York Times Book Review Research Articles

The Gospel on Book Theft

The Gospel on Book Theft John Maxwell Hamilton (bio) Twenty-five years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay for the Sunday New York Times Book Review that showed the power of the printed word. The essay argued that nearly everyone is a book thief and that might not be so bad. We learn something about people from the books they buy. We learn much more from the books they want so desperately that they slip them under their clothes and walk out, as one woman did at the New York Public Library. (She was foiled when the six-inch thick Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, clutched between her legs, fell to the ground in front of the library guard.) Many responses to the Times essay were gratifying. Agitated librarians said I was inciting theft. A reader, distressed to learn that Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book was missing from the Library of Congress, renewed the library’s stock with his own copy, which gave members of Congress and their staffs new material to pilfer. But one common reaction to my list of “the ten most stolen books” was disturbing. Friends hailed me on the street in Washington, D.C., where I lived at the time. “I didn’t know Practice for the Armed Services Test was the third most stolen book,” one said. “Wow,” said another, “that’s really interesting about The Joy of Sex. Who would have guessed it is stolen almost as often as the Bible?” Right, but none of it was true. Except for the Bible. It is the most stolen book—everywhere on the planet. A maid at a Singapore hotel once told me that it was lifted much more often than The Teaching of Buddha, which is written in English and Japanese and includes a note explicitly inviting people to steal it. The Nashville-based Gideon Society, which puts Bibles in hotel rooms all over the world, does not give written permission to steal them, thereby providing lodgers an eternal two-for-one value—salvation [End Page 265] and damnation all in one easy act of putting the book in their suitcases next to their dirty underwear. A better road to salvation than the one offered by the Gideon Society can be found in Brazil’s federal prison system. It recently decided that inmates could earn early release by reading. For each book they finish, prisoners receive a four-day reduction in their sentences. The program is called “Redemption through Reading.” Anyway, after the Bible, who can say for sure which books are stolen most often? Couldn’t absolutely everyone see that I had made this list up, using titles to create categories of theft that I could then discuss at length? The most resounding evidence that the answer was “no!” came later. I was killing time in a bookstore, waiting for a dinner companion. My eye fell on a copy of Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, a biography by Marty Jezer. Authors, like dogs, are always hunting for their scent, so I naturally opened the book to see what Jezer said about Steal This Book, whether by any chance he mentioned my offbeat comments. Here is what the deadpan footnote on page 229 said: “On November 18, 1990, the New York Times Book Review listed Steal This Book as among the ten book titles most stolen from libraries and bookstores.” After pondering the response to my essay for many years, I have arrived at an explanation. We have nearly limitless credulity for words set in type. We take words on a page as the gospel, even when the book is not a Bible. Readers rail against newspapers as biased or irresponsible, as the outraged librarians did with my essay, but then readers clip what is presented in the newspaper, put it on the refrigerator, and tell their friends about it. When it comes to books, they are even more likely to suspend judgment altogether. Although a book has a price on the outside just like a box of cereal, people treat what is inside as if it were manna. No one understands this suspension of judgment better than consultants. “I was amazed at how...

“A Parley of Historians”; or, A Learned Society in Public

In 1960 the Society of Architectural Historians, then in its second decade of existence, appeared in the New York Times on two occasions: in an article about the annual meeting and in an advertisement about the benefits of membership. Though unrelated, these mentions provide a good starting point for exploring perceptions of the learned society from within and without, raising issues about the nature and character of SAH as a dynamic organization whose aims and aspirations have evolved over seventy-five years. In October 1960, when SAH had 1,500 members, the society placed an advertisement in the New York Times Book Review inviting “the participation and support of all professionals and laymen who share its interest in our architectural past.”1 SAH was hoping to swell its ranks through direct appeal to the paper’s 1.3 million Sunday readers, inducing them to attend its meetings, join its tours, and read its journal. Complete with a mail-in coupon, the ad revealed SAH as a learned society coming to terms with the age of mass media and mass consumption, as far as these were manifest in the demographics of the readership of the Times Book Review . Here, in effect, was a public declaration that enthusiasm for the subject, along with an ability to pay $7.50 in dues, was as valid a qualification for SAH membership as an academic affiliation or any other conventionally recognized credential. You needn’t be learned about architecture, the ad implied; you need only be keen on buildings. Though the society’s Newsletter noted that the ad brought a “good response,” it is not clear how many Book Review readers, if any, accepted SAH’s invitation.2 This big-tent self-image was a departure from the conventional public persona of a learned society in the middle of the twentieth century, which is exactly …

Book Review: Glenn O’Brien, Ed., The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground

Book Review: Glenn O'Brien, Ed., Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground. New York: Library Classics, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-598532562 (Hardcover). 471 Pages. S27.95.[Article copies available for a fee from Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2015 by Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]A memorable scene in Robert Stone's National Book Award winning novel Dog Soldiers (1974) features Hollywood hustler Eddie Peace introducing the protagonist Ray Hicks to a couple of adventure-seeking squares. Adventure, in this case, is heroin, intravenously injected, which Hicks arrives on the scene to administer. Raymond [Hicks] is the operator, Eddie Peace tells the squares. He's the original hip guy. whole world is goofs to him.In one indelible moment, Stone collapses nearly all the qualities that manifest as hip or cool or underground in Glenn O'Brien's anthology, Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground: illicit substances (in some cool schools, the harder the hipper), hustlers, thrill seekers, danger, and, in the center of it all, a character who knows the score better than anyone and cannot be surprised. [NB: Stone's scene does not appear in O'Brien's anthology-I'm not complaining-but it could, especially because so many of O'Brien's selections conjure its action, milieu, and characters.] Stone has commented that the creation of Hicks derives in part from Neal Cassady, whom Stone knew. Cassady, immortalized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a cool school bible, might qualify in his own right as an original hip guy. Indeed, his Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.) appears in the book, as, of course, does Kerouac in essay form in his The Origins of the Beat Generation. Kerouac and Cassady flow-chart into so many of the book's other hipster representatives: Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, Amiri Baraka, Joyce Johnson, John Clellon Holmes, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Ed Sanders, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and so on-the Beats and their constellation are well represented, but Cool School shows that America's hip underground flows within them and without them.Can one quibble with the selection? Well, let's look at the numbers: of the fifty-seven entries, forty-six are male, nine female. Two of the entries by women are song lyrics (Fran Landesman's The Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Annie Ross's Twisted), and as such, nearly throwaways, but we also get two lyrics from the men (King Pleasure's Parker's Mood, and Richard Hell's Blank Generation). That leaves forty-four prose (or play or transcript) entries from men up against a mere seven from women, which begs the question: whither Patti Smith, Jane Bowles, Karen Finley, Hettie Jones, Memphis Minnie, Kathy Acker, Jayne Cortez? collection includes a half-dozen entries that directly or indirectly celebrate black culture, including Mezz Mezzrow's If You Can't Make Money, Teny Southern's You're Too Hip, Baby, Jack Kerouac's The Origins of the Beat Generation, Bob Kaufman's Walking Parker Home, Norman Mailer's The White Negro, Del Close's Dictionary of Hip Words and Phrases, but only seven black writers-six, if you don't count Anatole Broyard's A Portrait of the Hipster, given that Broyard passed as white in his hip-cool-beat NYC life. One may also wonder if his long-term employment at the New York Times Book Review compromises any of his hipster cred? At any rate, four of these seven come from the world of jazz, including excerpts from Miles Davis' Miles: Autobiography, Babs Gonzales' I Paid My Dues, Lester Young, from the interview LesterParis59, and the aforementioned Parker's Mood by King Pleasure. In contrast, there is nothing from Melvin Van Peebles, Claude McKay, Greg Tate, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Chester Himes, or Claude Brown. …

Gandhi before India

The definitive life of one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century New York Times Book Review Books of the Year 2014. In this fascinating new biography Ramachandra Guha allows us to understand the personality and politics of Mohandas Gandhi as never before. Showing that Gandhi's ideas were fundamentally shaped before his return to India in 1915. Gandhi Before India is an extraordinarily vivid portrait of the formative years he spent in England and South Africa, where he developed the techniques that would undermine and ultimately destroy the British Empire. Drawing on many new sources located in archives across four continents, Guha sensitively explores the many facets of Gandhi's life and struggles. This is the biography of the year.

Making Americans: Children’s Literature from 1930 to 1960 by Gary D. Schmidt (review)

Reviewed by: Making Americans: Children’s Literature from 1930 to 1960 by Gary D. Schmidt Sara L. Schwebel (bio) Making Americans: Children’s Literature from 1930 to 1960. By Gary D. Schmidt. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. Making Americans is a kind of institutional history that classifies and reviews US children’s books published during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Its aim is not only to describe the range of children’s books produced during that period, but also to celebrate those books as beacons of an American way of life. Author Gary D. Schmidt is well known for his middle grade fiction, including The Wednesday Wars and Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (both Newbery Honor Books) and Okay for Now (a finalist for the National Book Award, young people’s category). But in Making Americans, Schmidt, who is also an English professor at Calvin College, assumes the voice of a literary critic and scholar, arguing that the mid-twentieth century was critical because it marked the moment when American children’s literature developed as a genre. Mid-century juveniles were not only written, illustrated, and published by US citizens, but also reflected American values: a commitment to [End Page 297] democracy, to individualism, and to racial liberalism. Collectively, this body of literature nurtured the baby boom generation, including the author himself. Making Americans is organized into four chronological sections, each of which pairs a chapter-long case study of an author (or in one case, a series) with a chapter outlining larger literary trends. Schmidt characterizes books from 1930 to 1940 as Imagining the American democracy (subtitle: “Self-Reliance and Social Cooperation”); those from 1930 to 1955 as Defining it (subtitle: “Normalizing Inclusion”); books published in 1940–55 as Adapting it (subtitle: “Responding to the Urgencies of War”); and those from 1945 to 1960 as Globalizing it (subtitle: “Exporting the American Heritage”). It would be impossible for any one chapter to capture the breadth of children’s books published in even a single decade in the twentieth-century United States; nonetheless, Making Americans provides a tantalizing taste of the range. Scholars are familiar with major award winners, and with classics such as Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses and Virginia Lee Burton’s Katy and the Big Snow. But many texts that were vitally important in their own day have since been neglected or ignored. For example, Schmidt describes Fairfax Downey’s Dog of War (1943), which went through five printings during World War II. And he discusses a number of neglected African American–authored texts, including Margaret Taylor Burroughs’s picture book Jasper the Drummin’ Boy (1947). Importantly, Schmidt also devotes an entire chapter to Bobbs-Merrill’s Childhood of Famous Americans series. Begun in 1932 with the publication of Abe Lincoln: Frontier Boy and ultimately comprising 208 titles, the series pointed the way in juvenile biography. Its reach was impressive; during the first twenty years, it generated $2 million in sales and sold more than 100,000 copies of its initial title, written by Indianapolis schoolteacher Augusta Stevenson (she subsequently authored another twenty-nine). The extent to which Stevenson’s work is understudied is highlighted by the fact that during the 1960s, her biographies commanded the largest circulation of juvenile hardbacks in the entire world. Notably, her Buffalo Bill: Boy of the Plains was adopted by the US Army after World War II for distribution to German schoolchildren. Childhood of Famous Americans was one of many series that flourished during the postwar period; Schmidt writes, however, that it was unique in that “none of these [others] … were as strongly marked by a purposely fictive nature” (95). In fact, in a 1952 New York Times Book Review article, the editor of the William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History wrote that the Bobbs-Merrill series was Parson Weems “modernized for twentieth-century readers” (qtd. in Schmidt 95). In light of today’s Common Core State Standards, which call for both a curricular increase in nonfiction and the cultivation of discipline-specific text literacies, Schmidt’s review of the postwar debate about biography, fiction, and fictionalized biography is particularly fascinating. [End...

Albertine: Switzerland ⋆ Illustrator

AlbertineSwitzerland ⋆ Illustrator Roxanne Harde Born near Geneva in 1967, Albertine studied at the École supérieure d'art visual of Geneva. After graduating in 1990, Albertine opened a screen-printing workshop and became a press illustrator for Le Nouveau Quotidein, L'Hebdo, Bilan, Femina, and Les Carnets de Versailles. Her marriage to writer Germano Zullo in 1996 has led to an ongoing and productive collaboration. Their children's books have won many awards, including the Golden Apple of Bratislava in 1999, Prix Suisse Jeunesse et Médias in 2009, the Prix Sorciéres in 2011, and the New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book in 2012. Albertine also collaborates with director Claude Barras, and they have made animated and short films, and a puppet show production. She continues to develop her artistic career and has ex hibited drawings, screen prints, lithographs, and wood engravings in Geneva, Paris, Rome, Valencia, and Tokyo. Albertine also teaches screenprinting and illustration courses in Geneva. In interviews, Albertine often references the importance of games and play to her work. Her commitment to the story comes through the stroke of her Rotring, but her use of color and space, and of the variety of media she employs—including gouache, collage, line drawings, and digital pallets—speak to her sense of play. Overall, her art is aptly described as joyous and unrestrained, and her refusal to subscribe to the traditional constraints of illustrated books means that her work will stay fresh and relevant to children in the decades to come. Selected Publications • Le Chat botté [Puss in Boots]. Text Charles Perrault. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2009. Print. Google Scholar • Les Gratte-Ciel [Sky High]. Text Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2011. Print. Google Scholar • Marta et la bicyclette [Marta and the Bicycle]. Text Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 1999. Print. Google Scholar • Les Oiseaux [Little Bird]. Text Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2010. Print. Google Scholar • La Rumeur de Venise [The Venice Rumor]. Story Germano Zullo. Geneva: Éditions la Joie de Lire, 2008. Print. [End Page 50] Google Scholar Copyright © 2014 Bookbird, Inc.

The Collected Poems of Ai by Ai (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Poems of Ai by Ai Grace Bauer (bio) Ai. The Collected Poems of Ai. W. W. Norton. Admirers of Ai’s work will welcome the arrival of these Collected Poems, which chronicle the career of one of the most distinctive voices (and Ai’s poems give us many voices) of her generation. A mere glance at her book titles— Cruelty (1973), Killing Floor (1979), Sin (1986), Fate (1991), Greed (1993), Vice (1999), Dread (2003), and the posthumously published No Surrender (2010)—alerts readers to the fact that this poet is going to take us to the dark side of the street. Those seeking celebration, transcendence, affirmation, escape, or easy comfort had better look elsewhere. And yet, there is something about the poems that draws us in despite ourselves. I first discovered Ai’s work in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets sometime in the mid-seventies. Her poems stood out immediately as being unlike anything else in that particular anthology—or any other anthology I had ever seen. The speakers in the few poems included—and in the first three collections from which they were chosen—assert themselves with a kind of desperate self-assurance that forces us to acknowledge the existence of people and situations we might prefer to deny or ignore. The poems are raw and disturbing, even shocking—but entirely convincing. As Yusef Komunyakaa says in his introduction to the Collected Poems, “We believe Ai’s various speakers even when we don’t wish to.” To a large extent, Ai’s poetic strategies remain consistent throughout her career. The dramatic monologue/persona poem predominates, as does the first person, the present tense—and violence, always violence—on the domestic, national, and global level. David Wojahn, in a 1986 New York Times Book Review article, proposed that we “imagine a Browning monologue written in the terse manner of Sam Shepard and you have a good idea of what Ai sounds like.” While the poems are definitely “monologues,” her characters often say things we would not expect anyone to actually say out loud in any play, movie, or real-life situation—giving us a blow-by-blow description of their actions, even as they’re being performed. For instance, take this passage from “Finished” (from Greed): You force me to touchthe black, rubber flaps [End Page 169] of the garbage disposalthat is open like a mouth saying, ah.You tell me it’s the last thing I’ll feelbefore I go numb. There’s as much “stage direction” here as “dialogue.” The female speaker may be revealing a bit of her inner thoughts and feelings, but she is also telling the husband she is addressing what she is doing and what he is doing, even as their mutual actions unfold. In the hands of a lesser poet, this kind of artifice might seem awkward, but in Ai’s work, it often adds to the disturbing power of the poems. Both the “I” and the “you” in this scene are unstoppable. Pain is their default mode; the violence is happening and it is going to happen. While there is an undeniable consistency of subject matter and technique throughout Ai’s work, these Collected Poems reveal how her poems evolved over the course of her career. In her first book, Cruelty, the poems tend to be short— usually less than a page each—and written in short, often end-stopped lines and clipped declarative sentences. The speakers, frequently identified in straightforward titles that function almost like labels—“The Country Midwife,” “The Color Thief,” “The Tenant Farmer,” “The Child Beater,” “The Dwarf,” and so on—reside in a no-man-or-woman’s land that seems to exist both in and out of time. Details suggest a rural, possibly southern, setting (lots of porches and fields and dirt, beat-up pickup trucks and wagons), though primal desperation is the true locale these characters inhabit. In the second book, Killing Floor, the poems begin to get longer, the sentences more expansive. There’s a greater use of enjambment. Several poems are written in the voices of noted historical figures, such as Leon Trotsky, Yukio Mishima...

Foodie Mysteries

Research Article| February 01 2014 Foodie Mysteries Marilyn Stasio Marilyn Stasio Marilyn Stasio has written the Crime column for the New York Times Book Review for 25 years, and is also the Broadway theater critic for Variety. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2014) 14 (1): 51–54. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2014.14.1.51 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Marilyn Stasio; Foodie Mysteries. Gastronomica 1 February 2014; 14 (1): 51–54. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2014.14.1.51 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

For an archeology of online participatory literary writing: Hypertext and hyperfiction

This article analyzes one of the roots of contemporary online participatory writing practices within the literary field, focusing on an object that had its theoretical heyday twenty years ago: hypertextual fiction. Invented in the sixties by social informatics visionary Ted Nelson, the word "hypertext" gained academic attention in the humanities in the early nineties with the works (among others) of George P. Landow, Paul Delany, David Bolter and Stuart Moulthrop. In 1992, in his review of Michal Joyce's Afternoon (still credited as one of the first pieces of hypertext fiction) Robert Coover (1992) wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line […] [T]hrough print's long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line's power […] but true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text". Since then, hypertext started to be defined as an artefact empowering the reader to subvert the linear text and the author's authority, and thus, within a post-structural and postmodern theoretical framework, deconstructing and subverting the very roots of power tout court. By addressing hypertext theory (a mixture of history of textual forms, of reading practices, and of technologies of memory, semiotics, post-structuralist and feminist theory, etc.) and tracing the influences of postmodern literature and the literary avantgardes on hypertext fiction, the article will thus investigate both the construction of hypertext as a participatory "cultural object" - in Wendy Griswold's (1994) terms - and the legacy of that theoretical debate and those artistic practices in contemporary reflections on online collaborative literary writing.

Limitations of the Intellect in Matters Concerning Life and Death

She was 74 years and left school at age 14. She married young and thoughtlessly to a local boy from the same tribe, like many do around the world. She was neither pretty nor plain, but there was a spark about her. She bore her children quickly and efficiently. She left school early to work long hours, in the home and outside, keeping the family out of poverty. She neither complained nor whined. She enjoyed life. She laughed at risque jokes about marriage, drank a little beer with the best of them, and held the family together when the second oldest child died of a drug overdose. She had an uncanny straightforwardness and simplicity about life. She did not hanker after fashionable knowledge or art-nouveau films or wait expectantly for delivery of the New York Times book review. Her daughters hovered, practicing love, protecting her, as she once them. She spoke blandly and baldly about death, laughed and cried at once. She was down and up and all around frightened, but she looked fate straight in the eyes with nary a blink. She laughed with black humor and white humor and ribald humor, and her children cried behind her back because this tiny ball of fire and cancer was really a tower of strength and they feared for themselves the day she would not be. In his mid-70s, he was a professor of thought and improbable politics who wrote clever sentences about others. He was molly-coddled by a loving trio who cherished him overprotectively. He was the great academic and advisor to the seats of power. He wrote books like others write letters to the editor. Instinctively, however, the trio saw and smelled his fear even as he bandied back and forth clever words and intellectualized with the doctors, and he fooled them for a while in an effort to fool himself. He was working on another book and travelled hither and dither with pseudo-heroism, all the while avoiding the real meaning of his writings. He could not be disturbed but was terrified and swallowed antiterror pills and mood-uplifting pills and round ones and blue ones. He had created a narcissistic persona for his own moral support and recruited literary lackeys far and wide. The most he could do was talk theoretically about death just as he wrote about other people's death-defying experiences. As the end came near, he panicked and all his words and cleverness could not save him. He died grand-childless because all his life he harbored uncertainty, because he was scared and lacked courage, and he transmitted trepidation into their lives and they hesitated. “The paradox of the end of life dynamic is, that through acceptance of the life one has lived, comes acceptance of death” [1].

A Conversation with Steve Almond and William Giraldi

A Conversation with Steve Almond and William Giraldi Ryan Bradley (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 154] STEVE ALMOND is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America, which features a Best American Short Stories 2010 selection, “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched,” and which won the 2012 Paterson Fiction Prize. A frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, the Rumpus and the Boston Globe, Almond is among the nation’s most arresting essayists on culture and politics. WILLIAM GIRALDI is the author of the novel Busy Monsters and fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. In addition to being a novelist and memoirist, Giraldi is also a literary critic whose essays and reviews appear frequently in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Daily Beast. His next two books, a novel and a memoir, are forthcoming from Norton. Both authors use humor to excavate the messy truths of human emotions. Fellow Bostonians and close friends for a decade, Almond and Giraldi allowed me to interview them outside their reading at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 18, 2011. [End Page 155] RYAN BRADLEY: How would you define voice in writing, particularly voice in short fiction? STEVE ALMOND: You’ve been writing more short fiction. Do you have a rap on voice? WILLIAM GIRALDI: I believe I’ve got a rap on voice. And by voice, you mean style, I take it. When you’re talking about voice, are you talking about the voice of the writer or the voice of the character himself? For example: Barry Hannah. He has a voice, a language, that’s pretty uniform throughout all his books, no matter which character’s perspective he’s writing from. But if you look at Steve’s short stories, the voice varies a little bit— ALMOND: A lot. GIRALDI: Depending on who the character is. So voice, or style, has to fit that character, his or her vision. Steve’s collection My Life in Heavy Metal—those stories all have the same theme of longing and of shame. ALMOND: No. That’s not true. GIRALDI: Of young people struggling to make it through their tumultuous lives. ALMOND: Wrong. Wrong. That’s a lie. Don’t listen to that. GIRALDI: But whether the story is in first person or third person, that voice shifts a little bit. It shifts because it has to match the vision of the character. So whenever you say “voice,” I think you’ve got to connect it to vision. Go ahead, Steve. It’s your turn. ALMOND: Well, let me give you an example of Billy’s early work because I know Billy’s early work pretty well. Like he knows mine not very well, actually. Totally mischaracterized my work! This is typical of young writers. Young writers want to be taken seriously. They want the world to take them seriously, and they think it’s important not to joke around, to not make light of anything, be like [End Page 156] Hemingway and Faulkner, all the badasses that get the big awards. So Billy’s early work, although it’s interesting, was pretty self-serious and curtailed. This was true of his fiction and nonfiction. It wasn’t bad. It was competent and occasionally had pathos, but it was very obedient. And then he showed me the book you’ll hear him read from tonight, Busy Monsters. The voice wasn’t just like the full range of Billy’s personality had gotten onto the page. It was as if he had found a voice that was an exaggerated version of who he is. His kind of machismo and his erudition and all the stuff that is in his personality that as a friend of his, I knew had been turned up to eleven. Which is, I think, my conception of voice. Voice is an effort to get onto the page a version of your natural speaking voice, edited into eloquence, amped up by the writerly attention you have while you’re at the keyboard. You’re saying about first...

Grand Central's engineer: William J. Wilgus and the planning of modern Manhattan

Few people have had as profound an impact on the history of New York City as William J. Wilgus. As chief engineer of the New York Central Railroad, Wilgus conceived the Central Terminal, the city's magnificent monument to America's Railway Age. Kurt C. Schlichting here examines the remarkable career of this innovator, revealing how his tireless work moving people and goods over and under Manhattan Island's surrounding waterways forever changed New York's bustling transportation system. After his herculean efforts on behalf of Central, the most complicated construction project in New York's history, Wilgus turned to solving the city's transportation quandary: Manhattan-the financial, commercial, and cultural hub of the United States in the twentieth century-was separated from the mainland by two major rivers to the west and east, a deep-water estuary to the south, and the Harlem River to the north. Wilgus believed that railroads and mass transportation provided the answer to New York City's complicated geography. ingenious ideas included a freight subway linking rail facilities in New Jersey with manufacturers and shippers in Manhattan, a freight and passenger tunnel connecting Staten Island and Brooklyn, and a belt railway interconnecting sixteen private railroads serving the metropolitan area. Schlichting's deep passion for Wilgus and his engineering achievements are evident in the pages of this fascinating work. Wilgus was a true pioneer, and Schlichting ensures that his brilliant contributions to New York City's transportation system will not be forgotten. Praise for Schlichting's Central Terminal: Grand Central Terminal is celebrated for its Beaux-Arts style, but Kurt C. Schlichting looks behind the facade to see the hidden engineering marvels. (New York Times Book Review). His study peels away our contemporary expectations and experiences and reveals the layers of history and acts of men that served as the foundation for this great structure. (H-Urban, H-Net Review). The most detailed account yet of one of the most important events in the history of 20th-century architecture, railroad development, and city building. (Choice). In his detailed accounts of the fiscal, stylistic, and engineering decisions that went into the creation of...Grand Central Terminal, Schlichting clearly shows both how energetic and talented all of the people involved were and how dramatically they altered this central portion of New York City. (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians). Ably tells the story of the New York rail system's most active and visible symbol: the architectural and engineering masterpiece, with its grand public concourse, in the heart of Midtown. (New Scientist).

De/framed visions: reading two collections of gardens at the Xi'an International Horticultural Exposition

In landscape, we form meaning through placefulness; as Martin Heidegger observed, ‘“place” places man in that dimension which reveals the revealing meaning of being’. 1 Gardens infer a more acceler...

Social Media and the Review

Social Media and the Review Jeffrey R. Di Leo Where should you go to find out about the latest novel by your favorite author? Or to learn about the hottest works in your area of interest? Until the end of twentieth century, the clear and unambiguous answer to these questions was “book reviews.” Today, though, “book blogs” and “social reading” are competing—and compelling—responses to these questions. So, how do you choose? In many ways, book reviews are now the throwback choice. Written by specialists and generalists alike, book reviews populated magazines, journals, newspapers, and other forms of print media up until the rise of the World Wide Web. Some were written by nationally recognized writers for nationally distributed publications like the New York Times Book Review and The Nation; others by “professional reviewers” who sold their reviews to different publications; and still others by “non-professionals” who gave their efforts to scores of periodicals that put aside valuable print space for reviews. Reviews have been contested and controversial throughout their history, and there have always been efforts to improve them. In perhaps the best recent study of book reviewing, Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (2007), three specific suggestions are made: 1) “we need to devise a better means of choosing books for review”; 2) “we need to find better ways to reward reviewers”; and 3) “we need to better train. . .reviewers and review editors, better preparing them for the technical constraints and demands of the genre and, more broadly, alerting them to critical and ethical issues in the field.” But as the print publication age gives way to the electronic age, concerns like those raised by Pool seem distant—particularly when viewed through the lens of “book blogs” and “social reading.” The issue of a “better means of choosing” books evaporates when the constraints of print publication gives way to the expanses of the electronic dissemination. Book blogs cover and recover every imaginable corner of the book world. Book Blogger Directory (bookbloggerdirectory.com), for example, has links to “Fiction Book Blogs,” “Non-Fiction Book Blogs,” “Religious Book Blogs,” and “Young Adult Book Blogs.” The sublinks under “Fiction Book Blogs” alone then list “Children’s Under 12,” “Comics & Graphic Novel,” “Erotica, GBLT & Adult Romance,” “Historical, Classic Literature,” “General Fiction, Poetry, Everything!,” “Action Adventure, Mystery, Horror & Thrillers, Espionage,” “Romance,” “Science Fiction & Fantasy,” and, last but not least, my favorite of the sublinks, “Paranormal Romance & Urban Fantasy.” In the world according to book blogs, Pool’s “better means of choosing” issue translates into “opportunities for coverage.” Book blogs as a genre don’t have selectivity issues because anything can be covered or “selected.” Whereas Pool was concerned with lack of selectivity in book reviews because it leads to “overlooking good books, overpraising bad ones,” in the case of book blogs, the concern is not “overlooking good books” (How is it possible to miss one when all seem to be included?) but “overpraising bad ones.” To be sure, the most obvious negative potential to be found in the book blog is its capacity to become a bad books paradise. Pool’s comment about finding better ways to train reviewers and review editors seems remote from the world of book blogging. While there are bloggers and blog editors that meet the demands Pool is placing on book reviewers, the vast majority of book bloggers and blog editors do not. Nor is it reasonable to expect them to become versed in the “technical constraints and demands of the genre” since server space is their only technical constraint and time is the main requirement of the genre. Critical and ethical issues involved in book blogging are only beginning to emerge. However, unlike book reviewing for financial compensation, which has its own ethical and critical issues, reviews in book blogs are seldom compensated. Still, opportunities for logrolling—or even blogging on one’s own work—are widely available. Book reviewing can also be hindered by academic career aspirations. In a recent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor, who spent a dozen years as an acquisitions editor at Oxford and Duke University Presses, wonders if “the time...

Little Blue and Little Yellow by L. Lionni

Lionni, Leo. Little Blue and Little Yellow. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Print. Award-winning author, artist, and graphic illustrator, Leo Lionni, had a distinguished, decades-spanning career and wrote over 40 children’s books in an easily recognizable style. Little Blue and Little Yellow was his first children’s book, and it won the New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year award in 1959. Lionni was also a four-time Caldecott Honor Book winner, an award that celebrates excellence in children’s picture books. This review pertains to the 2011 board book edition, just right for the littlest hands. The story is simple perfection. Little Blue and Little Yellow, are best friends who live across the street from one another. They enjoy all sorts of games both together and with their other equally-colourful friends. One day, Little Blue wants to play with Little Yellow but cannot find him. Overjoyed as they finally meet up, they hug until they become green! However, when they go home, their parents do not recognize them, and they are very sad. Where did Little Blue and Little Yellow go? Are they lost? This delightful story has many layers. It can simply be read as a way to introduce the concept of colour to young children, but it has deeper, yet understated, themes of friendship and diversity. It is a delight to read and look at, and while this sturdy edition is certainly aimed at the preschool crowd, older children will enjoy it too. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Debbie FeisstDebbie is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta. When not renovating, she enjoys travel, fitness and young adult fiction.

The Associated Friends

Dr. Gabriel Wells attracted wide attention by purchasing at Benefit Auction held at Delmonico's in February four important items which he at once gave to four university libraries. Rutgers, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, all received gifts from the outstanding bidder of sale, as New York Times Book Review called Dr. Wells. The Rutgers gift is especially important for its historical significance. The unhappy history of Spain for last century and more has been punctuated by revolutions and counter-revolutions. One of these revolts took place in 1868 when Queen Isabella was forced to flee in face of a republican uprising. The news of this event was approved in United States by all those who welcomed republican regimes where ever they appeared, and in at least one case a group of prominent citizens united to send an expression of their pleasure to new government. An Address of American Citizens to Spanish Government and People, which Dr. Wells bought at Delmonico's and gave to Library is original manuscript of document which these enthusiastic American friends of freedom drew up in support of new Spanish government. It bears such names as those of Peter Cooper, Charles A. Dana, Horace Greeley, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and many others who were eminent in their generation. It forms, moreover, an important piece of evidence concerning attitude of Americans of two generations ago toward those who were fighting for right to govern themselves. The Associated Friends are indeed grateful to their Honorary President for his generosity in thus adding to many gifts which he has already made to Library.

Cross Over Water (review)

Reviewed by: Cross Over Water Bob J. Frye Cross Over Water. By Richard Yañez. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2011. 204 pages, $22.00. In his first book, El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border (2003), Richard Yañez narrates, for example, the challenges faced by a Chicano outsider adjusting to life in a new El Paso junior high ("Desert Vista") and tells of a boy named Ruly, not unlike Antonio in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972), who prepares his brother Frankie for communion by practicing the taking of sacraments using tortillas and Kool-Aid ("Sacred Heart"). In his first novel, Cross Over Water, Yañez develops the character of Ruly in a bildungsroman marked by a distinctive sense of place—El Paso's Lower Valley. Cross Over Water utilizes a four-part structure as Raul Cruz develops, matures, and gains understanding. In part 1, "Ruly," the twelve-year-old has been uprooted from the El Paso desert home he loves. Now a chubby outsider at Valle Vista Junior High, this seventh-grader cannot swim, dance, or understand sex. An older cousin, Laura, moves in with his family, provides him stability, but soon moves on. At thirteen, Ruly remains stuck with "his gordito self " (48). In part 2, "Raul Cruz," Raul at sixteen gets a football locker at Ysleta High School—as varsity team manager. Invited to a party with the team, he is thrown into a pool where he is rescued by "a big-breasted angel," Julia, who later drops naïve Raul for Benny, her journalism classmate (63). Unhappily still a virgin, Raul cruises with the huge All-City lineman Alberto Baca, drinking in Juárez before Alberto joins the Air Force. In part 3, "Rauluis," after graduation Raul Luis moves into Alberto's vacant casita, works at BigWay Foods collecting grocery carts, and "at eighteen, he was full of energy and muscles" (113). Searching for carts, he discovers the Peoples' Park full of the homeless and there meets Elena, a California student working with Hands United. She helps him learn—about compassion, sex, [End Page 99] family roots, César Chávez, music, reading, and the importance of his own stories. She returns to her California college; Raul remains for his cousin Laura. In part 4, "Cuz," cousin Laura returns from Juárez pregnant and stays with Raul, who waits on her, like a team manager. Accompanying her to parenting class at El Paso Community College encourages Raul to enroll. His English class with Dr. Sánchez sets him free; now "he wasn't freaked out that he still had more questions than answers" (189). In Thomason Hospital, Laura, mom-to-be, asks Raul to go climb that special childhood hill, La Loma, that she, Raul, and their Chicano friends used for playing King of the Hill. For her, yes, he will—Raul Luis, ever the team manager, but learning well. Yañez is gifted, creates memorable characters, yet his skilled evocation of a sense of place for El Paso is limited, too regional. William Owens, another Southwest writer, puts it precisely in the Texas Humanist (1983): "The only reason for regionalism is to make it an opening onto the universal" (27). Yañez can learn much from Rolando Hinojosa's Dear Rafe (1985) in which, as Robert Houston notes, "although his sharp eye and accurate ear capture a place, its people and a time in a masterly way, [Hinojosa's] work goes far beyond regionalism" (New York Times Book Review 1985). I especially recommend that Yañez examine Rudolfo Anaya's recently published collection The Essays (2009), where, in "My Heart, My Home," he remarks, "I like not only to write a good story, but to explore in it the core of human nature" (244). Cross Over Water is a good start. Bob J. Frye Texas Christian University, Fort Worth Copyright © 2012 Western Literature Association

Introduction: “The Greening (or Not) of America”

By chance, the date of the morning I set out to write this introduction was September 11, 2011. I found this coincidence worth pondering because the only other time I had guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of American Culture it was a theme issue on 9-11. My Introduction to that 2005 issue focused on the archetypal meanings of irreversible destruction as well as potential regeneration that pervaded the imagery and discourses of that terrorizing event. As I pondered, an image from the front page of that Sunday's New York Times Book Review (9-11-11) caught my attention. One of the legacies of 9-11 has been US Americans' collective apprehension of national demise, something directly addressed by the Times front-page review of Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum's new work, That Used to Be Us: How Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. That theme was encapsulated in a photo, showing an abandoned factory building on a grim and greenless winter's day. Despair is in this air. No human or animal presence can be detected and viewers easily might imagine the remains of toxic chemicals leaching into the soil. symbolic meaning seems to be not only a cessation of production, but also of reproduction, that is, regeneration. Winter has come1 and, the photo seems to say, might not ever leave. And it is regeneration, or not, that is precisely what this most recent special issue of the Journal of American Culture - The Greening (or Not) of America - is all about. word greening came into prominence with the publication of Charles Reich's 1970 book, Greening of Amenca, which heralded the birth of a new one that had evolved beyond greed, mechanistic models of humanity, violence, and fragmentation. Greening, which previously, in common vernacular, had meant only the ripening of apples, began in the 1970s to take on the new (if ancient and archetypal)2 meaning of replenishment, the return of vitality or freshness after decay or destruction. Not insignificantly, also became the color most aligned with the ideals and practices of the environmental movement. articles in this special issue of JAC all are concerned with issues related to regeneration: hope, accompanied by a necessary humility; vitality; and a resurgent and respected life/death force. They are rooted in a green consciousness, one that recognizes the consciousness of all beings, not just human beings, interconnectedness and value of all forms of life, the ecological meaning (and necessity) of death, the rejection of privileges bestowed by systems of male, white, and straight supremacies, as well as a parallel proclaimed superiority of humans over (something, in this scheme, that humans supposedly exist outside of and can exploit and abuse without consequence). consciousness necessitates a rejection of all of these and related forms of domination and an accompanying transvaluation of values and behaviors, including and especially those related to the most basic aspects of existence - birth, death, play, work, love, sex, food, and sense not only of self but of world, even of what we mean when we say nature or environment. In Katie Hogan's Green Angels in America, the promise of transformative regeneration after an apocalyptic wasting is revealed as a key theme in Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Hogan insightfully interprets Kushner's magnum opus as a play that explodes barriers and builds connections among various forms of oppression and social justice issues: AIDS discrimination, racism, queer oppression, women's rights, the violence of capitalism, and the earth's environmental deterioration. She aligns Kushner's perspectives with those of the environmental justice movement, which focuses on how marginalized peoples and their communities are treated as dumping sites. That grassroots movement has led to a profound redefinition of what constitutes our environment . …

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a PresidentCandiceMillard. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness/ Medicine, and the Murder of Candice Millard. New York: Doubleday, 2011. Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic, follows her superb first River of Doubt (2005). She brings the same meticulous research to Garfield's life and assassination that she applied to Theodore Roosevelt's post-presidential exploration of over thousand unknown and potentially lethal river miles in Brazil. Destiny consists of several, intricately interwoven, themes. In one, she brings living Garfield - the man, the scholar, the general, the congressman, and the president - to our attention, and restores him for the modern world. Americans tend to have weak or almost nonexistent grasp of history, and thus are likely to dismiss presidents of the late Nineteenth Century as bearded nonentities who could be interchangeable if they were even interesting enough to consider. Many scholars and other writers take the same position, but they are wrong to do so. These presidents had strengths and significance of their own. Millard certainly makes this clear with regard to Garfield. Nevertheless, in his generally quite favorable review of Destiny in the New York Times Book Review (2 October 2011), Kevin Baker, begins snidely with quip (If an obscure 19th-century president falls, does he make noise?), and asserts that Garfield's assassination little difference. Even Baker, though, concedes that one of the many pleasures of Millard's new book, is that she documents just how remarkable Garfield's life was. Clearly, Garneld was remarkable. How can anyone conclude that this man, whose brief time in office made his the second shortest of any presidency, would not have been major force had he had another three and half years - or even seven and half years - as president; that his assassination was unimportant historically? As Millard documents, even the previously hapless Vice Chester Arthur (Chet Arthur, president? Good God! said one former crony), rose to the occasion. As Millard quotes another of Arthur's former associates who found that later he had risen above machine politics, isn't 'Chet Arthur' anymore, . . . he's the President (250). Despite his machine background as spoilsman, Arthur resisted the bosses, strongly supported, and signed the Pendleton Act establishing the foundation for the merit-based Civil Service. However forgotten, Arthur became significant himself. Another theme of her tale revolves around the assassin, the madman alluded to in her subtitle, Charles Guiteau. She pieces together his disturbed and arrogant life, always using others and mistreating women. He is almost always described in textbooks as a disappointed office seeker. Although that is technically correct, it is misleading. The job he sought was hardly civil service position. With no qualification whatever, he assumed that he should be named minister to Austria or to France. …

Machine Poetics and Reading Machines: William Poundstone's Electronic Literature and Bob Brown's Readies

A recent essay in the New York Times Book Review titled “The Godfather of the E-Reader” suggests, “if you’re searching for a godfather of the reading machine, you might look past Jeff Bezo and Steve Jobs to a nearly forgotten early-twentieth-century writer and impresario named Bob Brown” (Schuessler 27). Robert Carlton (Bob) Brown, an American experimental writer of the modernist period, shared a social network with the likes of Williams Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, and planned to build a reading machine that would speed up the pace of reading literature and thereby change the kind of literature we read. He called his machine “The Readies.” “Revolutionize reading and a Revolution of the Word will be inkless achieved,” he writes (Readies 35). The Readies was never built and has been nearly forgotten by literary history; so too has Brown remained on the margins of literary history. But recent events in the evolution of digital reading machines prompt excavation of the Readies and reconsideration of it as a vital part of the genealogy of contemporary technopoetics and literary practices. The essay pursues such excavation by reading the Readies in relation to recent machine-informed poetics of electronic literature. I present Brown as godfather of a contemporary generation of writers experimenting with the newest reading machine, the digital computer. I claim