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Doubt it'd make my 50 pages. Aristotle's theory of dramatic structure? That's another story.

It's not my column; it's a column for anyone who reads and wants to share. I love your entries, particularly this one.

The Wanderers by Richard Price I couldn't put down. His most recent book, Lush Life, became another story. On page 43, not sure who any of the myriad of characters he had thrown at me were—or what they were doing—I put it down. Another first. I couldn't stand to read even seven more pages.

If someone has read this one and liked it, please let me known. Even since Clockers I've been a pretty avid Richard Price fan.

Sorry that I don't get to your page often, so you may have discussed this already.
Wondering how much anyone here knows about orphan books that are hitting the news these days...
like how many?
are they all science and non fiction types, or are there many fiction?
of the total big number, how many are recent and how many very old?
also seems like "millions" of these books exist, are copyrighted and supposedly owned, but where the author is not known...
seems to me that when a person takes from a few months to a few years, to publish a book, he/she wouldn't just walk away, and become invisible.
any light to shed on this? websites to explain etc?

just wondering...

Your post is the first I've heard of orphan books--at least so phrased. I googled to find a lot of info. I'll look more later. I knew there was some copyright controversy brewing but hadn't kept up with it.

I love Jonathan Kozol—as much as one can love anyone who tells horrific truths. And I say this after just finishing his The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Yep, folks, we're back to separate-but-not-equal.

Truths—as he sees them
1) "In a social order where it seems a common matter to believe that what we spend to purchase what we need bears some connection to the worth of what we get, a look at what we think it's in our interest to invest in children like Alliyah or Pineapple (elementary school interviewees) may not tell us everything we need to know about the state of educational fair play within our nation, but it surely tells us something about what we think these kids are worth to us in human terms and in the contributions they may someday make to our society." (page 44) Translation: if we saw any value in minority kids, we'd pay to educate them. Think about that and then dare to wonder why minority teens have no respect for the American system.

2) "We do not ask most children in America to summon up heroic qualities … in order to prevail." (page 61) If we did, wouldn't every child have to pull himself by his own bootstraps? What white, middle-class kid is asked to do that?

3) Student displays at inner-city schools are edited and corrected. "'The prevailing wisdom,' says The Times, is that these inner-city schools with 'long histories of failure and constant turnover of teachers' cannot afford to tolerate the 'misspellings or other errors that in wealthier, more successful schools' might be perceived as 'normal and even endearing.'" (page 81) And then there's surprise when the children don't take pride in "their" work being shown. My, my.

4) The goals of education: "Is future productivity, from this point on, to be the primary purpose of the education we provide our children?" (page 94) Or: "Beginning in the 1980 and continuing with little deviation right up to the present time, the notion of producing 'products' who will then produce more wealth for the society has come to be embraced by many politicians and, increasingly, by principals of inner-city schools that have developed close affiliations with the representatives of private business corporations." (page 95) And here I was, worried about universities being used as training schools for business. How yesterday of me.

5) The following from a superintendent in an inner-school district. "Our parents do not know what 'the best' is … but they want he best. When we have to assign their kids to summer sessions and portables while three miles down the road they can see schools with traditional calendars and with sufficient space, I can understand it when they ask, 'Why are our children not important?'" (page 171) My bet is a lot of the children see and ask similar things.

6) Moment of sadness: Kozol quotes a student who's unhappy when she's required to take "'a retarded class,' to use her words—that 'teaches things like the six continents,' which she said she'd learned in elementary school." (page 178) Sad, yes. But where—oh, where—do we start?

7) Kozol has a discussion with some students and asks them to write down possible explanations for the problems they discussed. "I was saddened to read these papers after talking with the students for so long, because their writing skills
would give no hint of the lucidity of thinking many demonstrated in our conversation." (page 184) Yes! Clarity of thought is linked to clarity of expression, whether expressed orally or in writing. Writing requires skills that can be taught. So why aren't they being taught? Too much time spent teaching the now-required tests? Poor teaching itself? Teachers who don't know? Again—where do we start?

8) Kozol warns us to be leery of the Texas test scores from the 1990s. There are indications of cheating. (page 206)

9) AEA members have been told that "education that does not promote the desire [for] earning … is not worth the getting." (page 211) OMG! My education is worth nothing. And I so enjoyed the getting. How sad.

10) Change in the current segregated education must come from public demand that leads to legislation, not the legislation itself. (page 258) Now there's a depressing thought. We'll have to do the 1950s and '60s over again. Once wasn't enough?

11) Kozol discusses how demoralizing it is for teachers to be presented with teacher-proof plans. (page 268) I can see and understand his point. At the same time though, I've seen some teachers who need teacher-proof plans. What do we do about them?

I'd like to end with a request. Some time ago I started a thread, asking what in the U. S. Constitution and court cases led to a right of privacy, which is not flat-out guaranteed in the constitution. I received many good responses. Kozol points out that "the notion that education is not a protected right … comes as a surprise to the majority of citizens." (page 254) Are there sections of the constitution that could be interpreted to guarantee a right to an equal education? Or have they been rendered meaningless by turn-back-the-clock decisions of the Supreme Court?

I had no real interest in Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book—although I have read and enjoyed her previous work—until someone on his thread said it was good. (Mellow perhaps?) So I read it and mostly enjoyed it. First, it appealed to my inner schoolmarm because one doesn't often run into the "envelope" structure these days.

"OK, show-off, what's the 'envelope structure'?"
"A group of stories fitting into an over structure, specifically the 'envelope.' Canterbury Tales is probably the most famous example."

And here I have to hand it to Brooks. Chaucer's envelope is the trip. Brooks' is yet another story with an interesting twist at the end. She wins—IMHO, of course.

The one problem I found with the book lies in the stories themselves. Each is fairly long, and with every one of them, once I was totally involved, the story ended. Grrrrrrrrr

I did dog-ear a few pages, although none contain what Mellow is illustrating in her earmarks thread. The ones I found in People of the Book are primarily interesting thoughts.

1) Start of the envelope. "To restore a book to the way it was when it was made is to lack respect for its history. I think you have to accept a book as you receive it from past generations, and to a certain extent damage and wear reflect that history." (page 17) Brooks' envelope then contains fictionalized stories of the people who have damaged or added to the wear of the book. Cool, huh?

2) "How could a people leave its dead untended." (page 251) Apropos of absolutely nothing else in this book, this sentence sent my mind skittering. Many years ago I read a history of the Donner Party and one of the author's contentions was that how that group of people treated their dead indicated how far outside the bounds of civilized behavior they had moved. Are there other works that treat this issue? Inquiring minds want to know.

3) During a story set in 1480 Brooks makes mention of a character "Hakim, who had been a calligrapher. He boasted that he had copied twenty Korans in his career, and that the holy words were etched on his heart. If so, they had not softened it. The only gentle words that came from his pursed mouth were his prayers. The rest of his speech was an endless stream of bile." (page 284) Interesting how one can find similar adherents to religious writings today.

Do I recommend? Yes.

Gray panther, if you're checking out this thread and haven't read People of the Book, I think you'd really like it.

Sometimes wading through a “true crime” book can be fun, and Joe McGinniss’ Never Enough does not disappoint. The author pulls a fast one in that he starts out making the reader think the villain will be one person, the victim another, and then switches who’s who. Beyond that, the story pretty much exemplifies what is expected in the genre.

Rather than analyzing, I’ll limit myself to passing on a bit of advice the book conveys. If you’re married and your spouse starts doing computer searches for sleeping pills or medicines that can cause a heart attack, leave. The marriage has problems too deep to fix.

The Terror by Dan Simmons is 955 pages long—and only twice did I mutter, "Oh, get on with it, will you?" My dislike of long books makes that sentence, in and of itself, a good review. But I'll elaborate.

If one were to categorize The Terror, it would fall, I guess, in the area of historical sci-fi terror—if such existed. It's a fictionalized account of a two-ship British exploration team trying to find a North-West Passage through the Arctic Ocean in the 1850s. The crews, icebound for two years, deal with disease, improperly packaged food, morale—and an outsized Polar bear who frequently attacks, often killing but always maiming his victims. Finally, in the last hundred pages, the book turns into straight science fiction as the protagonist, a captain of one of the ill-fated ships, discovers a new "race" of humans who inhabit the Arctic. All in all, it's pretty much of a page turner. And turner. And turner.

Specifics:

1) "The Ice Master knew as he fell that his life now depended upon simple Newtonian arithmetic: Thomas Blankly had become a simple problem in ballistics." (page 337) At the time of the quote Blankly is attempting to avoid the clutches of the Polar bear monster by swinging on the ship's rigging. I do like a writer who can find a light touch in even the grimmest of moments.

2) Let's hear it for literary hooks. "Up until this Day and the loss of Lieutenant Little's boat with all his men … I suspect that many of us still thought that we might Live. Now we knew that the odds of that had all but Disappeared." (page 730) Now those are sentences that will keep a reader reading—at least IMHO. (BTW, the odd capitalization is because that quote is from an officer's diary of the 1850s.)

3) "He (Bridgens, an officer) had taught Peglar to read but had never succeeded in teaching Harry how to spell. (Awkward sentence. You'll see why in the next sentence.) Bridgens suspected—since Harry Peglar was one of the most intelligent human beings he'd (poor pronoun reference) ever known—that there'd been some problem with the constitution of the man's brain, some lobe or lump or gray area unknown to medical learning that controlled the spelling of words. Even in the years after he'd learned to decode the alphabet and read the most challenging of books with a scholar's insight and understanding, Harry had been unable to pen the shortest letter to Brigdens without reversing letters and misspelling the simplest words." (page 762) Truthfully my editor cap didn't go on until I was typing the above. What interested me first was the description of dyslexia without the term. So I started wondering when the problem had been identified and named. 1881, according to Wikipedia. And that information turned my wondering to whether Simmons had known or researched the history or if some editor had caught the problem. From the sentence construction above, I'll now go with the latter, and that drops Simmons a degree in my opinion of him as a writer. And that, in turn, disappoints me.

4) I found it interesting when I came across one sentence that, IMHO, seemed to sum up a major theme of the book. With all the problems the crews of the two ships faced, a mutiny was not unexpected. Shortly after the event, the following is written: "'All this natural misery,' Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. 'Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?'" (page 802) Sudden insight: IMHO what truly creates horror in that so-named genre of literature is not the troubles that happen to characters but the ways in which they react. Lord of the Flies comes immediately to mind. Maybe that insight on horror novels, movies, etc. is common knowledge, but The Terror is the first book to make it clear to me.

5) Another quote from the officer's diary: (BTW, at this point he has begun to experience dementia from starvation and the other ills with which he struggles.) "If there is a Godd … I … thank you, Deaare God." (page 845) I find that a well written sentence as it shows the character's philosophical doubts as well as his current mental state.

Bottom line: I do recommend The Terror, in spite of some problems touched on above. But I also add that truly liking LONG books will certainly increase the enjoyment.

PS: I never did like the chapters categorizing whales in Moby Dick, and there were times when sections of The Terror brought them to mind.

Convinced by the "librul" media that Jonathan Cohn's Sick was an Important Book, I plowed through it, all the way to the very end.

(And, Martha, what makes a book an Important Book? First, its subject must be Weighty Material. Second, it must reflect hours of Intense Research.)

Sick fulfills both requirements. Its subject is 1) the intertwined history of medical care and medical insurance in America and 2) the results of that history, i.e. the mess in which we currently find ourselves. Cohn's research shows up in individualized case studies of people who have fallen through the cracks in our current system and in lots and lots of facts and figures.

One fact/figure that jumped out at me was: "In the thirty years since the creation of Medicare, the proportion of Americans who 'trust(ed) the federal government to do what is right most of the time' had fallen from 69 to 23 percent." (page 108) Dang! I had no idea our disenchantment had grown that greatly or that rapidly. (Disenchantment? How 'bout cynicism? No! Disenchantment.)

All in all, I learned a lot from Sick in the week and a half it took me to read it. (The length of time wasn't totally the book's fault; Christmas busyness did play a part.) So was reading it worth the time invested? Dunna know. (OMG! Brigadoon has kidnapped me?) The jury's still out on the issue of time v. worth.

Sue Grafton's U Is for Undertow has left me in a quandary. After reading it, I've finally figured out why I've always had reservations about her books. First, each book has a ton of characters, which means I have to read it fast so I can keep up with who's who. But I can't read Grafton fast because she's so descriptive—every piece of clothing a character has on, every piece of furniture in a room, every change in the color of the sky. And in U we starting getting doses of history, whether they're related to the story line or not. So why not just stop reading her? Because I'm crazy about the secondary characters who show up in every book. They're interesting and quirky. Surprisingly, I'm still not sure how I feel about the protagonist, PI Kinsey Millhone. But she's well-rounded enough that there's plenty to like and dislike. Additionally, it's hard to stop the series because I've read A to U. That's 21 books. Can I really not read the last five?

Specifics from U Is for Undertow:

1) Looking a the book as a whole, it bothers me that my favorite-to-read-about character, an uber-villain from a backstory set in the 1960s, got only a miniscule of "onstage" time compared to that given to many far less interesting characters.

2) A nurse insets a catheter though a character's penis. While I was amazed that Grafton knew the most common sizes of catheters, that information, IMHO, did nothing more than waste space in an already overlong book. (page 127)

3) A character tells Kinsey, "… I lived in an institution, the Children's Haven of Saint Jerome Emiliana. He was the patron saint of orphaned and abandoned little ones." (page 156) WHO CARES?

4) A bit of dialogue did grab me. Wow! A good bit of dialogue? Guess it proves the old adage, "Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters and …" Well, you know the rest.

5) About another character: "He had to laugh at himself. He hadn't written a word and he was already suffering writer's block." (page 204) Back when I first started to write, I used to wonder if writer's block truly existed if a writer hadn't been published. Set that bar high, Martha.

6) On page 205 Grafton writes a few sentences that compare/contrast Hemmingway and Faulkner, and they do it well. The comparison probably didn't advance the plot any more than the size of catheters did, but IMHO it was far more interesting.

7) On page 210, we get a detailed history of building a harbor in a town on California's southern coast. Be still my heart.

8) Did I know a "Boston marriage" was two women? No idea. It sounds familiar. Whatever. Even so, why Boston? Anyone know?

9) On page 353 I ran across a section that reminded me why I invariably break down and buy the next letter. Kinsey is talking about word problems in math and how she could never do them because she'd start wondering about the people on the train, who they were and where they were going. When describing my own problems with math, I've said the exact same thing.

All in all, 'tis now a quandary.