Author Archive
With the film version of the book Twilight opening this week, vampire fever seems to have descended on the nation. “Vampy” fiction is in high demand and library hold lists are building. While you wait, why not spend some time learning about real vampires? They are very strange, interesting and often connected to your everyday life.
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures is an entertaining introduction into the natural history of sanguivores (creatures that consume blood). Author Bill Schutt, a biologist with joint positions at Long Island University and the American Museum of Natural History, seems to have had quite a bit of fun in the process of learning about his topic and he has a lot of knowledge to share. His enthusiasm is contagious!
Dr. Schutt starts out with a bang, beginning with a deliciously thrilling description of field research at it’s finest. Schutt, his wife Janet, and a Trinidadian scientist explore the massive, abandoned ice house at Wallerfield, the former US military base. Seeking vampire bats in the decaying building, Schutt’s evocation of the claustrophobic ruin (and an elevator shaft filled with water and bat guano) are vividly described.
Blood feeding is a hard way to survive and Schutt’s description of various evolutionary hypotheses on how assorted sanguivores may have developed is satisfyingly detailed. Besides the infamous (but misunderstood and endangered) vampire bats, other well-known obligate sanguivorous creatures such as leeches, ticks, fleas are covered. The addition of creatures new to me (such as the “vampire finch” of the Galapagos — primarily a seed-eater) and digressions into the history of medicine (did you know George Washington died after his well-meaning but misinformed team of physicians nearly exsanguinated him?) keep things rolling along.
The professor is a funny fellow, with a lot of amusing anecdotes, funny footnotes and some groaningly-bad puns. His book is far-reaching, though a bit uneven, rambling from the folklore of vampires to the chemical composition of blood, touching on colony collapse disorder and mentioning his many aunts named Rose. Gorgeous illustrations by Patricia J. Wynne accompany the book. Ms. Wynne also provided art for Schutt’s handsome Dark Banquet website, which contains a not-to-be missed collection of Blood Recipes.
November 18th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Bill Mauldin’s single-panel Army cartoons featuring the everyman infantrymen, Willie & Joe, are instantly recognizable to many people (even those of us born well after WWII). Mauldin’s 1945 book Up Front was one of the biggest best-sellers of the time and is still in print.
Willie & Joe: The WWII Years is a handsome, two-volume set of Mauldin’s complete works. Volume One covers the homefront, from 1940-1943. Volume Two contains the overseas cartoons, created between 1943-1945. The 18 page introduction, playfully gussied up as a declassified war memorandum, provides a tantalizing overview of Mauldin’s life and career.
Ex-GIs recognize Bill Mauldin’s characters, Willie and Joe, at a glance. I learned this because volume one was sitting next to me on the reference desk, and three different men who were passing by noticed and commented favorably about Mauldin — their eyes caught by the small, black drawing on the book’s dark green cloth cover.
For even more information, the Library of Congress hosts a gorgeous online tribute in a web exhibition, Bill Mauldin: Beyond Willie & Joe or you might check out Todd De Pastino’s new biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Upfront.
September 18th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow is a fast read (less than 90 pages) which is more a story of the segregated South than a biography of Satchel Paige. The author, UW-Madison alumnus James Sturm, throws a curveball with his title: it showcases the celebrity of Satchel Paige through the eyes of an imagined contemporary. It is an odd blend of fiction and biography, telling a bittersweet, fictionalized story of segregation and oppression while providing teasing glimpses of the famed pitcher.
The story is narrated by Emmet Wilson, a sharecropper from Tuckwilla, Alabama. In 1929, Emmet is a young man full of hope, dreaming of making it big in baseball’s Negro National League. His career is cut short by a knee injury sustained when sliding into home plate during a game pitched by the rising young star, Satchel Paige.
Emmet returns to Tuckwilla, raising cotton on land owned by two other former baseball players — the wealthy, white Jennings twins. The 1930s and early ’40s fly by, with the inequities sharecropping and the menacing dangers facing blacks in rural Alabama scarily presented. Emmet’s attempts to keep his son in school during during cotton picking season are horrifically squashed by the twins.
The story jumps to 1944, when the Jennings brothers arrange a local baseball event featuring the now-legendary Satchel Paige and his traveling All-Stars playing against a team of local (white) heroes, The Tuckwilla All-Stars. Baseball long behind him, Emmet is loathe to attend the game but is pulled along by his beloved son, Emmet, Jr. The kid had heard rumors of his father’s baseball past, but nothing firsthand from his dad: “I don’t talk about my days as a ballplayer. It’s like talkin’ about a dead man.” And Emmet is almost a dead man, he has been beaten down by day-to-day life, by segregation and discrimination and the hardships of trying to raise his black child in a white man’s world. The ball game does and does not change all of that…
Rich Tommaso’s illustrations are as understated and roundabout as the story, with heavy black ink and strange pea-green washes of color (deepening to swampier tones during the darker parts of the storyline). This is not a “pretty” book, but the somber colors and simple drawing style elegantly compliment the text.
The last four pages of the book are “panel discussions”, with text providing additional information on topics touched on in the graphics and story. This is a weirdly moving book. Once you get in there, it does not let you out until the end. It is good!
It is a story of many defeats, both large and small — yet ends triumphantly. As an introduction to segregation and Satchel Paige, it serves more to intrigue than to inform, but any title that raises topics that lead to further reading is a good read in my book.
August 19th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
The 2008 Eisner Awards (the “Oscars” of comics) were announced last week at the San Diego Comic-Con. The winner for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Japan is Tekkonkinkreet: Black and White. Deservedly. This complex, multi-layered manga is a terrific read. Author/illustrator Taiyo Matsumoto has created a dark, surreal whirlwind of a book.
Honestly, at first this book is off-putting. It is a thick, oversize volume with weird art showing a screaming kid on the cover. A plot synopsis, such as mine (below) won’t do it justice. Just take away that this is a rich, dark story for adults (not your favorite teenager’s manga) and it is worth your time, whether you normally read manga and graphic novels or NOT. Maybe, most especially, if you usually do not read material in this format.
Black and White are two homeless orphans who rule the streets, alleys and rooftops of Treasure Town, a seedy and corrupt Japanese city. Black is brooding and morose, the self-appointed protector of his sunny pal, White. White, dressed in an ever-changing array of crazy hats and bedecked with amulets, talismans and an armload of wristwatches, spouts an incessant stream of gibberish and wisdom.
Black and White are renowned throughout Treasure Town for their ferocity. The duo survives by robbing thugs, mugging drunks and fighting brutal, bloody battles with anyone who challenges them. Local police and gangsters treat the boys with grudging respect and concerned affection. They are unstoppable forces, especially Black, who has a clearly expressed personal connection with Treasure Town. It is his town. He owns it.
Treasure Town has competing adult gangs fighting for control. One of these is the The Tribe, an elaborately painted and costumed street gang that is being pressured by the Yakuza who are themselves being squeezed by mysterious foreign investors interested in tearing down Treasure Town and building an amusement park. There is a battle brewing, for the heart and soul of the city.
Matsumoto’s art style is masterful but unusual– he has crazy, swirling angles and perspectives, all of his buildings lean and bend. Slanting frames sometimes show just fragments of the character’s faces ( a jawline or perhaps a forehead is cut off ). The outlandish characters and futuristic setting are dazzling. Details abound, enhancing the storyline (a re-reading of the book is helpful in catching all of the background action).
There is a lot of action in the book and much of the action involves brutal violence. But there are also many gentle kindnesses, often involving the most improbably sympathetic characters. The protagonists are at once broad stereotypes and nuanced individuals. If you are like me, you WILL care deeply about them and maybe (afterwards, because it sneaks up) be perplexed about how that happens. After re-reading it I am still thinking about it.
The manga has been adapted to film, in an anime also entitled Tekkonkinkreet. The anime was recently screened by the Ashman Anime Club, and it is also highly recommended. I have shown most of the anime in the years that our library anime club has been running, and this film is one of the finest (in my opinion) that we have ever shown. A stunner. With a few delicious differences from the manga. Check them both out and let me know what you think!
August 6th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
I caught an earworm tonight.
It is Harry Nilsson’s golden oldie, One (”is the loneliest number“) as sung by Aimee Mann. You know, her cover featured in the film Magnolia. Anyhow, like a bad case of fleas, this tune is hard to shake off. My apologies if passed along to you…
I’m blaming acquisition of the earworm on a seemingly unrelated source. My condition was triggered by idly thinking about a book title — Igort’s fabulous graphic novel Five is the Perfect Number — and musing on why it doesn’t get checked out more frequently. The book was first published in Italy in 2003 and went on to make a big impression, sweeping up numerous European book awards, including Book of the Year at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I am a big fan of this graphic novel. It is terrific and you should take it home and give it a read!
Five is the Perfect Number tells the story of an aged, retired hit man, Peppino Lo Cicero, who is lured back into action by the murder of his hit man son, Nino. Peppino, who had literally checked out and gone fishing, is suddenly back in the game, big time, fighting back against the big fish: Don Guarino and Don Lava and their respective henchmen. Both sides are out for blood. Our anti-heroes include Peppino’s retired fellow guappo, Salvato (reluctantly dragged away from his begonias) plus a languid and limp mob doctor (who ends up showing a whole lotta spine) and the surprisingly tough sweetheart school teacher, Rita.
Set almost 40 years ago, in Naples, this is a big, cinematic Scorsese/Coppola fan’s comic, filled with righteousness and cruelty and love and honor and betrayal — all twisted together. Emphasis on twisted. It is messy and the art and story leap around. There are strange, meltingly-presented dream sequences. Critical bits of the plot are exposed through flashbacks rather than direct action.
The book is a large-format volume, colored in elegant duotone blue and gray (hey, this is a book about hit men, there is a lot of bloodshed but not a drop of red ink on the pages). The art is gorgeous, the storyline will suck you right in.
European comics are a hard sell to American readers, competing rather badly against Japanese and mainstream American products. Igor Tuveri (aka Igort) lived and worked in Japan, his book not purely Euro-comic nor a Euro-manga knock-off. Instead, it is a wonderful melange of styles and themes uniquely his own. Don’t miss this fine work, it deserves a much wider audience.
Don’t let it be lonely tonight! (oops, on to a new song)
July 21st, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Life Sucks provides a funny spin on the seemingly endless spate of vampire fiction. At least, this was my first encounter with a vegan-wannabe vampire slacker — and I found it hilarious.
Dave is working a (literally) dead-end job as the night manager of The Last Stop convenience store. The store
is owned by money-obsessed Radu (aka Lord Arisztidescu), who bedevils Dave about sweeping the parking lot and rotating the hot dogs, while spouting ridiculous business jargon in a thick Romanian accent. Dave is part of Radu’s business plan. Vampire-Master Radu turned the resentful Dave into a vampire because undead employees can’t be killed — and night clerking in an LA strip mall convenience store is pretty hazardous.
Dave dropped out of community college because he can no longer survive in sunlight. And unwilling to kill, he survives on a diet of plasma and expired blood bank products, which leaves him weak and unable to optimize his vampire talents. He lives with his human best friend, Carl, and hangs out with a fellow indentured vampire wage-slave, Jerome. The highlights of Dave’s sorry existence are watching endless Mexican soap operas and catching glimpses of Rosa, a beautiful Goth girl who regularly visits the juice bar next to The Last Stop.
Dave’s nemesis is Radu’s previous night clerk/vampire slave, a surfer named Wes, who proved to be hopelessly irresponsible at clerking. Dave’s vampirization has allowed Wes to return to his beach lifestyle (although, being a vampire, he has to do his surfing at night). Wes has money, good looks, girls, a car: everything Dave longs for and lacks. When Wes goes after Rosa, underachieving Dave finally starts to show some un-dead life…
Writers Jessica Abel and Gabe Soria have done a great job, with witty dialog and a quirky, fast-moving plot. Warren Pleece’s art is fantastic, filled with intricate detail and cinematic angles. Pleece injects a lot into the story through his subtly-drawn characters’ expressions and gestures. Coloring is impressive too, with washed-out flat color for the fluorescent Last Stop and the many dark nighttime scenes creatively presented.
If you are in the mood for a different kind of vampire tale, this is the book for you!
June 6th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Set in contemporary Tel Aviv, Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds is populated by characters seemingly inured to violence and sudden death in their city. But slips in their facades reveal them as walking wounded, driving away living relatives and lovers while mourning their dead.
Koby, a weary, disaffected taxi driver, is approached by Numi, a young woman soldier who thinks his estranged father may have been an unknown victim of a suicide bomber. Reluctantly, Koby joins Numi in her quest to identify the unclaimed body.
Koby’s father, Gabriel, has abandoned his apartment and nobody in his family has heard from him for months. Numi had been Gabriel’s lover and he disappeared from her life abruptly as well. She is grasping at flimsy evidence: a flash of a scarf that she had knit for Gabriel appeared in television footage of a bomb site.
The gallows humor throughout the work bounces between funny and chilling. Scenes with Koby and Numi bickering with a clerk at the morgue while a young boy tries to identify his father’s body by viewing videotape of a corpse’s ear are unsettling and painful.
Koby and Numi are each lost too: nursing hurts and slights by their respective families, unable to move forward. The book gracefully unmasks these prickly individuals, challenging assumptions they have made about themselves and each other. Skillfully rendered ligne claire art, with interesting angles and perspectives, combines with artful storytelling to create a compelling graphic novel. Beautiful, absurd, sometimes wrenchingly sad Exit Wounds is graphic storytelling at its finest.
Modan also has a terrific blog at the New York Times called Mixed Emotions. Refreshingly un-bloggy (NYT refers to Mixed Emotions as a “visual column”), it consists of a set of fabulous illustrated essays. Don’t miss her piece called The Queen of the Scottish Fairies!
May 21st, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
April 16, 2008 marked the one year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, which ended with 33 people dead (32 murders and one suicide). The intervening year has seen other school shootings, although thankfully not with the body count suffered in Virginia. If you’ve struggled like everyone else to understand and make sense of it, then read on.
Gregory Gibson’s Gone Boy: A Walkabout is a remarkably uplifting, informative book about one man’s attempt to make sense out of senseless violence, to find “the truth in his son’s murder”. Gone Boy was published in 1998, but I just discovered it this month. It is timely and relevant, perhaps even more so today than when it was written.
Gibson’s son, Galen, was killed in 1992, a victim of a random campus shooting spree by a mentally ill fellow student. Parallels between the shootings in 1992 at Simon’s Rock College and in 2006 at Virginia Tech are achingly similar. The death toll at Simon’s Rock might have been much, much higher if the shooter’s weapon had not continually misfired.
Gibson and his family were devastated. There was a lengthy painful criminal trial, followed by civil lawsuits and countersuits causing more pain and no resolution. Gibson was being consumed by his rage and frustration over deceptions by college administrators, by the stalemating of the legal system.
Gibson’s close family and friends were valued supports, but he was powerfully driven to do something. He is a (self-described) drunk and an atheist, surviving his son’s death resulted in his overindulging in drink and finding little comfort elsewhere. His wife was lost in her own grieving, while his surviving children were struggling to go forward with their own lives.
After almost three years of being enmeshed in the aftermath of the shooting and ensuing legal battles, Gregory Gibson decided to write a book. He went on a “walkabout”, a quest to meet with and talk to and try to understand the people involved and how the shooting happened. The fact that he was able to turn all of this grief and pain and anger into such a thoughtful and contemplative book is rather miraculous.
The walkabout was a process of following the bullet back into the gun, the gun into the hands of the murderer, the killer back into the boy he used to be. He met with the owner of the gun shop that sold the used firearm to the college student. He met with the man who had originally purchased the weapon. He met with administrators and students at the college, with other victims who survived the shootings and their families. He interviewed police officers, psychiatrists and lawyers connected with the criminal trial.
He met with friends and family of the shooter.
Gibson didn’t find any easy answers or solutions but he found a lot of wounded people. A lot of people trying to make some sense out of what happened. It is a provocative and strangely uplifting read, a journey of forgiveness. Gibson is a listener and a thinker and a man with great heart. He also writes really well.
Gibson also has a website, GONEBOY: a walkabout, with a memorial fund, photos of his family, information about guns and violence, and an interesting update. Wayne Lo, the young man who killed his son, read the book and was moved to write to the author and they have been corresponding. An article about their correspondence appeared in the New York Times, Man and His Son’s Slayer Unite to Ask Why .
April 23rd, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
“You can write stories with chapters, lines, words: that’s the actual literature. You can write stories with a succession of graphic scenes: that’s printed literature. You can also do neither one nor the other, and sometimes that’s the best!”
UCLA Art History professor David Kunzle has assembled, 
translated and annotated the first English language compilation of Rodolphe Topffer’s “comic strips”.
Rodolphe Topffer (1799 - 1846) was a Swiss school master with polymathic abilities — he was also an art critic, novelist, playright, painter, philosopher, political activist and social satirist.
Often cited as “the father of the comic strip“, Topffer created satirical illustrated stories in the 1820s - 1840s. Topffer’s picture-stories (he called them histoires en estampes) are deliciously witty, providing sly social commentary and surreal, complex plots. He teases and pokes away at education, law, medicine, science, religion… and just about everything else.
A superb caricaturist, Topffer’s art has a wild energy — not a straight line to be found. Expressions, gestures and body language are comically exaggerated — as is the sly, flowery language of the strips text. The strips, including their accompanying French narration are carefully reproduced, with Kunzle’s English translations printed below each frame. Along with eight complete stories plus fragments and revisions that were previously unpublished, Kunzle provides biographical information, a chronology, and detailed notes explaining the more obscure cultural, political and historical references.
Rodolphe Topffer: The Complete Comic Strips is an amazing delight of a book. This may seem a bit improbable, since the book is a thick and scholarly collection of light social satire from the 1830s, yet it is completely engaging (and often surprisingly relevant to today’s world).
Read this book, it is one of the best!
February 25th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
A species of little fishes which I had never heard of before is the subject of a fascinating new book. Rutgers English professor H. Bruce Franklin, an enthusiastic saltwater angler, sounds an eye-opening environmental alarm in The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America. This book may change the way you shop!
Have you heard of menhaden? Hundreds of thousands of tons of them are part of our food chain: in fish meal that is fed to chickens, cows, and pigs, in fertilizers for crops, and in processed fish oil health supplements. Menhaden may also be part of your lipstick, sports drink, pet food, house paint, and “environmentally-friendly” insecticides.
Franklin skillfully weaves the natural history of the menhaden with the surprisingly large impact that industrialized menhaden fishing has had on the United States economy.
Commercial exploitation of menhaden for fertilizer and oil began in the nineteenth century. Industrialized menhaden fishing occurred on a scale far greater than the whaling industry. Menhaden lack the glamor of whales, they are usually described as smelly and unpalatable to humans. Modern menhaden fishing is also decidedly unglamorous: enormous industrial purse-seine nets scoop up entire schools.
Franklin presents compelling evidence that the populations of menhaden are vital to the health of our oceans and to many other species, and that they have been grievously over-fished. Commercial fishing supporters, including state and federal government regulators, feel otherwise. While debates rage on, menhaden schools continue to be harvested.
The statistics the author presents are mind-boggling. Franklin’s view is controversial, but he presents inarguable similar cases of other vanished populations of animals that appeared to exist in limitless quantitities: passenger pigeons and American bison. Read this book and see what you think! I will be checking my seafood wallet card and discontinuing my fish oil supplements.
November 29th, 2007
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Previous Posts
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures is an entertaining introduction into the natural history of sanguivores (creatures that consume blood). Author Bill Schutt, a biologist with joint positions at Long Island University and the American Museum of Natural History, seems to have had quite a bit of fun in the process of learning about his topic and he has a lot of knowledge to share. His enthusiasm is contagious! 
The 
