This web site didn't display a women's history book every day in March, either; nor are all the March book links about women's history, although that could easily have been done...
A friend of Wendy Welch's recommended this book about "Islamist" violence and terrorism, which asserts that as many as 85% of the victims may be Muslims (of less extreme sects and/or different tribe than the violent ones). If you are in Big Stone Gap, please order this book through the Little Bookstore...the review did not contain a link that guarantees the bookstore its rightful commission. If you follow the Amazon link you'll see that the book's available in paperback, which is of course cheaper. I wanted to share the image of the hardcover copy because it's an example of the often overlooked, visually fascinating, use of abstract line and color in a culture that has traditionally frowned on representational visual art. Muslim artists weren't encouraged to draw pictures of people or animals so they created a genre of visual art that can be inspired purely by geometric shapes, or by Arabic writing and its potential for calligraphic decoration with an artistic balance of shapes.
Do you know a child called "Mackenzie" (or some variant spelling)? Doesn't everyone, these days? Do you know who made this name famous? Would you like to read about Alexander Mackenzie's explorations and how the river got to be named after him? I would.
Do I really want to read Sex Matters? I mean, for the content, not merely because Mona Charen has become sort of iconic? Thanks to the preview at @NRO , I know there are two possible reactions I'll have when I do read it. (1) "It's just another wail about how people who are not gender-confused like gender stereotypes"--which I think is misguided and misleading; most of us fit some of the gender stereotypes that floated around in the early twentieth century, and tend to be quite comfortable with those, while we don't fit others, and are quite comfortable with their disappearance (or wish it were happening faster). (2) "It starts with just another wail about how people who are not gender-confused like gender stereotypes, but then it goes on to make a fresh, valid case for individual choices that may validate some of the gender stereotypes that floated around in the early twentieth century while smashing others."
Like I, personally, could and almost do live in dresses with swishy skirts and natural waistlines; I'm more comfortable in a dress than I am in most of the cheap, badly fitted pajamas I've owned. Dresses rule. Too bad men have to wear trousers! But lipstick...to me, is not about femininity. It's a climate issue. During the few months I lived in Michigan I liked lipstick; the air was cold and dry enough that I didn't like being outdoors with bare-naked lips. On the East Coast, that air quality does not happen. The air is humid enough that I don't want anything in continuous contact with my skin. Lipstick feels icky and it also tends to melt and run down and ruin everything else women wear, and I think we need to find a better visual image for girliness, fast. In my part of the world I don't believe I've ever seen a woman who either really liked smearing icky-sticky-gooey-greasy-slime on her face, or looked better when she did.
The idea of an Asian Book Club doesn't seem to be taking off as quickly as I'd hoped. I don't know...we had a real surge of interest in books about China, locally, when a few people had adopted Chinese children, and I'd hoped it might grow into an interest in other faraway countries. We've never had an Asian-American population to speak of, in Gate City. That stereotype that Asian-Americans always and only work in "Chinese" restaurants? Mr. Gong used to hire non-Asians to staff the real Chinese-American restaurant in Kingsport. Had to, I heard. We remain uninformed about modern China--the Amy Tan, Gus Lee, Carolyn See novels we love being about China as it was a hundred years ago--and, unless we happen to know veterans who can share equally outdated memories about wartime Korea or Vietnam, the rest of the map of Asia is just a huge blur in our minds. And there are actually whole publishing imprints dedicated to eradicating this embarrassing level of uninformedness from rural America; dozens if not hundreds of Asian-Americans have stories to share. Here's a shiny new novel from Mao-era China:
Alice Walker recommends this one, which is about women's history. We all know Alice Walker is a left-winger who admired Fidel Castro, so it's unlikely that the book is a tribute to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's individualist or libertarian views...nevertheless: primary text about obscure historical figure:
Can you imagine the United States without California? L.B. Johnson, author of The Book of Barkley
, recommends (and contributed a story to):
The first e-mail actually received was about Tom DeWeese's new book, Sustainable.
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+Lyn Lomasi Rowell 's pick of thirteen shiny-new children's books...looks like a selection from the narrow field of the local library's New Books Shelf, and includes one book I definitely would not give to The Nephews even if they were still in its target age group...but it makes me want to read Cathleen Francisco's picture book, Oh the Things You Can See in the Dark.
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| Click this link to give Lyn Lomasi Rowell her rightful commission: |
Since I've yet to read Neverwhere I'm pleased to see that it's been reissued in an "Author's preferred text" edition, which includes a related short story.
Goodreads recommended this one; I don't own it, but I've read enough of it to be able to say, "That's why they're called Goodreads."
I think it's fair to describe Stephen King and James Patterson as "guy" authors. I've read most of Big Steve's books, and he is very very good at what he does, but the things he chooses to write about keep his fiction from ever getting onto my Top 100 list. Yet whenever I've set up a display of books, some man comes up and says, "Have you got any books by Stephen King?" And about one out of four of these guys, if they don't immediately buy whatever I have by Stephen King, will say, "...or James Patterson?" Guys, there are alternatives to those two authors. For one, consider Stephen King's son, who wanted his books to be on a separate shelf in large bookstores or libraries and so made the decision to write as "Joe Hill." (??? There was a real Joe Hill. He didn't write fiction.) He would really like his gritty, tough-minded, action-adventure-and-horror stories to be described in terms completely unrelated to Stephen King's stories. This is not possible. For my generation, if a work of fiction starts in what appears to be our world and then develops into terror, horror, and/or gross-outs, it's going to be described as "Stephen King's kind of thing." Here, with empathy for the writer known as Joe Hill, is a novel that's not new, but that a correspondent recommended.
Madeleine L'Engle's all-time best-selling novel, A Wrinkle in Time, has been chosen for this year's Disney movie with live actors, starring Storm Reid as Meg Murry, with Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon as two of her otherworldly visitors and time-travel instructors. Even the Disney version of Wrinkle ought to be fairly good, though I've felt that all Disney remakes were second-rate parodies of the original books. If you read the book you can debate me about this.
This one was a Correspondents' Choice for February...but it's still one. People who've rushed to buy it can't stop raving. I've received at least three more e-mails about Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man since last month's Correspondents' Choice post. So here it is again. Congratulations, Timothy Sandefur, you've obviously done something right. (Will somebody Out There who's read it please send your gently used copy to me?)
Thomas Sowell celebrates being 87 years old with a new book. From what Tom Woods reports (he says he's scanned but not completely read this book) it's a remix of data from the multi-volume historical study that made Sowell famous, but don't you have to salute anybody who's still remixing and rewriting data at the age of 87? For those who don't already know...if you normally avoid books about economics or books that contain a lot of numbers, Sowell is one of the very few gifted writers who can make that kind of book fun to read.
Northern, urban Appalachian studies:
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