Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village

Curious about the life of Muslim women in the 1950's in Iraq? Trained as a journalist, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea travels with her anthropologist husband to a conservative Shiite village of El Nahra. She involves herself in the daily lives of the village women. For a year and a half, she lives as the native women do, in purdah, veiled from head to foot.

Check it out at the High Library!

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Bill on Will ...

I'll make this brief as well ... I LOVE Bill Bryson! I will read anything this author puts out, and he has never failed to surprise and enlighten. I was pleasantly amused to find that Bill's latest book is on the Bard himself. Bryson is himself an ex-pat now living quietly in the England he so loving explored in Notes from a Small Island. Loving the UK as he does, it is no surprise that he turns his attention and pen to the life of William Shakespeare. This is a nice, neat addition to the Eminent Lives Series - and thankfully the Bryson wit, wisdom and tenacity for the facts are all here.

Admittedly, this is a very brief book as we know very little about Shakespeare, which it seems would best be spelled Shakspere if we were in keeping with what we do know of the man. Bryson gives us wonderful detail about Elizabethan London - a place of plague, pestilence and wonderful theatre! Bill does a magnificent job of countering the anti-Stratford arguements that Will in one man did not exist. It is great fun and I offer that this is the perfect book to read if you little time and wish to learn a great deal about a great man who we happen to know nearly nothing about!

Al's short course on discourse ...

I'll make this brief ... read this book. The now Nobel Prize winning vice-president and global champion returns to his political roots and turns in a very simple lesson for us all. If you are like me and have found yourself asking how one might possibly try and address (let alone try and fix) the varied political problems facing our democracy, Gore does us all the favor of suggesting that we look no further than the core of the American constitution and return once again to reason and the power of a well-informed citizenry. The key word being well-informed. The self-proclaimed father of the Internet does an excellent job making the case for not mistaking quantity for quality in the role that information plays in our lives. Once we arm ourselves with solid information and facts, the central role of reason and discourse can return to our democracy. It seems like a simple lesson that we all did learn at one time in our American History class. For Al Gore it is a lesson which bears repeating. I would agree. An excellent and easy read. Do not spend too much time considering the overall layout of the book. The chapters have little discernable order and so flow from one idea to the next. The resulting effect is that you will be given pause to think and hope once again.

Suspension by Richard Crabbe

The Friends Book Club's newest reading selection is Suspension. This historical thriller centers around the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Here's a synopsis from Publishers Weekly.
"The saboteurs, led by former Civil War Capt. Thaddeus Sangree, view the bridge as a symbol of the North's moral corruption and misguided desire for unity. Sangree's own secret motivation is personal: his brother, Franklin, was killed at Gettysburg, and Sangree holds former Union Col. Washington Roebling responsible for his brother's death. Roebling's father designed the Brooklyn Bridge and the younger Roebling is its chief engineer. The scheme has been meticulously planned for years, with saboteurs obtaining jobs working on the bridge so they can understand its weak points. However, when they kill a bridge mason who has caught on to their plan, the murder attracts the attention of bulldog police detective Tom Braddock. Braddock sniffs out the plot through a combination of dogged pursuit, investigative cunning and the brute force that was common practice in 19th-century law enforcement."
(Nov.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Join the Friends on Wednesday, March 26th at 7pm in the High Library conference room for a lively discussion!

A sense of the mysterious by Alan Lightman

I was hooked by Alan Lightman's writing after reading Einstein's Dreams. Lightman is both a physicist and a novelist, giving him the tools to write this volume that is subtitled Science and the Human Spirit. Metaphors to explain scientific phenomenon fill these essays and your mind. For example, from cosmology, the use of a slowly inflating balloon covered with dots to represent the expansion of the universe with no known center. Lightman celebrates these unions of science and the humanities. His biographies of Albert Einstein (the contradictory genius), Richard Feynman (the one and only), Edward Teller (megaton man), and Vera Rubin (dark matter) explore each person's imagination, creativity and personality as they wrestle with science and the world. Lightman ends the book with two insightful essays. One essay explores the ramifications of turning 35 and thereby becoming an "old man" in theoretical physics. Most discoveries in that field are made scientists in their twenties! The final essay examines the wired world and the lack of time to waste. Wasted time for Lightman is time that feeds curiosity, creativity, and the inner soul.

Let us know what you think about this book or other books by Lightman.

Beguiled by the Wild: The Art of Charley Harper

I was introduced to the art of Charley Harper through a recent issue of Audubon magazine. By doing a little more digging, I uncovered this gem of a book.
Each colorful picture is accompanied by a paragraph of succinct information about each illustrated bird or animal. Mr. Harper labels his illustrations and fills the descriptions with a multitude of puns.
Some of my favorites include "Dolfun", "Family Owlbum", "Lovey Dovey", "Skimmerscape", and for the zebra picture above "Serengeti Spaghetti"!

The Summer of a Dormouse by John Mortimer

The Friends Book Club continues to meet.

Next meeting is Wednesday, Feb. 27th in the High Library Conference Room at 7pm. The Friends meet on the 4th Wednesday of the month. They select books from Bestsellers, National Book Award winners, Classics and the lighter side.

This month's selection is written by John Mortimer who is a retired barrister and is the creator of Rumpole. The Friends have characterized this book as "how not to grow old graciously." This witty book is filled with entertaining tales about Mortimer's childhood years in England during World War I, travels in Morocco, travel filmmaking with Franco Zeffirelli, panhandlers in New York as well as serous concerns such as prison reform.

Enjoy the book, then enjoy the company of other readers. See you there.