Almanac of Story Tellers: Mary Roach

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, in podcasts, and in books. 

Today is a story of March 15th

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    It is the 78th day of the year, leaving 287 days remaining in 2023.

 

  On this date in 1959, the science writer Mary Roach was born in Elna, N.H.

    She writes her stories about oddball topics in science, with surprising humor, diligent research and revealing interviews, and finding an inventive umbrella for a variety of topics about space, animals, or the human body.

    For instance, her first book, Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers, tells tales about how scientists use dead bodies to study live bodies. It includes stories about cadavers being used as crash-test dummies, the history of the study of medicine and its use of dead bodies, and how they are disposed of. She tells about grave-robbing, decomposition, and the ethics of it all.

    She later turned to the study of live people who have been uniquely but severely during times of war, or during the practice for war. Grunt: The Curious Science of Life at War, tells how doctors and other researchers find ways to heal some of the most hideous of injuries, or improve lives for those who haves lost specific body parts or functions. 

    Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void explores how people train to be astronauts or to fly into space.

    After graduating from Connecticut's Wesleyan University, Roach worked as a freelance copy editor in San Francisco. She fell into science writing while working as a publicist for the San Francisco Zoo. 

    Her early articles appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday magazine, and she later would write for magazines across the country, including at The New York Times, GQ, Vogue, Discover, and Sports Illustrated for Women.

    She lives and writes in California. Her latest book, published in 2021, is Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Laws.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Ben Okri

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, in podcasts, and in books. 

Today is a story of March 15th

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    It is the 74th day of the year, leaving 291 days remaining in 2023.

    On this date in 1959, the Nigerian-British poet and novelist Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria.

    He tells his stories with a realism and surrealism that transcend political and spiritual boundaries. But while they show Africans in harmony with the spiritual world, they also depict the social and political strain of the modern African country as it changes with the world.

    Although his poetry, novels, and short stories have been categorized as magical realism, Okri has rejected this term, saying it is used because critics do not understand his heritage or Africans' perceptions of reality.

I grew up in a tradition where there are simply more dimensions to reality: legends and myths and ancestors and spirits and death. ... I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history.

    He published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows, in 1980, followed by The Landscapes Within the following year. Both used surrealism to depict how society changed in an African country as the modern world brought corruption and politics.

     During the 1980s, Okri published several short story collections about the ties between the physical and spiritual world, and was the poetry editor of West Africa magazine.

    In 1991, he won the Booker Prize for The Famished Road. Part of a trilogy with Songs of Enchantment and Infinite Riches, Okri again tied together the spiritual and physical worlds, this time using a spiritual child narrator living in an unnamed African country, thought to be his native Nigeria.

    The novel has inspired musical numbers, plays and movies, and was read and quoted by President Clinton before and during his 1998 trip to Africa.

    Okri has published dozens of novels, short story collections, and works of poetry, and his books have won several international awards. He has been awarded the Order of the British Empire.

    He continues to live and write in London.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Wanda Gág

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, in podcasts, and in books. 

Today is a story of March 11th

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    It is the 70th day of the year, leaving 295 days remaining in 2023.

    On this date in 1893, the artist and author Wanda Gág was born in New Ulm, Minn.

 

    She told her stories in words and drawings. She wrote and illustrated books, especially for children. She drew pictures that were beautiful, dynamic, and simple. 

    Her art has been shown around the country, including in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

    With all her talent and creativity, she is perhaps best know for a children's book, Millions of Cats, which she wrote and illustrated. Published in 1928, it remains the oldest such book still in print, and remains a part of the childhood canon.

    In the book, Gág pioneered the double-page spread, engaging readers by continuing the story over two full pages of a drawing and text. It is now a common style in children's literature.

    She was a two-time recipient of both the Newberry Honor and the Caldicott Honor. The University of Minnesota presents the Wanda Gág Read Aloud Book Award each year. Her childhood home has been restored into a museum and interpretive center for her work.

    Gág died in 1946.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Andrea Levy

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, in podcasts, and in books. 

Today is a story of March 7th

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    It is the 66th day of the year, leaving 299 days remaining in 2023.

   

    On this date in 1956, the British author Andrea Levy was born in London.

    She told her stories about living the British-Jamaican experience, using the voices of Black Caribbean women and families living in London during the middle of the 20th Century, and Black soldiers with ancestors from the Caribbean colonies returning home to England after fighting in World War II. She told about the racism they encountered, the pain of emigration, and their trying to survive in a sometimes hostile country.

    But she also told the stories of the native British who interacted with the newcomers, as she sought to understand how imperialism affected lives on both parts of the colonial divide.

    In her early 20s, Levy was working as a costume designer, when, attending a diversity conference, she was asked to designate herself as Black or white. She thought of this as a rude awakening, and when she began to read on the subject, found few books by Black women with her background. She decided to write her own stories.

    Her first novel, published in 1994, Every Light in the House Burnin', is semi-autobiographical tale about a Jamaican family living in 1960s London. Her next book, Never Far From Nowhere, is about two sisters from Jamaica growing in public housing in London in the 1970s. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize, a major literary award in the United Kingdom.

    Levy's most recognized novel in 2004's Small Island, which uses four voices to tell the story of post-war emigration from the Caribbean to Britain. Hortense and Gilbert are a Black couple who move from Jamaica to London in 1948, and Queenie and Bernard become their landlords after renting a house to them.

    That book won the Orange Prize, along with two other major awards, The Whitbread Book of the Year, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

    Her last novel, The Long Song, returns to the 19th Century to tell the stories of the last days of slavery in the Caribbean through the voice of an elderly Black woman who experienced a life of slavery before a brief bout of freedom.

    Levy died in 2019.

Book Review: The Thin Man

 

• By Dashiell Hammett

• Pub Date: 1933

• Where I bought this book: Conveyor Belt Books, Covington, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I found this new bookstore, and felt I had to buy something.

****

    Too many characters for such a short book (201 pages) make this old dime-store novel confusing and difficult to follow. Yes, I know Hammett is considered one of the best of the hard-core crime novelists of his time, but it seems this particular gumshoe tale long ago passed its prime.

    While its writing is plain, straight-forward, and linear for the most part, it is jumbled by introducing some characters almost as an aside, using different descriptions or identifications for some, and having others float in and out of the story at random.

    The by-now cliches of the genre can be annoying, but are understood as part of the era when it was written.

    This is a detective story that uses lots of dialogue, and it isn't always clear who is talking, or whom they are referring to. Following along is confusing, and I found myself repeatedly asking, "Who now?" 

    At one point near the end, two colleagues meet, and their tone and relationship seem to have changed so much that I turned back pages to see what I'd missed. I'm still not sure what happened.

    But Hammett's descriptions of 1930s New York, and its cops and gangsters and dames and detectives is arresting. The style is compelling, and it is easy to get immersed in the tale, even if you sometimes feel lost in the twists and turns.

Almanac of Story Tellers: Tom Wolfe

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, in podcasts, and in books. 

Today is a story of March 2nd

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    It is the 61st day of the year, leaving 304 days remaining in 2023.

   

    On this date in 1930, the author Tom Wolfe was born.

    He told his stories in fiction and non-fiction, and sometimes a combination of both. He was a proponent of New Journalism, who sought to involve himself into his non-fiction. He chronicled the hippies, yippies and Merry Pranksters in the 1960s in books with titles such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, then turned himself into a serious novelist to critique the emergence of yuppie culture in the 1980s.

    He was a newspaperman and magazine writer, and wrote about the first astronauts in The Right Stuff.

    After obtaining a doctorate in American studies from Yale, Wolfe wrote for newspapers. including The Washington Post and the old New York Herald Tribune. He also wrote for magazines such as Esquire, for which he penned an unusual feature article on the car culture of California. Written in the New Journalism style of using literary techniques in his writing, the story was a hit, and later became the focus -- and title -- of a collection of stories in his first book -- The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

    He wrote his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in the old style -- a take on Dickens and other early novelists who published their work in installments, on deadline, as they wrote each chapter. Wolfe's work -- about class, racism, and greed in New York City -- was first published in Rolling Stone starting in 1984. Wolfe then heavily re-wrote it, and published it as a novel in 1987.

    He wrote three additional novels on contemporary American culture, which received praise for their insight and criticism for their pretentiousness.

    Wolfe died in 2018.