“An Uncommon History of Common Things” by Bethanne Patrick & John Thompson (National Geographic, November 2009, ISBN 9781426204203, $40.00, 304 pp.)

Bethanne Patrick’s book was a runaway bestseller, peaking at #147 on the Amazon book bestseller charts.  It was also selected as one of PEOPLE Magazine’s Great Holiday Gifts under $50 for 2009 and named as a “Great Read” in their December 7, 2009 issue.

Summary:

Sometime about 30,000 years ago, somebody stuck a sharp rock into a split stick—and presto! The axe was born. Our inquisitive species just loves tinkering, testing, and pushing the limits, and this delightfully different book is a freewheeling reference to hundreds of customs, notions, and inventions that reflect human ingenuity throughout history.

From hand tools to holidays to weapons to washing machines, An Uncommon History of Common Things features hundreds of colorful illustrations, timelines, sidebars, and more as it explores just about every subject under the sun. Who knew that indoor plumbing has been around for 4,600 years, but punctuation, capital letters, and the handy spaces between written words only date back to the Dark Ages? Or that ancient soldiers baked a kind of pizza on their shields—when they weren’t busy flying kites to frighten their foes?

Every page of this quirky compendium catalogs something fascinating, surprising, or serendipitous. A lively, incomparably browsable read for history buffs, pop culture lovers, and anyone who relishes the odd and extraordinary details hidden in the everyday, it will inform, amuse, astonish—and alter the way you think about the clever creatures we call humans.

Library Journal Review of An Uncommon History of Common Things:

Patrick (Forts of the West) and Thompson (Dakotas) offer a charming look at the genesis and evolution of the items, organizations, and events Americans generally take for granted, such as buttons, state fairs, and toilet paper. Organized into nine chapters, including “Garments” and “Medications,” and 50 subcategories like “Underwear” and “Beautification,” the descriptive mini-essays run roughly one page. Each is accompanied by a lovely, full-color photograph and, occasionally, an illustrated time line. Witty and enlightening, the book carries all the delights of an American history museum visit, although entries reveal that many contemporary objects and customs were developed on other shores.

Buy this book from Indiebound

Review of Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, AARP: The Magazine, December 2009

From author Sidney Offit to book mavens across the land, everyone seems anxious to let us know that the short stories in Look at the Birdie are substandard Vonnegut. In his introduction to this collection of 14 previously unpublished tales, Offit—a longtime Vonnegut chum, by the way—notes it’s possible they never quite satisfied the author, who died in 2007. And Publishers Weekly magazine claims the pieces, written during Vonnegut’s 20s and 30s, “lack the polish and humor” of his later work.

I’ve read plenty of Vonnegut, early and late, but not for some time, so I decided to approach Look at the Birdie without revisiting, say, such boomer manifestos as Welcome to the Monkey House or Breakfast of Champions. I’m glad I didn’t: in reading the rough-hewn yet complete short stories gathered here, I felt as if I were encountering an undiscovered writer. Vonnegut veers from irony to sentimentality to terror to whimsicality, sometimes in the same piece (I’m thinking of “A Song for Selma,” in which a high-school music teacher’s belief in a student’s hidden brilliance cycles through all those feelings—and more). Full disclosure: I didn’t read the damning-with-faint-praise reviews beforehand, either.

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Review of The Appeal by John Grisham, The Washington Post Book World, January 29, 2008

With “The Broker” and now “The Appeal,” John Grisham seems to be enlarging his fictional niche, focusing on hard-hitting, reality-based courtroom melodramas in which the message takes center stage. Despite cardboard characters and broad sweeps of malevolent action from Big Business, an affecting moral comes through in “The Appeal.” It reads like a long, engaging and sad fable.

The book opens with the tension-filled moments before a Mississippi jury delivers its verdict in the case of Jeannette Baker v. Krane. The woman lost her husband and son to chemical poisoning and is suing the corporation responsible for flooding the river in the small town of Bowmore with toxic amounts of bichloronylene.

In the courtroom, we meet Jeannette’s “mom-and-pop” legal team, Wes and Mary Grace Payton, who have risked everything to fight against the pollution in Bowmore. We also meet Jared Kurtin, Krane’s counsel.

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Review of Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel, Barnes & Noble Review, June 15, 2009

We know from the second sentence of Last Night in Montreal that protagonist Lilia disappears, but it is the first sentence — “No one stays forever” — that defines this beautiful, complicated, and occasionally disappointing debut novel. Lilia enters grad student Eli’s spartan and stable life one day at a coffee shop. She has a bohemian beauty (Eli finds her choppy, self-barbered hair “thrilling”) and a fascination with his study of dead and dying languages. At first, this seems to hold the key to Mandel’s plot: We constantly misinterpret the words of the people we love. It’s less important to know about Eli than to know he cares enough about Lilia to try and understand why she, in her own words, “doesn’t know how to stay.” Lilia, used to an itinerant lifestyle after years of moving rapidly with her father, leaves Eli in one city and pops up in another, living with the mysterious Michaela. Michaela’s father, police officer Charles Graydon, is also chasing Lilia — but his reasons for doing so couldn’t be more different from Eli’s. Unfortunately for plot cohesion, at this point the idea that “no one stays forever” takes over, and sometimes remembering why an event or character matters takes effort. Fortunately for Mandel’s future as a novelist, that theme was the right one to pursue. The author is concerned with the different faces of neglect and their consequences. Once Lilia’s full story is revealed, characters understand each other all too well — and perhaps too late. Mandel’s exquisite use of language and pacing mean that every last word counts, up to the very last sentence.

Interview with Jeannette Walls, author of “Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel”

Walls came to The Book Studio for her first interview promoting “Half Broke Horses,” her first book release after her hit memoir “The Glass Castle”.

Will we ever tire of the Henrys? There’s The Tudors on TV, new books about Henry VIII and his various wives appear all the time (the latest is “The Sisters Who Would Be Queen” by Leane de Lisle), and now we’ve got England’s prestigious Man Book Prize for Literature awarded to Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” yet another fictional treatment of those naughty, wacky Tudors.

Yes, we all loved Philippa Gregory’s “The Other Boleyn Girl,” and we saw it, too, made into a movie starring those starlets of the moment (is that a tautology?) Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. I resisted Gregory’s books for several years, convinced that they were just fatter versions of bad historical romances. When I finally gave in and read “Boleyn Girl,” I was delighted to find that it’s packed with earthy detail and devilishly human machinations.

But — and this is going to be a big “but” for Gregory fans reading this post — “The Other Boleyn Gril” still centered on the top level of Tudor life: King, Queen, and courtiers. It’s a different version of their lives than we’ve read in other novels and biographies, but it’s still all about those naughty wacky Tudors. I’ve been reading about the same characters for decades, now.

That’s why I’m going to tell you to read “Wolf Hall,” not “The Other Boleyn Girl” — although truly, I’m cheating this week, since I actually encourage you to read both. But if you’re only going to pick up one historical novel this year, let it be Mantel’s complex, and fascinating novel about Thomas Cromwell, for eight years King Henry VIII’s chief advisor and a powerful ally of the Reformation movement.

Here’s the thing: So often literary types claim that women write “domestic” novels about “female” things while men write “big” novels about “political” things. Ha! I say: Both of these writers are women, yet they couldn’t have written more disparate books. While Gregory is in the “domestic” camp, Mantel is in the “political” camp. Or is she? “Wolf Hall” begins with Cromwell’s quite miserable childhood/adolescent torments at the hands of his volatile father, and continues to show the domestic side of a man’s life by contrasting Cromwell’s strong, loving marriage and benevolent parenting style with his monarch’s many brief unions and fitful attention to children.

In “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel constructs a novel about big, historical events and shows the domestic drama and detail behind them in a way that feels richer and newer than any other book about the period I’ve read over the past couple of decades.