Dec/Jan '08
The Rejection Collection Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap - Ed. Matthew Diffee
Billed as "More cartoons you've never seen, and never will see, in The New Yorker " this delightfully vulgar and amusingly awful collection is sure to get laughs out of the crankiest curmudgeon. Interspersed with the various familiar New Yorker -style cartoons are short bio sheets filled out by by the cartoonists. So many wrong, wrong, wrong cartoon. Just try and avert your eyes!
Voyage of the Basset - James Christensen
Christensen is both an immensely talented artist and an excellent writer. His illustrations has the fantastic, otherworldly beauty of earlier artist/illustrators such as Arthur Rackham. While some of his work does tend to the maudlin and cutesily religious, the bulk of his work is brilliant and meticulously detailed. The story of Voyage of the Bassett compliments the gorgeous illustrations perfectly. A fairy-tale aimed more for children, The Bassett can serve also as a lesson for adults who don't take appreciate the value of traditional stories and myths.
Escape - Carolyn Jessop
This true and grimly gripping biography pulls you in and grabs your imagination. To the average, educated midwesterner this story of polygamy, abuse and life in a totally insular religious community sounds like soap opera madness. But Jessop both lived it and survived it. As her community slid into madness, Jessop, weakened and sick after 8 births and caring for a son with cancer, still found the energy and resources to escape with all her children from the insane world of Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I spent the three-quarters of the book saying "What are you thinking? Leave!" and the last quarter cheering her on as she ran. Better, more horrifying and much sadder, than an psychological fiction available.
Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited - Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein
Schein and Bernstein were both aware that they had been adopted at birth. Both had some interest in finding out who their birth parents were. Finally both found and contacted the adoption agency where their adoptions took place. Instead of finding their birth parents, the two were shocked to discover that they had an identical twin... and they had been separated for research. While their discovery and consequent research and interviews with living staff who decided to separate a number of twins is often infuriating and almost sickening, most of the book is uplifting. Once the shock of meeting an identical twin wears off, Schein and Bernstein candidly discuss their secret fears and worries and also their joy at finding their other half.
The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss - Claire Nouvian
This book is gorgeous. While the subject matter, sea creatures of the deepest abysses, is certainly fascinating the pictures are what makes this book so wonderful. Some show perfect, tiny jeweled creatures floating in the dark. Others, lit by ROV lights, look like computer generated movie sets. Unreal and intensely beautiful.
Bizarre Books - Russell Ash and Brian Lake
Ash and Lake have collected a mass of truly awful, useless and poorly titled books. Many owe their amusement factor to terms that have changed through time: Girls of the Pansy Patrol and The Gay Boys of Old Yale. Others are bizarre simply for their topics: The Supernatural History of Worms and A Nostalgia for Camels. Still other titles are so truly inane they could only have been printed at a vanity press: How to Avoid Work and How to Cook Roadkill. HI-larious.
The Year of Living Biblically - A.J. Jacobs
From the author of The Know-it-All comes another awesome title. At loose ends after his year reading the encyclopedia, Jacobs decides to embark on another experiment. As a agnostic Jew he always had some interest in religion and the perplexed fascination with belief that many non-believers have. Jacobs decides to meet the Bible head on. After completing a 70+ page list of commandments and rules from the Bible (old and new testament), Jacobs starts adding biblical commandments into his daily life. After soon realizing that many rules are contradictory and simply untenable, he decides to focus on one or two commandments each week. These biblical rules affect Jacobs in every way. He grows an enormous beard, wears white clothing, has restrictions on his eating habits, money, time spent and relations with everyone around him. All this, of course, must be done as he continues working as an editor for Esquire magazine and living in New York City. While Jacob's book is an eye-opener about biblical law and many of the religious groups he visits, it is also deeply amusing. Men are not allowed to sit on chairs where an unclean woman has sat. Jacobs wife passive-aggresively sits on all the chairs in the house, forcing him to stand or bring his own stool. His attempts at building a hut in their NY apartment living room are a hoot as are his accounts of the general populous' reaction to his massive beard, white clothing and tassels. A must read.