Book of the Month - Dark Tide

Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo

Did you ever hear of the “great molasses flood” in Boston? I grew up hearing about this event – probably because it took place in and around Boston’s North End, and we had ties to and visited the North End frequently. But even I took the reality of this event with a grain of salt.

But it actually happened. Around noon on January 15th, 1919, a fifty foot tall tank FILLED with over 2 million gallons of thick, black molasses collapsed – creating a massive tidal wave (fifteen feet high, some say) that traveled at a speed of over 35 miles per hour and transformed Boston’s North End into a disaster area. Twenty one people were killed, many animals were destroyed, and the injury and destruction left in its wake were devastating.

Dark Tide by Steven Puleo presents us with a fascinating story – not only of the tragic flood, but of the social and cultural drama that led up to the tragedy – from the tank’s construction (in 1915) all the way through the inevitable lawsuit that followed. Mr. Puleo is an award-winning newspaper reporter and his style is highly readable. If you have never heard about the Great Molasses Flood – and would appreciate a detailed look at Boston’s history- this is the book for you.

Book of the Month - Willie Mays

Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend by James S. Hirsch

Just in time for baseball season! James Hirsch, author of the 2000 bestseller, Hurricane, (about Rubin Carter), produces a definitive biography of one of baseball’s greats – Willie Mays, considered by some to be the best player in baseball.

From a Bookletters review: “Willie is perhaps best know for “The Catch” – his breathtaking over-the-shoulder grab in the 1954 World Series. But he was a transcendent figure who received standing ovations in enemy stadiums and who, during the turbulent civil rights era, urged understanding and reconciliation.”

A great read to get you in the mood to “play ball.” Meg

Book of the Month - Beauty

Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper

Remember Fractured Fairy Tales from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show? They took a standard fairy tale and mixed it up a bit, often with hilarious results. Jon Scieszka does the same kind of thing for kids with his The True Story of the Three Little Pigs or The Frog Prince, Continued.

Beauty by Sherri Tepper is not a fractured fairy tale so much as the tale of Sleeping Beauty told through a dark and sometimes bizarre and mysterious lens. Beauty is able to escape her wicked aunt’s curse, set for her 16th birthday, but that escape does not lead to happy-ever-after. Beauty is the half-daughter of a fairy queen herself, and the rest of the book explores the world of Faery and what it means to be “special.”

As Beauty searches both for her mother and for answers to the mysteries that surround her, we move, not only through Sleeping Beauty, but also glimpse elements of Cinderella, Snow White and even meet a frog prince. The land of Faery is not a place for the naïve and unaware, and Beauty’s journeys are fascinating and dangerous.

Beauty is a fairy tale for adults and even if you are not a fairy tale or science fiction fan, I highly recommend it. Meg

A note about the author: Sheri Tepper is a fairly prolific author of science fiction, horror and mystery novels. Beauty won the Locus Award for 1992.

Book of the Month - Song Yet Sung

Song Yet Sung by James McBride

The Plot: Liz Spocott, slave, breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinth of the creeks and swamps of Maryland’s Eastern shore. What follows is a chase story that involves slave catchers, small plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves and a secret underground network of free blacks helping their fellows. Mixed into this adventure tale is also the story of Liz’s special talent of visioning the future. As the New York Times said, in its review, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness.

I don’t generally like historical novels, but Song Yet Sung brought me to the Eastern Shore of Maryland before the Civil War and showed me a face of slavery and small farm living that has been hard to forget. The power of the tale – which is an exciting adventure, by the way, as well as an historical novel – comes from the fact that McBride never directly rails against the evils of slavery. He shows you – with a powerful narrative and complex and unforgetable characters – that no matter how much “the whites” cared for their slaves, or how much the slaves cared for their masters – the institution of slavery, by its very nature, is evil. And no good can come of evil – ever.

If you are looking for something really special to read in honor of Black History Month try McBride’s Song Yet Sung.

Book of the Month -- The Great Gatsby

Our book of the month to open the year 2010 is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby. It may be familiar to you from classrooms long ago, or it may be one of those books you’ve always meant to read but haven’t. But there will never be a better time to check it out—again or for the first time—than during The Big Read in Newport, brought to you by the Newport Preservation Society and the Newport Public Library. The Big Read runs from January to March, 2010, and features film screenings, lectures, book discussions, and even a jazz concert. You can see a complete listing of events on our online calendar.

Despite all these wonderful events, though, the novel itself is well worth the read. Set in the glitz of the roaring twenties, The Great Gatsby nevertheless survives as a uniquely American story of hope, love, and tragedy.

The Plot: Midwesterner Nick Carraway comes East to start out in the stocks and bonds profession and is quickly drawn to the fashionably excessive parties thrown at his neighbor’s mansion on Long Island. The neighbor happens to be a mysterious man known as Jay Gatsby, who is fabulously rich, supernaturally charming and totally mysterious. Where did he get all his money? Was he a German spy during the war? Nick soon finds himself befriending Gatsby and learning of Gatsby’s desperately romantic infatuation with Nick’s cousin, Daisy, who is unhappily married. Her husband, Tom Buchanan, a Yale athlete from an elite East coast family, happens to have a mechanic's wife for a mistress. As you can imagine, this tangled web of parties and extramarital intrigue ensnares the characters and the readers as well. Mysteries are revealed, love is declared, but doom lurks just around the corner for these characters. The narrator ends one scene with the ominous sentence, "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."

Though finishing at just under 200 pages, The Great Gatsby has an unusual depth of meaning for such a breezy read. And its themes of wealth, aspiration, unrequited love, and mortality appeal to us all. The setting, with its sea-facing mansions and tiny cottages, should be familiar to Newporters in particular. Many locals will remember the filming of The Great Gatsby movie at Rosecliff mansion in the early '70s. The Big Read offers an opportunity, within our unique and historic community, to engage with this wonderful book, the accompanying film, and that particularly glittering, decadent period in American history.

Big Read Calendar of Events

The Big Read at the Newport Preservation Society website

LO

Book of the Month - The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Bookviews’ Book of the Month for October was The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – a highly popular page turner with a unique set of characters and a wonderfully exciting plot. Well, Stieg Larsson’s sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire is just as good, if not better than his first attempt.

Lisbeth Salander, the unique, at times bizarre and always fascinating young woman, introduced in his first book, is back and carrying on as she began.

The Plot: Dag Svensson, a young journalist, comes to Mikael Blomkvist and the Millennium (magazine) Board with a proposal: his fiance is writing her dissertation on the sex trade in Sweden and how it is supported by public and private officials who should know better. In order to expose this scandal widely, Svensson asks that Millennium devote its May issue to the sex trade and at the same time publish a book based on the dissertation. Needless to say, many important and several very dangerous folks object.

Because Lisbeth has been doing a bit of her own sleuthing, she becomes linked to this project and manages to become the primary suspect when three people (one of whom is her former guardian) are brutally murdered. Mikael and his magazine are determined to prove her innocent and to publish their expose no matter the cost.

The Wiki article on The Girl Who Played With Fire calls Lisbeth “a punk, avenging angel with boxing skills and a photographic memory.” Despite seeming to be amoral, Lisbeth has a fine-tuned sense of justice and a strict personal moral code upon which she will act (aggressively), if she feels she is right.

I highly recommend The Girl Who Played With Fire. It is a page turner to the very end.

A little bit about the author: Stieg Larsson, a noted Swedish journalist, activist and writer, died in November, 2004, of a heart attack. The three books that form the Millennium Crime Trilogy are being published posthumously. Book three is entitled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and is due to be published in May 2010. Meg

Book of the Month - The Street Gang

The Street Gang by Michael Davis

Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away,On my way to where the air is sweet.
Can you tell me how to get…how to get to Sesame Street?

As the Google seach page has been reminding us this past week, Sesame Street is 40 years old! Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, Burt and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch – all are names that parents and grandparents and their kids know well. And just in time for this anniversary comes Michael Davis’ Street Gang: The History of Sesame Street.

For those of you who remember back before there was Sesame Street, the concept of combining early childhood education with a television show was, to say the least, unique. Getting a toddlers’ attention by singing the alphabet or using a vampire to learn numbers (remember Count von Count?) was entirely new and many of Sesame Street’s revolutionary ideas were reponsible for the early educational development of many children.

Michael Davis, who was a writer and editor for TV Guide for 9 years, brings his reporter’s expertise and writing skills to the many characters – both real and imaginary – that created the Muppets and peopled Sesame Street for a long time.

Davis begins with a watershed moment for the Sesame Street Gang – the sudden death of creator and master-puppeteer, Jim Henson. As Davis lists some of the people who attended Henson’s funeral (over 5,000 people crowded into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City) you begin to realize how this “simple” children’s show touched many. As Davis says, Henson had invented characters (think Kermit) “that made you smile just thinking about them.”

But Street Gang is more than just a tribute to Jim Henson. It is a look inside that creation called the Children’s Television Network and all the people and effort that went into starting Sesame Street and keeping it up and running despite money crises, critics and detractors.

Street Gang is subtitled The Complete History of Sesame Street and I highly recommend it. It’s fun and educational….and brought to you by the letter “A.” Meg