A city that never sleeps

The spruce mill and the pulp mill may be long gone, but Ketchikan is still a night-shift town: nurses, cab drivers, police officers, cannery workers, grocery clerks, bartenders and deckhands all toil away while we're snuggled down under our blankets. I've dabbled with the edges of night shifts - 5 am baker, midnight grocery clerk - but to be a true nighthawk is to live in another world. Nightshift NYC provides a glimpse into this world in the most 24-hour city in America. Russell and Cheryl Shaaman listen to the stories of transit workers deep in the subway, waitresses at all-night diners, cab drivers and ferry workers delivering intoxicated revelers home from Manhattan, and the guys down at the Fulton Fish Market. Oddly enough, most of the people they talked to choose to work the night shift. The traffic's lighter, the tips are better, and it frees up their day to spend with their kids. Sprinkled with striking black-and-white photos from Corey Hayes, this book is a really interesting look at a lifestyle many of us don't ordinarily think about until we happen to be out at 4 am. If you're looking to meander through late-night, big-city life without actually being on the NYC subway in the middle of the night, you can't go wrong with this book.

Women of a certain age

If you were a high school or college-age girl during the 1990's, the chances are pretty high you had a Tori Amos CD somewhere in your room. Her introspective, somewhat angst-ridden music - delivered with a high, breathless voice - was perfect for people who were trying to deal with the awkward transition into womanhood and a dawning interest in social and political ills. If you would like to replay those days of your youth, or if you would like to know what all the fuss was about, you can check out Tales of a Librarian: a Tori Amos collection.
Being a librarian, I got a chuckle out of the fact that the titles are all listed with their appropriate Dewey call numbers and LC subject headings. (If you didn't understand all that jargon, you probably wouldn't chuckle at the title list). I was never a huge Tori fan, but I will say that her lyrics can be extremely powerful - "Me and a gun" - her piano playing is fabulous - "Cornflake girl" - and her voice can be very stirring at times - "Crucify". She is unusually whimsical in "Mr. Zebra", a song which is reminiscent of a Lewis Carroll poem. In going through this album, my favorite track would have to be the dance remix of "Professional widow", since it's hard not to get up and dance around the room when it's on. So you don't have to be one of the legion of Tori fans to appreciate this CD, but since some of the lyrics can be a bit graphic and disturbing, it's definitely something I play when my young daughter is out of the room.

Required listening

Louis Bayard's latest historical mystery, The Black Tower, has been receiving fantastic reviews. He has garnered praise from Publishers Weekly, Bookmarks, Kirkus Reviews and Booklist for this great story set in France after the fall of Napoleon. The Bourbon monarchy has been restored, and the newly created Sûreté Nationale (the French equivalent of Scotland Yard) is being led by the colorful ex-criminal Vidocq.
Vidocq is currently investigating the possibility that the Dauphin - son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette - did not die during the Revolution in the notorious Temple prison, but was instead smuggled to safety. Treachery, political intrigue, historical color and wonderful characterization come together in this novel. A little bit of mystery, a little bit of thriller and a little bit of history (Eugène François Vidocq was actually a real person), this story offers a little something for everyone.
We not only have this in book format, we also have the audio version. Read by Simon Vance, who did such a great job with the voice characterizations in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, the audiobook makes for compelling listening.

Now I know who to blame

What do Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan and Hulk Hogan have in common? They all drew inspiration from a Nebraska-born wrestler (what is it with those Nebraskans?) with platinum-blond hair named Gorgeous George. An absolute king of showmanship, George's career was customized for the exciting new media of television. With his flamboyant outfits, carefully curled hair and trademark sneer, he was this bizarre mixture of feminine and masculine whose shtick predated that of Liberace.
Gorgeous George: the outrageous bad-boy wrestler who created American pop culture, by John Capouya, details George's metamorphosis from a traditional, if somewhat boring, wrestler into a consummate showman who clowned around with Bob Hope and Burt Lancaster, sold out performances at Madison Square Garden, and had his own fan club (Bess Truman was rumored to be a member, but I have my doubts). This is a story of his rise to fame, his excessive behavior, and his tumble into obscurity. He eventually ended up living in a flophouse in Hollywood, dying of alcoholism. His legend lives on, though, and his career has influenced a wide range of performers.

Got an hour or two to kill?

We have a new book that is guaranteed to make time stand still for you. It's The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker and - like salted peanuts - ya can't stop at just one. Edited by Robert Mankoff and covering 80 years of work from some of the most brilliant cartoonists ever, this book will completely suck you in. You might tell yourself you're just going to look at one or two, just flip through a couple of pages, and the next thing you know a couple of hours have gone by.
The New Yorker cartoons are something special because they are almost always one panel, with a very short caption. Therefore, the cartoonist has to distill the idea (the joke) down into it's pure essence. The thing that I have found most striking in going through this retrospective is how timeless these cartoons are, and how universal the themes are: marriage, parenting, business, finances and sports. In fact, there's something mildly depressing in the fact that the troubles and crises that the cartoonists were poking fun at 40, 60, 80 years ago are still firmly in place today.
And just on the offchance that reading the cartoons themselves doesn't use up enough of your time, the book also comes with two CDs that contain all 68,647 cartoons that were published in the pages of The New Yorker. You can search for cartoons by your favorite artist, the year you were born, or a particular subject matter. For instance, the first disc (1925-1965) contains 25 library-related cartoons. You can print them off. You can email them to friends. You can hassle your coworkers to come "take a look at this one, it's really good".
2008 was a grim year. Start 2009 off with a chuckle.

Summer in the library

There may be snow and sleet outside, but by some freak happenstance, all of the flowering plants here at the public library are blooming at the same time. We have three beautiful Christmas cacti in a variety of shades: red, magenta and coral. Our African violet is studded with pretty purple blossoms, and next to it our shamrock plant (or it might be an oxalis...I always mix the two up) is shooting up a few delicate white flowers. Even our peace lily has 4 lovely stalks topped with a pretty white bloom.

It's not the Kew Botanical Gardens, but it's something to notice the next time you come in to the library for a visit.

Actors

There are movie stars, and then there are actors: giants on both stage and screen who manage to captivate audiences with some kind of internal fire. We have three new biographies that focus on some of the most famous and powerful actors of their generation: Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and Christopher Plummer.
They were all born within 5 years of each other, in three different countries, and they have left their own imprints on the craft of acting. Brando was born in Nebraska in 1924, Burton in a Welsh mining village in 1925, and Plummer was born in Toronto in 1929. Multiple wives, heavy drinking and explosive tempers added as much to the legendary auras of these three men as their acting skills. And, of course, for every Oscar-worthy performance and every classic stage play they have a corresponding clunker in their closet: Last Tango in Paris, Cleopatra and Star Trek VI. But hey, you need to make money for all those alimony payments.
The writing style of each book is somewhat different. Stefan Kanfer has produced a standard biography of Marlon Brando, with a bibliography & an index & a section of photos. Michael Munn's biography of Richard Burton is basically a collection of interviews and recollections from people who knew and worked with Burton. There are no photos whatsoever, although there is an index and list of Burton's plays and films. Plummer has written his own biography (or, to be precise, his autobiography), and he includes no index and the grainy photos are interspersed with the text.
"What does it matter if it has an index, or where the photos are?" I hear you ask. It doesn't matter, really. If you want to read about Richard Burton, the lack of photographs is a minor annoyance, not a hindrance. But if you're just browsing for a biography, little things like indexes and photos can hint at the quality of the work as a whole. Hint, hint...