Books

Able and Willing

/ Susan O. / 2 Comments

Disability is a loaded word. 

I won’t debate the semantics of the term, what the current politically correct term is, or how to make your workplace more variant friendly.

Let’s talk about something far more inflammatory. The rights of the disabled to carry out adult relationships. At best, a disabled person is able to find a partner despite their difficulties, marry (or not), and live a happy adult life together, with or without kids (popular example: the TV show Little People, Big World). Sometimes, it’s disabled people fighting in court for the right to marry or raise their own children (the movie I Am Sam). At the very worst, it’s vulnerable people being preyed upon, taken advantage of, or controlled to the point of involuntary sterilization.

I grabbed the book Hunchback, partly because it was short, and partly because I’ve been in the field of disabilities for 40 years. Hunchback, a novella by Saou Ichikawa, was not the book I’d expected, despite winning multiple awards. Ichikawa’s character, Shaka, suffers from congenital myopathy (same as the author—write what you know), which has left her with progressively weak muscles. Her back is so hunched over she can’t breathe when holding a book, and she spends half the day using a ventilator. She can walk short distances, but her body is twisted and one leg is far shorter than the other. She has a tracheostomy, which makes talking difficult, so she uses a lot of alternative communication devices. Shaka spends her time writing erotica online, the money from which she spends on food for poor people and women. 

Winner of several Japanese awards, Hunchback calls out ableism on many levels. Ichikawa considers it political: Disabled people are hidden away by society, never considered because they’re never seen. People in wheelchairs are rarely mentioned in literature at all, unless they’re being “cured,” like in Heidi or A Secret Garden. Disabled people are portrayed as a drain on society, dependent on charity, so by making a wealthy disabled character (who generates income through pornography), she pokes a hornet’s nest.

Another book that touches on the subject of sexual autonomy is James Cole’s Not a Whole Boy. Cole was born in the 60’s with a severe case of exstrophy – most of his organs were born outside his body, and his pelvis malformed. Most babies with this condition do not survive. Due to Cole’s mother’s determination and a great team of doctors, Cole managed to thrive despite severe obstacles. While he seemed more or less normal to other kids, Cole hid the fact that he had double ostomies – all his waste was collected in bags, as he didn’t have the needed parts and couldn’t use a toilet. As he got older and puberty kicked in, it became necessary to undergo multiple surgeries just to have a sense of comfort, normalcy, and proper biological function. Cole’s book documents his struggles with medieval children’s hospitals, lack of pain management, and his eventual success with a career in art and film – certainly not hidden away.

A book that took me by complete surprise was Riva Lehrer’s Golem Girl, a golem being a creature formed from dirt or clay. Riva was born with Spina Bifida in 1958, a time when most afflicted infants did not survive, and almost certainly didn’t walk. She suffers dozens of painful surgeries to keep her mobility, most of which do nothing to ease her issues – she’s just a guinea pig for the surgeons. Although she attends a grade school for the disabled (disability laws hadn’t been written yet), she attends a mainstream high school, then university, where she gets a degree in fine art, all while dealing with surgeries and intense feelings of revulsion toward herself. Amplifying it is her mother’s overprotective codependency, spitting out helpful comments such as “You don’t need a nose job. No one wants to marry a cripple,” and “You shouldn’t have children; pregnancy will just mess up your spine worse,” – culminating in an involuntary hysterectomy at 15 on the mother’s order. 

Riva goes on to have multiple affairs with both men and women. While some relationships work out, many times she’s still hit with prejudice – “I can’t love a cripple.” Riva remains unstoppable. She becomes more comfortable with herself through meeting up with other people – often activists – with disabilities. As an artist, she gains renown (and awards) through her paintings of disabled people (and others) she has met. 

This book was so hard to put down, and read like you were in the middle of a conversation with her. Lehrer doesn’t go into detail on her disability or surgeries; she talks about herself, not her medical issues. After doing time as an anatomical artist, she sees people not so much as disabled, but as human variants – no one is “normal,” there is no “normal,” just human variations. But everyone has a right to love and happiness.

At the heart of it, people with physical disabilities are still people. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the same dreams, desires, or feelings as people who aren’t. All of these books will give you deep new insights into the strength of humanity.

Blast from the Past: Cheshire Library Memorabilia

/ Adam / Leave a comment

We recently uncovered some Cheshire Library memorabilia from at least 60 years ago. Though they’re regular objects you would find at any library—a bookmark, a checkout card holder, and a library card—they reveal a lot about the time they’re from and remind us of the dramatic changes that have taken place since.

First the bookmark: At the time the bookmark was printed, CPL’s hours were a bit different than they are now. They were open Monday through Friday, from 3:00 to 5:00 and 7:00 to 9:00 PM, presumably to allow for a dinner break. These days, we’re open from 9:00 AM to 8:30 PM Monday through Thursday, and 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Fridays. As a reminder, our summer Saturday hours for July and August are from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM.

Maybe the most interesting part of the bookmark is the phone number for The Cheshire Insurance Agency: three digits!

The library checkout card holder is most notable for the quaint slogan of First Federal Savings and Loan Association: “You’ll find us most helpful.” The First Federal Savings and Loan Association isn’t around anymore. 218 Maple Ave changed hands several times in the late 20th century and became a branch of Naugatuck Savings Bank in 1999 (later renamed “Ion Bank” in 2013).

Lastly, the library card. Those who’ve been coming to the library for a while know our cards have gone through many iterations. I love when patrons come to the circulation desk with one of our old Cheshire Cat branded cards because it means they’ve been loyal patrons for some time. But I’ve never seen a card anywhere near as old as this one. In place of a barcode, there’s a stamped metal insert with only four digits.

Across the board, the United States has become a more expensive place to live in the last 57 years, but at least you don’t still have to pay 25¢ when you need to replace your card! (25¢ in 1968 is the equivalent of $2.32 today).

It can be easy to walk through today’s libraries and look at them as though they came into existence at that very moment. Historical artifacts like these remind us that we’re part of a long chain of library excellence—standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say.

Tales of Shipwreck & Survival

/ Susan O. / 2 Comments

Everyone knows about the Titanic since they found the wreckage and made a movie about it, but shipwreck is usually the last thing on anyone’s mind when they book a cruise. In reality, only 24 cruise ships have ever sank, and many of those had been pressed into service as warships at the time. Cruise ships, despite their top-heavy appearance, are quite safe. 

There are an estimated 3,000 shipwrecks off the coast of the Outer Banks, NC

There are an estimated three million shipwrecks under the waters, not counting small craft. Some of these date back as far as 2500 BCE, when the Mediterranean Sea was a hotbed of trade from Egypt and North Africa to the coasts of Italy, Greece, and Spain. The rate of commercial shipwrecks has been declining throughout this century, from 200 in 2000 to only 26 in 2023, and most of those are cargo ships, which are often in poor repair, overloaded, badly balanced, and cross some of the most difficult waters (releasing rubber ducks and sneakers). This does not include the fishing industry, which is nearly unregulated, especially in Asia and South America. It is estimated there are 100,000 deaths from fishing each year, due to poor industry standards and almost no oversight.

When we think about historical ships, we think back to Roman biremes, Viking longboats, and primitive rafts like Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki long before we come to the glory days of Spanish, British, French, and Portuguese galleons vying for naval power, leading to spectacular – and expensive – shipwrecks. The Bermuda Triangle, The Skeleton Coast, The Cape of Good Hope, and several rocky coastal areas around the continents were famous for wrecking ships, let alone the risk – then and now – for icebergs in the North Atlantic, and the real though rare possibility of rogue waves – lone giant waves of up to 100 feet, with no warning and no precursors, which have been implicated in a number of wrecks. There’s also the 1958 Lituya Bay, Alaska tsunami, which, due to the funneling nature of the bay, created a wave 1700 (yes, one thousand seven hundred) feet high, lifting a fishing boat, whose crew miraculously survived.

Like all natural disasters, ship disasters make for fascinating reading and occasionally a great movie. Here are some excellent works on the misfortunes of ocean-bound ships, some of which you may not have heard of, but really happened.

The Wager, by David Grann

If you haven’t yet read The Wager, you need to. A true tale of murder, mutiny, greed, heroism, and unbelievable survival in the harshest of conditions. Against better judgment, the Wager tries to round the dangerous Cape Horn in 1741, smashing against rocks in a gale. In a barren wasteland, with nothing to eat, the crew splits, half commit mutiny, some commit murder, and half of them will make it back to tell the riveting tale. A must read.

Graveyard of the Pacific, by Randall Sullivan

Who knew that more 2000 ships have been wrecked on the corner of the Oregon/Washington coast? Fierce storms, fog, reefs, sandbars, and tidal rips from the incoming flood of the Columbia river are so bad that there are specific ships and captains who must steer commercial ships through the area. While the book is partially taken up by one man’s quest to kayak through this deadly area, the rest of the book is quite fascinating.

Ghost Ship, by Brian Hicks   

There are many theories as to why the ship Mary Celeste was found abandoned at sea in 1872, with no clue as to what happened. The lifeboat was missing, and the crew abandoned ship so rapidly that food was still on the table and a sleeping child’s form was still outlined on the captain’s bed. Hicks combs through details to provide a solid, scientific reason, the best theory anyone has come up with yet, and the horrible fate of the crew.

In the Heart of the Sea, by Nathaniel Philbrick. 

The foundering of the whaleship Essex in 1820 became the inspiration for Melville’s novel Moby Dick. The Essex was sunk by a sperm whale in the Pacific, killing most of the crew. A handfull survived in a whaleboat for five months, surviving on cannibalism and rainwater. Melville allegedly met the son of survivor Owen Chase while at sea, and later met surviving Captain Pollard, who was considered bad luck after two lost ships, and no one would hire him. The combined diaries of the survivors were later made into a film.

When the Dancing Stopped, by Brian Hicks.

If Ghost Ship wasn’t enough, Hicks covers the perfect storm of disaster on the Morro Castle, a top of the line 1934 cruise ship traveling between Cuba and New York’s Pier 13. With horrific odds, the ship faced a tropical storm gaining on them, a nor’easter barreling toward them from the opposite direction, a murdered captain, an arsonist’s chemical fire underneath a ceiling filled with gunpowder, a crew that had never performed a fire or lifeboat drill, lifeboats whose launch mechanisms were painted closed, and a crew that fell apart at the first sign of trouble. How anyone survived (besides the crew, who abandoned ship without helping passengers) is a miracle. A book that reads like a novel, and is very hard to put down.

Deadliest Sea: The Untold Story Behind the Greatest Rescue in Coast Guard History, by Kalee Thompson

More fish are caught in Alaskan waters than almost everywhere else, yet many fishing boats remain virtually unregulated as to safety, and there are powerful political groups that push against it. In 2008, the Alaska Ranger meets with bad weather and too much ice, loses its rudder, and starts to sink. As in every disaster, few are trained, shortcuts were taken, lifeboats don’t work properly, wetsuits have holes, and they are more than 200 miles from the Coast Guard rescue planes. Thompson creates a tense tale of survival and aggravatingly poor working conditions as the Coast Guard rushes to save the crew. A lot of names, but hard to put down.

Futility, or, The Wreck of the Titan, by Morgan Robertson

Okay, this one is short fiction, and because it’s so old it’s hard to get a copy of (you can read it for free on Project Gutenberg, here), but it’s mentioned in so many memes as “The Titanic Foretold!” that I wanted to include it here. Published in 1898, the book, yes, involves an “unsinkable” ship called the Titan, that, in its second collision in two days, hits an iceberg and capsizes. The unlikable protagonist rescues a little girl in order to get a seat on a lifeboat, then plots to use her to extort money from her family, and most of the book is about him whining about being stuck with the kid. There is almost nothing in this novella that compares with the Titanic, beyond a name (common enough. It would have been more compelling if the name was Carpathia or something) and an iceberg (also common in those waters). It’s short, you can read it, but it’s trite, simplistic, outdated, boring, and sometimes painful to read. But, truly, it in no way predicted the wreck of the Titanic.

If you’d prefer, check out these films of ocean disasters:

In the Heart of the Sea

The Perfect Storm

Finest Hours

The Poseidon Adventure

Titanic

The Life of Pi

All is Lost

Lifeboat

Making Sense of Book Awards

/ Adam / Leave a comment

Has this ever happened to you? You’re in a library or book store, minding your own business, when a ray of light blinds you, stopping you in your tracks. You think, “Is this aliens? Is this the rapture? What is going on?” You catch your breath and realize it’s just the gleam of one of those shiny emblems that says, “Booker Prize.” You pick up the book and even more questions flood your mind: “Who’s this Booker fella and what right does he have to tell me what to read?!” I’ve been there, I get it. But there’s no need to dismay. Once you make sense of book awards, they can be helpful tools in the eternal search for your next book.

Booker Prize

The Booker Prize (formerly the Man Booker Prize) is awarded to a book written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. A panel of five, made up of “creative peers,” choose the winning book. The award skews towards British and Irish authors, but winners hail from around the world, like Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka or Jamaican author Marlon James. These books land on the literary side side of things, and some recent winners include George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, and Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

The International Booker Prize is also worth noting. These books are translated into English and must be published in the UK or Ireland. The Vegetarian by Han Kang, Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, and Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov won in 2016, 2018, and 2023 respectively.

Nebula and Hugo Awards

The Nebula and Hugo Awards are the two big names associated with science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) literature. The biggest difference between these awards is the voting body. To vote on the Nebula, you need to belong to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Essentially, you need to be a SF/F writer yourself. For the Hugo Award, all you need is a membership to the World Science Fiction Convention, which costs $50. Despite this difference, it’s not uncommon for a single title to win both awards. Some recent examples of this feat are Network Effect by Martha Wells, The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin, and This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.

Edgar Award

The Edgar Award is named after (who else but) Edgar Allen Poe to honor the best of the mystery genre, and chosen by the Mystery Writers of America. In the past, some familiar names have won: Stephen King for Mr. Mercedes and Noah Hawley (writer of the Fargo television series) for Before the Fall. But overall, The Edgar Award stands out to me because the winning books tend to be less well known; it’s a good way to find underappreciated gems. Some recent winners include Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara, and The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths.

National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize

The National Book Award (courtesy of the National Book Foundation) and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (courtesy of Columbia University) are both meant for American authors. The Pulitzer Prize is awarded to novels that “deal with American life” and tend to be fairly popular, often getting the television or movie treatment in the years after its win. The National Book Award has more lofty goals, and is designed to “ensure that books have a prominent place in our culture.” These winners don’t generate as much buzz, but they’re just as profound and moving.

Winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction include The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.

Winners of the National Book Award include Blackouts by Justin Torres, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and The Good Lord Bird by James McBride.

Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature is voted for by the Swedish Academy and stands out in a couple ways: Authors from any country are eligible for the award, and awards are based on an author’s body of work as a whole. This means that the winning author can put the “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature” stamp on any book in their back catalogue and any future book they write. Sounds like a good deal to me! Past winners include Kazuo Ishiguro, Alice Munro, and Toni Morrison.

Women’s Prize for Fiction

The last award I’ll touch upon is the Women’s Prize for Fiction which is voted on by a panel of five notable women. This award, along with the Booker Prize and the now defunct Costa Book Awards, at one point made up the “trinity” of UK’s literary prizes. Recent winners include Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.

It can also be interesting to look at the notable awards of non-English speaking countries. Winners usually have an English translation available, and their relative obscurity makes it feel like you’ve uncovered some esoteric text. Compass by Mathias Énard was a great find of mine that won the French Prix Goncourt Award in 2015.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that these awards are all made up. They were all chosen by people, and people have their own tastes, their own mercurial and indecipherable preferences. There is no trait–not intelligence, success, nor clout–that makes one person a better “book judge” than another. If you find an award that speaks to you, great! But otherwise, take them all with a grain of salt and keep in mind the only book award that truly matters: The (insert your name here) Award.

P.S. If you really want to dive into the dramatic side of the book award world, there is always heated discussion about each year’s Booker Prize shortlist. This year, the six shortlisted books will be announced on September 23rd, and the more bookish parts of the internet will be a-buzz, defending their favorites and attacking the books they deem unworthy. It’s a bit messy, but good fun.

Serial Solving

/ Susan O. / Leave a comment

I never know what I’ll read next. What ever sparks my interest, either by title, by book cover, or by subject. I have no special direction or particular interest, but if I found one book on a subject interesting, I’m far more likely to read another on the subject, or by the same author.  Hence I’ve read an inordinate amount of books on Ebola, fast fashion, tea, books on the making of various movies, and, well, serial killers.

We know the names. Son of Sam. Ted Bundy. Green River Killer. BTK Killer. Long Island Killer. 

I have no fascination with them, find most of them repellent and frightening beyond description, and did not shed a tear when Jeffery Dahmer died in prison, but I find the psychological processes and forensics involved in tracking them down utterly intriguing. The science end, not the murder end. And there is SO much to be fascinated about. 

Most recently, I read the book American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years, by Peter Vronsky, and I was blown away by the premise. America – which has more serial killers than any other country (well, that are reported and connected. Other countries have mass murders by corrupt governments, so maybe we’re better off) – had a major epidemic of serial killers (those that intermittently kill more than three people, as opposed to a spree all at once) from around 1970 to the mid 1990’s – more than 600 a year, and then it tapered off sharply. Why? Why did we have terrible trails of serial murders for 25 or 30 years, and then few?  Vronsky makes a very strong, documented  case for the fact that most of these killers were born in the late 40’s and early 50’s (25 or 30 by 1975) and their fathers fought in World War II. Vronsky documents that many of these fathers came back damaged from the war – PTSD, violent, depressed, alcoholic, received no help, and were unable to nurture their children. These boys – coming of age with violent sex images in men’s magazines, pulp fiction novels, and comics – grew up with attachment issues, poor self-image, and violent fantasies about sex, which they slowly began to work up the nerve to carry out. Why did things taper off? Most of those killers were either dead, in prison for other crimes, or had worn themselves out and were living a quiet life until something might trigger them again, unknown to their neighbors. Vietnam Vets received more services than soldiers in the 40’s, there was more public support, it wasn’t as big a deal to divorce a man, and those children did not have the same issues their grandfathers did. Those children of Vietnam vets would have been 25-30 in 1990-95 – years when serial killers were in decline.

Another utterly fascinating book – one that sent me down a long, long wormhole of research – is Barbara Rae-Venter’s I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever. The Golden State Killer was alleged to have killed 13 people and committed more than 50 rapes across California between 1974-1986. Because police departments didn’t talk to each other or share information, no one was ever able to piece together all the information. Enter Rae-Venter. Rae-Venter spent her days helping people trace their genealogy and find their families using her home computer. Asked if she could do the same for a suspect, Rae-Venter needed 63 days and $200 to make a genetic profile of the killer from her dining room – something 30 years and $10 million of taxpayer money had never been able to do, leading directly to the apprehension of the killer. Since Rae-Venter, a huge number of backlogged, dead-end cases have been solved and cleared (like the Long Island Killer) due to the methods she used.

Spurred on by her methods, I fell down a rabbit-hole of genealogical research, aided by ancestry.com (free at the library), and in a week was able to trace my mother’s ancestry back 12 generations, connect some gaps, discover my grandmother had an older sister we never heard of (probably because she died at 5 months), and my grandmother’s younger sister was four when she died, not the two my grandmother remembered. Sometimes books are dangerous!

Through both of these books, several names kept popping up, and I realized I’d already read books by both men. John Douglas was the first real FBI criminal profiler, starting in the 1980’s, creating many of the procedures we use today. His book, Mindhunter, chronicles how he began, in a time where every department wanted the glory of solving the case, and thus no one ever shared information, and no one ever solved the cases. 

Unmasked: My Life Solving America’s Cold Cases by Paul Holes, is another. Holes learned the business under Douglas, pursuing cold-case investigations from the 1990’s into the 2000’s.  Some of the cold cases that perplexed them the most and they were never able to solve were later solved by Barbara Rae-Venter’s methods, like the Long Island Killer and the Golden State Killer.

If you don’t care so much about crime but like psychology and sociology, and want to find out why people kill, try I Am a Killer, by Danny Tipping.  It’s a sad book that dwells on the murderers and not so much the crime. Time after time, the horrific backgrounds of these killers are revealed (one father, to hide the bruises and welts on his kid when Social Services was coming, tied him to a mattress, poured lighter fluid on him, and set his back on fire). Many did not deserve the sentences they received, responding to unimaginable abuse. There are no winners in this book. 

Though he technically didn’t kill anyone, if you want local flavor, read Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, The Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, by Michael Cannell. Many people claim to have invented criminal profiling, but this was an early case. In the 1940’s, a bomber went around exploding devices all over New York City, then teasing the police through letters. After twenty years, he was determined to be George Metesky – from Waterbury, Connecticut, and the criminal profiling was eerily correct.

If you like crime stories and investigations, these are excellent books. If you like psychology and deviant behavior, these are also excellent books. The difficult part is that they had to be written at all.