pt at large

Robert B. Parker's "Double Play": An Audio Book Tour de Force

Double Play, a novel published in 2004
Robert B. Parker
A five CD audio book produced by Phoenix Records and read by Robert Forster (audio book link has sample of Forster's reading)

The combination of the late Robert Parker’s tight prose and Robert Forster’s laconically graceful interpretation has the poetry of a well turned double play. Parker invents one character, WWII veteran Joseph Burke and spins a yarn about a very real Jackie Robinson who breaks the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947.

Ex-Marine Burke, shot up at Guadalcanal, comes back to the states on a hospital ship with a body that can be repaired but an emotional life drained of hope and aspiration by his experience of war. After a short-lived boxing career, he’s taken on as a bodyguard for the 25 year-old spoiled daughter of a New York crime boss. He survives using his wits, strength, and lack of fear of dying.

Burke is let go after too zealously protecting Lauren and is recommended to Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey hires him to be bodyguard for Jackie Robinson, whose presence on the baseball team will certainly provoke antagonism, and perhaps worse, amongst racist fans.

The conversations between Robinson and Burke, who keep each other at arm’s length as they travel and room together, deepen as the season progresses. The surprise of the book is Parker’s ability to have his finger on the pulse of race relations in the late 1940s and bring it to the surface in the dialogue between Robinson and Burke, two tough men who at first don’t seem to share much else than a desire to succeed at the job they’re paid for. 

Burke is the center of a matrix involving a historic moment in American history and a world filled with gang bosses who fight over turf and nurse dangerous beefs with each other. The scrapes with cops, criminals, gang bosses, a headstrong woman – all are imaginatively overlaid with the day-to-day drama of Robinson’s first year in the big leagues.

Robert B. Parker was 15 years old in 1947. You can visualize him hunched over a radio to hear history unfold. If you remember the way you cherish memories from your childhood, the kind that transport you with emotional clarity when you recall them, you have an idea of the well from which he drew to write this story. He seamlessly inserts play by plays of hits, errors, pitchers, and batters through Burke's eyes as he sits near the dugout, peanuts in one hand and his .45 tucked in his belt. Forster’s reading is elegant. He channels Burke as perfectly as Parker has drawn him.

Parker usually paints the inner life of his characters with a broad brush but here, perhaps thinking about the story from his teenage obsession with Jackie Robinson and what he endured in 1947, Parker takes the time to penetrate Burke’s incapacity to access his feelings and to illuminate his upbringing (perhaps reminiscent of Parker's) that instilled his egalitarian values.

The beautifully imagined intersection of the lives of Burke, Robinson, and Lauren Roach paints a picture of three characters with universal appeal and an era now remembered in sepia tones. The enormous power of Parker’s prose and Forster’s reading drives this story right out of the park.

50th Annual Westport Quaker Meeting Used Book Fair: A Mighty Sale

Book Lover Alert!

The Mother of All Book Fairs, the Westport Friends (Quaker) Meeting Used Book Fair, will be held on Saturday, July 9, 2011, 11 AM to dusk and will continue for about 2 weeks thereafter.
938 Main Road, Westport, MA

This will be big. Last year, over 20,000 books in dozens of categories were laid out on tables under two huge tents and in two buildings on the grounds of the 190-year-old meeting house in the middle of Westport, MA. The added bonus about shopping on Saturday is that light snacks, home-made goodies and beverages will be sold.  The stuff will be good and, like the books, will be cheap!

This will be historic. It will mark the 50th anniversary of the book fair. Used paperbacks range from 6 for a dollar to a few bucks. A “Better Books” section has hardbound books that are ridiculously inexpensive. The event is the main source of income for the Westport Society of Friends (Quakers). No one leaves without buying something. This book fair is a reader’s answer to The Dollar Store. Scrape up the loose change on your bureau for a week and you can bring home a large paper bag of books.

The event will go on rain or shine. One year it was held while Hurricane Beulah was bearing down on Westport.

The book fair will go on for about two weeks. After Sunday, there’s a good chance you can find a page-turner. Just drop the dough you owe in the coffee can in the middle of one of the tables.

For more information: 
Greg Marsello, Book Fair Steering Committee Clerk 401-624-9840 
marsello@lern.org
Dave and Emily Sutton, Friends In Residence 
508-636-4963 sutton.df@gmail.com 
emilyhsutton

For the story of last year's super book fair, http://ptatlarge.typepad.com/ptatlarge/2010/07/49th-annual-westport-friends-used-book-fair-big-bang-for-your-buck.html#comments

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Hardcover and paperback used books at ridiculously reasonable prices bring buyers back year after year.

 
Part of the fun is comparing your "finds" and having lunch in the shade next to the historic meeting house or right on its front steps (the 6 for a buck books go on sale in the meeting house at 10 AM).

Walter Mosley Reads At The Brattle Theater

Walter Mosley Book Reading at The Brattle Theater, Cambridge, MA
March 24, 2010
Sponsored by The Harvard Bookstore, Mass. Ave., Cambridge,MA

Walter Mosley's got game. He’s in the first inning of a coast-to-coast book tour promoting his detective fiction novel “Known To Evil” and Boston’s one of his first stops. He’s smart, spontaneous, energetic, funny, and candid.

Listen to him when he gets rolling and you see where his characters come from. One minute he’s talking about Balzac and Zola, the next he’s riffing mile-a-minute street smack. The man straddles two worlds, white and black. Mosley could mix company in a cocktail party on the Upper East Side or in a sweaty gym in Harlem. He’s used to being the only black man in the room.
 
Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, the character he invented for “Devil In A Blue Dress,” knew how to make his way through both worlds in post World War II America. The black private investigator was a WW II veteran who lived in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles (where Mosley was born in 1952). The book was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington. Mosley’s books, including ten more Easy Rawlins stories, have perched on the NY Times Best Seller list since then.
 
Those early novels were homage to his father's life in post World War II Los Angeles. “Black men have no history in literature and I wanted to write about them because their lives deserve discussion,” he says.

"In post WW II America, Easy Rawlins knew what was behind every door," Mosley says. "Black men knew where they fit in and where they did not. After writing eleven books in the Rawlins series, I said all I could say about him. He became anachronistic in the 21st century, ” he says about beginning a new series.
 
That’s where Mosley’s new character Leonid McGill got created. “I needed a 21st century hero. Leonid is like me. He’s built like me, he thinks like me. He doesn’t know what’s behind every door. The world of possibilities is more complex than Easy Rawlins’ world. I think we’re living in meta-racial America and don’t know it yet.”
 
By the time Mosley’s read the first two chapters of his latest book “Known To Evil,” the second book featuring his new hero Leonid McGill, we see exactly what he means.
 
Complex personal relationships, family constellations tied together by blood and circumstance, mixed racial marriages and affairs, plot lines including a younger generation with Leonid’s 17 year old step-son, and the New York underworld - we can see this is going to take a score card to follow - and be worth it.
 
Publisher’s Weekly said this about Known To Evil:
"Bestseller Mosley scores a clean knockout in his excellent second mystery featuring New York City PI Leonid McGill. Still striving to atone for some of the lives he’s ruined, the 54-year-old McGill laments that there are ’no straight lines in the life or labors of the private detective.’ Instead, crises crowd him at every turn. A powerful, shadowy city hall official wants McGill to locate and protect a young woman named Tara Lear, a task complicated by a murder. Older son Dimitri is involved with a Russian hooker whose pimp doesn’t want to let her go. Younger son Twill, trying to help his brother, risks violating parole restrictions. Relations with wife Katrina and lover Aura Ullman, ’with her Aryan eyes and Ethiopian skin,’ are in flux. The ex-boxer has an eclectic group in his corner, including computer whiz Tiny "Bug" Bateman, but McGill is the one taking the blows and meting out punishment in this contemporary noir gem."

Here comes the Q and A part of the reading. This might not be every writer’s idea of a good time but Walter’s up to it. "I love to expound,"he quips.

“Leonid’s living in the 21st century, the world is changing and how we live in it interests me,” he says. Those first two chapters show that Mosley's absorbing the change like a sponge and wringing it out on every page.

He’s frank and wryly quirky. In response to one question, Mosley says he’s like a politician and if he doesn’t like the question he just bends the question to talk about something he really wants to tell you.
 

‘When authors tell you who their influences are, I guarantee you they’re lying. It’s hard to be honest and be a writer," he says with a twinkle in his eyes. "You pay them to make stuff up."

Then he gives you his fictitious list of influences, naming “dead writers, you have to have some of them, like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and a few established live ones like Alice Walker and Tony Morrison, and a few younger ones like Zadie Smith, maybe Kevin Powell.” The beauty of it is, we don’t know whether he’s fibbing or not.

Mosley says he doesn’t do research. He writes three hours a day. “The other 21 hours the story is percolating and when I come to it the next day it’s more shaped and I rewrite and keep writing. Somewhere around the 8th or 9th draft I read the story into a tape recorder so I can hear what I really wrote.”
 
 Mosley knows something about a meta-racial life. His father Leroy was an African American school librarian who worked as a clerk in the segregated U.S. Army during WW II. His mother was a Polish Jew who worked as a personnel clerk. He attributes his philosophical and story-telling bent to his father and his love of literature to his mother, who introduced him to Zola, Dickens, and Camus.
 
He writes to give African Americans a place in literature and to give others “outside the community” a window into understanding the complexity of African American life. Mosley matter-of-factly weaves the role of racial inequalities in America through the story lines in the entire Easy Rawlins series.

His manner onstage tonight is totally assured. His middle class background notwithstanding, you get the feeling Mosley could live on the streets packing his high caliber brain and trash-talking mouth.

Don’t fence him in. He won’t like it. He poked fun at a recent New York Times story leading with “Crime fiction writer Walter Mosley…”

“I’m a writer, period!” he says with mock irritation. He cites 34 books - non-fiction, mysteries, science fiction, a young adult novel, a recently completed play, and screen plays for TV and films he’s been cranking out for years.  He won an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and a PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award and has been translated into 21 languages. He’s got a point about being pigeon holed.

When he was a 34 year-old bored computer programmer, he wrote a sentence on his screen, and read it aloud.  “'Hey, that sounds good', I said to myself, and, since Californians have no sense of their limitations, I decided I’d become a writer and published my first book at age 38.”

Meta-racial America is all the better for it.

Photo top by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr. , bottom by Mr. Mosley's press agent.

Free Enterprise in The Republic of Cambridge

If you live around here, you gotta love Haavaad Square…

What’s this on the corner near the Harvard Graduate School of Education? A crowd of intrigued pedestrians poring over two tables of paperback books. There’s no one in sight to take cash of a potential buyer. 

I thought I’d seen it all in Harvard Square - jugglers, magicians, folk singers, puppet shows, panhandlers, chess players, free spirits, story tellers, tight rope walkers (yep. on a twenty foot piece of rope about three feet off the sidewalk) but this is a new wrinkle in a locale known for its share of zaniness.

In the past month, the students in the Harvard Theatricals’ Hasty Pudding Society marched through nearby streets to honor Anne Hathaway as Woman of the Year and Justin Timberlake as Man of the Year. Dressed in drag, the boys had a grand time roasting celebrities and awarded them with the famed Pudding Pot.

The only pot around today is the kryptonite cash box lashed on to the two tables and labeled HONOR SYSTEM. “Books are priced as marked with a white sticker on the cover.  If you find a book you like please put the money in the box. Your patronage is welcome and appreciated. Thank you!!”

Honor in the mercantile system. How quaint. Just what we need when every day brings a scandal about money managers and Wall Streeters, many of whom just might have graduated from the university next door.

Leave it to a small business entrepreneur in the middle of Harvard Square to try to right the ship.

I ask the fellow leaning against a street sign what he knows about the setup.
“It’s mine,” he replies.
“You have to have a permit to do this?”
“The way I set it up, it’s considered free speech,” he says. “as long as I’m not in the way and pick a good spot, I don’t have any trouble.”

He’s a Gutenberg road warrior, says he’s done this “around two or three hundred times” in the past three years.

“I usually shop for books after I set up the tables. It's such a beautiful day, I decided to stick around. My main business is reselling the more expensive textbooks. I look for them in auctions, thrift shops, and used bookstores. That’s also where I pick up the books for these tables.

They’ve been on the New York Times Best Seller list so I’m sure they’ll sell,” he says with an assured smile. “The money I make today, maybe two or three hundred dollars, pays for my trip and for the some of the books I buy.”

What better place to set up an “en plein air” bookstall, just like the ones on the Right Bank in Paris. Strollers are out in force on a day like today. This one-man Barnes and Noble sets up his tables summer through winter unless it rains.

There are over a hundred thousand books for sale inside the walls of The Harvard Coop and The Harvard Bookstore nearby.  The books on the tables on this sunny day in March are chirping to customers as sweetly as the early arriving songbirds overhead.

It’ll be beach time before you know it. Not too early to have some good lit on board for your first trip to the shore.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum

New Orleans is the most enigmatic of American cities, a city in which a stew of culture and cronyism, music and mayhem, racism and revelry, politics and populism, hang out on the city's laundry line for all to see.

The city and its residents are not malleable - but they are durable. Every strata of the population seems to possess a fierce loyalty to 'their own.' After Katrina, author Dan Baum was overcome by the stories of New Orleans residents of every level.

By the time he'd interviewed and drank beers with these people, Baum knew a series of stories in the New Yorker wouldn't be enough. He needed to write a book. Whether New Orleans can revive itself is an open question. By the time you finish this book, you'll care if it succeeds.

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans -
The Hidden History of a Beloved and Haunted City Told Through The Intersecting Lives Of Nine Remarkable Characters

by Dan Baum

We all know that hurricanes can swallow up New Orleans. What we don’t know, unless we’ve been there, is that New Orleans can swallow up reporters. The New Yorker sent Dan Baum to New Orleans to write about the effect Katrina had upon its residents.

In the course of interviewing scores of people, Baum got into the crosshairs of a benign Crescent City voodoo. He and his wife moved to New Orleans for several months in 2007 to complete interviewing, researching and breathing the air of the city as it began to put its lipstick back on and look for the next party.

Contradictions in New Orleans are as thick as shrimp in gumbo. Baum began to grasp how on earth New Orleanians can accept a culture in which corruption and bureaucracies filled with incompetents are the order of the day.

In the preface to Nine Lives, Death and Life in New Orleans, Baum writes,” Stop thinking about New Orleans as the worst-organized city in the United States and start thinking of it as the best-organized city in the Caribbean.”

While he doesn’t downplay the poverty, lethal crime, drugs, police brutality, he begins to see another face of the city, an attitude that is steeped in but transcends the food, architecture, and music. It’s a story of everyday people who ended up in extraordinary circumstances after Katrina - people including a millionaire Mardi Gras kingpin from the white Garden District, a retired streetcar repairman from the Ninth Ward, a transsexual from St. Claude Avenue, a trumpet playing coroner, a white policeman from Lakeview, a high school band leader who treats the kids as if they were his own, and a bad luck black ex-con from the Goose, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

They willingly, perhaps gratefully, sat with Baum while he collected bits and pieces of their lives that became part of the book.  As Baum found out, New Orleanians are not linear storytellers. The result is a kaleidoscopic tale, told through the eyes of nine characters, that covers the fifty years from hurricane Betsy to Hurricane Katrina. It takes an effort to keep all the characters straight, but over time they satisfyingly drifted into sharper focus.

It’s a tribute to Baum that he found enough specks of universal humanity in each of their stories to make us care about each of them and root for them to reconnect with their lives in the months after Katrina annihilated what they called home.

The nine main characters identified friends, relatives, and associates whom Baum and his wife interviewed for relevant background. They conducted nearly one hundred interviews and amassed over one million words that they boiled down to the final 120,000-word text. A four-page appendix lists every character interviewed and the dates of interviews. The book is massively authentic.

If you keep turning the barrel of a kaleidoscope long enough, similar patterns emerge. The thread that ties together all of the characters, regardless of race, social class, gender is that they all felt a connection, by blood, friendship, or profession, to “their people” - they didn’t always agree with them but they stood by them through thick and thin.

I spent two weeks in New Orleans and southwest Louisiana last August writing publicity material for an October “Help Re-Build New Orleans” Fund Raiser that was hosted in Boston.  Proceeds of the event were donated to Common Ground Relief, a non-profit group that organized volunteers to rebuild houses in the Lower Ninth Ward.

“The house we’re sitting in was covered in 18 feet of water for 3 weeks. Every single-story house around here was under water,” Thom Pepper, the Operations Director of Common Ground Relief said in his "office," a cramped storage room in a rebuilt house on Deslonde Street. You could count on one hand the original houses still standing on that street.

Looking two hundred yards behind Common Ground Relief’s headquarters, I saw where the barge pierced the levee in the Industrial canal, the gobbled up houses filled with vines and festooned with disgorged refrigerators and dinner plates, and blank slabs of concrete where houses had gone AWOL - floated away or obliterated by the surge from the breach. Eighty percent of the Ninth was under at least 6 feet of water. For months.

The divides in the city, cultural, racial, and geographic, are real. There are wards of the city in which I would have felt like an intruder. But I know that inside those neighborhoods were people like the people I "met" in Nine Lives, people whose stories are the fabric of this city.

Baum’s book is not a polemic or prescriptive. It is a close to the ground story of people who make the city what it is, a city acutely aware of its shortcomings and its past and one that prefers to live in the moment.

Photos

1. (Top) Screen saver in Common Ground Relief office on Deslonde Street, Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, in August, 2008

2 and 3: by Paul Tamburello, Deslonde Street 2008, Lower Ninth Ward,  New Orleans

Friends fabulous book sale

Westport (MA) Friends Meeting House Book Sale
July 8, 2006
Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

It was a few minutes before 11 a.m. but to book lovers it was the ”high noon” of the bargain book season. As the seconds ticked toward the top of the hour, hundreds of bookslingers stood in the sun, eyeing thousands of hardcover and paperback books stacked on tables under two huge yellow and white tents set up in front of the Friends Meeting House on Main Road. At precisely 11 a.m., a whistle sounded and the crowd surged forward with measured determination, intent on carving several more notches on their book lists. The annual Book Sale at the Friends Meeting House was underway.

Armed with canvas bags and cardboard boxes, it seemed, as one participant said. “like a swarm of locusts had descended on the place.” It was not a good day to be claustrophobic. Shoulder to shoulder, fanny to fanny, they milled through the narrow spaces between book-laden tables with surprising patience. If the shopper beside you picked a book you had your eye on, another good choice would likely appear within arm’s reach.

Shopping styles varied. The confident zeroed in, grabbed a book and kept on trucking. The tentative lifted one out of the rows of neatly stacked books and held it indecisively, making a mental roll of the dice to decide whether to drop or drag.

Some consumers filled cartons, slipped outside the tent to deposit them under a tree, grabbed another carton, and dove back into one of the tents.

“Did you read this one?” Advice and recommendations, unsolicited or requested, flew about between readers in their twenties and those old enough to qualify as their grandparents. As the first hour’s frenzy calmed, scores of purchasers sat in the grass, sorting their treasures and eating taboulie and hot dogs or rewarding themselves with the home made brownies and peanut butter cookies on sale in the refreshment area.

“We’ll do 80%of our business this weekend,” Dartmouth Meeting member Kevin Lee said, as he cheerfully waded through the crowd distributing what he hawked as “designer bags”, which looked an awful lot like plastic and paper shopping bags, to people with armloads of books. By the time the dust settled after the two-week sale, he estimated five to six thousand people would haul away about 20,000 books.

The book sale has become the Westport Friends’ major fund-raiser. “It helps fund our various ministries for the homeless, peace missions, soup kitchens violence prevention programs and other initiatives of the American Friends Service Committees,” Mr. Lee, who has eighteen years of experience with the event, said.

“We’ve built shelves in one of the buildings behind the meeting house. Books are dropped off all year round and volunteers sort them twice a week all through the winter,” Mr. Lee explained.

Occasionally a book is like a box of crackerjacks and includes a surprise tucked inside the pages. “We’ve found five dollar bills, pressed flowers, recipes from grandma as we’ve sorted. We just leave them in the books,” Mr. Lee said.

Over the next two weeks, the mountain of books will diminish in size and remain under one of the tents. Browsers will amble in. If they purchase, they’ll find the price written inside the book and drop their money inside a coffee can. “Some books get recirculated so often year after year that we started marking the prices in pencil,” Mr. Lee said.

And some books get reread several times. “That’s the advantage of old age, you end up reading books you read long ago, forgot what they were about, and enjoy reading them all over again,” one veteran shopper was overheard saying to a fellow book lover.

With sentiments like this, it’s clear that the Friends Meeting House annual book sale will never run out of customers or titles.

Book categories of hardcover and paperback books
History, Science Fiction, Mystery, Novels. Literature, Religion, Philosophy, Sociology, Art, Photography, Gardening, Hobbies, Crafts Music, Boating, Cooking, Travel, Foreign Languages, Sports, Biography, Coffee Table Books, Children’s Books

Moon Tide: A Novel

Moon Tide: A Novel
Dawn Clifton Tripp
Hardcover (304 pgs) and paperback available
ISBN 0375508449

Reading “Moon Tide”, complete with themes of longing, loss, class distinction, and survival, is like reading James Joyce except with better punctuation.A brooding, dark intensity seeps out of every page.

The novel’s imagery is a collision of symbolism and realism veined with fantasy. After the first forty pages I found myself adopting a reading style to accommodate the intense, fierce metaphors and descriptions of places, people, and emotional states. Once I stopped trying to grasp the book literally, I went along for a Nantucket sleigh ride over the cresting rollers of Tripp’s imagery. If your disposition harbors any shred of melancholy or lingering regret about any of your life choices, the author’s autumnal characterizations will have a tendency reignite those memories like dry tinder. A sense of crushing predestination and the influence of social and natural hierarchy is woven through the novel with a sense of relentless determinism.

Set in rural Westport, MA in the 25-year span between 1913 and the great hurricane of 1938, the book follows the lives of three women whose lives are inextricably tied together by blood and circumstance. The author researched the small town, listened to the stories of old timers, and plumbed her considerable cache of knowledge of geology, the sea, botany, and medicine to give the story its sense of place and time.

If you’re up to reading an evocative historical narrative written by an author who is deeply attuned to the natural surroundings and the characters of her adopted home town, “Moon Tide” is a good choice. Be sure to have a trashy beach novel to read as soon as you’re finished to re-establish equilibrium in your reading life.