"A Head Is a Terrible Thing to Waste"

That's the title of the first chapter of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach (611 R53s). It's all about how the heads of cadavers are used for surgery practice. Makes sense, yes? I suppose I'd rather know that my surgeon had practiced on something real before going to work on me. But Roach's first-hand observations of these practice sessions convey the strangeness of the scene:

"The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan. But here are forty of them, one per pan, resting face-up on what looks to be a small pet-food bowl."

And-
"The heads have been put in roasting pans -- which are of the disposable aluminum variety--for the same reason chickens are put in roasting pans: to catch the drippings."

Roach's point is that corpses have incredibly useful - ahem - lives. They serve as crash test dummies and as targets for weapons testing. They provide clues to the causes of car accidents, their rates of decay are studied by scientists, and they are being considered as future sources of composting material.

The last chapter of this fun book is called "Remains of the Author," in which Roach describes her own decision to donate her body to medical science. "My reasons for becoming a donor aren't very good at all. My reasons boil down to a Harvard Brain Bank donor wallet card, which enables me to say 'I'm going to Harvard' and not be lying. You do not need brains to go to the Harvard Brain Bank, only a brain."

Government as photographer

And doing a darned good job of it. Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives (779.997391 B968p) is based on an exhibit of representative holdings from one of the largest photographic archives in the world -- the National Archives and Records Administration. Its 8 million-plus photographs and 9 million aerial photographs were either taken by government employees or contractors, or were collected by a Federal agency for one reason or another. Many of the photos were taken by famous photographers - for example, 226 original signed Ansel Adams prints of the American West, Dorothea Lange's photos of the devastating impact of the Great Depression on migrant farm families, and presidential photos taken by David Hume Kennerly and Yoichi Okamoto. But there are also a lot of surprises in the collections. Here's an example of one of Lange's photos, this one of a Japanese family during World War II:



The caption reads: "Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus. Identification tags were used to aid in keeping a family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. Mochida operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township."

This one was taken by an unknown photographer:



These guys are American servicemen, former prisoners of the Vietnam War, who are cheering as their aircraft takes off from an airfield near Hanoi.

There's something so haunting about the black-and-white treatment. The color photos just don't seem to have the same impact.

Cool tool for finding fiction

If you like Alanna by Tamara Pierce (PB PIE), how can you find more books like it? That is, more books about girls who dream of doing things only guys have been permitted to do, or fantasies that feature healers and knights? As I noted in a previous entry, library catalogs aren't much good at indexing fiction. And the books themselves are usually shelved by author, maybe by genre. Well, here's your answer. On our Recommended Reads page, click on the Novelist link. My search on "Alanna" yields a quick description of the book, followed by a select-able list of topics that describe the book. And what a list! Check out this screen shot:



Ok, ok, the print is small, but trust me when I say that by checking the box next to "Determination in girls" (and/or "Girl healers" and/or "Knights and knighthood"), I can find all sorts of books I might like. Note that if you are searching Novelist from home, you will be prompted to enter your NetID and password.

9/11 Commision Report and the book Oscars

Hard as it might be to believe, a committee-produced government publication is a nominee for the 2004 non-fiction National Book Award. But once you take a close look at The 9/11 Commision Report (973.931N622), it's easy to see why it rates such praise. The narrative structure is quite compelling. The first chapter, "'We Have Some Planes,'" recounts the events of the day almost minute by minute. Then the second chapter steps back to reflect on the foundation of modern terrorism. The book provides detailed analyses of the country's intelligence services and our disaster preparedness systems. But it's not a dry tome, by any means. Chapter 9, "Heroism and Horror," is particularly poignant in its descriptions of the actions taken by first responders at the World Trade Center site. The book concludes with solid recommendations for the future. And about 117 pages of footnotes.

Winners of the National Book Award will be announced tonight.

Regrettable food

I can't believe I haven't posted about this book, which is one of my favorites in the collection. The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks (641.50207L627g) is an ode to the "cuisine" of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and beyond, particularly as represented in food producers' cookbooks of the time. The book is an offshoot of the author's Institute of Official Cheer, which itself is a branch of his wildly creative website, lileks.com.

Here's what he has to say about the sardine industry, as illustrated in the photo below: "No matter what they do, their product looks like fish torsos with the tails and heads chewed off. Which, of course, is exactly what they are. If you'd like to disguise this fact, just smother the piscine torsos in a vinyl sauce colored with melted peach crayons. Note: If you let this dish stand for an hour before serving, it will not move even if you turn the plate upside down."

Fiction with Asian-American characters

Finding fiction that relates to a topic or a theme can be difficult. Most library fiction collections are not subject-classified, except perhaps by genre (mystery, romance, science fiction, etc.). But there is no reliable way to find fiction that includes, say, characters with certain disabilities, or that take place during the wintertime, or in a specific location. We're starting to develop some lists on our Recommended Reads page that will help people find selected topic-related books in our collection. So far we've got two of these lists:

Books with Asian and Asian-American Characters and/or Themes
Books with Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Characters or Themes

If there are other lists you'd like us to develop, please let us know!
We've put books from the "Asian list" on display. Here's the cover of one of them (with the title American Eyes slightly obscured by the call number):

In memoriam: Iris Chang

Many Uni faculty and former students remember Iris Chang, class of 1985, who was found dead on Tuesday morning. Chang was an extraordinary writer and historian. She wroteThe Thread of the Silkworm (629.1092T778c) when she was only 25. It tells the story of Tsien Hsue-shen, the brilliant Chinese-born scientist who helped pioneer the American space age and, when deported by American authorities, became the father of the Chinese missile program. Chang is most well-known for her best-selling The Rape of Nanking (951.042C362r), a searing description of Japanese atrocities against civilians in China during the late 1930s. Her most recent book, The Chinese in America (973.04951C362c) is a history of Chinese immigrants and their descendants in America. At the time of her death, Chang was working on a book about former U.S. soldiers who fought the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II.

Chang had a tremendous gift for writing rigorously researched history and making it accessible to a wide audience. She leaves behind a tremendous legacy.

On my list

So many books, so little time. I've been wanting to read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (PB FFO) for ages. Since I haven't yet gotten to it, I'll steal the blurb from the back cover:

"Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Bronte's novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide."

New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani is quoted as saying that Thursday Next is "part Bridget Jones, part Nancy Drew, and part Dirty Harry." An unbeatable combination.

This is the first of four Thursday Next books, all published since 2001. I'd better get started -

A picture is worth a thousand words...

The paintings in this book are designed to mess with your head. Here's an example from Something's Not Quite Right by Guy Billout (Q.741.642092B497b).



The guy on the right is wearing snow gear while the guy on the left is dressed for the desert. Though easy on the eyes, every image in this slim volume is a teaser for the brain.

The incompetent or the incoherent?

This is the headline on the cover of our newest magazine, The Economist, recently gifted to us by retired Russian teacher, Connie Curtin (thanks, Connie!). The article inside (p. 9) notes that "America's presidential election is a contest between two deeply flawed candidates. If we had a vote, with a heavy heart we would cast it for John Kerry." Hardly a ringing endorsement. This London-based international news and business publication will give us a new insight into world affairs as well as our own country's workings. The articles are more pointedly opinionated than what we are used to in American news weeklies. The subtitles are particularly fun that way:

"At last, a trial for Peru's terrorist mastermind"
"Watch the governor [Arnold Schwarzenegger]smile and scowl"
"Challenging the imperialists is getting easier"
"Muslims die in custody, and the prime minister blames Ramadan"

Besides finding the current issue in the library, you can read it at home online here (to get back issues through the library's subscription databases) or here (the magazine's own website).

It was the worst year ever

Being thirteen. I thought it lasted about six years. Now we've got a book that portrays the year perfectly: 13: Thirteen Stories That Capture the Agony and Ecstasy of Being Thirteen, edited by James Howe (813.08 T3492). Each author's photo appears after his or her story - but the photos were taken when the authors themselves were 13. Priceless. Here are a couple of select quotes:

"If popularity at school had anything to do with how much teachers liked you, I'd have a posse." From Noodle Soup for Nincompoops by Maureen Ryan Griffin
"If you want to know the truth (and if you tell anybody this, I swear I will so never speak to you again), sometimes I'm not so sure who I am anymore." From Jeremy Goldblatt Is So Not Moses by James Howe

The cover photo couldn't be better: