Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 25

Because buying books for Ballou Sr High School is the best thing you can do

Cross posted from Guys Lit Wire, the group blog I moderate and co-created with the amazing Sarah Stevenson.

Students in the library with books bought this spring by Guys Lit Wire readers

We here at Guys Lit Wire keep our fingers pretty close to the pulse of the DC school system as the Ballou Sr High School library is near and dear to our hearts. After three previous online book fairs to help stock the shelves, we were already planning to return to Ballou but the news that libraries in particular were facing major cost cutting measures in the city has just strengthened our commitment. When we began with Ballou in 2011 there were just over 1,500 books in the library, or 1.25 for each of the nearly 1,200 students. Now, they have 5,484 which means we are about a third of the way to our goal of meeting the ALA standard of eleven books for each student. The three book fairs for Ballou to date have resulted in over 1,000 books bought from Powells Books and many others donated directly to the school through the publicity we have helped generate. Now, we are back to Ballou for another round of gift giving from a list of 450+ great new books that has us all really excited.

For those who have participated with our book fairs in the past, this explanation will be familiar: there is a wish list at Powells Books for the school that was created with input and final approval of Melissa Jackson, the Ballou librarian. (If you want to embed it in your own posts about the book fair, here's the link: http://bit.ly/GLWBookFair.) The list includes novels and poetry as well as nonfiction titles on colleges, travel, finance, nature, art and more. There is also a healthy selection of manga and graphic novels.

It is perfectly fine to purchase used copies of a book (more bang for your buck) but please check and make sure the book is in "standard" used condition and not "student owned". (You will have to click on the title and leave the wish list to check this). The "student owned" copies are very cheap for a reason - they are written in and thus not a good choice for this effort. Also, be on the look out for "sale" prices of new books which are really a fantastic deal. (And of course if you can buy new, we really hope you will!)

Once you have made your selections head to "checkout" and you will be prompted to inform Powells if the books were indeed bought from the wishlist. This lets the store know to mark them as "purchased" on the list. After that you need to provide your credit card info and also fill in the shipping address. Here is where the books are going:

Melissa Jackson, LIBRARIAN

Ballou Senior High School

3401 Fourth Street SE

Washington DC 20032

(202) 645-3400

It's very important that you get Melissa's name and title in there - she is not the only Jackson (or Melissa) at the school and we want to make sure the books get to the library. And please know we appreciate you jumping through a few extra hoops for the wish list at Powells - this is a chance for us to support an important bricks and mortar independent bookstore and while it takes a little extra effort, we really think it's worth it.

Finally, here's a look inside Ballou, from students speaking about the Jobs for American Grads program. It gives you a good idea of just how much these kids are up against and how incredibly motivated they are to improve their lives.

If we're going to make an effort to change the lives of anyone, it should be the kids at Ballou Sr High School - helping them in fact should be the easiest decision in the world for any of us to make.

How often do you tell yourself you'd make a difference if only you knew how? Well, here is your easy inexpensive nonpartisan apolitical (yea!) chance to make the best possible sort of difference, and one all of us as booklovers can certainly identify with.

So, please, go to the wish list, buy a book and make one school at our nation's capitol a better place. Thanks so much for your efforts and if you can, spread the word on the book fair as far and wide as possible. Follow @BallouLibrary on twitter where Melissa will thank folks as the books arrive and for more pics of the library and check out their facebook page. And here are a few more pics of kids enjoying the Ballou Library:

The Ballou Scrabble Team!

Celebrating African American authors!

Poetry Club at the DC Youth Poet Slam!

Chess Team!

Readerly state of affairs

Guys Lit Wire will be hosting a fall book fair for Ballou HS starting Monday so please plan your Powells Books shopping accordingly :). This is our second book fair for Ballou this year, and much needed - DC schools had their budgets cut again in 2012 and many schools are completely losing their librarians. If you can't shop then be sure to help spread the word.* The post with link to the wish list and all the details will go up on Monday morning at GLW.

October and November columns are done - scary stories next month and then [very] realistic fiction in November. (I'm calling that one "beyond Judy Blume" in my head.)

So now I'm reading for December which so far means Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, Libba Bray's The Diviners, Ned Vizzini's The Other Normals (had to put that one aside when I realized it wouldn't work for Oct but back into it now) and Tiffany Trent's The Unnaturalists. There will be a couple more, just not sure what now. (I'm kinda heavy on books with female protags so shall look for guys I think.)

Also for the December feature on "coffee table books for kids/teens", I just finished Unusual Creatures by Michael Hearst and it is a very funny/snarky animal book on some quite unique creatures. The book has heart also - Hearst is painfully aware of how many of these animals are endangered and makes sure readers know what we could be losing.

Next up for that piece is paging through Sketchtravel from Chronicle Books. Still waiting on a few other titles for this feature though and hope they show up.

A heads-up: new Darwin graphic novel due from Smithsonian Books in February. The science geek in me is thrilled to see his story coming out in a format that will work for reluctant reading teens.

In my hands right now - the gorgeous, over-the-top wonderfulness that is Oceanomania: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas by Mark Dion. I'm a huge fan of Dion's work (have several of his books) and just love what MACK Books has done with the design. It's a stunner and while it packs a hefty price, I consider it well worth it. This is what we mean when we refer to a book as an object - it's unthinkable in any other format. (For a look at several of the stunning interior shots, check out this post at Mapping the Marvelous.)

*Send me an email (colleenATchasingrayDOTcom) if you want to help send out the info for the book fair and/or have press contacts to share!

How did I end up analyzing Alaskan men?

I didn't expect to be writing about men so much. MAP happened because I followed that old adage and wrote about what I knew. (It's also because I spent a couple of years writing about it for college in a dry academic way and wanted to use all that research in a more lyrical way.) But now, what I'm trying to do now, is more.....planned. It's me deciding I really want to write about Alaska because there is more I want to know and more I want to say. What's interesting is that most of the telling is about men - men who fly in mountain passes, men who mapped mountain passes, men who climb mountains, men who land aircraft on mountains and, well, lots of men.

I blame the compulsion to unravel even more myths about Alaskan manhood on ridiculous bits of hyperbole like this. (If you follow the link it's another reality show, this time about a place that we flew into every damn day- at 7:30AM with the priority mail. Hell, they had mail in their mailboxes before we did in Fairbanks. But oh no - "People struggle to find food and heat; battle life-threatening predators just to survive.") (It almost hurts just to cut and paste that crap.)

I don't know if I can write about Alaska without exhausting my laptop's supply of exclamation points. I keep wanting to use all caps and scream "THIS IS HOW IT REALLY IS!!!!" But no one wants to read that book. (I understand why, really I do.)

But I digress.

In researching about climbing and flying, I kept coming back to the same thing over and over again - not the acts themselves but the men who did them. And I don't think they were perfect or even exemplary. The myths about them - or the ideal of them - are what really intrigues me. We just love myths, don't we? We can't resist them. (I'm kind of having a love affair with Joseph Campbell right now.)

So, yeah, I'm writing about men. Now if I can just convince my husband it's not all about him then this book would go a lot easier....

Sweet Jesus: "The Fracking of Rachel Carson"

From Orion Magazine, an absolute must read by Sandra Steingraber:

29. In 2011, Chesapeake Energy, a top producer of natural gas, was a corporate sponsor of the Pennsylvania Breast Cancer Coalition. In response to questions about possible conflicts of interest, the coalition's executive director Heather Hibshman said, "I'm not a scientist. I'm not a researcher. I run a nonprofit. I'm going to leave it at that." Hibshman also said that she was unaware of any correlations between fracking and breast cancer.

30. Fracking for the cure.

31. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson pointed out that pesticides were rapidly rolled out after World War II not because of some unmet pest-control need (like, say, farmers suddenly overrun with bugs and weeds). Rather, abundant leftover stockpiles from wartime use were in need of a domestic market. And so, with the help of Madison Avenue, one was created. DDT, a military weapon, was thus repurposed for domestic use without any premarket testing for safety. An abundance of former military planes that could be cheaply converted into spray planes--and an abundance of former military pilots who loved to fly them--helped seal the deal.

32. In March 2012, it was announced that the town of Monaca, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania (twenty-eight miles northwest of Pittsburgh), would be the site for a massive new ethylene cracker facility--the first in Appalachia--that will create chemical feedstocks for the plastics industry out of the other hydrocarbons that come up with the gas when Marcellus Shale is fracked. Most notably, ethane. This plant is being rolled out not because of some unmet need for more plastic. Rather, it is being built to solve a disposal problem for the energy industry and--of course--to create jobs. Petrochemical crackers are notorious air polluters, and the air of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, already exceeds legal limits for ground-level ozone (smog) and fine particles, which is the very sort of pollution that crackers create. Michael Krancer, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection secretary, is not worried. "The plant will be state-of-the-art and built by a world-wide, world-class, environmentally responsible company."

33. That company would be Shell Oil.

Go. READ IT ALL.

Greetings from The Gang of 164th Street, 1935

I spent part of the weekend scanning in some old family photos so I could label and archive them digitally and then mail the originals off to various family members. (These pictures all came from my great grandmother's photo albums and are dated from 1895 through the 1960s.) About half the pictures (and there are hundreds of them) are labeled with dates or names or locations or sometimes (yea!) all three. (Those are pretty darn rare though.) The rest are completely blank but my mother and I know most of the people and can pick them out and using the ages of the kids in the photos (usually my grandmother or her siblings) get a good date. But then there are some, like the photo above, that we are really pretty clueless about.

What's interesting about "The Gang of 164th Street, 1935" is that the handwriting for that caption on the back of the photo is probably my grandfather's. (I'm about 99% sure of that.) He and my grandmother did not get married until 1939 but he hung out with her and her family throughout the 1930s (he's in a ton of the pictures). So this group of guys were obviously his friends and with the picture in the album, they must have been friends of my grandmother & her siblings as well. (There are lots of friends who show up in the pics.) I kind of think that the one on the front row, far left, is my great uncle Thomas (one of my grandmother's older brothers and the same age as my grandfather) but I can't be sure as his eyes are closed and it's kind of a funny angle. (Plus the picture is so faded.) (I use a magnifying glass all the time with these pictures!)

But mostly all I know about this picture is that they were friends of my family, that they had a good time together (clearly playing football), and that they hung out on 164th Street (in the Bronx, where my family lived). I just love the whole idea of this group together, in their teens (my grandfather would have been 19 in 1935, my grandmother 16), having a good time. We should all be so lucky in our childhoods, shouldn't we?

And yeah, I'm keeping this one for myself. :)

Sweet Jesus: "The Fracking of Rachel Carson"

From Orion Magazine, an absolute must read by Sandra Steingraber:

29. In 2011, Chesapeake Energy, a top producer of natural gas, was a corporate sponsor of the Pennsylvania Breast Cancer Coalition. In response to questions about possible conflicts of interest, the coalition's executive director Heather Hibshman said, "I'm not a scientist. I'm not a researcher. I run a nonprofit. I'm going to leave it at that." Hibshman also said that she was unaware of any correlations between fracking and breast cancer.

30. Fracking for the cure.

31. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson pointed out that pesticides were rapidly rolled out after World War II not because of some unmet pest-control need (like, say, farmers suddenly overrun with bugs and weeds). Rather, abundant leftover stockpiles from wartime use were in need of a domestic market. And so, with the help of Madison Avenue, one was created. DDT, a military weapon, was thus repurposed for domestic use without any premarket testing for safety. An abundance of former military planes that could be cheaply converted into spray planes--and an abundance of former military pilots who loved to fly them--helped seal the deal.

32. In March 2012, it was announced that the town of Monaca, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania (twenty-eight miles northwest of Pittsburgh), would be the site for a massive new ethylene cracker facility--the first in Appalachia--that will create chemical feedstocks for the plastics industry out of the other hydrocarbons that come up with the gas when Marcellus Shale is fracked. Most notably, ethane. This plant is being rolled out not because of some unmet need for more plastic. Rather, it is being built to solve a disposal problem for the energy industry and--of course--to create jobs. Petrochemical crackers are notorious air polluters, and the air of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, already exceeds legal limits for ground-level ozone (smog) and fine particles, which is the very sort of pollution that crackers create. Michael Krancer, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection secretary, is not worried. "The plant will be state-of-the-art and built by a world-wide, world-class, environmentally responsible company."

33. That company would be Shell Oil.

Go. READ IT ALL.

Greetings from The Gang of 164th Street, 1935

I spent part of the weekend scanning in some old family photos so I could label and archive them digitally and then mail the originals off to various family members. (These pictures all came from my great grandmother's photo albums and are dated from 1895 through the 1960s.) About half the pictures (and there are hundreds of them) are labeled with dates or names or locations or sometimes (yea!) all three. (Those are pretty darn rare though.) The rest are completely blank but my mother and I know most of the people and can pick them out and using the ages of the kids in the photos (usually my grandmother or her siblings) get a good date. But then there are some, like the photo above, that we are really pretty clueless about.

What's interesting about "The Gang of 164th Street, 1935" is that the handwriting for that caption on the back of the photo is probably my grandfather's. (I'm about 99% sure of that.) He and my grandmother did not get married until 1939 but he hung out with her and her family throughout the 1930s (he's in a ton of the pictures). So this group of guys were obviously his friends and with the picture in the album, they must have been friends of my grandmother & her siblings as well. (There are lots of friends who show up in the pics.) I kind of think that the one on the front row, far left, is my great uncle Thomas (one of my grandmother's older brothers and the same age as my grandfather) but I can't be sure as his eyes are closed and it's kind of a funny angle. (Plus the picture is so faded.) (I use a magnifying glass all the time with these pictures!)

But mostly all I know about this picture is that they were friends of my family, that they had a good time together (clearly playing football), and that they hung out on 164th Street (in the Bronx, where my family lived). I just love the whole idea of this group together, in their teens (my grandfather would have been 19 in 1935, my grandmother 16), having a good time. We should all be so lucky in our childhoods, shouldn't we?

And yeah, I'm keeping this one for myself. :)

A graphic novel must-read about American music

I just finished reading The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song by Frank Young and David Lasky and can't recommend it enough. My full review will run in December (either in my column or annual holiday feature), but I wanted to give everyone a heads-up right now to keep an eye out for it. If you don't know much about country music history the Carter Family is one of the cornerstones of the country tradition (and thus also impacted the history of rock which grew from some country roots). A.P. Carter, his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle (mother of June Carter who later married Johnny Cash) were a trio that later grew to include Maybelle's children (she was married to A.P.'s brother) and were the sound on the radio for millions throughout the late 1920s and 1930s.

Young and Lasky tell the whole story here - the music, the relationships and the manner in which A.P. Carter collected the Appalachian songs that he later arranged with Maybelle & Sara into their recordings. What's really great is that the authors also include A.P.'s friendship with Lesley Riddle (pictured with A.P. above), the African-American musician who traveled with him and is credited with writing the melodies for many of the songs. (People would sing them and Lesley would craft the melodies by ear while A.P. transcribed/created the lyrics.) As has been noted by many others, the publication deal on the songs required that all of them be credited to A.P. Carter even though he tried to include everyone else. Riddle in particular is finally getting some attention now and the authors make sure he does in their story as well.

All in all it's fascinating stuff (Sara and A.P. split up but continued to record as the Carter Family which was crazy difficult), and so well done - a truly gorgeous hardcover. I see a ton of teen appeal for it and for any reader with any interest in music history at all. The book also includes a CD with recordings from 1939 which is just the icing on the cake. Holiday shop early - it's fantastic!

For more on Lesley Riddle, see this report from the 2012 RiddleFest.

A graphic novel must-read about American music

I just finished reading The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song by Frank Young and David Lasky and can't recommend it enough. My full review will run in December (either in my column or annual holiday feature), but I wanted to give everyone a heads-up right now to keep an eye out for it. If you don't know much about country music history the Carter Family is one of the cornerstones of the country tradition (and thus also impacted the history of rock which grew from some country roots). A.P. Carter, his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle (mother of June Carter who later married Johnny Cash) were a trio that later grew to include Maybelle's children (she was married to A.P.'s brother) and were the sound on the radio for millions throughout the late 1920s and 1930s.

Young and Lasky tell the whole story here - the music, the relationships and the manner in which A.P. Carter collected the Appalachian songs that he later arranged with Maybelle & Sara into their recordings. What's really great is that the authors also include A.P.'s friendship with Lesley Riddle (pictured with A.P. above), the African-American musician who traveled with him and is credited with writing the melodies for many of the songs. (People would sing them and Lesley would craft the melodies by ear while A.P. transcribed/created the lyrics.) As has been noted by many others, the publication deal on the songs required that all of them be credited to A.P. Carter even though he tried to include everyone else. Riddle in particular is finally getting some attention now and the authors make sure he does in their story as well.

All in all it's fascinating stuff (Sara and A.P. split up but continued to record as the Carter Family which was crazy difficult), and so well done - a truly gorgeous hardcover. I see a ton of teen appeal for it and for any reader with any interest in music history at all. The book also includes a CD with recordings from 1939 which is just the icing on the cake. Holiday shop early - it's fantastic!

For more on Lesley Riddle, see this report from the 2012 RiddleFest.

An erotica author's thoughts, this month's Bookslut & why Amazon reviews can not be trusted

1. First, the new issue of Bookslut went up last week with my new column on all sorts of science titles. Several of these are adult books that cross over for teens and I think this is one of my more official "grown-up friendly" columns to date. Great stuff, for sure.

2. There's also a joint review I wrote of several house-building memoirs and of course I think it is made of wonderful too. (House by Tracy Kidder just never gets old.)

3. Jenny Davidson had a fascinating interview up a few weeks ago with novelist Lilia Ford that was all about writing erotica and Fifty Shades of Grey and included many great tidbits including this one that I love:



Critics keep bashing Fifty Shades of Grey, but E. L. James might as well be the Henry James of this genre. The number one book on the Kindle erotica list as I write this is Training Tessa: Hot Texas Bosses BDSM Erotica, about two brothers who try to one up each other spanking and humiliating their secretary--I highly recommend checking out the cover.

There's a lot about romance vs erotica, writing under a pseudonym and self publishing. It's a great interview and well worth your time.

4. Finally, I haven't been especially fond of Amazon reviews for quite some time and started purposely ignoring the page for MAP this summer when the 1 star reviews that seemed suspect at best just got too annoying to read. (This was a mental health decision.) I'm sure many of you read the NYT article on selling 5 star reviews which pretty much proves why you can't trust anything you read over there, but this blog post by an Amazon Vine reviewer really has to be read as well. Basically you have an author, her husband, an Amazon review said husband did not like and commented on at Amazon, (who decided that commenting on reviews was a good idea?), followed by discussion of the whole deal at the author's facebook page, lots of grumbling, the aforementioned Amazon Vine reviewer who changed her review after getting disturbed by the author's behavior (both before & after the review commenting fiasco) (she felt the author was pushing her fans too hard all along to buy the book, etc.) and then more facebook posting by the author (concerning the Vine reviewer's changed review which noted the author's online behavior as the reason the book went from 4 stars to 1 star) and ultimately, no kidding, death threats for the Amazon Viner.

Word to the wise kids - ignore Amazon reviews like the plague.