Tag Archives: books

Good reads

Every year about this time I recommend a few books about Boston or by Boston authors that might make good holiday gifts for your friends or relatives. Here are three for you to consider.

 

Winter Storms by Elin Hilderbrand

 

This book is not literature. But it is also not junk, as I feared. It was quick and fun.

The story follows an extended family whose members have complicated, theatrical lives. One has two boyfriends, one is at war, another is in jail, still another is a news anchor. All are in touch with one another—old lovers, step-children, former spouses, half siblings. All have a base in Nantucket, where the author must spend much time. She also lives in downtown Boston.

The story has a strong sense of place, which is both good and bad. The book captures the spirit of Nantucket. Beacon Hill also gets a mention, but the distance between one character’s home and Whole Foods is wrong. Readers lose the narrative when they follow a character through well-known terrain if the author doesn’t get it right.

This is the third book in a trilogy, but it is easy to get up to speed on the characters. If you lived in a family like this you’d be exhausted from the drama. But as a read, this family provides imaginative entertainment. This book would be a nice gift for a female friend who likes some fluff—but good fluff—in her life.

 

Boots on the Ground; Flats in the Boardroom by Grace Crunican and Elizabeth Levin

 

Few women worked in the transportation sector when the authors began their careers. This book tells the stories of some of these pioneering women. They were business majors, planning specialists, community organizers, political neophytes, civil engineers. They ended up running airports, railroads, consulting companies and transit authorities.

Similar threads weave through the stories. All faced low expectations, discrimination and unfair treatment. They also found mentors, both female and male, who helped them develop their skills and find new connections. They usually give their parents credit for their drive. Their family life often suffered from their job responsibilities. Their connections served them well when they wanted or needed to change jobs. One of the biggest obstacles to their success was counteracting the attitude of many public officials that transportation for the public deserved little respect—it was for the “other.” Some officials call those of us who use public transportation the “transit dependent,” as if we were in need of an intervention or a 12-step program. The reader quickly understands that to those officials, the people who matter drive cars.

The stories are compelling even though they are laced with the alphabet soup of transportation acronyms. The authors helpfully include at the end of the book a guide to these pesky strings of letters. The stories are short, which is both an advantage and a problem. The reader gets an interesting, fast-paced telling of a person’s professional life. But skipping over certain details means leaving questions unanswered. “Then-husbands” come and go, and we’d like to know more. Especially frustrating is former MBTA General Manager Beverly Scott’s portrayal. She came to Massachusetts well-prepared, with success behind her. When the 2015 winter blizzards crippled the T, Scott took the fall for the agency, which surely had been in disarray prior to her arrival. But we don’t understand what happened from Scott’s point of view.

In addition to Scott, several women who are profiled came from or worked in Massachusetts, so this book could have great interest for those who want to be reminded of the state’s history over the last 30 years. It would be a good gift for those people and also for teenage or college-age girls contemplating a career in transportation.

 

The Lively Place by Stephen Kendrick

 

I wish this delightful book about Mount Auburn Cemetery were a coffee table book, though that might have been too expensive to produce. The writing is eloquent, picturesque, all about nature as well as death. Photographs would have illustrated the writer’s already vivid prose, especially since the book’s structure is based on the seasons. As it is, we’ll make do with the rich interweaving of Mount Auburn’s facets and the charming black and white drawings.

The author is the minister of the First Church of Boston and has acquainted himself well with Mount Auburn. While he describes the people who have walked its paths and occupied its earth, he also muses on the history of horticulture, the history of Boston, the beginnings of Transcendentalism, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the nature of decay, the obsession with birding, the pleasure of walking and the innovation in burials that created Mount Auburn and that continues even today with the cemetery’s “green” burials designed to assist in the movement from dust to dust.

Almost anyone with an inquiring mind will like this book, so bestow it liberally this holiday season.

Extreme Books

You have heard people say books are going away, that we’ll all be reading on Kindles, etc. for the foreseeable future. The more extreme prognosticators declare that whole libraries are in demise, and with the cloud, their books are destined for landfill. (They obviously haven’t read the statistics on the increased use of libraries, and not just for their computers.)

Some book publishers have an extreme prognostication of their own. They have predicted they’ll succeed if they publish general interest books—not coffee table books—with a beautiful design, a gorgeous feel, and a reach toward complexity. Such qualities can be pictured on an e-reader, but, compared to a real book, it would be like listening to a symphony on the radio instead of hearing it in a concert hall—the experience would suffer.

Some publishers, of course, have always published beautiful books—Godine comes to mind—but there is a new emphasis toward making an object that can’t easily be transformed into an electronic mode.

Here’s an example. Chronicle Books’s The Little Book of Jewish Celebrations, written by Ronald Tauber, is a guide to Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot and other holidays and rituals. It is concise, entertaining and readable. The descriptions are amplified by related biblical quotations, a list of important words and phrases, and sometimes sidebars explaining a bit of history. (Full disclosure: the writer is a long-time friend. His book made me pay attention to this trend in the publishing industry.) It’s a book you can’t stop from reading.

It is also a book you can’t stop yourself from stroking. Its navy blue and gold cover has a silky feel—in textiles the feel is called the “hand.” Inside, the pages are enlivened with color, drawings, creative typefaces and charming decorative lines. While graphically much is going on, the division between parts is always clear and readability is paramount. The design of the book confers an importance to the text that would be lacking on a plain page. You could read the text on a Kindle, but you’d miss half the fun.

The Thing The Book is another Chronicle production. My friend, Shari, will love it. This book deconstructs books. In college I was a proper English major. I was told to do what I had always done: read stories and discuss them.

Then things changed. English departments were introduced to and fought over a new approach to literary criticism and analysis—deconstructionism. Deconstructionists don’t enjoy stories. Instead they consider all other kinds of meaning, most of which I didn’t understand or else found irrelevant. Shari, however, loves this kind of philosophical tangle.

That’s what this book is—a tangle, fully decorated with graphics that may hold secrets. I think I know what the Table of Contents is about, but I’m not sure. The cover’s texture is rough, probably a clue to the contents. There is one black page. All parts of a book are scrutinized, analyzed and dramatized, from the endpapers and a book plate to ink. Many writers contributed. Some articles are heavily footnoted, which, I suspect, carries some deconstructionist meaning.

But whether I understand this book or not is not the point. It’s an extreme book, which cannot easily be transposed to your Kindle. I’m giving this book to Shari.

Extreme books have moved into literature too. The Luminaries (Little, Brown) is a novel with a remote setting, swashbuckling characters, an epic tale, and a historic time. I picked it up and didn’t put it down until I had read all 900 pages.

It goes way beyond the usual novel. The deconstructionists will love it. The structure is mathematical. The author plays with the reader, introducing astrological charts and characters representing astrological beings. Again, graphic design plays an important role. You could read this on an e-reader, but you’d miss the fun.

While The Thing The Book did not engage me in the same way as The Luminaries, I did pay attention to its introduction. It is both silly—“[Books] can be used to level a table”—and profound: Those objects, your books, are “a manifestation of your own history,” write the editors. People will continue to read books on e-readers. But, like extreme books, other books will have meaning that can’t be retrieved on an e-reader. They’ll need to be in hard copy and allotted shelf space.

 

Conventional wisdom

Recently, at a City Hall hearing, a man in authority declared, authoritatively, that books, as we know them in paper format, were on their way out, and they would soon be completely replaced with electronic versions.

Silly man. Another slave to conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom is just that—conventional—with no imagination or sometimes even intelligence behind it.

I wanted to say to him, “Remember the paperless office?” That was touted by futurists all over the planet. “Remember that marvel called the floppy disk?” That little plastic square was going to change our technological world.

So don’t fear, those of you who love books. You may love your Nook and take it wherever you go. But the traditional paper book is not going away. Continue reading →