Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 9

Meeting Darwin's Ghosts

I believe the first time I learned about Charles Darwin was in the 7th grade, during Earth Science class. (A very dismal course with a teacher who was annoyed from the first day of school until the last.) What I never could figure out, even after reading about the finches and barnacles, was how he put together the Theory of Evolution. It was always presented as a bit of a thunderbolt - he sat back, he watched, he studied and he figured it out. What I wanted to know was why no one else had.

Flash forward many years and I came across an article about Alfred Russell Wallace and learned that someone else did figure out evolution - at the same time as Darwin. But still, why them and why then? Was no one else curious before these two men? Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution by Rebecca Stott is the answer to my questions, by an author who wondered the same thing.

What I liked most about this forthright, very accessible collection of mini biographies, is that Stott is so straightforward about what she wanted to know. She looked into the men (and yes, they are all men) that Darwin acknowledged as treading a bit on evolutionary ground and fleshed out their stories, looking for clues into their natural history passions. She gives us men from all over the world who indulged in their curiosity to varying degrees and became famous or forgotten. She answered all of my questions about evolution and how it came to be a theory that explains....everything. And, she made Darwin more of a man I could understand. He wasn't the first, he was just the most patient and was also lucky enough to be born at a time where he had a chance to indulge his ideas with less fear (though he still took chances).

I still have a soft spot for Wallace, with his wild adventures and crazy dreams, but Darwin is becoming someone I can understand as are all the men who came before him.

Baseball season...finally

My favorite time of year, when all the wins are still possible, when all the games hold promise. My heart is always with the Red Sox but I have a serious soft spot for the Cubs and especially for Wrigley Field. Eddie Vedder wrote "All the Way" at the request of Cubs great Ernie Banks which is just...so perfect. I hope it gets you ready for the Boys of Summer...

Flicks that caught my eye....

I caught these two [very different] film trailers the other day and both appealed to me for different reasons. First, Redwood Highway starring Shirley Knight and Tom Skerritt is about retaking control of your life after everyone else has, apparently, decided you should be put out to pasture. Take a look:

I have been a fan of Knight & Skerritt's forever so the chance to see them together makes this one I will seek out. (Likely not in the theater around here, but I'll get it one way or another.) (Remember Pickett Fences? Skerritt was sublime in that series!)

And then we have one of those always fun "return to summer camp" films: Camp Takota. I don't know why I find these so appealing; my only summer camp experience was a very dismal Christian day camp when I was around 9 or 10 years old where the crafts were dull, the lifeguards criminally negligent (how dozens of us didn't drown I'll never know) and the bathrooms...well, you can guess. Maybe it's wish fulfillment, but this just looks like right sort of sarcastic rip on young adulthood that will ring as extremely familiar to many of us. Take a peek:

Never be ordinary....

The other night I watched the first season of The Bletchley Circle from PBS which I received on dvd last Christmas. Set in 1952, on one level it is a murder mystery where a group of four intrepid women set out to catch a serial killer of young women in London. But the bigger story is about the four main characters all of whom were code-breakers in Bletchley Park during WWII.

Required by the Official Secrets Act to never tell anyone what they really did during the war - even spouses - thousands of women all claimed to have performed "clerical duties" when really they were much much more. Now, married or working mundane jobs, they are quietly losing their minds. The chance to stop a killer brings these four old friends together again and their dormant code-breaking skills come to the forefront of their everyday lives causing unintended problems. They also have to deal with the police who don't think they know what they're talking about and the killer who is way smarter than they initially realize.

So what did I think? LOVED IT. Smart women, wicked cool largely unknown history, very evocative setting and a solidly suspenseful mystery. I can not recommend this wonderful miniseries enough and keep an eye out for Season 2 that will be broadcast in a couple of weeks.

Paramotoring over the Iditarod Trail

This is made of awesome from start to finish (and even wing walking!!!)

"Gender specific books demean all children"

I could go on and on and on. While I understand what The Independent is trying to do by insisting that books should be gender-free, I also understand that sometimes boys like books about boys and sometimes girls like books about girls. And some girls really like books (and clothes and ribbons and socks and shoes) that are pink and sparkly. Publishers are just aiming to those markets, just like they aim to other markets with all those black and purple vampy covers for YA reading paranormal lovers.

Here's the thing - I have a niece who has been hardwired for pink and sparkly since she was born. You put this kid (now 8) in a department store and pink and sparkly is what she will find first. (She wears plenty of other colors too but she loves the pink and sparkle.) Maybe she will outgrow this (she seems to be moving in a zebra stripe direction recently) or maybe she won't but insisting that her love for a book with a pink cover is somehow damaging to her or to every other child is just....well it bothers me.

The Independent can review whatever they want but it raises my hackles a bit to insist that a book all about girls with girls on the cover is somehow wrong.

Plus, could we please stop the knee-jerk attacks on Disney? They are so ten years ago (or twenty or thirty) that I can't even stand it anymore. If you don't like their movies then don't buy a ticket but if my niece wants to go get her picture taken with Cinderella, then I'm all for it. I'm sure she will still manage to be just fine when she grows up. In fact, I think this kid might just end up ruling the world one day. (And whether or not she wears some pink along the way really shouldn't matter.)

(I bought my niece Saffy's Angel - and it's sequel Indigo's Star - for her birthday. The whole Casson Family series is wonderful and while I prefer a different cover, I can't see how ignoring this book does the world any good.)

Pardon me while I tell you about some great mysteries

In recent weeks I have sought balance to some heavy nonfiction by indulging my deep need for well written mysteries. I've recently read four really great books: The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea by Mark Douglas-Home, Brooklyn Bones by Triss Stein, Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny and The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton by Elizabeth Speller.

Three are contemporaries and one a historical (Kitty Easton). Only one is set in the US (Brooklyn Bones, of course) while the others are in Scotland, Quebec and England. All involve tales from the past and, most enjoyable for me, the secrets held by people in small communities or close knit neighborhoods. None of them are obvious and none of them are thrillers. There is no running for you life in these books, although there is the discovery of bodies, the certainty of murder and the search for clues. All of them are great.

I was drawn to Louise Penny's series because of the French Canadian setting (my father would have loved these books so much). Bury Your Dead involves a contemporary murder but is mostly about Samuel de Champlain's missing grave. As he is basically the George Washington of French Canada, his loss matters a lot and I very much enjoyed reading about where he might be and why. (Plus the research library!!! The French phrases! THE FOOD!)

Triss Stein's main character does community history in Brooklyn and that was interesting in a whole other way. I liked the turning of scrapbook pages, the search in family photos, the diving into local museum records. This reminded me a bit of Nancy Drew if she went to work as a historian; I could see it all really happening which is a mystery trope I really enjoy. (Most of us are not cops or FBI agents but historians? That's something we could do!)

Elizabeth Speller writes about post-WWI England which is period of history that endlessly fascinates me. Some of my distant relatives served in this war and there were very interesting stories concerning religious visions that came back with them from the war. Plus, it really frustrates me still how little Americans know about the war - this was a big theme when I was teaching - and Speller does an excellent job at showing how it permeated every aspect of life in England in the 1920s. She also does tortured heroes very well. :) (This book 100% did not end the way I thought it would.)

Finally, Cal McGill and the intriguing career of a Scottish oceanographer (which often involves the tracking of bodies). If you grew up on the ocean as I did then you know that beach combing comes with the territory. The more I read about McGill's adventures, the more I wonder why I let myself get so intimidated by oceanography in college. I always loved studying the tides but for some reason I thought anything to do with the ocean meant I had to dissect sharks. (Sadly, I didn't spend a lot of time looking into careers in this field.)

With The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea, Cal is not in as much of the story as secondary characters are, especially the young woman looking for answers about her lost mother. I missed Cal a bit but I did like the mystery a lot (another grim small town, this one facing land sale issues) and I did like how Cal answered a key question about items that washed up on shore. I read these books partly as a "might have been" for myself and so far, Cal has not had to dissect a single thing.

Dammit.

For more: The Malice of the Waves, the third Sea Detective novel, is due in August; Brooklyn Graves, the second Erica Donato book is out in paperback; a ton of books in the Chief Inspector Gamache series are out and Elizabeth Speller is working on a new Laurence Bartram entry right now.

Reimaging an airplane graveyard

From the current issue of Smithsonian, you can get a peek at Michael Christopher Brown's series on children using an aircraft graveyard in the Congo as a playground.

From the text:

In Congo, where nearly two decades of war has claimed millions of lives, a civilian airport in the eastern city of Goma that has housed Congolese military arms also serves as a final resting place for abandoned aircraft--hulks that kids gleefully occupied during a break in the fighting a year ago. "Something about the situation captured the imagination," says Michael Christopher Brown, a photographer based in Brooklyn who documented this unlikely outbreak of fun. "What young child would not want to walk on, in and around a big airplane? It was a giant playground." The photograph's poignance seems even more apt now, with the rebel militia M23 vowing in November to disband--a step toward ending the grisly conflict. "For now," Brown says, "there is a chance for peace."

Because dreaming of Mars is the best kind of dream

It's an interesting literary convergence that I should have just read Philip K. Dick's short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" the same week that I finish reading the upcoming Sally Ride biography.

(More on the Ride biography after it's published - I'm reviewing for Booklist.)

I never read "Wholesale" although I did, like everybody else, see the movie "Total Recall" which I totally loved. But like nearly everything else, the story (while way shorter) is even better. There is still a wish to create false memories of Mars and still a problem encountered in implanting those memories and then, while the movie veers off to a Martian adventure, the story gives readers a much quieter, and crazier, ending. It's very Philip K. Dick and perfect (although I still love the movie).

Subterranean Press is reissuing all of the Dick's short stories in lovely collections -- I was reading the 5th volume which is due out in late August. "Wholesale" made me think about when Mars was an impossible dream and then Sally Ride made me think about when it was becoming attainable and then I follow the Mars rovers on twitter and they just make me think every dream could come true. Remember when Mars was beyond our reach?

Heck, remember when a female astronaut was the stuff of science fiction?

Mars. It's the planet I can imagine visiting one day, standing on, driving a rover around the surface, exploring its canyons, exploring the volcanoes, and then, most important, looking for evidence of past or current life. If there is life on a location other than Earth, Mars is a good candidate.

---[the wonderful amazing] Sally Ride, 2009

[Post pic is self portrait of Mars Rover Curiosity via NASA JPL.]

"...a guttural scream..."

Several things of note in recent days as I process the AWP conference and absorb Iditarod madness over at Alaska Dispatch. A few things that have caught my eye recently:

1. Rebecca Hall is starring in the play Machinal which is loosely based on the life and death of murderess Ruth Snyder. I find it very interesting how journalist/playwright Sophie Treadwell wrote about Snyder in 1928: not in a biographical or chronological way but by breaking up her life into segments and looking into what would drive any woman of her times to murder her husband. Also crazy is that the newspapers ran pictures of Snyder as she died in the electric chair. I'm just not getting a warm fuzzy "good old days" feeling from that bit of information.

2. Quote from Hall: "It's primal," she says. "It was sort of a guttural scream (that) just tumbled out of the writer in response to anger and emotion to seeing that photo and following how this woman's mythology was built around this case."

3. The National Portrait Gallery has a new show: "American Cool" which includes portraits of Americans like Debbie Harry, Steve McQueen, Jimi Hendrix, Billie Holliday, John Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck and I could go on and on. (Joan Didion! Jackson Pollock! Duke Ellington!) You can see some of the portraits here. I want a coffee table book of this exhibition in the most absurd way.

3. What it's like to take the train for 47 hours - you certainly meet a ton of interesting Americans. (via longreads)

4. And via Jenny D., Gary Panter on the NY Public Library: "But much more exciting to me is knowing that really deep scholarship is going on there, the real thing, human computers desiring to know, souls burning with curiosity in a place that they can't exhaust, that there is a deep life of the pursuit of knowledge happening on and on in that hive."

5. Finally, a movie report. I loved The Lego Movie ("Everything is Awesome!!!!") and Monuments Men (Bill Murray = amazing) and after watching Thor: The Dark World (on blu-ray) I am having a lot of feelings for Loki. I am still trying to process if I am under a spell or something....

[Post pic - I'm also addicted to a rewatch of WONDERFALLS. You should be too.]