Winter reads

I have enjoyed the books that I brought home to read over Winter Break and the ones that I received as gifts:

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

The blatant, subtle, and insidious evils of slavery infect every resident in the teeming world of Edward P. Jones' Manchester County, Virginia. Blacks who are themselves slave-owners anchor the plot of this wonderfully woven tale of desire, despair, and complexity. A masterful hand is at work in the storytelling; blithely dropping future histories of the characters at all points in their development which never undermines but only enrich the story. I also enjoy "large" stories like this that take the time to flesh-out, however incidentally, passing characters who remain two-dimensional devices in shorter works.

(The SLJ had a small article about The Digital Library of American Slavery. Here is a link to "petitions" of free black slave owners.)

Miss Leavitt's Stars by George Johnson

Henrietta Leavitt was a "computer" in the early 1900's, a modestly paid women who compared photographic plates of the night sky to catalog any number of variables. A largely unknown footnote to the history of astronomy, Leavitt's grassroots observations and perseverance recognized that cyclical changes in the size of Cepheids, giant variable stars, could be correlated with their luminosity. This relationship provided the "missing link" that allowed scientists to extrapolate the distance to stars and the size of the universe. Indeed, Johnson spends most of his time (and it is time well spent) relating the incremental story of
just how fluid those computations have been; even up to the last decade.

Chasing Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson

This is a direct compelling telling of Lincoln's assassination and the subsequent chase and capture of Booth and his conspirators. It is a very accessible book for students. The book also strikes an effective balance between design and content; overcoming the often distracting use of graphics with some well-executed visual support.

Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

If I don't buy multiple copies of this book and share it as a weekly booktalk with a dozen colleagues, I should be horse-whipped. Lehrer makes a case for several artists of varying sensory expertise (Whitman, Cezanne, Woolf, Escoffier, Stravinsky) anticipating scientific neurological discoveries in their artistic work. Lehrer's writing is clear, compelling and graceful. His even-handed applause for the overlapping insights of both the artist and the scientist is no accident as he is a proponent of the "third culture" where art and science are complementary rather than adversarial.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

This is a coming-of-age story with all of the cruel bumps and hilarious eccentricities that accompany the lonely passage through adolescence. There is little relief in the bullying, the dissolving family, and the day-by-day feinting and manipulation to survive it all. The well-drawn characters, the infectious British slang, and the islands of compassion make the hard reality just bearable for the reader. It is not an easy book; either emotionally or contextually, but it is a passage that consoles us for what we ourselves know of the journey.