Just Kids

Patti Smith

Celebrity autobiographies are an iffy proposition. This one grabs your with the first sentence and never lets go. No wonder it won a National Book Award.

Patti Smith arrived in New York on a Trailways bus with only a few dollars in her pocket and an old address of some friends she hoped to stay with. Instead she found Robert Mapplethorpe, then an unknown young aspiring artist. Together they worked their way up from homelessness to fame, or at least noteriety, and relative affluence.

You may recognize Robert Mapplethorpe's name. He was the artist who's work was used as an justification for an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989, led by then House Speaker and now Presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich. Mapplethorpe never received any NEA money. The controversy over an exhibition of his work that resulted in cuts to the NEA budget erupted about four months after Mapplethorpe's death.

Mapplethorpe's photographs were a deliberate attempt to make pornography an art form. His awakening to his own homosexuality, as well as the development of his artistic vision are central to this book.The opening chapter, as well as the end of the book deal with Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS. Smith does not attempt to gloss over or sugar coat his, or her own, participation in the sexual revolution that took place in the 1970's, or it's consequences. I'm sort of glad that I was so clueless that I missed the whole thing. You may want to have a serious conversation with your middle school age child before giving her this book to read.

Patti Smith came to New York believing that she was an artist, or maybe a poet. It was only through a series of accidents that she came to realize that she could be a rock star. Her musical debut occurred when she brought her friend, Lenny Kaye, along to play guitar at one of her poetry readings. She continues to produce drawings and publish poetry along side her musical career.

Smith and Mapplethorpe lived together in a room at the Chelsey Hotel in New York for a couple of years. At the Chelsey they met such people as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and saw Salvadore Dali stroll through the lobby. Many opportunities came to them through their association with the Chelsey.

Just Kids is not a "how I became a rock star" pot boiler. Smith's attention is very much on Mapplethorpe and the intense, if odd, relationship she had with him. Her premise is that the growth of his art, and hers, came directly out of this relationship. I get the impression that she feels it was worth the price of admission.

The Long Trail

My Life in the West
Ian Tyson
Ian Tyson of the sixties folk duo Ian and Sylvia, the seventies country rock band Great Speckled Bird and the authentic singing cowboy of the eighties wrote this memoir with the ghostwriterly help of fellow Canadian, Jeremy Klaszus. The book is an interesting blend of brutal honesty and self deceiving disingenuousness. Honest because Tyson admits that he wanted Sylvia out of his television show and musical career, so that he could be a solo act and disingenuous because he claims to believe that they just drifted apart due to lack of common interests.

Starting, briefly, with his childhood in Victoria British Columbia, the son of an Englishman who came to Canada to be a cowboy and became a life insurance salesman, Tyson wrote this book to establish his credentials, successfully, in my humble opinion as a genuine cowboy with the rights and privileges thereof, including the right to write and sing cowboy songs.  I think that at some time his authenticity has been questioned. He did make his show business start singing French Canadian folk songs and English ballads. Those critic, the ones that I imagine, were not aware of Tysons summer job at the age of fifteen running a pack string of horses into the mountains for a wilderness tour outfit or his youthful foray at horse breaking. Before he became half of Ian and Sylvia Ian Tyson was following in the footsteps of fellow Canadian, the western artist and author Will James.

Tyson admired Will James as a youth and followed his example in becoming a cowboy. In The Long Trail, Tyson is a bit disparaging of Jame's cowboy cred. I find that odd. They guy spent time in a Nevada jail for cattle rustling. How much more credible can you get? Did he have to be hanged? Being a Will James fan myself, I think that James has at least as much credibility ad Ian Tyson. Both came from Canadian non-ranching backgrounds to work with horses and cattle and quickly moved to other, more creative careers. Both retained their love of the cowboy life and used it in their art.

Tyson talks, in the book about the process of writing and recording his cowboy songs.  I recommend putting a copy of one of Tyson's cowboy albums, perhaps Cowboyography or And Stood There Amazed in the CD player while reading this book. It will get you in the mood.

This post is in the 71st

Published at Colloquium.

Bird Cloud

Annie Proulx

Although she won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, Annie Peoulx didn't become a hot property until her novel The Shipping News (2001 and her short story Brokeback Mountain (2005) were made into movies. What she did with the money she made from those movie deals was to buy a section (640 acres or one square mile) of land in Wyoming and build herself a house on it. Once the house was well under way she realized that she wouldn't be able to live there in the winter because the county doesn't plow her road when it snows.


Bird Cloud, the name Proulx gave to her new property, has the North Platte river running through and contains the mouth of Jack Creek, named after Ute Jack, a Ute Indian of some small renown. I can't seem to find the place on Google Maps. There is a cover photo of the magnificent high cliff which Proulx's new house overlooks, across the river but still on the property. We're talking some serious real estate here.

Proulx bought the land from The Nature Conservancy. She is critical of that organization for it's failure to keep the neighboring ranches' cattle of of the overgrazed section and implies, in the book, that The Nature Conservancy is a front for cattle business interests. The fact that her six miles of expensive barbed wire fence don't succeed in keeping those cows off the land lead me to suspect that this issue may have had a role in The Nature Conservancy's putting the land up for sale in the first place. I'm thinking that they concluded that it was best to spend their finite resources on something other than a futile effort to build the perfect fence.

The book begins with a bit of history of Annie Proulx's French Canadian and New England Yankee parents and ancestors, going back briefly to the 17th century. She quickly brings the book around to the main subject, which could be read as a textbook on how not to build a house. This is important to me because I am in the beginning stages of a house construction project of my own. It's not my first, though. I gather it was hers.

Except for taking more than two years to build and running over budget by a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and that little thing about the snowplowing, Proulx got just what she asked for in her house. She remains friends with her  general contractor, an important thing, since he often comes and plows her out when it snows heavily before she heads south to New Mexico for the winter. (It seems to happen every year) Not so much the concrete finisher(s).

It is a wonderful place, with elk,  coyotes, bald eagles, golden eagles, pre-Columbian dwelling sites and stone (for tools) quarry and lots of rich history. I would love to visit. If the author would like to extend an invitation . . .

This post is in the 68th

Published at Imagineering.

With Reckless Abandon

Memoirs of a Boat-Obsessed Life
Capt. Jim Sharp

Bilbo Baggins warned us to beware when setting foot on a road, because you never know when and where you might get swept away. This advice also, obviously applies to setting foot on a boat. Jim Sharp, son of a jazz musician turned payday lender, went in with some friends to buy an old, plywood trailer sailor to launch at the Jersey shore and ended up owning a fleet of windjammers in Camden Maine.


Between 1953 and 2006 Jim Sharp's boat obsession led to his ownership of an impressive list of old, mostly wooden, boats. I count 35 of them, from 14' to 120' in length. Some were schooners, others tugboats. One was a Norwegian coastal freighter, another a Dutch canal boat. He wore out his welcome with two wives in the process of buying, running and selling all these boats. He also managed to make some sort of a living from them.

A friend lent me this book, which he got from the author, now master of a maritime museum up there in the Moon Pie state. I found it the perfect book to stoke my Spring fever.

My Father at 100

A Memoir
Ron Reagan

All the recent hoopla over Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, including a multi-part documentary extravaganza on PBS has helped to propel My Father at 100 to the NY times bestseller list, where it currently sits at number 24 for nonfiction, a long way down from No.1, currently occupied by Donald Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown, in which, hopefully, we will finally learn what the difference is between a known unknown and an unknown unknown - or is it known unknown and an unknown known?

 Ron Reagan is Ronald and Nancy's youngest child who, like his sister, Patti Davis, holds many views on political, moral and religious matters that are in conflict with those espoused by their father. Nonetheless, in this memoir, Ron shows a great love for his father. The personal, en famille, anecdotes Reagan tells give My Father at 100 an intimacy no other biography could have. - Ronald Reagan used to dive to the bottom of the swimming pool with young Ron riding on his back; Ronald Reagan nearly crashed his jeep dragging a trailer load of stone over a steep hill on the ranch, three times in a row, all along refusing to take a slightly longer and more level route.

Ron Reagan said in the book that he suspects, in hindsight, that there were signs of impending Alzheimer's disease in the President which began to show after the assassination attempt by by John Hinckley. The fact that the 70 year old was recovering from a near fatal shooting while doing what is arguably the most stressful job in the world may be an alternative explanation, though. Reagan's management style was always to delegate important functions and trust his subordinates with them. This did make his seem disengaged. Ron is not suggesting that his father was off his rocker or incompetent during either term of his presidency.

According to his son, Ronald Reagan's best job was as a lifeguard on the Rock River in Illinois, which he did, summers through most of high school and college. Rescuing people was what Reagan loved to do. He made 77 rescues in his lifeguarding career. Ron Reagan believes that his father enjoyed playing the part of the hero in his movies but relished more being the actual hero at Lowell Park more and saw his role as President as one of rescuing America from big government, rescuing the world from nuclear war, rescuing democracy from the threat of Communism.

He does point out a few important things which our current crop of tax cutting legislators should be aware of. Early in his first term Reagan got an income tax cut through Congress, but, later in his term in office, much of those taxes were restored because it was realized that Reagan's economics really were "voodoo" and the deficit was growing out of control. I have heard people say, (on NPR! ) that every time the income tax is cut it results in an increase in revenue, due to economic growth that is stimulated by the tax cut. Guess what? When you lower your prices below the cost of production you lose money no matter how much of it you sell, Milo Minderbender notwithstanding. In fact, almost every time that this tactic has been tried, including the original Reagan tax cuts, and most certainly the current "Bush tax cut," it has resulted in a shortfall in revenues, just like the math says it should.

Tunesmith

Inside the Art of Songwriting
Jimmy Webb

The author of By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, and MacArthur Park, Jimmy Webb should know something about the art and business of songwriting. Tunesmith is part pop psychology self help book, part memoir and part music theory and poetry writing textbook. That is a lot to cram into a 422 page trade paperback.


What got me started reading this book was a comment by Steven Sondheim on NPR's Fresh Air that he, of course, used a rhyming dictionary when writing songs. I had thought that those rhymes just fell out of his mouth like pearls, I guess. Looking for a good rhyming dictionary on Amazon.com led me to a list of songwriting books, including this one.

I have to disagree with Webb in his preference for perfect rhymes over the more interesting, IMHO, false rhyme, which he deplores - and also employs on occasion. Back in the day when I was an English major, using all perfect rhymes was considered a sign of immature, singsongey writing. Oh right, he is talking about writing pop songs.

The chapter on music theory is mostly wasted. Either you read music at a level where you already know the material he is covering or it's gibberish to you. I have a collection of music theory textbooks, some of which I have even read, but my music reading is pretty well limited to lead sheets. When he puts a three staff piano score under my nose, my eyes glaze over. I guess that guy who teaches the easy way to play piano on PBS wasn't around when Jimmy wrote this book.

I enjoyed reading about Jimmy Webb's adventures at Motown West, hanging out with Johnny Rivers and working with Art Garfunkle. His tales of wrongdoing on the part of record labels and music publishers are valuable lessons for the aspiring songwriter.

The music industry is a far different landscape now than when he started out in the early 1960s and was changing rapidly in the 1990s, when Webb wrote this book. His ideal of writing songs and pitching them to artists, producers and label executives is long dead, except perhaps in Nashville. I know that there is an Amway like organization which feeds songs from people all over the country into some inner sanctum in music city, where the high priests of country music choose songs for the big hats to record. I've met a few people on the bottom rung of that ladder. These days you have to be your own performer, producer, executive and have your own Facebook fan club if you want your songs to be heard.

My only problem with Tunesmith is that I have one of Jimmy Webb's songs stuck in my head. "Wouldn't you like to ride in my beautiful, my beautiful baloooooon."

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Keywords: memoir, music industry, songwriting, Jimmy Webb

Half Empty

David Rakoff

The grizzled, cigar chewing editor, who bore a striking resemblance to Parry White, as played by John Hamilton in the 1960's TV series The Adventures of Superman, slammed his hand down on his desk and groweled "Rakoff, go find me another David Sedaris!" Young David Rakoff spent the next month hiding behind stacks of over the transom manuscripts, for which it was his job to write polite rejection letters, wondering where he could find another diminutive, gay, jewish writer of amusing vignettes, who arrived in New York from the boonies with stars in his eyes, only to find himself cleaning houses for a living.


As the deadline approached he grew ever more desperate. Finally one Thursday night, Rakoff, who was cleaning his closet, rediscovered a manuscript which he had written himself, when he first arrived in New York from his native Canada. "Hey, I'm short, gay and Canadian. Why can't I be the next David Sedaris?" he thought to himself. He had been so hopeful, expecting to make it big as a writer, just like Garrison Keillor, except short, gay, Canadian and without a radio show. The next day he slipped his manuscript into the middle of a pile of mediocre over the transoms, and brought them to Parry's office. Take a look at these, chief. I think there might be a Sedaris in this stack.

On Monday morning Rakoff crept into the office, filled with trepidation.  "Great Caesar's Ghost!" Cried the editor, "Bring me the author of this piece at once!" He was holding David Rakoff's manuscript in his huge, ham-like fist. "That's my work sir," said Rakoff.  "Well son, you're fired! And now you are an author. Here's your $100,000 advance," said the editor with a smile.

This is not how David Rakoff became a published author, as far as I know. At any rate Half Empty is his third book, he did labor in the vineyards of publishing for several years and he now claims to make his living by sitting up in his room scribbling away with a no. 2 pencil.

David Rakoff's philosophy of life, main source of comedic material and raison d'etre appears to be the power of negative thinking. This despite surviving a childhood as a "big fag" and two (or was it three?) bouts with cancer as an adult. He says that being kvetchingly funny was, and is, a survival mechanism. Now he gets paid for it, just like Woody Allen.

Half Empty is a series of stories from Rakoff's life, or a very small volume in a long autobiography, built on the new Mark Twain plan, in which the author goes off on whatever topic strikes his fancy until exhausted and then takes another tack. I found it to be quietly chuckling funny in many places and soberingly touching in others. His stories are both tongue in cheek and sincerely real.

As to the question of whether he is another David Sedaris I can only quote the elf in the Christmas gift factory at the North Pole, in The Polar Express, which I watched with my daughter over the weekend: "What are they, mishugenah?"

This post is in the 60th



Published at Atticus Books.


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keywords: memoir, David Rakoff, non-fiction

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and other editors of the Mark Twain Project
The complete and authoritative edition
Volume one

The long awaited first volume of Mark Twain's unabridged autobiography is a great fat doorstop of a book that the casual reader might avoid trying to tackle. In fact more than a third of the volume is taken up by various editorial introductions and explanatory notes that can be safely ignored in favor of the actual words of the great man. This makes it a much easier read than it, at first, appears.

Twain's plan for this autobiography was to dictate his reminiscences to a shorthand secretary. He allowed himself to talk about whatever subject came to his mind at the moment and put it into the book in just that order. It is just the plan that you use when you go after your grandfather with a tape recorder and demand that he say something for posterity. If you keep at it long enough you will have a vast collection of anecdotes which cover a good part of the old man's life and some of it will be true.  This is a good plan, a reasonable plan, which saved a great deal of effort on the part of the author. It makes it a bit hard for the reader, but if you've already read Albert Bigelow Paine's biography, Charles Neider's version of the autobiography or the new one by Fred Kaplan, or even Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It, you will get along just fine.
Twain says that he would like future autobiographies to follow the format that he has created for his. We may have to wait another hundred years to see if his advice will be taken.


The point of waiting a hundred years for the publication of this tome is to allow Twain to say what he really thought on any subject or about any person without fear of offending someone he knows. He must have thought it would take a century to cool down the public reaction to his views on religion, although there is nothing in this volume of the autobiography that comes close to what appeared in Letters From the Earth, which was published soon after his death.


I would like to quote Twain on the subject of Book Reviewers: "A generation ago, I found out that the latest review of a book was pretty sure to be a reflection of the earliest review of it; that whatever the first reviewer found to praise or censure in the book would be repeated in the latest reviewer's report, with nothing fresh added.  . . .  I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades and that it has no real value - certainly no large value." I came to the same conclusion about my second year as an English major. Somehow I persevered long enough to get a BA.

Now that I have written my piece I can go read Garrison Kiellor's pan of the autobiography in the New York Times. My policy is never to be influenced by other reviewers by the simple device of not reading them until it's too late.

This post is in the 59th



Published at Colloquium.

UPDATE:

News has reached me that NewSouth Books, a publishing house in Alabama is bringing out new sanitized editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the long controversial word "nigger" will be replaced with "slave" and in which Injun Joe will be referred to as "Indian Joe." The publisher's stated goal is to get the books back into classrooms in which they have been dropped from the curriculum due to complaints about the use of those terms.

I know that this has been an issue decades. I have always thought that those who wanted to ban the books were ignorant people who had never read them or who were incapable of understanding what they read. I'm sure that am Clemens is spinning in his grave over this bowdlerization of his work. What do you think?

P.S. Do you suppose that this is where George Lucas go the idea for Indiana Jones?

Note: Even though this was posted in December of 2010, I cheated just a little bit and submitted this as my "best of 2011" blog post in the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup. Click the link and see what a lot of bloggers think was their best post of the year.
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keywords Mark Twain, autobiography, memoir

Skipjack

The Story of America's Last Sailing Oystermen
Christopher White


Skipjack is one of a growing genre of non fiction books in which the author does something intersting for a year or so in order to write a book about it. Christopher White, a native of Baltimore, MD, moved to Tilghman Island, on the Eastern Shore, and sailed with, sometimes working as a crewman, on some of the last working skipjacks.

A Skipjack is shallow draft wooden boat, with center board and a single mast, sloop rigged, with an enormously long boom and an immense spread of sail. By law, they have no engine on board, but use a small push boat, which is carried on davits at the stern and lowered into the water when used and is operated from the stern of a skipjack. Imagine an eight foot rowboat with a huge V8 truck engine in it, tied to the back of a 40 foot sailboat and pushing it along. Skipjacks lower dredges to the bottom and scrape up oysters which are dumped onto the deck and sorted by hand. Maryland law allows dredging under power only two days a week, so most days dredging is done under sail.

White did an excellent job of capturing the sound of Eastern Shore speech. Dredge is pronounced "drudge" oysters are either "orsters" or "arsters," depending on whether the speaker is from Tilghman or Deale island. Fish are "feesh" and "either" is a multi-purpose word. "We lose a couple of drudge boats either year" he quotes Wade Murphy, captain of the Rebecca T Ruark, a skipjack built in 1896 and still sailing, now taking tourists out for short cruises. At the time of White's residence on Tilgman, in the 1990's, Murphy was still dredging with Rebecca and White crewed with him often.

Chesapeak Bay oysters are under assault from two diseases, MSX, which kills oysters in the more saline waters of the lower bay and Derma, which thrives in the brackish waters of the upper bay. Losses due to these two diseases are aggravated by over harvesting as watermen try to stay in business with a declining resource, using power dreding and "patent tongs," a kind of marine steam shovel. To extract as many oysters as they can before they all die. In the spring and summer, oystermen are hired by the state of Maryland to plant oyster shells and "spat," larval oysters, on the depleted oyster beds.

Skipjack does a good job of capturing the flavor of life on the Eastern Shore, the language of it's people and the difficulty of making a living in a dying industry. I have lived on the Shore for the past 27 years and seen it change from a land of independent working watermen to one of pleasure boats and condominiums. I even built some condos myself. I must be getting old, because I long for the good old days.
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This post is part of the 58th Book Review Blog Carnival, hosted by The Book Frog. You can still be part of the fun if you have a book review you would like to share.

Copy the code in the text box below and go to your blog's edit tab. Paste the code in at the bottom of your book review post and save it (publish). Then enter the URL of that post, along with it's title and you blog's name in the form here. The ferris wheel graphic will appear on your post with a link to the carnival (and one to this blog) and your review will be linked from this post. I'm still working on a way of adding a Mister Linky script to the hosting blog.

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This post appears in in the



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keywords: Skipjack, Eastern Shore, Chesapeake Bay, watermen

The Routes of Man

How Roads Change the World and How We Live Today
Ted Conover

One might expect a dull, academic, sociological treatise based on the subtitle but fear not, The Routes of Man is a collection of road trips made by the author over the years, magazine article assignment reworked into a fun, informative and easy to read book.

Conover begins the book with a ride over the Andes mountains in Peru in the cab of a truck hauling mahogany logs. They also carry passengers on top of the load. The highest part of the mountain road is unpaved, filled with switchbacks and unguarded dropoffs and single lane encounters with vehicles coming the other way. Peru is building a modern highway to connect the Amazon basin and Brazil with the Pacific coast, which will make this trip much faster and easier and help to denude the rain forest even faster.

Conover takes a walk on a frozen river in Kashmir with a group of Kashmiri outh who are headed to boarding school. Walking out on the ice is an annual ritual for people from these remote villages, near the Tibetan border.  India is slowly building a road, which will eventually allow the villagers to walk down from the mountains without fear of falling through thin ice. That's a good thing, except that it will also bring the Indian and Pakistani armies closer together, right in their home.

He then takes a ride from Mombasa, Kenya into Uganda, also on a truck. This is the route famous for spreading aids across east Africa. The driver and his "turnboy" are willing participants in this process.

He then visits the West Bank, where he goes through several Israeli army checkpoints. It's easier for an American journalist than for a Palestinian college professor to go through them.

Conover takes a ride on new Chinese superhighways with a "self driving" club.

The road trips are interrupted by a chapter on the evolutionary growth of Broadway, starting with a Wickquasgeck Indian foot path.

Finally, Conover rides with an ambulance crew in Lagos Nigeria. A Lagos ambulance is sort of a mobile first aid station, as people have no other access to medical care and the roads are so congested that they can't get anyone to a hospital anyway.

In each chapter there is a bit  of discussion about how change is inevitably coming down the road.  This is news?
This post is in the 47th



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keywords: memoir, journalism, travel

The Mayor of McDougal Street

a Memoir
Dave Van Ronk
with Elijah Wald

This book was originally envisioned as a history of the Greenwich Village folk music scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dave and Elijah were planning to collaborate on it, using Elijah's research skills, and Dave's memory and rye sense of humor. Soon after work began, with only a few scribbled notes on Dave's part and a couple of hours of interviews under Elijah's belt, Dave was diagnosed with cancer and went into a rapid decline. Rather than abandon the project Elijah used all of the written and filmed interviews and recorded stage patter he could find from Dave's career to put together the book in Dave's own words.

Since I have them, let me tell my own two Dave Van Ronk stories. In 1970, I think it was, I saw Dave perform at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. He sang Cocaine Blues among other songs and with his gravely Brookynese voice his slouching posture and his scruffy appearance he was so effective that I wondered how he had managed to survive so long. Dave would have been 34 years old at the time.

Back in the late '90s I had the privilege of doing sound for Dave at a concert. I was used to spending an hour or more tweaking the EQ for people like Tom Rush and Livingston Taylor, eventually getting everything back to just about the way I started, to satisfy them with their sound. Dave sat down on his stool, strummed a few chords, sang about half a chorus of a song and mumbled, "That sound pretty good to me," got up and went to the green room. I don't envy Elijah's listening to hours of concert recordings for the stage patter. Dave loved to talk and told great stories about where he learned songs, but he mumbled softly, paying no attention to mic placement. His singing was loud and on mic so it was hard to hear him while he rambled on.

Elijah Wald soldiered on, though, an put together an interesting and coherent story of Dave's experience, of becoming a folksinger despite himself, living in his native New York but miles away from his mother's home across the east river. Dave dropped out of high school and gradually moved in to the Village, sleeping on floors and couches in other people's apartments. He wanted to play jazz in the worst way and put together a band which did. He played banjo because guitar was not considered authentic enough for a trad jazz band. Dave calls himself a "moldy fig" in jazz parlance of the time, as opposed to those awful beboppers playing their incomprehensible stuff. Incidentally Dave says in the book that he was insufferable about it.

As time went by, Dave realized that he was not going to be able to make a living playing Dixieland banjo and he went back to the guitar to become a solo act. He played his traditional jazz songs, plus others that he learned from other guitarists in Washington Square on Sunday afternoons. By default Dave became a folksinger. He hated that title.

There are many stories in the book about Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Rev. Gary Davis, Peter Paul and Mary - just about everybody that was part of that scene, all told by Dave in his own words, not to mention old time jazz musicians like Clarence Williams, who had recorded Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong back in the 1920's doing songs that Clarence wrote. It must have been a nightmare, or a labor of love for Elijah Wald, a former guitar student of Dave's and a long time friend, to find and write down all of Dave's stories of the time. It makes fascinating reading. For a video of Dave singing a Bessie Smith song and a snippet of his reminiscences, go to my music blog here.

Don't Shoot! We're Republicans!

Memoirs of the FBI Agent Who Did Things His Way
Jack Owens

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend I'll say it clear
I'll state my case of which I'm certain
I've lived a life that's full
I traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this
I did it my way
(Jacques Revaux, Paul Anka, Gilles Thibaut and Claude Francois)

Which of course he didn't or he would have quickly been out of a job. Don't Shoot! We're Republicans! is a memoir of his career in the FBI by an agent who retired after 30 years of service. He made some arrests without calling for backup and once used an old yellow Volkswagen and a pair of jeans to get close enough to a fugitive to grab him. He did need a haircut in the '70s, but then who didn't? Jack Owens writes with self depreciating humor and expresses some strong opinions. He is especially opinionated about the relative merits of the several FBI directors that he worked under. J. Edgar Hoover topping the list. Owens joined the FBI in 1969, while Hoover was still alive. Hoover had headed the FBI since the late 1920s and was famous for the demands he put on his agents; white shirts, blue suits, wing tip shoes and no coffee in the office. He was also famous for blackmailing members of Congress and dressing up in women's clothes, but Owens doesn't believe any of that. He liked directors that had been field agents and not those that were appointed despite a lack of law enforcement experience. Who would have guessed?

Owens stories of chasing down fugitives, cosying up to Soviet spies and subduing rioting federal prisoners with the SWAT team are well told and interesting. He gives the impression that every day is an adventure, glossing over the long hours of report writing and unproductive cold call interviews. He does mention the reports in passing and a few stake outs in his BuCar (Bureau car). Did I mention there is a lot of FBI jargon in the book?

I discovered through Google search that Jack Owens was briefly on the 1993 season of the CBS "reality" show Big Brother. The news of his being voted out of the house still reverberates through the reality show bulletin boards. Perhaps Owens was more of a loose cannon than thought.

The title of the book comes from a story of a road block, where a group of blue haired old ladies is rousted out their car at gunpoint. They had been driving right behind the suspect and were at first thought to be accomplices. I don't think Owens would have shot them, even if they had been Democrats.

Long Quiet Highway

Waking Up In America
Natalie Goldberg

"People would rather read about how to become a writer than read the actual products of writing: poems, novels, short stories," says Natalie Goldberg in the opening chapter of this, her third and, I think best, memoir. Her first two bestsellers, Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind, are disguised as how to books for aspiring writers, so she should know what she is talking about when she says this, laughing all the way to the bank. Perhaps reading about how to write is related to watching cooking shows on television while ordering takeout. The idea of cooking, the idea of writing are appealing. The hard work, not so much.

In Long Quiet Highway Goldberg goes into much more detail about her journey from her Long Island childhood to a career as a writing coach in New Mexico and as a student of Zen Buddhism in, of all places, Minneapolis. She talks about her writing practice and teaching methods without prescribing them and ties her methods in to her meditation practice and study with Dainin Katagiri Roshi at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center.

There is a great contrast between Goldberg's exposition of the practice and the benefits of Zen meditation and the "ancient secrets" that Dan Brown describes in his novel The Lost Symbol. Granted, Brown's book is fiction and deals with the Judeo Christian tradition, yet when Goldberg describes her exploration of Judaism, she finds a direct similarity to what she was taught by Katagiri, not some kabbalistic mumbo jumbo. The inner peace and sense of belonging in the world, the rightness, that she discovers in the zendo, is the same thing that she finds in the ritual practices of Judaism. Neither is easy, though. Both take a lot of work.

Just do your practice for it's own sake, just be who you are with no expectation of reward, these are the lessons Goldberg brings to her book. The hard work, to her, is it's own reward. Getting up a four in the morning to walk six blocks to the Zen center in mid Minnesota winter and sit on a wood floor. This is her work and she learns to love it. Sitting down every day for several hours with a pen and a notebook and putting words down on the pages without pre-judgment is also her work. Somehow Goldberg makes books happen this way but you'll need to read the other two books to learn how.

Roads to Quoz

An American Mosey
William Least Heat Moon

William Least Heat Moon is best known for his travel journals Blue Highways and River Horse. This newest book, which came out in 2008, is sewn together from his notes from years of visits to various places in the United States. It lacks the coherence of the others, because it is not the narrative of a single purposeful, or even purposeless journey. Nevertheless it is an enjoyable read from the millennial era's answer to Charles Kuralt. It is perfect for inducing Spring fever.

Quoz is a made-up word which Heat Moon defines as: Anything, anywhere. living or otherwise, connecting a human to existence and bringing an individual into the cosmos and integrating one with the immemorial, thereby making each life belong to creation, and so preventing the divorce of one from the all which brought it into being. Heat Moon is blowing smoke up out collective skirts with this fancy definition of his fancy word. Suffice it to say that he likes odd and interesting stuff, especially if it's old. He is able to tease a story out of each discovery. If I have any criticism of Roads to Quoz beyond it's scattershot nature it would be Heat Moon's attempt to make much out of the letter Q. His wife is known in the book as Q, rather than her name, and he makes up more than a few words which start with that letter and showers the reader with them and other Q words more grounded in the English language. By the end of chapter one this rhetorical flurry settles down to a drizzle however and it didn't kill my enjoyment of the book.

Heat Moon and Q meet many interesting people in Arkansas, Northern Louisiana, Northeast Pennsylvania, the Florida Panhandle, New Hampshire and I've probably left out a few more places. oh yes, the intercoastal waterway starting in Baltimore and going all the way down to Florida. I think that the intercoastal could have made a book by itself if he had done it in River Horse and not as a passenger on a commercial vessel. Next time, maybe.

Book Review Blog Carnival Number Five

Welcome to the Book Review Blog Carnival. Every other Sunday the carnival appears, like Brigadoon, on some blog somewhere, with links to book reviews all around the world. If you write book reviews on your blog we would love to have you participate. Submissions can be made at Carnival Dot Com for the next carnival, which will be published on December 7th at Imaginary Lands.

We have a large group of book reviews for you today.

In Fiction:

Marina, of Momma Writes About Books reviews The Blessing Way the first in Tony Hillerman's Navajo Police mysteries.

Marina has also reviewed The Pearl Diver, by Jeff Talarigo. This is the story of a Japanese woman who is sent to a leper colony, where she loses her identity and becomes a caregiver for the other patients.

Coralie writes about Stephen King's The Stand in her blog Happily Oblivious. It's a post apocalyptic story in which the cause of the mass die-off of humanity is an accidental release of a biological warfare germ by the U.S. government. Oops!

Ruth Schaller at Books Books and more Books read The Family Bones by Kimberly Raiser. If you inherit a property in a small town with a name like Astral, just call a realtor. It will save you trouble.

Charli was unimpressed by Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. Find out why at Bloody-Kisses.org.

Alessandra, of Out of the Blue, has found the winner of the best title award with her review of The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things by Carolyn Mackler.

Serena Trowbridge reviews Susannah Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu on her blog, Culture and Anarchy. Culture I get, but anarchy?

Serena Trowbridge also read The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, which is a story of the Queen (yes, that one) discovering the wonders of literature at the bookmobike.

NathanKP of Inkweaver Review writes about Things Hoped For, by Andrew Clements., a science fantasy mystery novel.

NathanKP also reviewed Un Lun Dun by China Miéville. This book is a through the looking glass journey from London to it's opposite - Un Lun Dun. Get it?

Heather J. of Age 30+ ... A Lifetime of Books has a review of the classic Jules Verne novel The Mysterious Island! Verne, or the translator, or Heather seems to have used a lot of exclamation points!

Tanya, of Children's Books: What, When & How to Read Them predicts that Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson will win the National Book Award for young people's literature. That happened Wednesday, so now we know, but, really, she predicted it before.

Jason Isbell, writing in Tired Garden, reviews Shade by John Olson, which is not a gardening book.

switch2life thinks that The 3 Mistakes of My Life. is so similar to author Chetan Bhagat's other books that Bhagat must use some kind of software to grind out books like sausage, although sausage may not be the kind of image an Indian novelist would want to be associated with.

Jeanne, from Necromancy Never Pays read Cycler by Lauren McLaughlin', which is not about bicycle racing. It is the story of a girl, Jill who becomes a boy, inevitably Jack, for a few days each month. How inconvenient.

Alyce reviews My Lady of Cleves by Margaret Campbell Barnes on At Home With Books. It's the story of Henry VIIIths wife number four. Henry could learn a lot from Larry King.

Kindlelicious would like to recommend Chris Moriarty's Spin Control. That is if you have a Kindle to read it on.

Keira writes, in Love Romance Passion, about her favorite book, Sleepless at Midnight by Jacquie D’Alessandro. I lie awake at night sometimes, too, but nobody writes romance novels about me. (With good reason)


In Non- Fiction:

Marina, of Momma Writes About Books has a short review of The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron. I took the self-test on Elaine's website. Not surprisingly, I scored "insensitive boor."

Barry Wright III has submitted a review of an ebook, The Life Uncommon by Nacie Carson, on his blog 3style life. No word on what has happened to Barry Wrights I and II at this time.

Woman Tribune reviewed The Wilde Women by Paula Wall. Even during the depression, Wilde women don't get the blues.

Nigel Beale, of Nigel Beale Nota Bene Books has discovered The Idler's Glossary a book about creative idleness. It could be a manual for bloggers, at least according to my wife, who wishes I would get up and do something useful.

Christina M. Rau reviews Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno on her blog Livin' The Dream (One Loser At A Time) . Are the MSP (mainstream publishers) missing out on a good thing?

Mike Bergin has written a review of The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts, which I thought at first must have something to do with President Johnson but, as it turns out, is a literary journal with a birding bent. LBJ = "Little Brown Job" which is an oblique refrence to what I have heard of as LGBs or "little gray birds," a term of art in the Audubon set. OK, so it's not really a book. You can find the review on Mike's blog 10,000 Birds.

Corey Finger, also writing at 10,000 Birds, has reviewed Birds: The Art of Ornithology by Jonathan Elphick, which contains 300 color illustrations from the Natural History Museum in London. They're pictures of birds, Hon.

Laurie Bartels reviews Neuroplasticity and the Brain That Changes Itself on SharpBrains: Your Window into the Brain Fitness Revolution by Norman Doidge. I need to get me some of that.

GrrlScientist of Living the Scientific Life has read Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe. Oy, life wasn't complicated enough?

Dolfin from Lionden Landing submitted a review of Yoga Planet: 50 Fun Activities for a Greener World by Tara Guber and Leah Kalish,
Illustrated by Sophie Fatus, formerly known as My Daddy Is a Pretzel. I think I would have stuck with the first title.

Jim Murdoch reviews The Paris Review Interviews Vol. III , in which Martin Amis is quoted as saying All writers are Martians. Does that include bloggers?

Tim Gebhart, of A Progressive on the Prairie has a review of I Hate New Music by Dave Thompson. Thompson posits that rock music died in 1978 from an overdose of technology. I always thought it had something to do with a Chevy and a levy, oh well.

LAL wrote a review ofBook Review: Investing for Dummies for the blog LivingAlmostLarge. I wouldn't be caught dead reading a"For Dummies" book. I don't want to make to obvious.

Manoj reviews The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil on Unreal Blog. Could a computer like "Hal" be built some day, that possesses consciousness? Do we really have consciousness? Can I have a ham sandwich?

Callista has discovered a book about book bloggers, The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs by Rebecca Gillieron & Catheryn Kilgarriff. She completes the circle by blogging about the book about bloggrs who blog about books at her blog SMS Book Reviews.

Liz Fetter reviews Art History For Your Children, a series of 48 titles, on many many different artists from every period in art history, on her blog Power In Art . There must be a mail in certificate for a PHD diploma in the back of the last volume.

Coralie writes in Happily Oblivious writes about Ten Men Dead by David Beresford, which deals with the 1981 hunger strike by IRA prisoners at Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland.

Douglas Karr of The Marketing Technology Blog writes about The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t" by Robert Sutton.

A last minute entry, Barry Wright III, of 3stylelife just finished reading The Sociology of Taste by Jukka Gronow. Is taste innate, he asks? Tell it to my plaid pants, I say. Still no word from Barry Wright I and II.

A Freewheelin' Time

A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties
Suze Rotolo

The photo on the cover of this book is instantly recognizable, to persons of a certain age, as the cover photo on the 1963 Colombia Records album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan." The author is in fact the young girl shown clinging to the arm of the soon to be famous singer-songwriter. Susan "Suze" Rotolo was a seventeen year old emancipated minor, house sitting a friend's apartment in New York's Greenwich Village when, in 1961, Robert Zimmerman arrived from Minnesota and began to invent the mythical character we know as Bob Dylan.

Rotolo's memoir gives an interesting insight into the process and into the mind of the developing artist that became Bob Dylan. Memory being a tricky thing, however, she begins the book with a disclaimer: Secrets remain. Their traces go deep, and with all due respect I keep them with my own. The only claim I make for writing a memoir of that time is that it may not be factual, but it is true.

Keeps them with her own what? Dylan like she doesn't say. Like a poet, like Dylan himself, Rotolo's language sometime eludes understanding. This book was definitely not ghost written. I bears the marks of a non-professional, veering from one subject to another unexpectedly, leaving the reader wondering what just happened. Fragmented sentences and abandoned thoughts pepper the narrative. In a perverse way, this is perfect for a memoir about a time spent with this master of evasion and misdirection.

Rotolo was a red diaper baby. The passages that deal with her own family, her involvement with radical politics in the 1960s and her visit to Cuba, as a test of the travel ban imposed on American citizens, could have been expanded into a book themselves, if she had never met Bob Dylan. Another book certainly could be written about the folksingers, Pete Seeger, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Ian & Sylvia, who wander in and out of her Dylan centered story. The story of her work in the avant-guarde off off Broadway theater could make a third. Perhaps a career as a memoirist is being born here.

What this memoir is, though, is an impression, looking back 40 years in memory, of a time when a young man and a young woman were embroiled in a moment of extreme pressure and confusion and the way that they tried, with difficulty to deal with it. Some things are glossed over and some things are left unsaid.

Princess

A man's affair with a boat
Joe Richards
Susan Richards, Pub.
JoeRichardsPrincess.com



Years ago, my friend Johnson, the man with two last names, lent me an old yellowed hardback book called "Princess, New York." He told me that I had to read it and that it was a great story of an artist, who had bought a 60 year old Friendship sloop at the tail end of the great depression and sailed away in it, looking for an island. Johnson is a lover of old crankity wooden boats. He has one of his own that is just turning 44 this year, which keeps him gainfully employed in order to pay the repair bills.

Eventually Johnson got the idea to find the boat "Princess" and have it restored and put in a museum somewhere. He made a lot of telephone calls and even traveled to Florida, the last known location of the boat, to no avail. He did meet Joe Richards' daughter Susan, though, and his obsessive behavior regarding "Princess" gave her the idea that a new edition of the book was in order.

Johnson was right about one thing. "Princess" is one heck of a good read. Joe Richards was an artist, living in New York who discovered, on Long Island, the ruins of an old sloop, built in the 1870s in Friendship Maine. He bought the thing and then found himself learning the craft of wooden boat repair. Eventually Richards set off down the inter-coastal waterway, headed for Florida and an as yet to be discovered island, where he would live happily ever after- or something.

The book is a well written memoir of an impractical quest for an undefined goal, interrupted by the Second World War. There are many asides, stories of adventures in the merchant marine during the war, as Richards tell the tale of his journey down the inter-coastal to Florida.

In book II, when Richards has acquired a wife and two children, he decides to escape New York for Key Biscayne, bringing his family and sailboat along with him. In this book the mysterious island, or at least an island, is finally discovered.

There are several small color prints of Joe Richards' paintings in the book as well. The book cover illustration above is a fair example. Take a peek at the website JoeRichardsPrincess.com for more examples.

Driving Mr. Albert

A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain
Michael Paterniti
The Dial Press
ISBN: 0-385-3300-5

If there is a greater waste of time than taking Einstein's brain, in two Tupperware containers, on a cross country road trip, it could only be removing that brain during an autopsy in order to discover the source of Einstein's genius. Thomas Harvey, defrocked pathologist, did both of these things. He dedicated his life to them, in fact. Paterniti became his enabler, by going to interview Harvey and offering to drive the 85 year old retiree from his home in Princeton New Jersey to San Jose California in order to show the brain to Einstein's granddaughter, who really didn't want to see it.

It did provide Paterniti with a hook that he could hang a book proposal on, get him published and keep him from a lifetime of housepainting. It is a very readable book, a memoir of an uncomfortable cross country trip with an elderly stranger and has some funny incidents in which Paterniti confesses to strangers that they are transporting Einstein's brain in the trunk of their car. Harvey did fly back to New Jersey, presumable with the brain in his carry-on luggage, so there never was a need to actually drive the whole way, except to write a book about it.

Harvey's lifetime of research, with the help of various scientists with whom he has shared parts of the brain, is inconclusive. Einstein may have had more glial cells than average. The part of the brain associated with math, I didn't know there was such an organ, may have been somewhat larger that usual. Not much for 50 years of study. There is speculation in the book about cloning the brain. After half a century in formaldehyde there's no chance of that. That fact is kind of glossed over for the science fiction effect.

The Center Cannot Hold

My Journey Through Madness
Elyn Saks
Hyperion
New York
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0138-5

This is a personal memoir of schizophrenia and outstanding achievement taking place simultaneously. Elyn Saks earned a masters degree at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, graduated from Yale Law School, became a law professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and became a psychotherapist all while being treated for Schizophrenia, with several interruptions for hospitalizations because of severe psychotic episodes. Oh, and she has written several books. On the side she is a cancer survivor. And you thought you had it rough. She is also a founding member of the Click and Clack school of first name spelling. Now go do something with you worthless, miserable life and stop your whining.

Practicing: A Musician's Return To Music

Glen Kurtz
Alfred A. Knoph
ISBN: 978-0-307-26615-6

"When you play an instrument, and playing comes easily, playing is enough. But slowly, as you play more, what you hear outpaces your ability. This music beyond you, as you are, leads you on, and you ache to lay hold of it. You sit down, you look at your hands, you hold the instrument. You listen to the musicians you admire, who have this same equipment, hands and instruments. Then you look at your own hands again, and it doesn't seem possible. How do they do it? What you want to play shimmers ungraspable in the air, or in the hands of others. I think this is when your story as a musician begins. Playing, you begin to practice. And practice makes "perfect." Now you'll never play the way you wish you could. Now one lifetime is not enough. You'll never be finished practicing." That says it all right there, that does.