Books: The Geographer’s Library

This book apparently belongs to the “literary thriller” genre. Naturally it is compared to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code – sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, depending on the reader’s prefernces, I suppose. Not having read Brown’s book – or heard anything that would interest me in reading it – I can’t comment on the comparison. But The Geographer’s Library is a decently-written book if you have an interest in esoteric bits of history and patience for a slow-moving mystery.

Attaching the word “thriller” to this book seems somewhat inappropriate, as the pace moves fairly leisurely, especially with historical vignettes interspersed with the present-day story. As many reviewers at amazon.com noted, these short stories-within-a-story are generally better than the frame story. (I saw one review that opined the opposite, which surprised me. The one drawback I can think of to those shorter stories was that they were good enough that I would have liked them to continue.)

The common thread through all the historical pieces is that they deal with items that have some significance in the history of alchemy. You learn, over the course of the book, something of the ideas of alchemy – which is much more than trying to turn lead into gold. I found all this very interesting, almost more so than the present-day story. Of course, I was expecting all these items to show up sometime, somehow, in the present-day story. That they did not was part of my disappointment with the ending.

The narrator also lost his appeal for me as a character at the end. He is a young man who ended up as a journalist more or less by accident, and he still has not figured out what to do with his life. I do not expect every book to end with success for the main character, but at least a triumph of the human spirit over obstacles makes a satisfying ending.

Movies: Song of the South

My husband has been telling me about this movie since we first started collecting Disney movies to play on our VCR. (We buy DVDs these days, but rarely get Disney movies anymore.) He had seen Song of the South on TV on “The Wonderful World of Disney”; I hadn’t even heard of it. (There were many movies I had never heard of – he says I was culturally deprived.)

As each classic Disney movie came out on video, we waited for Song of the South to hit the shelves. But it never happened; finally we realized it just wasn’t going to be released. There are all kinds of rumors about why it isn’t going to be released – or alternatively, that it is going to be released (always next year or the year after). The reasons for not releasing it have to do with the racial stereotypes it portrays, and apparently it has been controversial in this regard since its initial box office release.

My husband decries this sort of political correctness, pointing out that the black people in the movie are portrayed very positively. I’ve read similar opinions on websites regarding the movie. I also read one comment, from an “Anonymous African-American” who guesses that all such comments were written by white people, who have no idea why the racial stereotypes in the movie are so offensive. Unfortunately, this person doesn’t try to explain why they are.

Finally, today, I got to watch the movie. My husband has been downloading lots of TV shows and movies from the internet, and burning them to DVD. Apparently Disney had no problem releasing Song of the South in other countries, where the racial history of our own country does not provoke such controversy. These have been turned into bootleg versions of the movie, and Disney has (at least according to wikipedia) chosen not to take any legal action.

As this seems to be the only way to see the movie, and Disney evidently is more concerned about not officially releasing the movie than preventing it from being distributed, I was happy enough to sit down with my sons to finally watch it (my husband had to sleep before going to work for the night). My younger son was bored through the initial live-action sequences, but started enjoying it once some animation appeared.

Books: Paths of Glory

Until I picked up this audiobook by Jeffrey Archer (the author’s name alone was enough to recommend it to me), I had never heard of George Leigh Mallory. He was, I know now, one of the greatest mountaineers in history, and according to this site also “perhaps the most famous mountaineer in history.”

Ten years ago, Mallory’s body was found high on Mount Everest, where he and his climbing partner Irvine had perished 75 years earlier. I read many stories of adventure as a child, and one of my favorite books was James Ramsey Ullman’s Banner in the Sky. So why had I never heard of Mallory, whose story would no doubt have greatly intrigued and inspired me?

Probably because there is no solid evidence that he ever made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain. People remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (my uncle’s family named one of their cats Tenzing, because he climbed everything), because they made it to the top and then back down to tell the story. But no one knows for sure if Mallory and Irvine died trying to reach the top, or on the way back down.

Archer happens to be of the opinion that they did reach the summit, and tells a very plausible account of how it was done. But that comes very late in the book (one knows from the prologue what Mallory’s end will be, so the suspense is only in when and how it will happen), and I would not have been eager to get that far if Archer had not drawn me fully into the story with his engaging account of Mallory’s life and character.

A mountain, a man, and a monument

At the opposite end of the size scale from Willard Wigan (see my post “Art under the Microscope”), Gutzon Borglum sculpted works so large you have to stand pretty far away to see them properly. Eighty-two years ago today, he started carving the face of an American president into the southeast face of Mount Rushmore. When he died fourteen years later, the work was still not complete. His son Lincoln finished the massive monument, which today attracts almost three million visitors a year to the Black Hills of South Dakota.

I hadn’t known until today that increased tourism was in fact the initial motivation behind the project. Having lived in a town whose economy depended on tourism (Houghton Lake, Michigan), I don’t think highly of such a plan for stimulating the economy. There are plenty of jobs in a tourist economy, but few careers. Few young people aspire to work in motels or restaurants (or gas stations, gift shops, or convenience stores), so they move away in search of better work. And while an economic downturn hurts the whole country, it hits especially hard in an area that depends on people from elsewhere coming to spend their discretionary income.

The sculptor selected for the project had grander things in mind than tourism, however. He rejected the initial ideas of subjects for the sculpture: Western figures such as Chief Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody, Lewis and Clark, and legendary Sioux warriors. Borglum wanted his work to inspire all Americans. Besides the four Presidents, he also planned a huge panel commemorating the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, plus the Louisiana Purchase and other territorial acquisitions. But this part of the project had to be abandoned due to lack of funds, along with carving the Presidents from head to waist rather than just heads.

I don’t know what I’d think of Mount Rushmore if I saw it in person. I love mountains, but in large part that’s because I like to be out in nature. I don’t dislike civilization, but I do like to get away from its noise, as well as from the lack of beauty in many populated areas. Mount Rushmore is certainly out in nature, but it is so obviously a work of man, I’m not sure I’d be more awed by man’s achievement there or wishing it had been left alone to be shaped by wind and rain.

Even without seeing Mount Rushmore, though, I will always associate it with the ideas of resourcefulnes and perseverance. When I was in elementary school, we occasionally were shown movies (on those old reel-to-reel movie projectors). My favorites were the Bell Telephone science series, and a movie adaptation of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, all of which we saw more than once. One movie we saw only once, but which I have always remembered, was called “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.”

Books: The Bone Garden

This is the first book I have read by Tess Gerritsen, and from the reviews I have read it is not one of her best. Since I did enjoy this one, though, I look forward to reading others by the same author.

The Bone Garden is a combination of mystery and romance, historical fiction, social commentary (on Boston in 1830), and a detailed picture of the state of medicine in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The romance is the weakest part, in my opinion, but then I wouldn’t have picked up the book if that had been its primary element. I was more interested in the mystery, and while one customer review at amazon.com claims that the solution was clear from about a quarter of the way through the book, I certainly did not see it until much closer to the conclusion.

The novel attempts to intertwine the mystery/romance of 1830 with one in the present time, as a young divorcee named Julia attempts to learn the story behind a skeleton found in the garden of the house she just bought. Together with a crotchety old man whose cousin previously owned Julia’s house, she gradually unravels the story by reading letters written by “O. W. H.” to “Margaret,” letters found in boxes in the old house when its elderly owner died.

I agree with other reviewers at amazon.com that this part of the novel, set in the present, is weak and could easily have been left out. The real story takes place in 1830, and after a while I was glad the present-day chapters were as short as they were, because I wanted to get back to where the real action took place. Here in Boston in 1830, the lives of several characters are increasingly intertwined, all somehow involved in a mystery that involves a serial killer.

Movies: Night at the Museum 2

Al and I spent the morning at the zoo and the afternoon at the museum, and there we had a great time watching Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian on the giant IMAX screen (with my husband and older son, who met us there). I really hadn’t wanted there to be a sequel, as it was hard to see how they could do as well as the first movie, but they did.

I can see from the comments at imdb.com that my opinion is hardly shared by all or even most. There are some viewers who think it’s even better than the first, but many who think this is just a poorly reheated batch of leftovers. The sequel is admittedly more into spectacle and witty conversation than character and motivation, but if you enjoy it for what it is rather than what it is not, it really is great fun. (One viewer titled his review “Dumb-dumb but fun-fun,” which is good summing up – as well as a reference easily recognizable by anyone who has seen either movie.)

There’s not much of a plot, so I wouldn’t be giving much away to describe it, but it also is hardly worth telling without being able to watch it unfold. It has some pretty big holes: how in the world did Larry become a successful businessman in just a few years? where did the fuel come from for the rocket and airplanes? who cleaned up the mess at the end? just to name a few.

But I was too busy enjoying the movie to mind that. Some people complain that it’s cluttered with too many characters, too much action, scriptwriters with more ideas than sense trying to throw everything in that could possibly be entertaining, until it’s nothing but a senseless succession of scenes. I enjoyed the fast-moving action, however, and found the quick but clever snippets highly entertaining.

Books: The Daughter of Time

I had looked at the back cover of this audiobook on a few occasions before I finally decided to check it out (of the library). The idea of a mystery that gets its start with a man scrutinizing a portrait and trying to analyze the character of the subject – it put me in mind of recent books such as The Girl with the Pearl Earring. I haven’t read that latter book either, and don’t plan to, as nothing I’ve read about it particularly interests me.

I did finally check out The Daughter of Time, however, as  the CD-based audiobook holdings at the library are limited, and trying something I may not enjoy has many times given me new authors and even new genres to enjoy. This time it was definitely a good choice, and I intend to look for more books, on CD or otherwise, by this author. I would not have expected to find a discussion of the historicity of events from the time of Richard III and Henry VII interesting – and perhaps it is a very rare writer who can make it so. But Josephine Tey does it admirably.

One reader review at amazon.com points out that “most Americans have only a passing familiarity with English royalty and even less with their interwoven families” and that is certainly the case for me. I know a bit about major figures such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, but the rest are little more than names – several of which were used too many times to keep easy track of.

The same reader says, however, that “unless you are familiar with these people and CARE about who did what to whom and why the book becomes tedious very quickly.” I don’t particularly care about them, but I do care about whether we can trust what is written in history books. This book explores in depth whether Richard III was responsible for the deaths of his nephews, but it raises larger questions about how we know what happened in the past.

Moon memories

If it weren’t for all the focus in the news media today, on the events of forty years ago, I wouldn’t be able to say what I had been doing the evening of July 20, 1969. In my memory, as a matter of fact, it was afternoon, not evening. So I don’t know how much of what I remember is accurate. But I do know that, like millions of people across the country and around the world, I was in the living watching TV and waiting to see the astronauts walk on the moon.

Some people were inspired by the event. Jim Todd, nine years old and 70% deaf, was motivated not only to study science and engineering, but also to overcome his disability. Today he runs a planetarium and teaches children about space. Eight-year-old Jeff Weld and ten-year-old Tom Hockey were also inspired to become science educators. Somewhere I’m sure there’s an astronaut who first got the yearning to go into space while watching the moon landing.

I’m afraid I can’t identify with all that. I had never given any thought to such a career path (I have no idea if I even knew what an astronaut was before July 1969), but I certainly would not have after the moon landing. I could not imagine wanting to do something so terribly boring.

I’ve read that some children were put to bed in the early evening, and then awakened in time to see the first moon walk. I don’t remember going to bed, just sitting in the living room and waiting and waiting and waiting. The astronauts had to check and double check everything. Maybe they triple checked. I couldn’t imagine what they found to check that took so long.

I would much rather have been watching a baseball game. Even a football game would have been more interesting – and for me at that age, football was the epitome of boring. Most of the time the clock was stopped between plays, and when the ball was moving I could never figure out where it was until the bodies piled up on top of it.

But even football moved faster than those astronauts. I honestly don’t remember what I thought when they finally descended to the moon’s surface, other than relief that the long wait was over. Whatever I saw in those grainy black-and-white images, I wasn’t very impressed. I remember also watching the splashdown when the astronauts returned from space, and seeing how they had to go into quarantine before they could be reunited with their families. More waiting!

Now, of course, I remember it with some nostalgia. It’s the only nationally shared event of the sixties that I do remember. Along with certain cartoons, songs, and other cultural expressions that at the time I simply took for granted, it represents a piece of my childhood. Since many of my childhood memories are of being lonely, afraid, bored, or otherwise unhappy, I’m not sure why reminders of that era evoke pleasant feelings of nostalgia. But they do.

National treasure

“National treasure” was the theme of our Cub Scout day camp this summer. As I am a member of the planning committee, I spent a good deal of time thinking about what kinds of national treasures to try to work into the camp program. National parks? Natural resources? Our flag? Our history? Our people?

Mostly we focused on nature and the national parks. I spent evenings coming up with clues, then ideas where to hide the clues, and more clues to point to those hiding places. Since I didn’t work with the Scouts directly during camp, and my own son was at College for Kids instead of camp, I never did hear how well some of my clues worked out.

I figured a yellow crayon and a stone should be a fairly easy reference to Yellowstone. That one was for the youngest group; the older boys had to figure out that a picture of a bald man’s head, a feather, and a quarter were clues to “bald eagle” (the only answer that wasn’t a national park). For Mount Rushmore, they got a picture of a mountain, and three coins: a penny, a nickel, and a quarter. I was going to include a dime, then someone pointed out that it had the head of the wrong Roosevelt.

The theme for today’s July 4 parade was “Stars and Stripes Forever.” At the last Cub Scout pack meeting, some of us expressed an interest in making a float for the parade, and I was wondering if there was a way to somehow show the history of the American flag. But I was too busy with day camp to work on it. So were other parents, I guess. The boys just walked next to a trailer pulled by an old (1945) tractor, handing out ice pops to the children along the route. (Another float in the parade did display the history of the flag.)

Today we celebrate one of our nation’s greatest treasures – the commitment to liberty embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was at once an eloquent statement of values around which the new country would form, and a bold political action that set in motion the battle for America’s self-government. Googling for more information on this historic document, I was happy to find this website at the National Archives: The Declaration of Independence: Our National Treasure.

Books, metaphors, and the march of history

Today my sister sent me a link to the transcript of a very interesting speech, given in 1872 upon the occasion of the centennial of the New York Library Society. Of course, one reason I found it very interesting is the possibility that the speaker was one of our ancestors. The name is the same as that of our great-great-grandfather (Thomas Ward), who was a printer and would certainly have had an interest in the library, and we do have ancestors from the New York area. But even aside from that possible connection, I enjoyed the speech for its own merits.

Margaret had mentioned Ward’s comments about the importance of books, and how loving books seems to “be in our DNA.” I certainly liked Ward’s descriptions of books, which included intriguing metaphors. It’s common enough to call books treasures of knowledge, but Ward also speaks of books as “granaries wherein the mental harvests of past generations are safely garnered” and “ancient bottles, where in skins of the goat, the calf, and the sheep are stored the rarest wines, expressed and fermented, of the teeming human brain.”

I was reminded throughout the speech (considerably longer than I expected – people had somewhat longer attention spans then) of the more literary style appreciated by listeners in that era. In books “we find the pure grain of wisdom winnowed of the chaff of mortal infirmity, the flowers of song shorn of the thorns of human fretfulness, and the perfect thought, no longer shapeless ‘in its infant dew,’ but crystallized into forms of imperishable beauty.”

Ward didn’t stick to talking about books, however. From discussing the history of books and writing in general, and of the New York Library Society in particular, he launches into extolling the wonders of the modern era (for him, the last third of the nineteenth century). Well over a hundred years later, it is enlightening to see what was then considered the height of mankind’s achievements.