital age?

* Taiga Forum Provocative Statements (2006) and Taiga 4 Forum Provocative Statements (2009)

Why Don't Students Like School?

Why Don't Students Like School?
A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
by Daniel T. Willingham

In Why Don't Students Like School?, cognitive scientist and educator Daniel T. Willingham makes cognitive theory accessible, bridging the gap between theory and practice.

The book is divided into nine chapters, each of which is begins with a question (like Why do students remember everything that's on television and forget everything I say?) and is focused on a fundamental principle and it's applicability to the classroom. The principles are:

1. People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers.
2. Factual knowledge precedes skill.
3. Memory is the residue of thought.
4. We understand new things in the context of things we already know.
Proficiency requires practice.
5. Cognition is fundamentally different early and late in training.
6. Children are more alike than different in terms of learning.
7. Intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.
8. Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved.

This book was required reading in preparation for our information literacy summit next month. It's geared toward K-12 teachers, but I found it very enlightening nevertheless, particularly the sections in which Willingham dispels certain prevalent pedagogical practices.

My favorite quote from the book is one that Willingham cites in his notes for chapter one: Sir Joshua Reynolds' "There is no expedient to which man will not resort to avoid the read labor of thinking" (17).

The one thing that I didn't like very much about the book was the layout of the text. Willingham includes lots of visual material (charts, graphs, illustrative photographs), but they are occasionally distracting* and the way the text flows around them on certain pages is very awkward.

* This is particularly the case with the image of the author's grandmother on page 123. In chapter three Willingham writes about a 4th grade teacher who had his students bake biscuits as part of a unit on the Underground Railroad (because biscuits were a food staple for runaway slaves). He explains why this wasn't an effective lesson because the students spent more time thinking about measuring flour, etc. than about the Underground Railroad. For me, the grandma photo was like the biscuits. I vaguely remember something about "grandma psychology" but have completely forgotten the broader context.

Starbucked

I haven't finished this book yet, but it comes likely recommended from Russell and I needed a nonfiction title for the November book of the month for the student services blog.

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Published in 2007, Starbucked sets out to answer the question of how Starbucks became so popular. More than just a company history, Starbucked is an exploration of America's love affair with coffee.

While author Taylor Clark is not a fan of the coffeehouse chain, it is clear that his journalist roots compel him to strive for balanced reporting. Clark makes an effort to dispel myths about Starbucks and shows how it compares favorably to other infamous corporations like Walmart and McDonalds. This objectivity is precisely what makes Starbucked different from other books about the company, the majority of which are either aggressively pro- or anti-Starbucks.

You don't have to be a Starbucks fan or coffee lover to enjoy Starbucked because economics, cultural change, and quirky trivia are equally part of its narrative.

The Lexicographer's Dilemma

The Lexicographer's Dilemma:
The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park
by Jack Lynch

I wasn't sure what to expect from The Lexicographer's Dilemma. I received through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers. There's so much competition for books that I tend to request any- and everything that I think looks interesting because there's such a slim chance that I'll actually get any individual book.

Descriptivism vs. prescriptivism, that is the lexicographer's dilemma described in the book. Should the dictionary writer describe language as it is actually being used or should (s)he write only of "proper" or "correct" usage?

The Lexicographer's Dilemma is not a quick read, but it is definitely a worthwhile one. Rutgers English professor (and Samuel Johnson scholar) Jack Lynch charts the history of the English language in a surprisingly accessible way.

Lynch describes how the English language has developed and changed over time, focusing specifically on the genesis of our grammatical rules. Lynch also takes a bit of a biographical approach to language, spending numerous chapters on famous lexicographers like James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary and Noah Webster.

The stories of some of our words, however, are the most interesting bits. Here's an example:

The English had long been using the words swin or swyn (first written down around 725), cu (before 800), and scep (around 825) to refer to common barnyard animals. The newly arrived French speakers, though, used their own terms: around the year 1300, they began referring to the same animals as porc, boef, and motoun. All six of these words, as it happens, have survived into modern English, but now they have different meanings: swine, cow, and sheep refer to the living animals--which would have been the English-speaking peasants' experience of them--and pork, beef, and mutton to the meat that they provide, the only way the French-speaking aristocrats would have dealt with them. (141)

While Lynch does spend quite a bit of time on grammatical problems like the split infinitive, the serial comma, and the inability to distinguish between who and whom,* The Lexicographer's Dilemma is an empowering book. Rather than making readers bemoan their writing skills, the book encourages them to engage with their language. Lynch ends The Lexicographer's Dilemma with this thought:

Speaking and writing shouldn't be a chore; we should resist all attempts to make us feel ashamed of speaking the way that rest of the world speaks. Using the language should be an opportunity for inventiveness, even playfulness. It's the only way to retain our sanity as we grapple with this big, messy, arbitrary, illogical, inconsistent, often infuriating but always fascinating language of ours. (276)

* Lynch has good news for many of us here. He predicts that whom will not last out the 21st century.

trick or treat

I got a belated birthday package this week, which contained two books:

Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus by Salley Vickers

In the latest retelling of the world’s greatest stories in the Myth series from Canongate, the highly regarded novelist Salley Vickers brings to life the Western world’s most widely known myth, Oedipus, through a shrewdly told exploration of the seminal story in conversation between Freud and Tiresias.

It is 1938 and Sigmund Freud, suffering from the debilitating effects of cancer, has been permitted by the Nazis to leave Vienna. He seeks refuge in England, taking up residence in the house in Hampstead in which he will die fifteen months later. But his last months are made vivid by the arrival of a stranger who comes and goes according to Freud’s state of health. Who is the mysterious visitor and why has he come to tell the famed proponent of the Oedipus complex his strangely familiar story?

Set partly in prewar London and partly in ancient Greece, Where Three Roads Meet is as brilliantly compelling as it is thoughtful. Former psychoanalyst and acclaimed novelist Salley Vickers revisits a crime committed long ago that still has disturbing reverberations for us all today.

The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey

Respected financial expert Dave Ramsey offers a comprehensive plan for getting out of debt and achieving financial health. Against a playful backdrop of fitness terminology, Dave gives solid, hard-hitting advice needed to make your goals a reality. Filled with both the hope and the how-to, The Total Money Makeover includes: Useful worksheets and forms Readable and informative charts and graphs The four factors that keep people from getting in shape financially Photos and amazing stories from people who have succeeded following The Total Money Makeover plan

The Total Money Makeover is a necessity for everyone in need of a financial makeover. Readers will learn to live by the The Total Money Makeover motto: If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.