Gretchen Beilfuss Witt
Library Notes
Christmas Expectations
In late October, the Rowan Public Library Foundation and their guests were charmed with a ‘literary feast’ which included a presentation from the very entertaining speaker Dr. Elliot Engel. At the end of the evening, Engel spoke on behalf of the charity he often represents, that of the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital founded by Charles Dickens in 1852 as the first of such hospitals. He introduced to us a delightful Christmas treasury which begins with a version of Dickens’ beloved classic “The Christmas Carol” designed to read aloud. “A Christmas Carol Keepsake” also contains recipes, games and crafts to create your very own Victorian Christmas celebration. The recipes include Dickens very own Christmas punch and sweets with such names as Curates and Maids of Honour. Directions for a kissing ball and how to play ‘Forfeits’, an early version of truth or dare in riddles, complete this amusing collection.
“Christmas Observed” represents another type of treasury; a collection of short stories, poems, diary entries and letters relating to the observance of the Christmas season. It includes a most amusing letter from Leacock refusing an invitation from a young lady to attend a party for the young in the year 1910. He concludes “I do not consider a five-cent pen-wiper from the top branch of a Xmas tree any adequate compensation for the evening you propose.” Many no doubt often feel the same when asked to attend some holiday gathering. In the short story “Vera’s First Christmas Adventure” the foibles of obtaining just the right gift are examined. The poignant verse of Anthony Ross in “Christ Ran Stumbling” reminds us all of not to forget the unfortunate in this season. The anthology also includes the marvelous story of the impromptu peace between British and German on Christmas Eve during the Great War.
The final book selection is Stephen Nissenbaum’s “The Battle for Christmas” a study of the social and cultural history of Christmas, particularly as it is transformed into the present day American holiday. He outlines some of the more outrageous misbehavior of the British which led to the early Puritan ban against the holiday in the American colonies. However, as the turn of the nineteenth century approached, other denominations began to reclaim Christmas, urging church services be held on December 25. To combat the general misrule that continued to be prevalent, Nissenbaum claims the appearance of St. Nicholas brought a little domestic peace to the season. The appearance of Santa Claus also began to shape the focus of Christmas merriment towards children and into the home. Nissenbaum shares the experiences of Clement Moore’s friend Pintard and Moore’s own creation of the poem “The Night before Christmas.” Other traditions - gift giving, Christmas trees and Christmas charity - are explained in succeeding chapters. An enthralling study of the formation of our most cherished holiday.
Whatever your forte – history, literature or entertainment – check out these Christmas treasuries.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Library Notes
Betty Moore
Novels from other countries
Kabul. Kathmandu. Dubai. Shanghai. We may envision these locales as exotic places and wonder what life is like there for ordinary people. Fiction can be a good way to climb into the skin of someone in another culture. The authors of each of the following novels portray their settings almost as another character.
“Years of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai” is the latest book from Qiu Xiaolong. He offers 22 brief stories, set in Shanghai’s Red Dust Lane from 1949 to 2005. Like calligraphy, the author’s deft brushstrokes illuminate the effects that radical political and cultural changes have had on people in one small neighborhood in this historic city. Even the story titles – such as “Return of POW I,” “When Nixon First Visited China,” “Cricket Fighting,” and “A Confidence Cap” — evoke this unique place and time.
Qiu is also the author of four mysteries featuring Inspector Chen Cao, head of the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad. While his hero investigates murders, the author weaves in social commentary about the changes going on in modern China.
Dan Fesperman shows the clash of new and old in his portrait of boom town Dubai, a global city that is part of the United Arab Emirates. In his latest thriller, “Layover in Dubai,” American businessman Sam Keller extends his layover to keep an eye on, then search for a missing co-worker. The search leads him on a suspense-filled ride through Dubai’s glittering malls and foreign worker labor camps, and into conflicts between Western culture and local religious traditions. According to a “Booklist” review, “ ‘Layover in Dubai’ has plenty of action, but it's Fesperman's portrait of a truly bizarre place that will captivate readers.”
Photographer Maria and journalist Imo face vast differences of language, culture, and religion in Kabul, Afghanistan, as they research a story about Afghani girls who have attempted suicide rather than enter arranged marriages with older men. In her novel “The End of Manners,” author Francesca Marciano evokes the landscape and environment of the region in addition to showing the moral complexities confronting both the local people and their visitors.
“The Godfather of Kathmandu” is John Burdett’s fourth thriller to feature Buddhist Sonchi Jitpleecheep, a Royal Thai Police detective. Sonchai seeks personal solace from his guru, an exiled Tibetan lama, to deal with a personal tragedy, at the same time he investigates the most shocking crime scene of his career. Along the way, readers are treated to a vivid portrait of today’s Thailand.
We may never visit these places ourselves, but fiction can provide us glimpses into life in these fascinating faraway cultures.
Betty Moore
Novels from other countries
Kabul. Kathmandu. Dubai. Shanghai. We may envision these locales as exotic places and wonder what life is like there for ordinary people. Fiction can be a good way to climb into the skin of someone in another culture. The authors of each of the following novels portray their settings almost as another character.
“Years of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai” is the latest book from Qiu Xiaolong. He offers 22 brief stories, set in Shanghai’s Red Dust Lane from 1949 to 2005. Like calligraphy, the author’s deft brushstrokes illuminate the effects that radical political and cultural changes have had on people in one small neighborhood in this historic city. Even the story titles – such as “Return of POW I,” “When Nixon First Visited China,” “Cricket Fighting,” and “A Confidence Cap” — evoke this unique place and time.
Qiu is also the author of four mysteries featuring Inspector Chen Cao, head of the Shanghai Police Bureau’s Special Case Squad. While his hero investigates murders, the author weaves in social commentary about the changes going on in modern China.
Dan Fesperman shows the clash of new and old in his portrait of boom town Dubai, a global city that is part of the United Arab Emirates. In his latest thriller, “Layover in Dubai,” American businessman Sam Keller extends his layover to keep an eye on, then search for a missing co-worker. The search leads him on a suspense-filled ride through Dubai’s glittering malls and foreign worker labor camps, and into conflicts between Western culture and local religious traditions. According to a “Booklist” review, “ ‘Layover in Dubai’ has plenty of action, but it's Fesperman's portrait of a truly bizarre place that will captivate readers.”
Photographer Maria and journalist Imo face vast differences of language, culture, and religion in Kabul, Afghanistan, as they research a story about Afghani girls who have attempted suicide rather than enter arranged marriages with older men. In her novel “The End of Manners,” author Francesca Marciano evokes the landscape and environment of the region in addition to showing the moral complexities confronting both the local people and their visitors.
“The Godfather of Kathmandu” is John Burdett’s fourth thriller to feature Buddhist Sonchi Jitpleecheep, a Royal Thai Police detective. Sonchai seeks personal solace from his guru, an exiled Tibetan lama, to deal with a personal tragedy, at the same time he investigates the most shocking crime scene of his career. Along the way, readers are treated to a vivid portrait of today’s Thailand.
We may never visit these places ourselves, but fiction can provide us glimpses into life in these fascinating faraway cultures.
Sunday, November 07, 2010
Library Notes
Rebecca Hyde
If you’re interested in the craft of writing, as a writer or a reader, you may want to look at the new “Art of” series, in which the art of criticism is used to “illuminate” the art of writing. Each book in the series explores an aspect of creative writing (syntax, description, time, poetic line). The authors are “contemporary practitioners impassioned by a singular craft issue.”
Take, for instance, Mark Doty’s “The Art of Description: World into Word.” “It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see,” he says, this poet who is known for his passionate search for the exact word and phrase, all the while recognizing that it is an exercise in naming the unsayable (“But try to find the words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf…). Why bother to try to turn perception into words? To refuse silence, so that experience will not go unspoken? To match words to the world to give those words to someone else or to savor them for ourselves? “The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing,” he concludes. Doty examines the poetry of Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others who capture sensory experiences that “leap toward transcendence,” like Bishop’s fish, caught, stared at, and released (“The Fish”).
In the last part of this engaging little book, Doty offers his lexicon “Description’s Alphabet.” He begins with “Art”: “Description is an ART to the degree that it gives us not just the world but the inner life of the witness.” He concludes with “A to Z”: I reach the end of my lexicon and feel that my effort to describe description is happily partial, partisan, a work of advocacy….I declare myself here on the side of the sensible, things as they are, the given, the incompletely knowable, never to get done or get it right or render it whole: ours to say and say.”
Other titles in the series include Sven Birkert’s “The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again,” where he examines the impulse to write about the self and the art of the memoirist in assembling patterns of meaning in experience. In “The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes,” Joan Silber illustrates the ways in which time is used as a technique in writing fiction: “A story can arrange events in any order it finds useful, but it does have to move between then and now and later.” In “The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song,” poet Ellen Bryant Voigt turns to music, “a helpful analog in any consideration of artistic language use.”
Rebecca Hyde
If you’re interested in the craft of writing, as a writer or a reader, you may want to look at the new “Art of” series, in which the art of criticism is used to “illuminate” the art of writing. Each book in the series explores an aspect of creative writing (syntax, description, time, poetic line). The authors are “contemporary practitioners impassioned by a singular craft issue.”
Take, for instance, Mark Doty’s “The Art of Description: World into Word.” “It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see,” he says, this poet who is known for his passionate search for the exact word and phrase, all the while recognizing that it is an exercise in naming the unsayable (“But try to find the words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf…). Why bother to try to turn perception into words? To refuse silence, so that experience will not go unspoken? To match words to the world to give those words to someone else or to savor them for ourselves? “The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing,” he concludes. Doty examines the poetry of Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others who capture sensory experiences that “leap toward transcendence,” like Bishop’s fish, caught, stared at, and released (“The Fish”).
In the last part of this engaging little book, Doty offers his lexicon “Description’s Alphabet.” He begins with “Art”: “Description is an ART to the degree that it gives us not just the world but the inner life of the witness.” He concludes with “A to Z”: I reach the end of my lexicon and feel that my effort to describe description is happily partial, partisan, a work of advocacy….I declare myself here on the side of the sensible, things as they are, the given, the incompletely knowable, never to get done or get it right or render it whole: ours to say and say.”
Other titles in the series include Sven Birkert’s “The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again,” where he examines the impulse to write about the self and the art of the memoirist in assembling patterns of meaning in experience. In “The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes,” Joan Silber illustrates the ways in which time is used as a technique in writing fiction: “A story can arrange events in any order it finds useful, but it does have to move between then and now and later.” In “The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song,” poet Ellen Bryant Voigt turns to music, “a helpful analog in any consideration of artistic language use.”
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