It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes!

Posted on March 11, 2010 by smellincoffee

It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes: Four Seasons of Natural Phenomena and Oddities of the Sky
© 1992 Jerry Dennis; illustrations by Glenn Wolff
323 pages

It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes is a collection of nearly forty essays on the many mysteious of the heavens. While I initially thought this to be a book of weather, auther Jerry Dennis covers the sky in total — writing essays on the animals that soar through it and the natural and artificial bodies that inhabit it.The essays are divided seasonally, each season starting with an introductory essays. Essays regarding year-round occurances, like eclipses, are sorted into summer. Dennis’ essays should be quite lucid to any reading level: I imagine I could’ve read this as a child, provided I had the patience. Most of the essays were fascinating to me, and they covered a wide range of topics — migratory patterns,  mating rituals, the magnificent fury and beauty of natural weather systems, animal sensitivity to environmental changes, fog, and much more. I’d reccommend this as a breezy and interesting read to lay readers.

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This Week at the Library (10-3)

Posted on March 10, 2010 by smellincoffee

American Infidel is a biography of Robert G. Ingersoll, one which places slight emphasis on his career as a “secular preacher”, one who railed against the abuses of organized religion while promoting liberty and humanism.  The biography is thorough, presenting a rich view of his life.

Murder at the ABA is one of Isaac Asimov’s few straight mysteries. Unusually, Asimov himself is a primary character, helping protagonist and narrator Darius Just find out if the death of a mutual acquaintence was an accident or murder. The result is a humorous whodunit.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a 1889 fantasy story in which a proud believer in the American ideal is transported to the sixth century, where he puts his “Yankee ingenuity” and knowledge as a machinist to work, attempting to build the 19th century from the bones of Dark-Age England.  The book is not only a fantasy story, but an attack on the romanticized medieval world and a slight commentary on the 19th’ own views of progress.

Hitler’s War, first in a new series by Harry Turtledove, is a straightforward “What if? story with two points of derivation from reality, one of which sees World War 2 beginning at the 1938 Munich Conference. The book’s ending plot twist guarantees that I’ll be reading the second novel.

The Archie Americana — Best of the Fifties two-volume set collects forty Archie Comics stories from the 1950s. The books’ portrayal of the fifties is largley limited to clothing fashions and slang, with the occassional story about Elvis or the Beats.

Potatoes are Cheaper by Max Shulman uses the classic formula of a love triangle to present a comedic novel. Although these stories can  be somewhat tragic,  the lead character of Marty Katz doesn’t necessarily command the reader’s sympathy. This is a hilarious story all the same.

Pick of the Week:  American Infidel or Murder at the ABA.
Quotation of the Week:
“It was useless to argue with her. Arguments have no chance against petrified training: they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.” (p. 87, Connecticut Yankee)
Next Week:

  • It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes by Jerry Dennis  amounts to a collection of essays about curious weather phenomena.  
  • The Human Zoo, Desmond Morris. I’ve been nibbling at this one for weeks, but never really diving in. 
  • The Ethics of Star Trek, Judith Barad and Ed Robinson. The book uses episodes with pointed philosophical themes alongside more conventional philosophical works (Plato’s Republic, The Nicomachean Ethics) to tackle ethics, exploring the ideas of justice, personal virtue, and morality. 

It’s also time to dive into more term paper research, so I’ll probably be reading about medieval/renaissance science and submarine warfare in the next month or so.

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Potatoes are Cheaper

Posted on March 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

Potatoes are Cheaper
© Max Shulman 1971
235 pages

Potatoes are cheaper
Tomatoes are cheaper
Now’s the time
To fall in love


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The dearest book in my private library is not a groundshaking or even remotely serious: it is rather a collection of humorous short stories entitled The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.  I came upon it completely by accident, my high-school librarian  giving it to me in the midst of her annual shelf-clearing. It’s easily the funniest and most charming book I’ve ever read: I would chance fire to rescue it from a burning house, and I would buy another book off the internet blindly to read more from the same author because of its effect on me. That’s how I came to read Potatoes are Cheaper.
In the midst of the Great Depression, Marty Katz and his cousin Albert have just come up with a brilliant way to escape poverty: they’ll head for college to find and woo homely rich girls. The girls have to be Jewish of course, since Marty and Albert’s mothers are. While the boys might not object to marrying a “shiksa”, their mothers would never tolerate it. Determined to debunk the myth that ‘Jewish girls don’t put out’, each boy soon has his mark, Marty’s being the only heir of a theater magnate. Marty commissions poetry from his cousin “Crip” in order to woo young Celeste Zimmerman in hopes of marrying her lovely stacks of money. This Crip is only too happy to do, for he lives vicariously through the romantic triumphs of his cousin.

If Katz’s uphill battle against winning the tolerance of Celeste’s father  wasn’t enough, Celeste happily forwarded one of Crip’s love poems — signed under Marty’s name — to a school literary journal, where it catches the eye of one Bridget O’Flynn. Bridget is very lovely, and very much smitten by Katz and “his” poem. Although Katz would readily take advantage of the situation, ever willing having a little fun before returning to the war for Celeste and her father’s heart,  Bridget has an unexpected effect on young Marty. She’s captured his heart.  Thus Marty must choose between two women, each with enjoyable ‘assets’. His mother and cousin think him daft for wanting to choose love over easy money, especially given that his status as a “poet” is fraudulent. It’s a a comic love triangle, one that might be sometimes tragic if Marty weren’t such a boor.

Tomatoes are Cheaper was a enjoyable read: wildly funny, of course, sometimes bawdily so. It’s not Dobie Gillis, but definitely a book I’ll return to for laughs in the future.

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Teaser Tuesday (9-3)

Posted on March 9, 2010 by smellincoffee

It’s Tuesday again, and time for teasing. As ever, this meme’s home is Should Be Reading.

“What major are you most interested in?”
“What’s the easiest?” I said.
“Home economics,” he said.
“What’s the next easiest?” I said.
“It’s between sociology and library science,” he said. “To my certain knowledge nobody has ever flunked either.”
“Which one got the most girls in it?” I asked.

p. 28-29 Tomatoes are Cheaper, by Max Shulman. When planning a college career, one should have goals in mind.

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Archie Americana — Best of the Fifties

Posted on March 7, 2010 by smellincoffee

Archie Americana Series: Best of the Fifties, volumes 1 and 2
© 1991/1992 Archie Comics
96 pages each

(I wouldn’t normally comment on comic books, but these are part of a special collection.)

I grew up on — indeed, learned to read with — Archie Comics. I’ve been enjoying the silly stories of the gang from Riverdale since I gained the dexterity to hold a book upright. They’re a family obsession spanning the generations, so no sooner did I buy this set for my dad than did he begin to pass them around. Back in the 90s, Archie Comics issued a series of anthologies showcasing their favorite comics from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. Each volume begins with a two-page article introducing the volume: volume 2 of this set’s intro is particularly helpful, as it explains the birth of the American teenager in the 1950s consumer culture and Archie’s place in documenting that world. Each volume contains twenty stories, and together the volumes amount to a little over 190 pages.

The central characters of the Archie universe are five American teenagers, although stories almost always involve their friends, parents, and school authorities. Archie Andrews is the star, being the object of a love triangle between his best girls Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge, the best friend of food-loving Jughead Jones, and the favorite target of chronic prankster Reggie Mantle. The kids are perpetual eleventh-graders, forever seventeen and always getting into trouble with their parents, their teachers, or among themselves. Some of the basic stories I read as a child were around in the fifties, although it’s obvious that the characters have become more fully developed  in the passing decades: Betty and Veronica  share the same basic personality at this point, the only hint of Betty’s future role as a tomboy coming in a story in which she plays baseball. Many of the gang’s defining traits have not yet been developed by this point, it seems.

The forty stories presented here were never intended as explicitly portraying “the fifties”: the art and props just reflect the times in which they were written. Based on my experience seeing the comics change through the 90s and early 00’s, they generally take a few years to catch up. Still, the comics from every generation reflect the fads and fashion of the time: just as the late 90s had the gang obsessing over Beanie-Babies and electronic pets, these comics demonstrate the popularity of Elvis, sock-hops, and (oddly)  genealogy-tracing. The general culture displayed in the books reflects the American 1950s: girls wear dresses that are both flowy and (very) form-fitting, Archie wears sweater-vests and drives a ’30s jalopy,  and Mr. Lodge is a captain of manufacturing industry. (Contemporary comics have him as a commercial overlord who does a lot of Wall Street trading.) Stories about Elvis or the the conversion of Archie and Jughead to the “Beat” lifestyle are the  most explicit evidence that these comics were taken from the fifties. (Jughead will become a hippie in the 1960s.) One fifties element I looked for was Cold War paranoia and obsessive American patriotism, but the closest the stories come to that is in covering the fad of genealogy-tracing, when after deflating the egoes of several people who have gotten haughty as a result of being descended from royalty, a teacher infers that the only “coat of arms” worth wearing is the American flag.

As far as art goes, the characters look less refined than they are today. The style that predominates these two collections isn’t unusual for me: I only read Archie comics in digest form, and they tend to recycle stories from across the decades. I’m thus used to wide variations in dress, in props, and in slang. The stories tend toward the goofy — even ‘cornball’ — but I’m sure fans of Archie will appreciate the volumes. I think the volumes could benefit from being bigger: while they convey a sense of the fifties, it’s not  very rich. Then again, I may not notice the distinction because so many of the classical elements — the gang living in an old-fashioned town in which the neighborhoods have sidewalks where one may walk to school or the corner malt shop — remain in the contemporary comics.

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Hitler’s War

Posted on March 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

Hitler’s War
© 2009 Harry Turtledove
496 pages



The year is 1938, and war wages in Spain between the Popular Front — a collection of democrats, liberals, socialists, communists, and anarchists —  and the Nationalists, those supporting the attempted military takeover of the Second Spanish Republic. German chancellor Adolf Hitler, who has recently remilitarized the German border with France and effected the annexation of Austria in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, is meeting in Munich with representatives from the British and French governments over the fate of Czechoslovakia. The western powers created Czechoslovakia following the Great War, and its mountainous border regions are peopled by Germans whom Hitler believes belong in the Fatherland.  He expects the allies to concede these regions and more to him, and the unexpected political assassination of those Czechoslovakian Germans’ leader seems a godsend to his cause.

He does not anticipate Chamberlain’s reaction, for the British prime minister sees this assassination as an obviously staged event on the part of the German ruler. Angered by the Chancellor’s arrogance, Britain and France affirm their support of Czechoslovakia. The political leaders leave the room and return to a Europe at war: soon, Russia will join the Allies in condemning this fragant display of imperialism.  World War 2 has begun. While Hitler’s newly-revived Wehrmacht goes into action in the Czech mountains, French and British troops gingerly tip-toe into Germany to run over a few mailboxes and blow raspberries. Meanwhile, smaller nations bordering Czechoslovakia join Germany in its evisceration and tensions rise between Russia and the “fascist” state of Poland.

As the struggle develops, people continue to live their live — and it is their story told here. Some are soldiers who fight in the various conflicts — a German tanker, Republican and Nationalists in Spain,  French and British infantrymen,  fighter pilots, and submarine commanders — that emerge after Munich, but others are innocents caught in a miserable situation. As is typical for Turtledove, these viewpoint characters are multi-national and range the moral spectrum. Some even existed in reality, as did their triumphs and humiliations. Although Turtledove is tasked with making only a small derivation from the standard course of history interesting,  those minor changes force the conflict to develop in a wholly different way by novel’s end. Hitler’s War is typical Turtledove in style, strengths, and weaknesses, and is the first in a six-volume series. Although initially unimpressed except by the novel’s depiction of the Spanish Civil War, the book’s final fifty pages whet my appetite and I am eager to see what develops from here on out.

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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Posted on March 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court 
© 1889 Mark Twain (alias Samuel Clemens)
Bantam Classic edition, 274 pages

I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court along with other highly-esteemed literature as a child through the ‘Great Illustrated Classics‘ series. In the summer I decided to begin revisiting these classics in their original form. Yankee is the story of one Hank Morgan, a machinist who is rudely transported through time and across an ocean to the time of King Arthur by a simple blow to the head.  Quickly captured by a knight and taken to Camelot to be burned as a tresspassing lunatic, Morgan manages to save himself and achieve power by using “Yankee ingenuity” and the preemptive power of Clarke’s third law.

Happily, the date of his arrival to the world of King Arthur coincides with that of a full solar eclipse. Morgan uses this to his advantage, threatening to block out the light of the sun forever — relenting only when King Arthur agrees to make Morgan his right-hand man. Morgan quickly overtakes the wizard Merlin as the land’s preeminent magician, using his scientific and mechanical knowledge to gain the fear and respect of Arthur’s court.  Morgan aims to take command of the country — not overtly, but by guiding its progress into a new world. While earning his keep in making the country’s bureacracy run more effiencly, Morgan lays the foundation for a cultural takeover — establishing secret factories and schools that will create the 19th century thirteen hundred years early.  To do this, he must render Merlin impotent, destroy knight-errantry, and erode the power of the church. Only by abandoning superstition, tradition, and authoritative religion can Morgan successfully create the kind of progressive society he believes himself to have formerly been part of.  Alas, the newly-styled “Boss” of England will become a victim of his own success and all of his hopes will hinge on one battle.

When I read the book as a child, I saw it only as a simple story of speculative fantasy:  if Twain’s satirical humor and commentary were present in that manuscript, they were completely lost on me. Not so, this time: Twain uses the book to lambast medieval romanticism, spending much time to describe the miseries of the general period. As the world of King Arthur  never truly existed — being a world that evolved in the imaginations of centuries of men, changing as the given culture demanded — Twain is not criticizing any specific timeframe, but rather a dark-age or early medieval stereotype. Twain also pokes fun at the 19th century idea of progress, one that is limited to the progress of technology and not necessarily of the human spirit. Morgan also comments repeatedly on the power of mental “training”, what we might call indoctrination or conditioning. He regards the medieval man as being woefully ignorant and credulous in part because he is relentlessly trained to be so: not all the rational arguments of the world can budge a lifetime of mental apathy or credulity.

Yankee makes for a entertaining read, with much thought-provoking humor. Its commentary says as much of Twain’s day as it does of Arthur’s.

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Murder at the ABA

Posted on March 3, 2010 by smellincoffee

Murder at the ABA: A Puzzle in Four Days and Sixty Scenes
© 1976 Isaac Asimov
230 pages

    On May 25th, 1975, booksellers and authors gathered in New York City for a weekend of networking, book pitches, and speeches. One such author would not live to see the convention’s second day. His body was found in his bathroom by his one-time mentor, the apparent cause of death a sudden blow to the head caused by a nasty bathtub fall. His estranged friend and former mentor is not convinced that this matter is innocent, based on the condition of the room – and what appears to be spilled heroin upon a countertop. Just is also bothered by the possibility that his last contact with Devore consisted in publically humiliating him for being a mean-spirited heel. Thus, without sanction from the police and to the dismay of hotel staff who don’t want their good name soiled by implications of murder, Just begins investigating the matter .

            The story’s plot unfolds over the course of four days. Just elicits the help and advice of many of his fellow convention-goers, most particularly his friend Isaac Asimov. Asimov has been consigned to spending time at the conference in order to write a book called Murder at the ABA. His publisher, Doubleday, wants him to finish the book within three months’ time so that it can be ready to sell at the next convention. That book is Murder at the ABA:  as Just informs the reader,  he is allowing Asimov to use the story of these days in return for his occasional help. As Just is a writer himself, he sometimes steps into the narrative to chide Asimov for taking too many liberties. This approach proved to be surreal, but entertaining to say the least. Often Just and Asimov argue in the footnotes, and Asimov has a knack for self-depreciation.

    As Just investigates, he finds that many people might have felt inclined to do the often-obnoxious DeVore in, but none of this explanations includes the spilled heroine, which mysteriously went missing as soon as hotel security arrived. After listening to Asimov and Carl Sagan debate Uri Gellar and other practitioners of woo, Just wonders if he is just as guilty in convincing himself that DeVore has been murdered. (This debate, says Asimov in an afterward, was real, as was the conference and most of its guests.) He must get to the bottom of the matter before the convention breaks up, least he be plagued  by the thought What if?

            Murder at the ABA is an Asimovian classic, a page-turner replete with dry humor  and allowing Asimov to have  more than a little fun at reality’s expense.

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Teaser Tuesday (2-3)

Posted on March 2, 2010 by smellincoffee

It’s Tuesday, and thus time for teasing — as always, from ShouldBeReading.

 I said to him, “What are you doing here, Isaac? Why aren’t you home writing a book?”
[Asimov] groaned. “In a way that’s what I’m doing here. Doubleday wants me to write a mystery novel entitled Murder at the ABA.” 

This from page 37 of  Murder at the ABA, by Isaac Asimov.

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American Infidel

Posted on February 28, 2010 by smellincoffee

American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll
© Orvin Larson 1962 / republished 1993 by FFRF Inc
316 pages

Robert Green Ingersoll has long been a personal hero of mine, so when during the course of a class on the Gilded Age I was allowed to choose a contemporary of the period to write a biographical article about, I eagerly chose “Colonel Bob”.  I have read most of Ingersoll’s available works and a previous biography, and looked forward to seeing Larson made of him. At the outset, American Infidel is more personal than Robert Ingersoll: while the latter emphasizes his legal work and examines themes in his speeches, Larson’s work is very much about the man who referred to his wife and daughter as his Holy Trinity, who rehearsed his speeches before a bust of Cicero as he engaged in his favorite sport of billiards.

Unlike David Anderson’s topical approach, Larson is strictly linear. While his gives the reader a better picture of Ingersoll’s life as he lived it, the ever-rushing narrative was a bit distracting at times. The book might have profited from more occasional focus, but overall Larson presents a richer view of Ingersoll’s life with particular emphasis on his humanistic worldview and his relationships with the religions and churchmen of the day.

      Although I tend to think of Ingersoll as a man apart from his era– a colossus whose committment to humanism made the times look poorer by comparison — Larson’s work makes it clear that Ingersoll was a man of his time. He was a principled but profit-conscious lawyer, a frightfully polemic politican, and an ardent lover of the Union whose passion for the American dream was only rivaled by his contempt for those who would render the Union asunder or undermine its foundation.  He seems almost a man of multiple times: his political philosophy is from the 18th century and his morals from the 20th, but he lived in between the two. He emerges from the narrative as an extraordinary man of conviction, fighting fiercely for the causes he sees as just and making sacrifices in order to keep true to his principles.

    Thus, while the book has a few minor weak points, it is an easy reccommendation for those interested in the life of Ingersoll or his works.

Related:

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