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Family Art Workshop at the Transit Museum this Saturday, July 14

July 10, 2012

Family art returns to the New York Transit Museum on Saturday, July 14, this time with artist Enrico Miguel Thomas. Thomas draws scenes from the subway, using subway maps as background. On Saturday, Thomas will share the story of his two great passions – art and New York City’s subways – and then lead a drawing program for participants.

The workshop, which is free with museum admission, is for ages 8 and up. Reservations recommended – call (718) 694-1792.

The New York Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Bring Up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel

July 9, 2012

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“Bring Up the Bodies” is a follow-up volume to Hilary Mantel’s wonderful novel “Wolf Hall” (2009). Ending in approximately 1532, “Wolf Hall” described the life of Henry VIII’s advisor Thomas Cromwell up through the execution of Thomas More, Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and his impending marriage to Anne Boleyn. In “Bring Up the Bodies” (the command to the Tower jailer to produce prisoners for trial) Mantel takes Cromwell up to the middle of 1536.

Spoiler alert – The demise of a main character is described in this paragraph – I’m always a little sad when I begin a historical novel about Anne Boleyn, because now that I’m old enough I feel so badly for the Boleyn parents, complicit in Anne’s well-plotted rise to Queen though they may have been. And that is because not one but two of their children were executed within a day or so of each other, after being found guilty of treason and incest. Were they guilty? At this point, we have no way of knowing, but that’s hardly the point. As Mantel puts it, “In this book I try to show how a few crucial weeks might have looked from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer.”

As a portrayal of Cromwell, not one of history’s heroes (Mantel repeats a trope from “Wolf Hall,” that Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell makes him look like a murderer) this is a very sympathetic portrait, consistent with the rendering in “Wolf Hall.” Cromwell the character is an extremely able and competent minister to a mercurial king, maneuvering carefully among the many nobles and courtiers surrounding Henry. (It was Cromwell who managed Henry’s divorce from Katherine, and Cromwell who procures the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Anne.) He is also likable, and Mantel’s characterization of Cromwell as student of human nature is the best part of the novel. Here is her description of Cromwell thinking of his earlier employers: “Custom stales the intimacies of marriage, children grow truculent and rebel, but a good master gives more than he takes and his benevolence guides you through your life.”

It could be a description of Thomas Cromwell. He is a loving parent, and good master in his turn to his students and acolytes, one of whom, his nephew Richard, was great-grandfather to that other Cromwell, Oliver. And there are some lovely touches in the book, including a description of a jelly molded into the shape of a castle, “in stripes of read and white, the read a deep crimson and the white perfectly clear, so the walls seem to float. There are edible archers peeping from the battlements . . . “

But where “Wolf Hall” was candle-lit, with meaning flaring up here, or flickering into illumination there, “Bring Up the Bodies” is “Bring Up the Bodies” is more fluorescent. Mantel is clearer about certain things, such as the deaths (by plague) of Cromwell’s wife and daughters; the peacock feather wings, which in the earlier book signified the fleeting life of a daughter, make several more appearances in this volume, as themselves. The removal and trial of Anne was a complex political process, and Mantel is effective and clear in telling the story. But in doing so she has jettisoned some of the magic, making this book feel more labored than “Wolf Hall,” more reminiscent of her novel of the French Revolution, “A Place of Greater Safety.”

Cromwell survived in Henry’s employ for four more years after Anne’s execution. Mantel certainly suggests there will be a third volume. Mantel’s Cromwell is convincing and sympathetic, and I look forward to the next installment of her story. How do you feel “Bring Up the Bodies” compares with “Wolf Hall”? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up” by Kaitlin Bell Barnett

July 6, 2012

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People diagnosed with ADHD, depression, or anxiety as children or young teenagers, and treated with medication, may take those medications for a very long time. In the probing and insightful “Dosed: The Medication Generation Grows Up,” the young journalist Kaitlin Bell Barnett explores and assesses the effect of taking psychotropic medications during the crucial developmental years from teenager to young adult in order to understand how and to what extent the use of psychotropic medications shapes young adults.

The cohort born in the 1980s, Barnett herself among them, was the first to grow up taking medications – stimulants, anti-depressives, and anti-anxiety medications. Alternating between the illustrative stories of the young people she has interviewed and her research into the literature studying the long-term effects of psychotropic drugs, and using her own experience as a medicated teenager and young adult to illuminate the issues, Barnett perceptively outlines the questions and conflicts the youth growing up medicated face.

Barnett describes the behavior (inattentiveness, inability to sit still) and the emotions (depression, anxiety), and the paths (school referrals, pediatrician referrals) that may lead young children and teenagers to medication. Despite concerns in the press about overmedication, Barnett makes clear that, while it may not always result in improved school performance, medication has a lot of positives. “Medication at its best enables you to feel that you are playing the role that you were always meant to play,” she says.

But Barnett’s point is a larger one: the task of adolescence is made much more complex for medicated adolescents, as the medicated youngster has to separate the drug from the self and the self from the disorder. Barnett points out that the long-term use of medications poses serious challenges to the sense of self, because the medication itself has shaped who the person is or believes herself to be. Emerging sexuality, the importance of peers, and the presence of alcohol and other drugs, not to mention the challenges of going to college, are other complicating factors. In one particularly poignant vignette, Barnett shows the unhappy results when one of her subjects, who has been depressed most of her life, tries to figure out whether to wind down on anti-depressants during a pregnancy. The drugs may put the fetus at risk, but the possibility of depression puts the mother, and hence the baby, at risk. There is no easy answer.

The most valuable contribution that Barnett adds in “Dosed” is perspective: the perspective of the young people whose lives were altered by medication. Did they grow up differently? They may have. Barnett says that young people who have taken medications may think of their feelings as symptoms, not as a guide to behavior, and may doubt the authenticity of their emotions. And this response, she points out, can lead to other actions: refusal to take medications, either in response to side effects or as a rebellion. These actions in turn may have consequences, not yet fully understood either by science or by the teenagers themselves.

Clearly, some kids need medication; some will need to be on medications for their entire lives. Do your experiences, as student, teacher, parent, treatment provider bear out Barnett’s conclusions? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics here.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Chemistry of Tears” by Peter Carey

June 29, 2012

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In Peter Carey’s new novel “The Chemistry of Tears” Catherine Gehrig, a horologist and conservator at the fictional Swinburne Institute in London, struggles to come to terms with the sudden death of a heart attack of her married lover, Matthew Tindall. Catherine, who is miserable, funny, and suddenly very lonely, is kept away from the funeral by her regard for the bereaved family. Matthew, whom we never see alive, only in a few emails and in Catherine’s memories, was the Head Curator of metals, and had two sons, one studying mathematics. The Head Curator of Horology, Eric Croft, was Matthew’s best friend and, Catherine discovers, knew about the affair. In order to distract Catherine from her grief, she thinks, Croft gives her a complex project to work on: restoring a mechanical duck. He also gives her something more, an assistant, Amanda Snyde.

Though she does not know the provenance of the duck, Catherine finds something in addition to its parts as she unpacks the boxes: a series of notebooks, diaries written by Henry Brandling. Brandling commissioned the duck in the mid-19th century as a distraction for his son, Percy, who was ill with tuberculosis. Brandling, who is alternately annoying and just plain silly, travels to Germany to see to the duck’s completion. Henry’s chapters alternate with Catherine’s, and, while hers are entertaining, I couldn’t wait to get to the end of his.

Catherine is tough, feisty, and funny. She is good at her job, but struggles to manage Amanda, who has a talent for drawing but becomes obsessive about the various secrets they uncover about the duck. Eric moves more and more to the background, but it is clear that there are wheels moving within wheels here, especially when it develops that Matthew’s son is Amanda’s boyfriend. Amanda begins to stalk Catherine, and breaks into her flat, and Catherine flees. In the end, the mysteries, such as they are, are resolved, and both Catherine and Amanda are able to get on with their now separated lives. Oh, and the duck which, we learn fairly early on, is actually a swan, is restored to working order. In fact, it’s a triumph: a crowd-pleasing money maker that is displayed in the Swinburne’s lobby.

I found this book to be deeply unsatisfying, the emotional crisis coming at the beginning, the manipulations becoming evident all of a sudden only at the end. Perhaps less time with Henry and more with Catherine and Amanda would have made me happier. Or am I missing something? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

June 22, 2012

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Viktor and Liesel Landauer meet and marry in the late 1920s. They live in small city in the newly-formed Czechoslovakia, about an hour’s train ride from Vienna. The Landauers, both descended from wealthy families – his manufactures automobiles – commission an architect to design a house for them. The architect bemoans the fact that man has been “building caves! But I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.”

The author explains that the German word glasraum can mean glass room, or glass space, and adding one letter, making the word glastraum, changes the meaning to glass dream.

A dream that went with the spirit of the brand new country in which they found themselves, a state in which being Czech or German or Jew would not matter, in which democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people.The architect went on to build skyscrapers in America. As for the Landauers, Viktor is Jewish, Liesel is not, and Czechoslovakia was to be overrun by Nazis.

But the novel is less about the Landauers, and, as the title suggests, more about the Glass Room. After living there for nearly 10 years, with two servants, their own two children and, in time, a governess and her child, the Landauers flee to safety in Switzerland. Eventually they go on to Cuba, and then the United States. The Nazis take over the Glass Room, using it as the site of a laboratory dedicated to the scientific classification of human phenotypes. Later still, it becomes, under the Communists, a hospital gymnasium used for physical therapy for children with polio. Throughout, two characters stay near the house, Lanik, the servant, and Hana, Liesel Landauer’s best friend. Both of them survive and, perhaps, thrive under the successive invasions and regimes.

The Glass Room itself is a constant, not quite a hearth, but the scene to which the novel’s action returns over and over. A lot of life is seen in that room, almost as if the room is a stage: there are seductions, betrayals, dances, a rape. And return and recognition. The Glass Room, and the house, make a permanent impression on all who lived or worked in it, and on some visitors as well. And even though the house could be considered the main character, the book contains characters who are deeply engaging.

It did not take much digging to discover that the Landauer House is based on the Villa Tugendhat in Brno. The architect of that house was Mies van der Rohe. The book is illustrated with schematic drawings of the house; even better are the photographs, available here. (The house has been restored and opened to the public.) But wait until you’ve read the book, as Mawer does a great job evoking the house, its inhabitants, and its impact on their lives. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Passage of Power” by Robert A. Caro

June 18, 2012

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“The Passage of Power” is the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s masterful biography, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson.” Originally projected to be just three volumes, the work seems to keep growing, and that’s for the good. There’s no question that politics junkies will love this book, but even if you’re not, it’s a great book.

First, there’s the history. This book covers the runup to the presidential campaign of 1960, the election, Johnson’s Vice Presidency, the assassination in Dallas, and the first seven weeks of Johnson’s Presidency, from November 22, 1963 through his first State of the Union speech in January, 1964. A lot has been written about the election, and the Kennedy Presidency, not to mention the assassination. This retelling, with up-to-date research and coming from the Johnson viewpoint, adds perspective and a fuller view. To give just one example, Caro vividly describes the beginnings of the bitter feud between Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, and then spends several pages showing how that feud played out on the day John F. Kennedy told Johnson, and the world, that Johnson would be his running mate. It’s an interesting take on the close relationship between the brothers on a day when they did not see eye-to-eye.

You may have read the excerpt from the book in the New Yorker, telling the story, again from Johnson’s perspective, of the events in Texas on the day of the assassination. The book has a fuller and more detailed recounting. Again, one example. Johnson wanted to be sworn in while he was still in Texas, and he wanted a particular federal judge, Sarah Hughes, to swear him in. Why Hughes? Because when Johnson asked that she be nominated to the federal bench Bobby Kennedy turned him down, and Johnson told Hughes the nomination would not go ahead. Johnson was humiliated at this demonstration of the limit to his power. (The nomination went ahead anyway at the request of Sam Rayburn.) Johnson’s choice of Hughes was a subtle, but pointed, statement that things were changing. Immediately.

The last half of the book, and the reason, I’m guessing, that Caro turned his projected final volume into two, is the extraordinary story of the transition. During the three years of the Kennedy Administration, Johnson had sunk into obscurity, to the point where people were making cruel jokes about him, sometimes within his hearing. So his ability to rise to the occasion after the assassination, which he did, magnificently, came as a surprise. Caro provides a detailed chronology of the first five days, showing Johnson meeting with grieving Kennedy staffers and asking them to stay on and reaching out to Congressional leaders. It’s an extraordinary portrait of a man under great stress taking control.

In the final section, Caro continues with the next several weeks as Johnson shaped his Presidency. Legislation that had been stuck started to move through Congress. A budget was finished and passed. Most important of all, the 1964 Civil Rights bill became possible. And while all that was going on, Johnson waged, and won, an extraordinary public relations effort intended to rally the press and the country to his side as he took over while positioning himself for the 1964 presidential election, less than a year away.

Don’t worry if you haven’t read the earlier books – though they are very much worth reading. Caro borrows, or adapts, episodes from them where necessary, and this book stands on its own in any case. Some people find Caro’s style repetitive, but I find it rhythmical and helpful. What he has to relate is complex, and Caro relates events slowly, adding more memorable detail with every iteration.

I came away from this book with a heightened estimation of the political skills of Lyndon Johnson, and a lowering of my esteem for Bobby Kennedy. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Book Trailer for “Z is for Moose,” by Kelly Bingham, Illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky

June 12, 2012


Z is for Moose, by Kelly Bingham, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky, was published a couple of weeks ago, and now, in a reversal of the usual order, the trailer has just been released. (Click on the link, not the picture, to play the trailer.) Creating the trailer was something of a labor of love for  Paul O. Zelinsky, the illustrator and children’s book author. He says,

“I don’t like making a book and just going on to the next one. Book trailers are more of a thing for Young Adult books, but I wanted to see one for Z is for Moose, so I was going to  make it myself, and teach myself more about animating in the process. In the end, I got some professional help to move it along. I wrote a script first, but even before that I asked Maurice Sendak to record something for it. I knew Maurice when I was his student in 1971, in the first class he ever taught. Several ‘Oy gevalts’ [look for the glove] were the improvisation he recorded into my computer when my wife and I visited him in February.

“Then I decided to populate the soundtrack with other illustrators. Except for a couple of the mutterers and for Moose, who is my 14-year-old neighbor, they’re all illustrious names in the field of children’s illustration. All are from Brooklyn, too, at one point or another. Brian Selznick (Apple) is the author and illustrator of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which became the movie Hugo. Sophie Blackall (Kangaroo) is the creator of a wonderful poster you can see currently on many F trains, and has work on exhibit at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. John Rocco (baby kangaroo) won a Caldecott Honor this year. I could go on…”

We hope you do. In the meantime, get the book for anyone in your circle of friends who is in the right age range (1-100) – it’s hilarious.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “The Grief of Others” by Leah Hager Cohen

June 11, 2012

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Going it alone is something that people do when they feel they can’t trust another person, for one reason or another. John and Ricky Ryrie, the couple at the center of Leah Hager Cohen’s novel, don’t believe in each other despite their more than 15 years of marriage. Their lack of trust communicates itself to their children, two they have together (Paul, 13, and Biscuit, 10) and the third, Jessica, 23, who is John’s daughter from a brief college romance. The other main character, 19-year-old Gordie, goes it alone too, but he is forced to do so by circumstances: his mother died when he was born, and his father has just died.

‘The Grief of Others’ opens with a flashback which describes the brief life and almost immediate death of the infant anencephalic son of John and Ricky. A year later, each parent is so caught up in the immediate tragedy that they forget its effects on the others in the family. In a week of mounting challenges – Biscuit has been skipping school, Paul is being bullied – Jess shows up in their Hudson Valley town, having crossed the country by bus, and announces herself to be pregnant and estranged from her parents. The same day, Gordie appears in their lives, coincidentally but fortuitously.

As the story develops, it’s clear that these characters have been intent on emotional distance. Jess’s mother has raised Jess herself, wanting nothing to do with John, though at Jess’s insistence she did meet her father and his family, and in fact once spent a happy vacation with them. As if in response to the fact of John’s child, born before they met, Ricky had a brief, if meaningless, sexual fling just before she married John. Though she pretends to John that the baby’s deadly neural tube defect was a surprise to her at his birth, she in fact knew of it, and kept it secret from John, from the time she was about five months pregnant. As a result, all four of the Ryries are wrapped up in their own feelings, the two children wordlessly, and each is something of an enigma to the others.

The depiction of a family whose life together has spiralled out of control is convincing, and harrowing – this book kept me up for a couple of nights, after I tried to read it right before bed. But they struggle onward, and eventually each character starts to respond to the others, rather than to their own thoughts and feelings. It’s an assured, vivid telling of a story of ordinary people muddling through unusual circumstances made worse by their past actions. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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Events

Transit Museum to hold discussion of BikeShare Program, June 13

June 8, 2012

Ben Kabak of Second Avenue Sagas will talk with Caroline Samponaro, Director of Bicycle Advocacy at Transportation Alternatives, in the third installment of the museum’s Problem Solvers series on June 13 at 6:30 pm at the Transit Museum.

The discussion will focus on the City’s new Bike Share program, scheduled to launch in late July. Just as Metrocards revolutionized the subways 20 years ago, bike share supporters hope the ease of the new program will bring about a new wave of bicycle commuting. Riders will be able to check out bikes from 600 locations throughout the city by buying a pass for the day, week, month or year. Alta Bicycle Share, a Portland-based company, will manage the program.

Guest Caroline Samponaro is the Director of Bicycle Advocacy at Transportation Alternatives, an 8,000-member pro-bicycling non-profit founded in 1973. Caroline is one of the nation’s foremost advocates for cycling and has directed campaigns that address all areas of bicycling, from developing new neighborhood bike lane networks, to educating cyclists about their responsibilities on the road, to leading national roundtables of experts on public bike share systems. Caroline holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University.

Doors open at 6 pm; program begins at 6:30. Guests are invited to explore the Museum prior to the start of the program. Light refreshments will be served.

The Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Streets in Brooklyn Heights.

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Books

Brooklyn Bugle Book Club: “River of Smoke” by Amitav Ghosh

June 8, 2012

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“River of Smoke” is the second volume of a projected trilogy about the first Opium War (1839-1842). I reviewed the first book, “Sea of Poppies,” here. When Sea of Poppies ends, the characters are in two boats and facing a storm . . . The second novel stands on its own, but clearly some of the characters from the first have survived and their continuing story is one of the subjects this second novel. As for the others – we catch sight of one, possibly. One reverts to his opium habit, but the fates of several others remain a mystery.

After an initial chapter in Mauritius in which we get a peek of the futures of a couple of characters from the first novel, including a glimpse of the many grandchildren of Deeti, the Indian emigrant, and in which Paulette Lambert, the orphaned daughter of  a French botanist, struggles to make her way alone, we are once again at sea, this time on the Redruth. Paulette has thrown her lot in with another naturalist, Penrose Fitcher, who is on his way to China to find something he calls the Golden Camellia. This is not an unreasonable hope, as Fitcher is carrying a painting of the plant he hopes to track down, and China had already been the source of chrysanthemums, peonies, wisteria, hydrangeas, and begonias, to list just a few.

The novel also follows the course and passengers of another ship, the Anahita. The Anahita, part of the opium fleet which sails annually from India for China, belongs to a Parsi businessman, Bahram Modi, who has invested his life savings in a large shipment of opium. On a stopover in Singapore, Modi takes on Neel as his munshi, or scribe. (Or translator – see the Chrestomathy, or glossary, from ‘Sea of Poppies.’ The Chrestomathy is not included in the second book; happily, it is available on Ghosh’s website. Since Neel is identified as the Chrestomathy’s author I don’t think it’s giving anything away to identify his appearance in the second book.) The fleet leaves India loaded with opium despite warnings that the Chinese are no longer tolerating the import of opium.

Everyone fetches up in Canton, the main port open to Western traders, where the opium has in past years been offloaded for open smuggling into China. Western women are not allowed in Canton, and the Westerners are limited to their own section of the city. This year, the ships are kept at harbor near Macau, and the magnates move upriver to Canton where they fully expect the mandarins who rule China to back down. Ghosh describes this settlement, and the society the men created there, weaving a rich, complex brocade from the threads of politics, history, economics, art, and botany. Ghosh paints a very sympathetic portrait of the Indian trader whose entire livelihood is at risk, and a somewhat less flattering one of the English free traders, who are convinced that right is on their side.

Ghosh splits the narrative among two main reporters, Bahram Modi and those around him, and a painter named Robin Chinnery, who describes the delights of the all-male settlement, and the events surrounding the bitter conflict over the importing of opium, in letters to Paulette, his childhood friend. Among many other things, the book allows Ghosh to enchant the reader with his delight in words and wordplay, including several multi-language puns. Here he is on the interplay of words with personality:

As the reading proceeded, Bahram had the odd impression that he was listening not to the translator, but to some other voice that had taken command of the young man’s mouth and lips, a voice that was at once completely reasonable and utterly implacable. Bahram was astounded by this: how could the voice of this remote and distant figure Lin Tse-hsu, have seized control of this youthful Englishman? Was it possible that some men possessed so great a force of character that they could stamp themselves upon their words such that no matter where they were read, or when, or in what language, their own distinctive tones would always be heard?

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics for people who hate numbers here.

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