Review 'em & Weep

The funniest piece of writing I have seen in a cat's age is right here.

Don't waste any time. It's got a mystery, it's got heart, it's got a snooty secretary-type, a jaded-reviewer, a craggy editor, and a loveable guy dressed as Santa with all the answers.

Dealing them off the arm

My mother always said have a backup skill in case those dreams of marrying wealthy and divorcing wealthier didn't work out. So I learned to type. Very fast. And typing was good. It paid for a trip to Ireland in my senior year of college. I couldn't believe how lazy all these student were who hadn't learned to type.

If one backup skill was good, two were better. So I became a waitress, which pays much better than typing and you get drinks at the end of the day. I used to regale my friends with "service industry" stories. Like the time I waited on 30 people on Mother's Day, couldn't take any other tables because this party kept dribbling in, growing larger and more demanding and ordering food every five minutes. After two hours, 45 goddam tossed salads with the dressing on the side, constant refills of Dr. Pepper, and a $300 check, one of the wives pressed a $5 dollar bill in my hand and thanked me for a lovely job. Her nephew was in the kitchen, cooking the day's food and she wanted to show her appreciation for his coworkers. For a brief moment I thought about beating her mightily around the head and face. But instead I laughed. I tipped my bartender with that fiver on my first drink of the evening.

The Waiter has felt my pain, joy and incredulity, and written about it in a book to be published this August, Waiter Rant. I harbor a secret obsession with any memoir about the restaurant business. I've spent too many years schlepping food and owe a great deal to the dining room managers who have given me a job at the lowest points of my life. I've read Debra Ginsberg's Waiting: True Confessions of a Waitress and Service Included by Phoebe Damrosch. Those books are good. But The Waiter has perfectly captured what it is like to work the front of the house. The chapter alone on tipping and why the tip is so important to the server is priceless. I knew exactly how The Waiter's friend Allie felt after she'd delivered consummate service and was royally stiffed. It's not about the money. It's never about the money. Two tables from now, someone will over tip and make it all even for Allie. It's the insult. It's knowing that someone else has to assign a dollar value to your work and deemed it lacking when you know you turned in a top notch performance.

The Waiter understands the emotional toll serving the public can take on a human being. No matter how much he dresses it up, he understands that people who work in food service are hired servants.

With humor, wit, a liberal dose of snark and a soupcon of sentimentality, The Waiter brings the dining room into the reading room. Sometime in August, on a Monday night at the Pine Grove Inn or Tony's Villa Capri or the Airport Cafe or Friendly's or Domino's Pizza or New China or Racine's, the staff will share a drink, the tips and stories about their favorite Monday night customers--who are all in the food service industry. They will also share their impressions of Waiter Rant and none of them will find any part of the book to be lacking in verisimilitude

They also serve, who wait.

Calling all Jane-iacs!

You know who you are. If you're an academic, then you refer to yourself as a "Janeite." Those of us who are hip to Jane's trendster cred refer to ourselves as "Jane-iacs".

Catch a whole month of Jane-inspired programming, events, movies, book discussions and author visits at Kansas City Public Library's month long Jane-uary celebration.


Join the Jane-iac blog, too.

And the Angels try to bar the Gates

I have to put my grief someplace. We won't have Norman Mailer around anymore to epitomize the idea of a "man's writer." He was a macho, braying scoundrel, but I loved him anyway. A guy's guy. Guybrarian is probably mourning over a beer. Keir is staring blankly out the window of an El car. Bill is trying to compose a fitting Backpage.

Norman was street before all those faux "gangstas" made it a lifestyle.

Bye, Norman. And fug you for leaving us all behind.

The Big Read @ Kansas City Public Library

Kansas City Public Library, Park University and Liberty Memorial will be celebrating Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, A Farewell to Arms during October and November.The Big Read aims to encourage Kansas Citians to read, enjoy, contemplate, and discuss Hemingway's landmark novel of love and war on the Italian Front during the First World War.

The program period coincides with the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Caporetto, a devastating Italian defeat that served as a climactic moment in A Farewell to Arms.

More than 500 free paperback copies of A Farewell to Arms will be distributed to interested participants. In addition, there will be special events, panel discussions, book groups and movie screenings revolving around Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and Hemingway's influential ties to Kansas City. Register for an event, book group or free copy of the book here.

Contribute comments and insights at the Kansas City Public Library's The Big Read blog.

Beisball's been berry good to SOMEONE!

To the tune of $2.8 million, the above non-descript cardboard image of an old tyme baseball player who is NOT a household name, has been sold anonymously. Read the greedy story here.

Read the story behind the story in The Card: Collectors, Con Men and the True Story of History's Most Desired Baseball Card. Authors Michael O'Keeffe and Teri Thompson trace the history and ownership of one of baseball's most famous, and hard-to-find, cards of a player unfamiliar to most fans except for his face on a collectible.

Now, I expect some sunburnt bleacher bums will cry foul. "The Flying Dutchman" was one of the foremost players of his day. Honus Wagner was an all-star quality player, a contemporay of Ty Cobb and one of the first to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. If his quotes are accurate, it sounds as if Mr. Wagner was one of the most forthright and honorable players of his time, too. There's a lesson to be learned here (I'm talkin' to YOU, MLB All-Stars). It's "How to Be a Gentleman and a Ballplayer instead of a Billionaire Athlete".

Wagner's fame is now tied to a little piece of cardboard he didn't endorse enclosed with a product he didn't condone.

O'Keeffe and Thompson eyeball the hobby of card collecting and aren't sure how to call it. A harmless American hobby that started with little boys and bubblegum (or bigger boys and tobacco) has morphed into a booming and conniving business involving authentication experts, auction house and Wall Street bankers.

Although the history and backstories are fascinating, the writing is a little dry. Some of O'Keeffe's sparkling sports prose would be welcome in this book. Fans and collectors will be entertained and informed and likely a little disenchanted with the moneyfication of the Great American pasttime. But there's no crying in baseball or baseball card collecting, either.

Stop what you're doing and read this book

At holiday gatherings, Friends of the Ballet cocktail parties and roller derbies, I am often asked what it is like to work in a library. "Huh huh, you must read all day" is the typical inane comment I hear. To which I reply, "Why no, I don't. I answer reference questions and suggest reading material to interested patrons." What I really want to say is, "Yep, right in one, psychic. But it beats chewing tobaccy, changing oil and yanking it to the Miss Quaker State calendar all day."

If you want to know what it's like to work in a library, then read Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks and Gangstas in the Public Library. Don Bochert has captured all the most delightful elements of working a public service desk. From reaching into the bookdrop and retrieving a fecal-encrusted dildo to reissuing a library card to a patron who swears the triple 666s will cause him pain to chasing off the drunk wearing a tutu to the patron who tried to mail a letter in the dictionary stand.

Bochert spills the beans about contemporary libraries with generous doses of love, candor and good natured humor. At the end of the checkout period, he still believes in the power of libraries and that patrons truly mean to return their materials on time.

A New Life With Old Demons

Gail Giles is known for taking on serious, almost controversial subjects, in her popular young adult novels. A loathsome student becomes the most popular kid before he is killed by classmates. When a daughter, thought to be dead, returns to her shattered family, her sister is skeptical. A Goth girl takes an inordinate interest in a quiet student with drastic results. The most popular girl in school is buried alive as revenge for the death of another student.

Giles has perfected the art of young adult heart-stopping page-turners. She does it again in her newest title, Right Behind You.
Kip has just committed a horrible act. He flung gasoline and a lit match on seven-year-old Bobby Clarke. Bobby has died from his burns and Kip has been sequestered in a hospital. Kip is nine years old.

Flash forward almost five years. Wade has just moved to Indiana. He is trying to fit in at his new high school but his anger gets in the way. When Wade is angry he forgets he has a secret that he is longing to reveal. But to tell it means life is over for Wade and his family. So Wade fights to hide--from his friends, his family and himself. Wade is about to lose the fight.

Readers who have enjoyed this character-oriented story told in realistic dialogue and vivid action should turn next to Chris Crutcher.
This book was discussed on The Walt Bodine Show 's Book Doctors program August 13, 2007. KCUR 89.3

A Year in the Death

Chris Crutcher remains one of my favorite authors of all time. His books are beloved by teens across the nation and astute adult readers looking for a story full of emotion, action, wit and intelligence will never be disappointed in a Crutcher novel. His quartet, Running Loose, Stotan, The Crazy Horse Electric Game, and Chinese Handcuffs, are Crutcher at the top of his game. Every book since then has been great, but none have achieved the completeness of story, mastery of character and depth of emotion and realism as his first four novels. Which is not to criticize. All Chris Crutcher novels are worth the time taken to read them. Even a Crutcher novel not as good as the top four is still better than most of the books out there.

Deadline is good, not great, Crutcher, but still better than the majority of teen novels put to paper. Ben gets a disturbing medical report just before his senior year starts. He has been diagnosed wth a rare blood disease that is too difficult to treat andh e has less than a year to live. Armed with this knowledge, Ben, a 120lb whippet-thin cross country runner turns out for the football team and steps up his efforts to date the elusive and athletic Dallas Suzuki. When Ben isn't cramming every drop of life in his quickly shortening one, he is searching for all the education he can get--these methods include tormenting his right-wing conservative civics teacher, consoling the town drunk (harboring a dark secret of his own) and trading therapeutic quips with his psychologist. How does Ben manage to accomplish all this during his treatment for cancer? He doesn't. Take treatment, that is. Ben, a legal adult at 18, has excersized his doctor-patient privelige and refuses to tel lhis family, friends and teachers about his condition.

The conversational style will immediately hook readers. All the teens in Crutcher's books are articulate and inquisitive. Sometimes everyone, teachers and teens alike, are a bit glib, but the rat-a-tat style will get anyone past those snarky moments. There aren't too many authors, teen or adult, that write like Crutcher, but Gail Giles' most recent book, Right Behind You, has the same high octane pacing and conversation.

Lost Boys of the Jungle Guns

On the way to a talent show for students, Ishmael Beah, his brother and four other friends find themselves separated from their families forever as war breaks out in Sierra Leone. For the next four years Ishmael travels the jungles of his country, carrying an AK-47 and suffering migraines and jangled nerves from the marijuana and cocaine he ingests instead of food. He has become an emotionless killer, a tiny robot soldier with no memory of childhood, A Long Way Gone from the life had known. A UN team negotiates his release, along with a few others, from the guerrilla army he has called "family" and tries to rehabilitate Ishmael. But the violence of he past four years is too ingrained and Ishmael and his comrades fight with other boys who have been "discharged" from their armies. After a painful drug withdrawal process, Ishmael begins to experience all those emotions and activities that kept him tied to his world. But just as Ishmael is about to join a family and begin again to live with people who love him, the war finds Ishmael again and he must take drastic measures to avoid the harsh and violent life he has escaped and seek out a new life in another country. Readers may be shocked at the level of brutal violence present in Ishmael's story. Yet the author tells his harrowing tale unapologetically and simply. Readers who wish to read further on this subject may enjoy God Grew Tired of Us by John Bul Dau and Measuring Time by Helon Habila.