Jenny Baum's blog

Halloween is fast approaching, as is the opening of the new film, The Box, starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden in early November. Of course, many great books have been made into movies, and sure, there's the Twilight series and Cirque du Freak, both book franchises with new movies coming out, but what are the some of the best horror and science fiction books for adults that have been made into films that you may or may not have heard of?

• Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison for Soylent Green
• The Box: Uncanny Stories by Richard Matheson for the new movie of the same title and a new Twilight Zone “Button, Button” episode from 1986. Also, don't miss his novella for "I Am Legend" [see the film]
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick for Blade Runner
• Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (translated by Ebba Segerberg) for the film of the same title. The U.S. version of the book is sometimes entitled Let Me In. A bestseller in his native Sweden.
• The Ring by Kôji Suzuki for the 2002 U.S. remake with the same title of the 1998 Japanese film, Ringu.
• For an example of Hollywood going to the book first, check out the first of Guillermo Del Toro (The Orphanage, Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) and Chuck Hogan's new vampire trilogy, The Strain.

In his recent movie review of the documentary film No Impact Man, available in book form from NYPL here and in blog form here, A.O. Scott writes, "The year of doing something crazy to learn a lesson or prove a point is by now less a gimmick than a full-fledged publishing genre. Activities that would, in the course of ordinary life, count as modest or private undertakings acquire a special significance when they become the basis of book proposals. A. J. Jacobs followed numerous biblical commandments (there are a lot more than 10) [The Year of Living Biblically]; Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but fast food [Supersize Me]; Julie Powell cooked her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. [Julie and Julia: my year of cooking dangerously]
And Mr. Beavan, in a similarly self-displaying if more austere spirit, weaned himself, Ms. Conlin and their young daughter from motorized transportation, nonlocal food and light bulbs."

There are certainly many films and books that have this theme, and I wanted to highlight a few others:

Ultramarathon Man: confessions of an all-night runner by Dean Karnazes

The Urban Hermit: a memoir by Sam Macdonald
In an attempt to get out of debt and to lose weight, Macdonald embarks on a year long experiment of living on lentils and little else.

A Year Without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy by Sara Bongiorni.
A mother and journalist, Bongiorni is shocked one day by how dependent her family has become on items made in China. She makes (and occasionally breaks) rules for her family to try to break this dependence, not so much as a boycott, but more to try to give other countries a chance, sometimes with humorous results. Watch a short video about this book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56rPPYMVJMM

Give It Up!: My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less by Mary Carlomagno.
Each chapter is dedicated to something different that she tries to live without.

Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine
Levine tries to give up shopping, except for "necessities". Like Bongiorni, she starts out with a set of rules for her family, which are sometimes broken.

Here’s a small sampling of nonfiction science books that are sufficiently strange that even readers who usually shy away from such titles may enjoy, and that readers who usually enjoy such titles may have missed. While none of them will bring back Pluto’s official status as a planet, they all have something interesting to say about medicine, science or technology.

Wendy Moore’s The Knife Man (Broadway Books, 2005) tells the story of John Hunter (1728-1793), a Scottish physician in Georgian London who, through his experimental and unorthodox methods, including body snatching and infecting himself with venereal disease in an attempt to self-inoculate, managed to bring to light many modern-day surgical insights into skin grafting, evolution, not infecting patients with dirty tools, and the harm of bleeding and purging patients, which had been common practice in his day.

G. Wayne Miller’s The Xeno Chronicles (Perseus Publishing, 2005) reflects on xenotransplantation, or the practice of transplanting organs from one species to another, in this case from animals to humans. This book focuses on Dr. David H. Sachs of the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and his hopes for one cloned pig named Goldie. Miller examines this practice from several different angles: its potential to become a multi-billion-dollar business, to the ethical concerns that animal rights groups have about this kind of experimentation, to the hope it can inspire in a patient who has had no luck on the human organ donor list.

Charles Seife’s Decoding the Universe (Viking, 2006); Seife, the author of Zero and Alpha & Omega tries to explain everything from DNA to black holes using information theory. Though the concepts are complex, Seife has a knack for making things more accessible, partly through the use of helpful illustrations.

David Levy’s Love and Sex with Robots (HarperCollins, 2007) is a nonfiction account of the foray of robotics and artificial intelligence into the world of human perception – creating robots that have life-like characteristics of voice response, touch, appearance and scent.

Michael Chorost’s Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) is a warm and interesting memoir of his life as a deaf computer nerd and how his cochlear implant has changed his life and his perceptions of reality. He considers himself a cyborg in the sense that he uses technology to augment his body’s natural abilities.

John D. Barrow’s The Infinite Book (Pantheon, 2005) explores infinities in mathematics, physics, philosophy and religion.

Back in the summer of 2005, Jake Gyllenhaal was quoted as saying:

I am reading a booked called SALT: A WORLD HISTORY, and it's all about salt.

I have a weird fascination with specifics. I like the idea of learning a lot about one thing. And salt is something you take for granted.

You think it's just something on your table. But it has a huge, long history. Wars were started over it.

This celebrity factoid stuck with me because it seemed like a very librarian conceit to be drawn to books about isolated subjects that, as he says, most people take for granted. I am also drawn to books like this, so I wanted to create a booklist of books about specific things and/or with one-word titles. Unsurprisingly, many of these have graced NYPL’s Books to Remember from years past. Movies have long been shortening their titles to evoke this dedication to minimalism, yet something about having such a myopic view of the world continues to have an appeal. Interestingly, many of these books focus on foodstuffs, perhaps in deference to the trend toward simple meals.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History by Katherine Ashenburg (BTR 2007)

Sweet and Low: A Family Story by Rich Cohen (BTR 2006)

This one is a little different, but it does inspire strong reactions in people…

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan (BTR 2004)

Tom Zoellner’s new book Uranium continues our theme. His previous, The Heartless Stone focused on diamonds. After getting dumped by his fiancée, he goes on a personal quest to find where the diamond he purchased came from, visiting Africa, Canada, Japan and other countries in the process.

History of the spice trade books:
http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/spicehistorybooks.html

Coffee history books:
Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast
God in a Cup by Michaele Weissman
More history of coffee books: http://www.jimseven.com/2006/08/18/recommended-coffee-reading/

Tea, of course, has also inspired many books about its cultural history and trading and has just as many devotees as coffee does.

Lastly, a one-word nonfiction book that doesn’t really fit, but that brings us back to the notion of celebrity that began this post.

Flapper by Joshua Zeitz

The subtitle “A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern” pretty much sums it up. Zeitz chronicles the evolution of the flapper from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings to the cinema with Clara Bow and Louise Brooks. His approach is refreshing, detailing the escapades of a young and wild Zelda Fitzgerald and comparing the changing morals from the Victorian age to the rise of industrialization and spread of fashion.

My friend and I have a longstanding debate over whether kangaroos run or hop. Regardless of who is correct (I am), it’s true that many urban dwellers develop a curious understanding of the natural world. Here’s a small sampling of how some people, city folk and others, relate to animals or view the animal kingdom.

Marina Belozerskaya’s The Medici Giraffe: and other tales of exotic animals and power (Little Brown, 2006) has a truly striking cover, I even had someone on the train comment on what an attractive book it is. This book is more about the political climates that encouraged the exploitation and slaughter of exotic breeds for power, amusement and misguided curiosity than some of the accounts of animal caretaking that I will discuss here. A really thorough account of zoos and the use of animals by leaders such as Alexander the Great.

Recommended for bird-watching enthusiasts, or by those who love accounts of the truly obsessed is Club George by Bob Levy (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). Levy feeds (!) his way into the heart of a red wing blackbird in Central Park and keeps a detailed diary about it and other birds and mammals in the park. There’s an entire chapter dedicated to what binoculars to get for optimum bird-watching… need I say more?

With the same friend I have the kangaroo debate with, I watched a show on Animal Planet about animal surrogates, that is, people who adopted Tasmanian devils or wombats and raised them in pouches until they were old enough and healthy enough to be released into the wild. Interestingly enough, this practice has an antecedent in the literary world, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I think I was introduced to this idea in The Medici Giraffe, my apologies if I’m not attributing the story to the right book. Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept a wombat as a pet, among a cadre of other animals, and it purportedly slept on a silver platter on his dining table. The British Museum has a copy of a pen drawing and verse lamenting the death of his beloved wombat.

In Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger (Random House, 2005, A NYPL Book for the Teen Age 2006, under Fur, Feathers and Scales), two New York Times authors, Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson, visit Tasmania with their pot-smoking artist friend in search of sightings of the Tasmanian “tiger”, a marsupial last seen in the 1920s and widely believed to be extinct. Along their quest, they report on the exotic and unusual creatures both thriving and threatened in Tasmania, recent attempts to clone the tiger, and the threat of logging on the old-growth eucalyptus forests. www.carnivorousnights.com.

The variety of animals on our planet never ceases to amaze me. A recent New York Times article by Natalie Angier focused on the echidna, found in New Guinea, a mammal worthy of that amazement and a potential, IMHO, topic for Mittelbach and Crewdson’s next book.

Another NYPL Book for the Teen Age 2006, under Fur, Feathers and Scales, is Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s Raising the Peaceable Kingdom (Ballantine Books, 2005). Mr. Moussaieff Masson, no stranger to writing (When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love ) about animals and a former psychoanalyst, decides to conduct an experiment in his New Zealand home wherein he adopts several baby animals: chickens, cats, dogs, a rabbit and two rats, and sees if he can build his own “peaceable kingdom”. This book raises lots of interesting questions about nature vs. nurture, the process of socialization and animalistic characteristics vs. humanistic characteristics. More recently, in his newer book, The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Your Food and in a New York Times profile on him, he applies his findings to advocate for veganism.

Sy Montgomery’s The Good Good Pig (Ballantine Books, 2006) employs a similar hands-on approach to experiencing the emotional lives of animals firsthand. Her book chronicles the life of “Christopher Hogwood”, a black and white pig on her small farm in New Hampshire who grows from an undersized runt to a 500 lb attraction. It’s a beautifully told story by an author who has also covered dolphins and Southeast Asian bears. This book is sure to appeal to fans of Jon Katz’s dog books.

Lazare-Nicolas-Marguerite Carnot was the original multi-tasker, known as the “Organizer of Victory” because he applied his background in engineering to French military operations under Napoleon Bonaparte and successfully led them to victory. His background in mathematics led to innovative ground tactics and recruitment methods. To be sure, mathematics and science never ceased to be part of his life. He was well known for his early work on kinetic energy and went on to write "La métaphysique du calcul infinitesimal" in 1797. He instilled his love of calculations in his son, Sadi Carnot, who created the second law of thermodynamics. In 1783 he published his first work, "Essai sur les machines en general". It contains a statement that suggests the principle of “energy as applied to a falling weight, and the earliest proof of the fact that kinetic energy is lost in the collision of imperfectly elastic bodies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazare_Nicolas_Marguerite_Carnot).” In it, he described his unique approach to the sciences, and it is easy to see how such an approach could apply to the art of war.

“... the sciences are like a beautiful river, of which the course is easy to follow, when it has acquired a certain regularity; but if one wants to go back to the source, one will find it nowhere, because it is everywhere; it is spread so much [as to be] over all the surface of the earth; it is the same if one wants to go back to the origin of the sciences, one will find only obscurity, vague ideas, vicious circles; and one loses oneself in the primitive ideas.”  read more »

If you enjoyed my earlier post on the Unexpected Lives of Women, here are some authors who did or wrote about things that were different from the status quo at the time.

George Eliot, wrote under pen name of a man so that she would not be seen as, what was considered at that time, merely another writer of romances. Other female writers who have used male pen names include George Sand, and more recently, writers such as Nora Roberts who have used gender-neutral initials, as J.D. Robb, for various reasons.

Mary Shelley, best known as the author of Frankenstein (written, incidentally, during a long winter night as a contest with some of the leading male Romantic writers of the day, including Lord Byron, in order to determine who could write the best supernatural story), was also the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, → the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), a key work to the emergence of the feminist movement.

Octavia Butler, an African-American woman, wrote in a genre, science fiction, that was predominantly written by white males, and she did it in a way that changed that genre forever.

Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea as a “prequel” to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, essentially “remixing” it to remark on the Caribbean, where she grew up and to address themes of “imperialism, capitalism, religion, racism, classism, and sexism”.

Zora Neale Hurston → drew on folklore to create groundbreaking fiction, inspiring modern writers such as Alice Walker. She also worked as a librarian at points in her life, including at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

I don’t have the space to write about all the landmark female authors that have changed literature through their contributions, but I invite you to explore NYPL’s holdings of literature by great female authors, past and present.

“Revolution is but thought carried into action.” Emma Goldman
“All creative people want to do the unexpected.” Hedy Lamarr
“If the career you have chosen has some unexpected inconvenience, console yourself by reflecting that no career is without them.” Jane Fonda

For Women’s History Month, you might expect to hear about the same Notable Women, but what about women who are famous for one thing, and yet are accomplished in multiple arenas? Many modern women are familiar with juggling different aspects of their lives. Let’s take a look at a few famous women who have accomplished great feats for things other than what they are commonly known for…

The National Women’s History Museum’s gallery Clandestine Women: Spies in American History explores the contributions of women such as Julia Child, who, before she became internationally known as a leading chef, was a World War II era spy. Other female spies that parlayed their status as entertainers so that they could gather intelligence include Josephine Baker and Mata Hari. Harriet Tubman, best known for organizing the Underground Railroad trips to free slaves, “also served with the Union Army in South Carolina, organizing a spy network and even leading raids and spy expeditions” (http://womenshistory.about.com/od/civilwar/a/women_spies_un.htm).

Actress Hedy Lamarr, best known for her roles on the silver screen, was also a co-inventor of a radio-controlled torpedo electronic guidance system. Although she eventually received credit for her role in the invention, she never saw any money from its application.

I hope you enjoy browsing some of these links to unexpected or little known lives of women. Stay tuned for some links to unexpected lives of women authors.

Thank you for participating in this month’s discussion! If you enjoyed A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown, here are some more titles that you might enjoy:
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer

Girlbomb: a halfway homeless memoir by Janice Earlbaum
Leaving Dirty Jersey by James Salant
Beautiful boy : a father's journey through his son's addiction, by David Sheff
A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Next month The Reader’s Den will be discussing the novel, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado. Visit your local branch or the LEO catalog to reserve your copy!

I hope you have been enjoying the memoir A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown. Here are some discussion questions to get you started. Feel free to talk about other parts of the book as well…

• Which characters served as turning points in Cupcake’s life, either for better or worse? Do some stand out as being more influential, for example, the cop known as “Preacher” or her former boss Dave?

• She calls Cupcake her “first birth name” on page one, even though it ends up being changed to La’Vette. What significance do you ascribe to her reclaiming the name Cupcake?

• What role does addiction play in the book? Does its role change with the type of drug ingested? With the type of emotions involved?

• Cupcake has a meltdown in Dairy Queen on page 379 and V instructs her that she must make amends. How does this or any other scene in the book encourage her to open up to others?

Welcome back to the second edition of The Reader's Den!

A brief summary:
A Piece of Cake is the autobiography of Cupcake Brown. Cupcake (not her birth name) finds herself wrenched from a loving home at a young age and placed with a sadistic woman, her privileged birth daughter, and a handful of other foster-care children. Running away leads into deeper trouble, with brushes with prostitution, gangs, and heavy drug use. Ultimately uplifting, this memoir documents her rise from difficult circumstances to becoming a functioning, but drug abusing, employee, to becoming a stable and sober paralegal. Those who enjoyed James Frey's A Million Little Pieces will also enjoy this book.

Official Cupcake Brown Web site:
http://www.cupcakebrown.com/

Reviews:
http://www.bookreporter.com

http://www.bonnieglover.com

To find a copy, visit your local branch, find a copy of the book in the catalog, find a copy of the CD in the catalog, download a copy of the eAudiobook, or find a copy at your nearest library through Worldcat.