"Who does now remember the Armenians?"

This quote from Adolf Hitler (1939), justifying his argument that the world soon forgets the extermination of a people, appears at the beginning of Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian (813B1462f2002). The book is Bagdasarian's fictionalized account of his great-uncle's childhood experience from 1915 to about 1918 during the Armenian genocide in Turkey.



Told in spare language, the novel movingly portrays what a twelve-year old might have seen and felt as his world is utterly and irrevocably changed. He watches helplessly as his father and uncle are taken away and his brothers are killed. From one day to the next, Vahan does not know if he or those around him will survive. I tore through this book, astonished by the relentlessness of the unfolding events. It is awful, it is riveting, it is required reading.

Sandman the Dark and Scary

I was pondering the graphic novel collection this morning when Liz walked by and exhorted me to get more books in the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. She has them all and finds herself loaning them out to friends all the time. I'd like to get more, yes, but have this nagging worry in the back of my mind I call the "subbie factor." These books are, as the PR says, "filled with stories both horrific and beautiful."



And the back cover says "Suggested for Mature Readers." Advice? Liz says people will self-select, which I have found to be true. Those who are twelve years old and likely to be squeamish don't tend to pick them up.

When I was at ALA, I was introduced to another series called Strangers in Paradise by Terry and Trey Moore.



The authors describe the series as "a story of real life, kicked up a notch." Looks like it's worth a try.

Autobiography of a Face

This book is Lucy Grealy's memoir (PB GRE) of being treated for a cancer that left her face disfigured and then enduring 15 years of further treatment "for nothing other than looking different from everyone else." As a child, her response was naive:

"I told my teacher and all of my friends, probably with pride: I had a malignancy, I was going to have a big operation now.
Some years later, I don't remember exactly how many, as my family was milling about the kitchen and I was leafing through the paper at the table, someone dated an event as something that had happened 'before Lucy had cancer.' Shocked, I looked up.
'I had cancer?'
'Of course you did, fool, what did you think you had?'
'I thought I had a Ewing's sarcoma.'
'And what on earth do you think that is?'
My family seemed rather incredulous, but it was true. In all that time, not one person ever said the word cancer to me, at least not in a way that registered as pertaining to me."

I think the image on the cover of the book is more evocative than a graphically realistic photograph:

Scientists fighting

Newton versus Leibniz ("A Clash of Titans"), Lord Kelvin versus Geologists and Biologists ("Age of the Earth"), Wegener versus Everybody ("Continental Drift"), Derek Freeman versus Margaret Mead ("Nature versus Nurture"). These are a few of the chapter titles in Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever by Hal Hellman (509.22H368g). Some of these "fights" are about famous intellectual disagreements which have long since been resolved. For example, modern earth science is based on what we we now understand about continental drift - even though Alfred Wegener's critics labeled his theory "preposterous" and even "dangerous." Some of the disagreements in this book are still disagreements and probably always will be. Darwin's theory of evolution, for example. Some are just plain fun to read about, though. Nineteenth-century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh made the front pages after leveling charges at one another, including, but not limited to, "plagiarism, incompetence, and even the smashing of fossils to prevent others from getting at them." Throw into the mix that Marsh was for evolution and Cope against it. Hoo boy, time to get out the boxing gloves.

Fries with that?

Know what makes McDonald's fries smell so good? Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (349.10973Sch396f) tells us that for decades, McDonald's cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow - which gave the fries more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger. Thought I'd better write an entry about this book before it gets checked out again. One of the truths about being part of the University Library community is that our books often circulate widely to folks on campus and never get to be seen here. This book is one such hot item. Schlosser explores all the implications of the fast food industry and makes significant charges against it: "Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad." Whew. It also produces guys who look like this:



Written in 1991, Fast Food Nation pre-dates Super Size Me, and focuses on a wider variety of topics. Did you know that out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at a fast food place, around 2 cents goes to the farmer who grew the potatoes?

P.S. McDonalds now uses all vegetable oil with "natural flavorings."

Boy Scouts

Jay Mechling, the author of On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth (369.430973M465o), draws on more than twenty years of research to uncover and describe "the key rituals and play events through which the Boy Scouts shapes boys into men." With a great deal of respect, he demonstrates how the organization strives to mentor young men, despite a bureaucracy that is unyielding in its stance against "the three G's" - God, gays, and girls. Mechling's close connection to the Boy Scouts is evident in his author photo:



The structure of the book is appealing - each chapter covers a day at the camp where Boy Scout Troop 49 has convened each July for the past thirty years. Through each day's events, Melching interweaves rich ethnographic detail - camp songs, organizational minutiae, behind-the-scenes staff activities, camper meltdowns, memorable meals, and the many ceremonial moments that constitute the experience.

The library Oscars

Tomorrow I fly to Boston for the Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association. About 10,000 librarians will be there, working on a huge variety of projects. The most well-known outcome of the meeting is the press conference on Monday morning at which the winners of various children's book awards are announced. The most well-known of those are the Caldecott Medal and the Newbery Medal. This is an intense selection process for those who are involved. The members of the two committees receive books from publishers throughout the year. They share nominations with one another, then at the Midwinter Meeting meet for hours upon hours making their deliberations. (I'm tempted to say "Picture a smoke-filled room populated by sweaty people with their sleeves rolled up, cartons of leftover food strewn around, piles of paper everywhere, and a lot of raw nerves in evidence. Actually, it's probably all true except for the smoke-filled part).

What many people don't realize is that there are a number of other notable book awards given out at this time as well. There's the Batchelder Award, given for an outstanding children's book published in a foreign language and translated into English. And the Belpre Medal, given for outstanding children's literature and illustration that celebrates the Latino/a cultural experience. And the Carnegie Medal, given for excellence in children's video. And the Printz Award, given for excellence in young adult literature. And the Sibert Award, given to the author of the most distinguished informational (nonfiction) book for children. And believe it or not, there are more besides these I've mentioned.

The press conference for the children's book awards will be Monday morning from 8:15 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. So starting around 8:30 Central time, you'll be able to see winners' names posted to the ALA website. And for real devotees, the next morning some of the winners will appear on the Today Show.

Making comics in addition to reading them

With the popularity of our graphic novel collection, I'd also like to draw attention to the books we have on how to create comics yourself. These books are back in the nonfiction section (741.5-ish) rather than with the graphic novels. Here is an example from Klaus Janson's DC Comics Guide to Pencilling Comics (741.5J267d), where he speaks about drawing eyes:



The caption reads: "Gil Kane uses every component of visual storytelling to communicate information to the reader. Here he uses the eyes, the body language, and the compositional opposing angle to reflect the emotional states of the characters. From Captain Action #4 (April 1969)."

Cool, huh? We've also got at least one guide to drawing Japanese comics, which are a style unto themselves. Take a peek at Manga Mania: How to Draw Japanese Comics (741.5952H251m) by Christopher Hart.

The klezmer fiddler librarian

Two entries ago I mentioned going to KlezKamp during Winter Break. How did I get interested in such a thing? Through reading a book, of course. Author, musician, record producer, and ethnomusicologist, Henry Sapoznik, has been a major force in the revitalization of Klezmer music in America. His book, Klezmer! Jewish Music from Old World to Our World (781.62924 Sa68k), tells the story of how klezmer music immigrated from Europe along with the Jews and went through various changes over the course of the twentieth century.

Here's a picture of my "predecessors," the Spielman family kapelye (band) in Ostrovke, Pland, c. 1905:



Notice: Four violinists, only one clarinetist, a drummer, a cellist, several horn-type players, a flutist, and a bass player. Not an unusual arrangement for traditional klezmer bands.

Sapoznik also wrote about his dream to start the Yiddish folk arts institute which quickly became known as KlezKamp and has been going strong since 1987. My husband and I have attended for three years now and had a blast each time.

Now Henry has gotten together with my fiddle teacher, Cookie Segelstein, and with bassist Mark "Check-Out-the-Tattoos" Rubin to form the Youngers of Zion. Their new CD is called the Protocols. I'll save the lengthy explanation of these names for another day. Suffice to say, they'd make good fodder for one of our Computer Literacy website evaluation exercises. The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is an infamous phony tome, supposedly written by a cadre of Jewish elders dictating an international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

Audio books are cool

Ah, back from a wonderful break. We drove from Urbana to Boston to the Catskills and back. That gave us a lot of car time and we managed to fill it with three audio books. We started with Tony Hillerman's The First Eagle. Next came Janet Evanovich's Hard Eight (A Stephanie Plum Novel). Finally, we listened to Alexander McCall Smith's Morality for Beautiful Girls (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency).

I don't know what it is about listening to a book that is such a different experience from reading it. I felt utterly immersed in each one, and rather bereft as they ended. In particular, Morality for Beautiful Girls has stuck with me, most likely because the narrator, Lisette Lecat, does such a great job modulating her voice for the different characters and has mastered the musical Botswana accent.