New Next Week: Curious Cats by Mitsuaki Iwago

Internationally known nature photographer Mitsuaki Iwago casts his lens on the common cat with surprising results. Curious Cats (Chronicle Books) is like a love letter to family pets everywhere from someone whose usual oeuvre is somewhat more exotic.

In a way, it seems as though Iwago has photographed these common household kitties like wild animals. We see them comfortable in their own elements: with their offspring, mothers carrying babies, youngsters playing with abandon and rubbing heads lovingly. Hunting, sleeping, jumping. It’s a tiny book and not particularly thick. But the photos are sweet, charming and well-chosen.

“Because as I always say,” writes Iwago in an introduction, “when cats are happy, people are happy, and the world is happy.”

A lovely little book. Cat lovers will be unable to leaf through Curious Cats without a smile.

New This Week: The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves by Andrew Potter

No matter what you make of Andrew Potter’s path to bring us back to reality, it’s an interesting journey. A philosophical one, in many ways. On a par with the paths of thought taken by the (thus far) better known Alain de Botton, who is, after all, one of our best known contemporary philosophers. Though he holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto, that isn’t what Potter calls himself, but that does not change facts. Read his work and you’ll see: this is an artful, gymnastic mind and he takes on some of our biggest contemporary foibles in a book that manages to be both sweeping and intricate at the same time. From the introduction to The Authenticity Hoax (Harper/McClelland & Stewart):

The quasi-biblical jargon of authenticity, with its language of separation and distance, of lost unity, wholeness, and harmony, is so much a part of our moral shorthand that we don't always notice that we've slipped into what is essentially a religious way of thinking....the search for the authentic is positioned as the most pressing quest of our age.... My central claim in this book is that authenticity is none of these things. Instead, I argue that the whole authenticity project that has occupied us moderns for the past two hundred and fifty years os a hoax. It has never delivered on its promise and it never will.

The author argues that the quest for authenticity in our lives is nothing more than yet another form of status seeking: ecotourism, performance art, the cults of Oprah and Obama and more.

Potter weaves elements of history, philosophy and pop culture together in a book that will leave an impression even if it doesn’t necessarily show us the path. Is Andrew Potter one of the great thinkers of our age? He may well be: this is great stuff.

Art & Culture: Hieroglyph Detective by Nigel Strudwick

Picture this: you wake up deep inside a pyramid with only a single clue as to how you got there: there are hieroglyphs plainly visible on the wall but -- alas! -- you have no way to read them. What an Earth do you do?

Well, if you’re lucky and had a bit of foresight before heading out on your locked-in-pyramid adventure, you will have packed a copy of Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick’s handy field guide Hieroglyph Detective: How to Decode the Sacred Language of the Ancient Egyptians (Chronicle Books). With an extra bit of luck, you’ll have had time to study it on the plane during your journey. Or the barge, as the case may be.

And yes, of course: while most of us are quite unlikely to find ourselves awakening in a tomb, there is still a place in the world for this innovative and expertly creative little book. From the introduction:

The aim of this book is to provide a practical, easy-to-follow guide to Egyptian hieroglyphics, giving readers sufficient grounding in the pictorial script to enable them to decipher for themselves some of the many inscriptions they will encounter while pursuing their interest in this fascinating civilization.

One of the things I found really interesting about Hieroglyph Detective is the way it made me think about written language. At a time when many people are in a panic about the state of the book, it is informative to read about one of the most ancient forms of written communication and realize that, as up-in-the-air as things might seem right now, the literacy our culture enjoys has likely never been higher. That is to say that looking at the long-ago can help put things in perspective:

Literacy was restricted to a learned elite, which would have included the king and his officials, particularly scribes. It is thought that as little as one percent of the ancient Egyptian population was literate.

Hieroglyph Detective is a fascinating and informative book. Those with an interest in Egyptology and language will be entranced.

Art & Culture: Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy: Curiouser and Curiouser edited by William Irwin and Richard Brian Davis

“...We don’t just want to know how deep the rabbit-hole goes .... We also want to know how to make sense of what we discover when we suddenly land ‘thump! thump!’ in Wonderland and pass through the looking glass.”

These words from the introduction to Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy (John Wiley & Sons) seem to me to sum the central force of the book as neatly as anything ever could. If we are to see the philosophy behind Lewis Carroll’s classic, that’s a terrific place to start.

Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy is the latest in a series edited by King’s College philosophy professor Irwin that uses contemporary pop culture to frame philosophical concepts. He’s done it through the looking glass of Seinfeld, The Simpsons, The Matrix and others. Upcoming titles will do the same with 30 Rock and Mad Men to name just two.

While I love the idea of popularizing philosophy for the masses, as it were, I’m not completely convinced that there really is any deeper underlying meaning in all things Alice to probe or that the answers to life’s ultimate questions lie buried in the unseen meaning behind a hookah-smoking blue caterpillars.

What saves the book from pure exploitive stupidity, however, is an engaging and ingenious approach. The book is essentially an anthology with some of the biggest thinkers in modern philosophy contributing their big thoughts. All sorts of professors and lecturers musing on Alice as feminist icon or Alice’s lack of social contract. It may sometimes be silly, but it’s never boring and it makes you consider. It makes you think. Which, when you ponder it, is what philosophy is meant to do.

Art & Culture: The Shores We Call Home: the Art of Carol Evans

Those who enjoy the watercolorist’s art or who admire the rugged coastline of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest will enjoy The Shores We Call Home (Harbour Publishing). Carol Evans is a master watercolorist based on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia’s Gulf Island chain. Beautifully reproduced in The Shores We Call Home, Evans’ work is luminous, surprising: this is the work of an artist is clear control of her materials and confident about the subjects she chooses.

Since shores are the thing that connect the 80 or so watercolors included in the book, we see a lot of light dancing off water under many circumstances and in a lot of different places. Evans knows what that looks like and, more important in this case, she knows exactly how to convey it in both paint and words:

Water hangs in great silken sheets of fog across mountains and inlets. It ripples and reflects along the shore. The wet, delicate, and raw subtleties of watercolour washes are ideal for conveying the gradation of light within clouds or a summer haze, perfect for suggesting shapes and forms barely visible in shrouded mist or streaking rain.... It has a wild quality and although the water can be somewhat controlled, it cannot quite be tamed.

Art & Culture: How to Defeat Your Own Clone by Kyle Kurpinski and Terry D. Johnson

One of the things I like best about being January Magazine’s art and culture editor is keeping my ear to the ground for emerging trends. For example, in the late 1990s, we were seeing a lot of books that sounded as though the authors had written them with their hands on their hips (if such a feat were physically possible). A decade on and we are seeing a new but somewhat similar trend: books that sound as though the authors had written them with their tongues firmly wedged in their cheeks.

While the difference between those things might seem subtle, it’s actually not really. Hands on hips books were laughing at themselves and the world at large while the tongue in cheek ones are a flight of fancy told in a way that makes them sound plausible, or even likely. Except that they’re not.

A good example of that is How to Defeat Your Own Clone (Bantam) by Kyle Kurpinski and Terry D. Johnson, a book based on the premise that you will require special skills to survive the biotech revolution. Except it’s funny. Only it’s kind of not.

Written by a couple of actual and for-real bioengineers, How to Defeat Your Own Clone is fascinating reading. Even when they play it for laughs, a message is being brought home. Here is what your future may look like, they seem to be saying at times and though the tone is often playful, they manage to pack a wallop of a message into this very slender paperback volume. As Kurpinski has said, “While many books have already been published on cloning and genetic manipulation, half seem to be textbooks and the other half are science fiction novels. The problem is that the former are generally unwieldy or boring for the average reader, while the latter have little or no scientific value or basis.”

How to Defeat Your Own Clone fills that gap handily, adding just enough silly to make us stop and think.

Art & Culture: How to Speak Zombie by Steve Mockus

If you’ve been wondering when -- or even if -- you’d hear the final word on zombies, you’ll be relieved to get a load of How to Speak Zombie (Chronicle Books), the book that calls itself “A Guide for the Living.” Here’s some of what the book says about itself:

In a world overtaken by zombies, the only hope for survival lies in learning the language of the undead. How to Speak Zombie demonstrates how to blend in and avoid being eaten while carrying on with everyday activities like ordering a latte from a zombarista and shopping at a zombie-infested mall.

Although, in a way, this doesn’t even come close to describing this strange little book. Just 12 pages long -- think about a child’s boardbook -- each of the chunky pages is cut around the shape of the electronic sound module that sticks up through the book, ready to demonstrate “proper zombie pronunciation.”

You’ll find instruction for what to say at the mall, at the gym, at sporting events and other places where zombies might congregate in the post-zombie apocalypse imagined in the book.

While the book is somewhat clever and the graphic novel-style illustrations -- by Travis Millard -- are great, it’s difficult to imagine just who this book is intended for. Beyond the book’s potential as a gift for the zombie-lover in your life, I can’t imagine anyone having a burning need to run out and grab a copy. But then, what the hell do I know? I’m still trying to figure why The Da Vinci Code blew so many minds and, anyway, I suppose it is possible zombies will take over the world at some point. Better to be safe than sorry.

Non-Fiction: The Locavore Way: Discover and Enjoy the Pleasures of Locally Grown Food by Amy Cotler

So many people are talking about green issues these days, alternative lifestyles have gotten to be mainstream. Long gone are the days when a hostess could plunk a steak down in front of dinner guests without first asking about food preferences and considering the social and moral implications of such an act. In the West, we are critically concerned with the consequences of our actions and while, in broad strokes, that’s a good thing, on a micro level, it can get a little cloying. And you’ve encountered those books. Self-righteous finger-pointers waggling correctively at us while we choke on the meat fiber that would otherwise have been enjoyed.

Amy Cotler’s The Locavore Way (Storey Publishing) isn’t that book. Quite the opposite, in fact. Cotler brings the uninitiated joyously into the fold, while taking those already moving towards a slower food lifestyle more deeply into a world she is comfortable with: both to travel in and to share. She explains herself and her mission succinctly, then shows us how to get to where she’d like us to go: to a place where fresh food is simply cooked and joyously shared. She makes this sound like an attainable place. She makes it sound like Nirvana:

Imagine a healthy landscape, dotted with small farms raising food without ravaging the land, water and air, promoting better-nourished communities and local economies, and creating less dependence of the fossil fuels needed to transport food from afar.

As idyllic as she makes it sound, in subsequent pages she demonstrates that this is more than a distant vision. For many people, it’s a growing reality. With stories, profiles, recipes and tips, Cotler engages us with possibilities and ideas.

Here, from a slender book filled with great real-world examples of how to bring local and organic into your life, a list that breaks things down to its most essential components (something this author does very well):

Why Bother?
10 Reasons to Eat Locally Produced Food:

1. For the sheer pleasure of it.
2. To connect.
3. For the health and safety of your family and yourself.
4. For the health of our planet.
5. To boost the local economy, community and region.
6. For an open, working landscape.
7. To maintain biodiversity.
8. To support our neighboring farms and farmers.
9. To prepare our culinary heritage.
10. To give us a just choice.

Art & Culture: Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books edited by Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Patrick Clare

Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books (Nimbus Publishing) is like a blueprint for what provinces, states, regions and even countries should be doing for their literature. In straightforward fashion and in easily accessible language, it rounds up the 100 greatest books of Canada’s huge and literarily formidable Atlantic region. Full stop. Then it bundles them all together under a bright, shiny cover, giving a couple of pages and a full color representation to each of the chosen 100 along with a breezy write-up and -- voila! -- a literary map for anyone who would like to hit all of the regional highlights.

Editors Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Patrick Clare asked local readers and reviewers for their selections and, in the end, compiled the list based on this input as well as their own considerable expertise. From the introduction:

We relied on invaluable input from hundreds of people, but ultimately, we take sole responsibility (or blame) for these rankings. You won’t agree with all our decisions. That is fine. In fact, that is ideal -- good books should spark debate and discussion, they should raise questions and challenge preconceptions.

As though to deliver on this promise of discussion-sparking choices, Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief takes the number one position. While MacLeod’s 1999 debut novel truly is a wonderful book, putting it in the number one spot would have taken some courage. There is, after all, a rich literary heritage to mine from the Atlantic provinces. To prove the point, the top ten of Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books almost looks like a list of Canada’s greatest books, depending, of course, on where you stand and how your tastes run. It’s certainly a great reading list for anyone:

1. No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
2. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
3. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston
4. The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler
5. Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
6. Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan
7. Random Passage by Bernice Morgan
8. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood by Alistair MacLeod
9. Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards
10. Rockbound by Frank Parker Day

Best of 2009: Art & Culture

Adrift on the Ark by Margaret Thompson (Brindle & Glass) 203 pages
There is something sweet and unassuming in Adrift on the Ark. And the book itself is physically small. These two things -- the sweetness, the size -- work together to mask the power of the topic at hand and, ultimately, of Thompson’s little book. In lush yet charming prose, Thompson examines pets and peacocks, swans and bats, and there’s even a chapter called “Pigs Might Fly” (though they actually do not). These are deeply personal essays that examine, as the subtitle suggests, our connection to the natural world. They look at our relationship with the animals in our lives and what we provide each other. In her introduction, though, Thompson corrects this. “In my mind,” teacher and birdwatcher Thompson tells us sternly, “this is a bestiary for a confused modern world.” -- Monica Stark

The Artist’s Mother, introduction by Judith Thurman (Overlook) 160 pages
Like exhibitions loosely grouped around a theme, books with a themed core seem to come in one of two categories. They’re either lame excuses to connect that which probably shouldn’t have been connected in the first place, or wonderful triumphs that have us looking at the topic in a new way. In almost every regard, The Artist’s Mother falls into the latter camp. “Maternal love takes many forms,” author and journalist Judith Thurman writes in her introduction, “not all of them benign, but one of the most essential is to provide an experience of attunement.” We don’t experience that attunement in all of the work collected here, but one does get a glimmer of what Thurman means as well, in some cases, the connections some painters maintain with where they’ve been as well as how they’re getting where they’re going. The book opens on a fantastic portrait of Albrecht Dürer’s mother, Barbara. Painted when the artist was just 19, it is a masterwork that clearly lays the groundwork for the genius still being developed. For a later glimpse of that genius, a charcoal sketch of Dürer’s mother done just months before her death captures the woman as she was, not idealized as was dictated by the fashions of the time. Both works are remarkable, but it’s terrific to see them almost side-by-side. Delivered chronologically, the book ends on Andy Warhol’s 1974 portrait of his mother, Julia Warhola. In between is a history of art in maternal form: John Constable, Rossetti, Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, and that most famous mother-painter of all, James Abbott MacNeill Whistler whose “Portrait in Gray and Black” has come to be known as “Whistler’s Mother.” The Artist’s Mother is a wonderful short course in art history as well a terrific tribute to one of humankind’s most lasting bonds. -- Aaron Blanton

The Bedside Book of Beasts by Graeme Gibson (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Canada) 368 pages
Author Graeme Gibson follows up 2005’s magnificent The Bedside Book of Birds with a less gentle offering. The Bedside Book of Beasts collects some of the very best writing -- ever! -- on the relationship between predators and prey. “They are central to us,” Gibson writes in his introduction, “and to our understanding of our place in nature, because the primal fact of hunting and/or being hunted, and the inescapable demands of hunger, have largely defined animal life on earth, and are undoubtedly one of the key energies driving evolution.” That’s the theme, in the words of the author. The reality is somewhat more beautiful. The work of around 100 artists is represented here, from people as diverse as Franz Kafka and Marian Engel, both Pablo Picasso and Pablo Neruda, Barry Lopez, Leo Tolstoy. William Blake and Wayne Grady. Slender threads of writing -- fables, stories, sacred texts, essays, travel writing -- wind their way around carefully selected artwork. The resulting book is a work of art in itself, capturing the very soul of the topic Gibson has chosen to editorially muse upon. -- Sienna Powers

The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants by Wolfgang Stuppy, Robb Kesseler and Madeline Harley (Firefly Books) 144 pages
This new coffee table book compiles the very best of three books published in a slightly larger and more spectacular format over the last few years. All three were named to the January Magazine best of the year lists in their respective years. And why? In their class, they are as good as it gets. The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants is slightly more compact in format than the three that went before, but it is no less spectacular. What has contributed to this series’ stellar nature is a combination of dream-team authorship and world class design and production. A seed morphologist at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Wolfgang Stuppy brings straight up solid plant knowledge and the books have all benefited from being filled with rock solid information not readily available from other sources. Artist and art professor Rob Kesseler is responsible for the stunning microscopic photography that really sets the book apart. And so each book -- and this book -- are dynamic tours through a fantastic alien world punctuated by incredible explanation and information. The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants will dress up a coffee table, start a conversation or fill a young heart and mind. -- Linda L. Richards

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley (Vintage) 304 pages
Shockingly lucid, surprisingly good, unexpectedly funny, The Book of Dead Philosophers meets its initial mandate, then passes it by a country mile. I liked it a lot. I find it difficult to imagine anyone with even a passing interest in philosophy who would not enjoy it. Author Simon Critchley looks chronologically at those who dedicated their lives to thinking about intellectual matters of life and death and how they themselves exited the material world. “Very simply stated,” writes the author, “this is a book about how philosophers have died and what we can learn from philosophy about death and dying.” But it’s more than that, too. Critchley points out that we, as a society, are almost ridiculously frightened of death. And what can we do about that? Critchley has the answer: philosophy. The author brings together short profiles of close to 200 philosophers, a little about how they lived and -- more importantly in the context of this book -- how they died. We encounter all that life has to offer: wit and wisdom, tragedy and comedy. There are bizarre ends and others that are pathetically unexceptional. In short, he gives us the tools we need to begin to “learn to have death in your mouth, in the words you speak, the food you eat and the drink that you imbibe.” It’s a remarkable book. -- David Middleton

The Dark Hunters, Vol. 1 by Sherrilyn Kenyon (St. Martin’s Griffin) 208 pages
Everywhere you turn, it seems, there’s another vampire: waiting for teenage love or some other quasi sympathetic situation brought on by a lot of romance regarding princes of darkness. However Sherrilyn Kenyon has risen to the top of the paranormal wave by writing books about vampire killers. In this first volume of her Dark-Hunter manga, Kenyon has worked with Joshua Hale Fialkov (Afro Samurai) and Claudia Campos (Tokyopop) to reimagine the Dark Hunter world as a manga. It really works. Campos’ illustrations are vivid and fierce and, thankfully, the story Kenyon and Hale Fialkov have worked out manages to keep pace. Amanda Devereaux has been mistaken for her sister, the vampire slayer, and is being stalked by the most dangerous vampire that didn’t ever live. And while Amanda’s life is in danger, so is humanity more or less as we know it. Tense stuff beautifully handled, the manga approach here seems fresh, original and exceedingly well done. I enjoyed every bite. -- Lincoln Cho

Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim (St. Martin’s Griffin) 288 pages
Elissa Stein and Susan Kim’s marvelous Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation is a tour de force of sub-cultural revelation. So forceful, in fact, that it brings what has long been a part of the dark subculture of shame into the fully-lit culture of womanhood. Menstruation, long misunderstood, long maligned, long cringe-inducing, is finally given its due in this wonderful illustrated book that’s perfect for everyone, whether they have monthly periods or not. (In other words, folks, it’s not just for girls.) Read it and you’ll be entertained, shocked, surprised, and (best of all) educated. Flow is the real deal, a book brave enough to tackle a topic that most people probably think isn't worth tackling. The thing is, now that it's been wrestled to the ground, it's a vital resource, to be referred to again and again. It’s impossible to imagine not having it. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Inklings by Jeffrey Koterba (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 272 pages
The debut work of writer, musician and political cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba tells the author’s own story with the aid of strong graphic elements, yet without the maudlin self-pity often associated with works of that genesis. In his bio, Koterba tells us that “during the summer of 1978 [I] was struck by lightning and lived to tell about it.” He makes it sound like an advantage -- a thing to have survived and gained strength from, rather than a horrid obstacle which had to be overcome. That pretty much describes all of Inklings. Koterba’s inky stylings are bright, as is the spirit that drives them. Inklings is an almost rabidly optimistic look at a difficult childhood and coming-of-age from the hands of a fiendishly talented artist. If Inklings is just the beginning, I can hardly wait to see what is yet to come. -- Lincoln Cho

Life As We Show It: Writing on Film edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn (City Lights) 290 pages
Author and filmmaker Brian Pera and critic and fictionist Masha Tupitsyn together help rekindle the wonder and magic of the movies in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film. This is a vibrant collection that uses all of the mediums available to it to tell its vigorous tale. The contributors here pull out all the literary stops: poetry, fiction, essay: you name it. At the heart of things, though, there is a philosophical question at play here. “Thus, the genre of assemblage and insertion, fictions about fictions, fiction from fictions, or more specifically, fictions affixed and inserted into already existing fictions ... might be an interesting and useful way to describe what the writers in this collection are doing.” And though, admittedly, all of this sounds a little too much like someone is trying to wean himself from his leather elbow patches, it’s also -- with all of the extra bits washed away -- exactly what this collection is about. Not necessarily film itself, but film at its essential and highest self. Is Life As We Show It sometimes almost laughably self-indulgent and youthfully self-conscious? Well, yes. But, in the spirit of such things, it also pushes the envelope about what we’re thinking now. With a lot of syllables. But still. A thoughtful exploration on the art and the influence of film. -- David Middleton

The Maxims of Manhood: 100 Rules Every Real Man Must Live By by Jeff Wilser (Adams Media) 224 pages
Sit down with The Maxims of Manhood: 100 Rules Every Real Man Must Live By and you’ll realize it’s more than just about being a real man, it’s about being a real good, decent human -- from a man’s perspective of course. It has nothing to do with eating or not eating that egg pie-casserole-flan thing that was so popular to hate in the 1980s and then okay to eat in the 90s -- who can keep up with that kind of crap? It’s about being clean, polite, loyal and able. It goes over everything from how to treat your fellow guy (maxim 78: Cockblock and die) to how to treat your fellow woman (maxim 87: Being considerate doesn’t make you a wimp) and nearly everything that might fall in between. That doesn’t mean that this book is all froofy and fey and polite . There is still funny-ass stuff like maxim 2: You only recognize primary colors, maxim 94: Your dog must be larger than a toaster or 46: Spend more on beer than haircuts. In fact most of this book, when not being just plain practical about nearly everything having to do with owning a penis, is funny. Pick up a copy and be a better man. -- David Middleton

Planet Ape by Desmond Morris with Steve Parker (Firefly Books) 288 pages
If you wanted to commission the penultimate book on apes, the name Desmond Morris would come up. Many books and paintings and years ago, zoologist, ethnologist, artist and brilliant thinker Morris wrote The Naked Ape. It was 1967 and it shocked the world by writing about man in the same way one would write about animals. It was a ground-breaking work, an international bestseller and it led to a 1973 film of the same title as well as wide-spread reconsideration of the way we think about humans and animals and the little that can separate them. In the meantime, Morris has written about many things, including dogs, horses, cats, babies and other things. Many of those books have been bestselling. But none could compare with that first all-important bestseller and more than 40 years later, and with Morris now into his 80s, he’s come back to some of the ground he covered in The Naked Ape, with Planet Ape. This time out, though, it’s the hairy apes that have focus: the naked ones get the (justifiable) blame. This is a fantastic book. One can not imagine a better one on this topic. A portion of the profits generated by Planet Ape are earmarked for charities who are working to conserve the apes Morris and co-author Parker deliver to us so vividly. -- Linda L. Richards

Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Douglas & McIntyre) 120 pages
Even if it were not so skillful, Red: A Haida Manga would be special just for being first. Set in the islands off the coast of Northern British Columbia, Red is a full color graphic novel that references classic Haida narrative. Red is stunning and in its way quite perfect. The traditional Haida-style images have been twisted by Yahgulanaas’ skilled and considered interpretations. This is Japanese-style Manga, yes. But one doesn’t need to be an expert in West Coast indigenous people to see Yahgulanaas’ inspiration and even -- perhaps? -- instruction. His colors are brilliant -- sometimes even lurid -- his lines bold and true and his storytelling instincts without flaw. I loved Red: A Haida Manga for everything it is and is not. It’s a wonderful blend of old and new, all in support of a captivating story. -- David Middleton

The Red Book by Carl Jung (W.W. Norton) 416 pages
What does it say about our culture and economy when one of the hits of the year is a nearly 100 year old book on psychology published for the first time in an almost $200 volume? There are so many possible messages to be gleaned there, Carl Jung himself might well have had a party with it. The Red Book is one aspect of the work Jung called his confrontation with the unconscious, a journey with self he took between 1914 and 1930. The Red Book as presented by Norton is spectacular and provides some deeply interesting reading. Before you even begin to read though, The Red Book is almost startlingly beautiful: an art book on a par with any published this year. But read the book -- especially in a certain frame of mind -- and doors open. This is how modern psychology was created. More: the book exhibits the energy and power that was Jung’s genius. Jung’s archetypes, his work on the collective unconscious and the process of individuation: you see the ideas unfold here almost in fetal form. The Red Book is a rare and important work. It’s exciting that everyone can now share in it. -- David Middleton

Slang: The People’s Poetry by Michael Adams (Oxford University Press) 256 pages
Michael Adams is that guy. He teaches English language and literature at the university level. He is the editor of a magazine that focuses very tightly on speech. He is the author of a book on the slang of the now defunct hit television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, you’ve got it right: Adams is a word geek. So, clearly, if he writes a book called Slang: The People’s Poetry, it’s not going to be the expected compendium of slang that anyone else might do. Especially if said book is published by Oxford University Press. So take those hints, and construct them into the book you would imagine Slang might be and you’re almost there. First of all, there is no aspect of compendium to Slang. In some regards, it is an erudite love letter to a verbal form. With footnotes. And joy. Those things might sound separate -- footnotes, that is, and joy -- but Adams pulls it off. Sometimes Adams is playful, sometimes he is verbose (“Whereas the impletive interposing with meaningful infix is a marginal variety of a marginal feature even of slang, let alone English at large, nonpletive infixings and interposings may be trendy.”), sometimes he is insightful (“Saying the wrong thing or saying the right thing in the wrong way, just generally lacking in social finesse, can mean social isolation.”) but there is never a moment when you think he got it wrong. Slang will not make you laugh from end to end, but I’m quite sure that was not Adams’ intent. This is an intelligent book, executed with passion. Slang offers important comment and documentation on an aspect of our culture that is very often overlooked. -- Sienna Powers

Holiday Gift Guide: A Guide to Fantasy Literature by Philip Martin

Author, editor and folklorist Philip Martin knows his fantasy literature. The newly published A Guide to Fantasy Literature (Crickhollow Books) is a reworking of The Writers Guide to Fantasy Literature, first published back in 2002. This new work reorients Martin’s take, opening it up to a broader audience of writers and readers. It was a good idea and it works.

In addition to talking about specific authors and works, Martin addresses the genre in new and interesting ways:

By and large, this field of literature is a lot of new wine in old bottles. Fantasy is a form of traditional culture. Like all vibrant, living traditions, it allows a tolerable amount of experimentation, adaptation, and acceptance of new forms over time.

Though in some ways, Martin’s work is a scholarly one, he never seems to lose sight of his readership, bringing interesting, learned and accessible thoughts on all aspects of fantasy fiction, from the history, through patterns, places, characters and so on. A Guide to Fantasy Literature is a very good book. Anyone with a strong interest in fantasy literature will come away from Martin’s guide knowing more than what they arrived with.

Holiday Gift Guide: Planet Ape by Desmond Morris with Steve Parker

If you wanted to commission the penultimate book on apes, the name Desmond Morris would come up. Many books and paintings and years ago, zoologist, ethnologist, artist and brilliant thinker wrote The Naked Ape. It was 1967 and it shocked the world by writing about man in the same way one would write about animals. It was a ground-breaking work, an international bestseller and it led to a 1973 film of the same title as well as wide-spread reconsideration of the way we think about humans and animals and the little that can separate them.

In the time between, Morris has written about many things, including dogs, horses, cats, babies and other things. Many of those books have been bestselling. But none could compare with that first all-important bestseller and more than 40 years later, and with Morris now into his 80s, he’s come back to some of the ground he covered in The Naked Ape, with Planet Ape (Firefly Books). This time out, though, it’s the hairy apes that have focus: the naked ones get the (justifiable) blame.

This is a fantastic book. One can not imagine a better one on this topic. It is gorgeous enough to sit on a coffee table, yet informative enough for the reference section of a library. Wonderful photos illustrate page upon page of facts and thoughts and ideas. And in the true tradition of a book by Morris, you not only learn about the subject at hand, you are also pushed to think independently about what all these facts might mean. The information is shared in a thoughtful, intelligent way and, without even realizing it, we end up learning as much about ourselves as we do about the apes Morris obviously has a very real affection for.

A portion of the profits generated by Planet Ape are earmarked for charities who are working to conserve the apes Morris and co-author Parker deliver to us so vividly. Once you’ve experienced Planet Ape, you’ll understand just how important that is.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Indie Rock Coloring Book by Yellow Bird Project

This is not so much a review as a mention: a great project for a great cause that makes a great gift!

The Yellow Bird Project is a Montreal-based non-profit organization who have, since 2006, worked with a number of indie rock acts to create T-shirt designs that, in the end, benefit a wide range of charities.

The Indie Rock Coloring Book takes it to the next level, offering up 28 coloring and activity pages by created for the project by UK-based artist, Andy J. Miller. Each page represents an indie icon, including Rilo Kiley, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene and a bunch more.

A quibble (seems like I can’t not do something reviewish each time out): like the T-shirts, it would have been nice to have seen at least some of these illustrations created by the indie artists themselves. Some of them are multi-talented and would have been up to the task. It’s a small quibble, though: Miller’s illustrations are mostly bright and innovative and would be lots of fun to color.

A foreword, hand-lettered by Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder sets the tone and the intent: “This wonderful coloring book,” writes de Reeder, “is yours to enjoy and be inspired by, and is a great example of how you can turn your love for music and art into something that can really help.”

The Yellow Bird Project Web site is here.

Holiday Gift Guide: Precious Metal: Decibel Presents 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces edited by Albert Mudrian

Understand going in that this is a book for the already converted. If you -- or the person you’re trying so hard to find the perfect gift for -- is not already deeply infected by heavy metal music, then Precious Metal (Da Capo) is not for you. Or them. But if they are... if they are this is seriously the best gift a metalhead could get.

And why? These are the untold stories. Okay: that’s not strictly true. These are the selectly told stories, originally told in Decibel Magazine -- the voice of extreme music. The 25 tales collected in Precious Metal are the best of the best of Decibel’s Hall of Fame pieces. As a result, they’re pretty great. If you’re unfamiliar with Decibel’s Hall of Fame and how it works, in the words of editor Albert Mudrian, it goes like this:

Take a classic extreme metal record (as determined by our staff) released at least five years ago, track down and interview every band member who played on it, and present them questions exclusively about the writing, recording, touring and overall impact of said album.

The result is, well... obvious, right? There’s a reason Decibel is simply the best in its field. It pushes itself beyond the readily apparent, beyond the everyday and comes up with stuff like this.

So who did Mudrian determine should be included in this round up of best of the best? Well, as I said, there are 25, so I’ll just hit some of the albums that I feel are the highlights: Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, Morbid Tales by Celtic Frost, Napalm Death’s Scum, Paradise Lost’s Gothic, Eyehategod’s Take As Needed. It’s an incredible list and since it combines not only some of metal’s top stories, but also some of the top writing about metal around, it’s just an incredible win-win.

Precious Metal is an absolute must for the metalhead on your list.

Holiday Gift Guide: Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts

When we think of space travel, people of my generation think of the Apollo missions. Starting in 1969, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, we reached beyond our own planet to look deeper into the world beyond home. This book comes at that idea from a new vantage point, that of the astronauts themselves. In essays and stunning photographs, Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts (Abrams), lets us experience those missions from the inside, getting to know what Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Alan Bean, and the other astronauts were thinking and doing at that time in our common history. Each has chosen a favorite photograph, as well, one that crystalizes their own experience.

Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts is an eye-popping book that brings tangible glory to a time that seems almost quaint and ancient now. The grandeur of those missions, the seat-of-your-pants wishful thinking they embodied, and the venturing into truly unknown territory all make NASA’s troubles of recent years seem almost -- but only almost -- beside the point.

Holiday Gift Guide: Daylight Noir by Catherine Corman

Raymond Chandler at least lived in Los Angeles during the time he wrote his seven Philip Marlowe detective novels (beginning with 1939’s The Big Sleep), and knew well the landmarks that fueled the fiction he wrote. But for most of us, either the setting or the time period, or both, is foreign. We can do no better than to imagine the surf-slapped piers and lushly landscaped estates and fleabag hotels in which he set his action.

While there’s certainly delight to be found in making up images of those locations for ourselves, it’s also interesting to see some of the actual places Chandler had in mind as he sent Marlowe out to question suspects, bitch-slap cops with sarcasm, and fend off bruisers intent on making his body a masterpiece in black and blue. Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver took on this very task when they published Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles (1987), a photographic tour of Southern California’s largest burg, with excerpts from Chandler’s novels. And now Catherine Corman, the daughter of filmmaker Roger Corman and the editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (2007), offers her own take on that subject in Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City, published by Charta.

Photographer Corman has assembled here more than 50 black-and-white studies of everything from Lido Pier to the iconic Hollywood sign, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank’s Grill, from Union Station to the old Bullocks Wilshire department store (those last two being credited to architects John and Donald Parkinson). Some of the sites in Corman’s collection were identified in Chandler’s work; others were lightly fictionalized. Many of these shots are fascinating, even without considering their association with one of America’s foremost detective novelists. But the Chandler excerpts Corman employs bring another creative dimension to her Daylight Noir spreads. I only wish she’d identified which books they come from. My other quibble: There’s at least one instance here (see pages 56-57 and 88-89) where parts of the same building -- Santa Monica City Hall (another Parkinson creation) -- are used twice. Surely, Corman could have substituted a different landmark and quotation in one of those cases.

Writer Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City, Motherless Brooklyn) supplies a short but pithy preface to Daylight Noir that sets the haunting scene for these images. However, it’s a quote from English novelist J.B. Priestley, contained in Corman’s own introduction, that reveals the most about Chandler’s P.I. and his world:

Despite the pervasive solitude and moral wasteland at the heart of Los Angeles, Chandler does find meaning in it. As James said, he loved the city for its pathos. There is a kind of desolate candor, a tragic sense of honor, in the insistence on perpetuating a façade long after everyone knows it lacks substance. This is what Marlowe’s enemies, the ruthless city fathers and low-life gangsters, are ultimately doing. Eventually, like Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Marlowe discovers the truth but loses the impulse to expose it. He falls in line with illusion.

This may be a volume of real-life photography, but it’s illusion -- the unpredictable artistry of imagination -- as much as substance that is at the heart of it all.

Holiday Gift Guide: Merry Christmas, Even If You Don’t Buy This Book

Let’s be honest: there is not enough book here to even begin to write a review. Merry Christmas, Even If You Don’t Buy This Book (Sterling) is a small and sweetly snarky book of seasonal postcards. I’m writing about it for two reasons: both important. Reason one: It’s clever. It says what a lot of people are thinking in a way that can be cheerfully shared with friends. Reason two: In a year where we are, more than ever, encouraging people to buy books during the holiday season, this is one you can buy easily and share with a lot of people.

Viewed from one angle, though, Merry Christmas, Even If You Don’t Buy This Book isn’t even really a book. It’s a collection of 45 postcards -- bound together as a book, hence the ISBN and book-like form. And I don’t know for certain that each card is based on classic Christmas clip-art, but it certainly looks that way to me.

And then the sweetly snarky part. The image is Santa Claus sitting at a piano and laughing so hard it looks as though he might fall down. The caption: There’s nothing like holiday cheer to offset devastating seasonal affective disorder.

Another: Santa is speaking while popping out of (or into?) a chimney. “I hope your Christmas display doesn’t incinerate your home and loved ones.”

Or a couple, sitting next to a Christmas tree, speaking to the child at their feet: “I want a menorah for Christmas.”

There are a lot more, obviously. Forty-two more, to be precise. It seems likely that most everyone will find at least a handful to inflict on their friends. A fun, arms akimbo way to meet holiday 2009.

Art & Culture: Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim

It was bound to happen sooner than later. Someone just had to write FLOW: The Cultural Story of Menstruation (St. Martin’s Griffin). I only wonder why no one did it sooner. But I'm glad it was written on my watch.

FLOW isn’t just a book; it's a movement. It’s sparking debate all over the Internet, from the editors at Redbook, who unceremoniously and unfairly dismissed it (is Redbook still a magazine for women?) to those at The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, who celebrated it. Then there are all those people in the blogosphere and the Facebookosphere who seem unable to stop singing its praises.

And here’s the thing: FLOW deserves it. It’s not a breakout book (yet), but it sure is a breakthrough. It’s stimulating sometimes heated conversation about a subject that was, until now, taboo. And that’s the point the book’s authors, Elissa Stein and Susan Kim, are making. Menstruation isn’t something to be ashamed of or decried; it’s something to be explained, understood, and celebrated.

Written in a hip, funny voice (and designed with an accessible yet edgy sensibility), FLOW tells it like it is -- or rather, like it’s been for too many years. For example, did you know Lysol was marketed as a douche for 40 years as a way to kill post-sex sperm and make the vagina smell nicer? Did you know the age for a girl’s first period has dropped over the last 200 years from 17 to 13? Did you know that the first pad was marketed in 1896? And did you know -- here comes the hate mail -- that there’s really no such thing as PMS? (Don’t blame me: Research proves that hormone levels do not change during periods.)

But that’s just scratching the surface. As it turns out, periods are woven throughout our culture. To see it, you’ve just got to look a little harder. FLOW looks at language, history, politics, sex, religion, marketing, scent, and more. And sprinkled in among all the cultural, corporate, and personal stories are full-color reproductions of the advertising used to sell feminine products over the last half century or so. In each, you’ll find images and language that perpetuated what we all thought about periods (if you thought anything at all). From From Dr. Scott’s Electric Corsets to The Hite Report, from Tampax to New Freedom, from Kotex to Carrie, it seems Stein and Kim have left nothing out. Frankly, if reading the whole book isn’t your thing, just study the illustrations; their images and words will give you a sense of what’s been going on.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been telling friends about FLOW, to gauge thier reactions. Some have been fascinated, some repulsed (shame on them!). But no one’s been unwilling to admit there’s a story here that deserves to be told. They don’t know what it is, but they sense, every one of them, that there is one. Even better, more than a few (women and men) told me they’d be buying it for their daughters; after all, they said, the girls are going to learn about periods eventually, so they may as well get the whole story. They should learn about it, understand it, and yes, be proud of it. Go with the flow, indeed.

Art & Culture: Public Art in Vancouver: Angels Among Lions by John Steil and Aileen Stalker

Every city needs a book like Public Art in Vancouver (TouchWood Editions) a kind of walking tour through the public art -- all the public art -- in the city of Vancouver, Canada.

“The character of a city is revealed by its public art,” the authors point out in their introduction, “what it collectively places on its streets and walls and in its public spaces.”

Most of the book, however, is given over to that art in well-organized sections that begin with a map that indicates each artwork under discussion in that section. Each piece of art is given one third to one quarter of a page that includes a small but clear photograph, the name of the piece, the year it was installed and a little about how it came to be where it is. And so you have, for instance, the iconic Girl in A Wetsuit from Stanley Park. We’re told it was installed in 1972 and that there was initially talk “of recreating the Little Mermaid from Copenhagen’s Harbour, but luckily, a West Coast image was used instead. Many people refer to her as a mermaid, but she is a scuba diver with flippers.”

This is a fantastic, well conceived and executed book. I hope TouchWood is planning on adding other cities and making it a series.

Art & Culture: My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice by Erin Moure

“Writing is always and forever a social practice. The varying discourses in a society either shore it up or challenge it. And discourse isn’t something we walk away from when we set down our pen.”

My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice (NeWest Press) is like an intellectual dance through Erin Moure’s three decade (thus far) career as a writer and translator. It’s not always an easy dance. “The framework,” she writes at one point, “can we avoid it? Can we speak outside a framework? A guide or friend? A restraint on vision? Can we ignore it? Can we say ‘pure sound’? ‘I am a woman is full of consequences’ … for we are part of a representational system, a system of behavioural laws, of social conditions that have privileged the (male) gaze.”

Not well known even in her native Canada, Moure is, however, deeply respected and very well published. Her thoughts on the writing life are complicated and even -- sometimes -- a little angry but it’s an interesting journey through a well-lived creative life.

New Today: Inklings by Jeffrey Koterba

The debut work of writer, musician and political cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba is published today. Inklings (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) tells the author’s own story with the aid of strong graphic elements, without the maudlin self-pity often associated with works of that genesis.

In his bio, Koterba tells us that “during the summer of 1978 [I] was struck by lightning and lived to tell about it.” He makes it sound like an advantage -- a thing to have survived and gained strength from, rather than a horrid obstacle which had to be overcome.

That pretty much describes all of Inklings. Koterba’s inky stylings are luminous, yes. But so is the spirit that drives them. Inklings is an almost rabidly optimistic look at a difficult childhood and coming-of-age from the hands of a fiendishly talented artist.

If Inklings is just the beginning, I can hardly wait to see what is yet to come.

Cookbooks: The Foodie Handbook by Pim Techamuanvivit

The very first paragraph of The Foodie Handbook (Chronicle Books) describes the journey on which you’re about to embark:

Relationships that matter most in our lives are often complicated. Think of the one with your mother or your current love, and perhaps the most perplexing, food. These liaisons can be fraught with love, hate, joy, fear, trust, suspicion, and a whole lot of other emotions. Sometimes it is nearly enough to make us wish we were orphans, turn us celibate or, worse yet, vegan.

Many foodies have met Techamuanvivit through her food blog, Chez Pim, where the Silicon Valley dropout brings foodie stuff to many thousands of visitors every week. The Foodie Handbook is better. And why? Because it is the physical embodiment of Techamuanvivit’s passionate, knowledgeable spirit. Foodie lore, recipes, advice from Techamuanvivit and other, more famous, chefs: it’s all here, just as on Chez Pim. But the book stuffs the blog into the shade. You can hold the book in your hands, flip through it, bury yourself in it and learn. And enjoy. The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy is what the book is subtitled. And it’s that -- sure it is. But, oh, so much more.

New Today: The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

This is a brand new and greatly improved edition of a modern classic: the National Book Award-winning The Great War and Modern Memory (Sterling). Originally published in 1975, it was named one of the most important non-fiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library. In his preface, author Paul Fussell explains his book succinctly:

This book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 and some of the literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized and mythologized. It is also about the literary dimensions of the trench experience itself.

The new Sterling edition is greatly enhanced. Photographs, illustrations, maps and other ephemera from the period illuminate what was already a good and celebrated work. This new edition takes on a very good work and makes it better and, ultimately, more useful.

Art & Culture: Best Music Writing 2009 edited by Greil Marcus

2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the Best Music Writing anthologies edited by music journalist and scholar Daphne Carr and published by Da Capo. As befits an anniversary edition, this anthology is stunning with contributions from some of the very top names in music writing, and letters, as well.

As guest editor Greil Marcus points out, Best Music Writing 2009 is not meant to be an almanac:

It is not a record of the best or worst or most important what-happened-in-music of 2008, the year from which all of the pieces here were drawn …. I distrust the notion that something has to happen in any given year that in the future we will look back upon as a portent of something or as an example of something else.

What we have, instead is, quite simply, the best. The most passionate, the most deeply felt, the most well-crafted and stated and sharply rendered. Over 30 pieces reflect all aspects of the music business and all types of music. You’ll recognize some of their names. Jonathan Lethem. Aidin Vaziri. Carrie Brownstein. David Remnick. Stanley Booth.

If you appreciate reading about music, you’ll enjoy Best Music Writing 2009. It does not get better than this.

Zombie Success Story Tops One Million

The usually elegant Three Rivers Press is quick to point out that their “2003 sleeper hit,” The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks, was at the vanguard of the current zombie movement. From a Three Rivers Press release:

The Zombie Survival Guide has spurred countless other books on zombies, along with its own line of products such as The Zombie Survival Guide Journal that gives people a chance to record their to-do lists and survival strategies, and The Zombie Survival Guide Flashcard Deck, created to provide private citizens with an emergency crash course in basic zombie survival techniques.

The Zombie Survival Guide has sold over 1,000,000 copies and sent author Brooks back to Zombie land for a couple of novels. Brooks has said his inspiration for The Zombie Survival Guide was the Y2K scare. “I wrote The Zombie Survival Guide for me,” says Brooks, “stuck it in a drawer for a while, and never imagined it would be published, let alone be this successful. I think its longevity is due largely to its realistic tone. Take out the zombies and it is still a general disaster survival guide.”

Art & Culture: Page Fright by Harry Bruce

Readers are more interested in process than product we’re told be author Harry Bruce in his vastly entertaining new work, Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers (Douglas Gibson Books). Says Bruce:

But process, which is what this book is all about, includes not only tools but the rooms in which writers work; the number of hours, in each day or night, that they imprison themselves in those rooms; and the number of words, in each day or night, that they’ve sworn to write…. Indeed, process is everything that creative writers do to make themselves as receptive as they possibly can to what so many of them see as dictation from a forever-unknowable source.

Bruce’s strong interest in the process of making books has led to him collecting the anecdotes that contribute to Page Fright throughout his 50 year career as an author and journalist. Burce tells us that Susan Sontag wrote in longhand on yellow legal pads as do Nelson DeMille, Jim Harrison, Beverly Cleary, Toni Morrison and Wendell Barry.

Yellow legal pads had not been invented when Alexandre Dumas did his writing, but the poet and author still used yellow, though only for his poetry. Dumas wrote his non-fiction on rose-colored paper and his novels on blue. And as silly as that sounds from this distance, it probably made it easier to find what you were looking for in his office.

“Nabokov and Saul Bellow liked to soak themselves in bathtubs,” writes Bruce. (Though probably not at the same time.) Nor were they the only water babies in this crowd. Bruce includes a quote from Diane Ackerman, who does it up right:

I have a pine plank that I lay across the sides of the tub so that I can stay in a bubble bath for hours and write. In the bath, water displaces much of your weight and you feel light. When the water temperature and the body temperature converge, my mind lifts free and travels by itself.

Since Ackerman is best known as the author of 1990’s A Natural History of the Senses, all of this sort of makes sense.

Page Fright is fantastic. Writers and would-be authors will find inspiration here. And anyone who loves books will find facts worth collecting and smiles that can’t be resisted. It’s a great book.

New Today: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violini

“Sometimes the world’s magic leaks out,” Juanita Rose Violini writes in her introduction to Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible and the Ignored (Weiser Books). “Mystery does that; it can never be truly contained. Jagged cracks occasionally split the carefully laid constructs of our safe and predictable lives, and the unexplained tumbles forth into our awareness.”
If this is not something that you know for certain, it is something that you’ve always suspected: that the thing you look at isn’t always what you see.

That is the subtext -- always -- of Violini’s wonderful book, a work that is also an almanac in the proper sense of the word. Mysterious crystal skulls of unknown origin. Green children with inexplicable pasts. Phantom hitchhikers grabbing rides on the backs of passing motorcycles. Flakes of flesh that fall from the sky.

With skill, panache and a real sleuth's quest for the unknowable detail, in Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible and the Ignored, Violini delivers a world most of us can't even begin to imagine. This is something quite beyond strange occurrences. Rather, Violini brings us a whole year’s worth of unexplained mysteries with which to confuse our staid little hearts: a new one, each and every day.

Be afraid! This one could change your life.

Art & Culture: How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll by Elijah Wald

It’s important to know going in that How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (Oxford University Press), doesn’t really have much to do with the Beatles at all. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that it has everything and nothing to do with them.

What the book really does is take on everything we think we know about popular music because, as author Elijah Wald tells us, “the past keeps looking different as the present changes.”

In many ways, Wald looks at music from a new and surprising place: the various spots where it is seen and felt. From those who make it and those who, individually, groove to it. This passage explains the title -- and in some ways the book itself -- most succinctly:

If you are not aware of the Beatles, you cannot hope to understand any music of the 1960s, because they are ubiquitous and affected all the other music. Even if some musicians remained free of their influence, those musicians were still heard by an audience that was acutely conscious of the Beatles. They were the dominant, inescapable sound of the era.

And though you might disagree with those words -- or, at least, some of them -- the fact that they are worth arguing is... well... inarguable.

Wald is a musician and writer who has authored six previous books on music including Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues and Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll is highly readable. Wald adds something new to a field most of us thought had been over planted. The book is lucid, innovative and richly worthwhile.

Art & Culture: Slang: The People’s Poetry by Michael Adams

Michael Adams is that guy. He teaches English language and literature at the university level. He is the editor of a magazine that focuses very tightly on speech. He is the author of a book on the slang of the now defunct hit television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, you’ve got it right: Adams is a word geek. So, clearly, if he writes a book called Slang: The People’s Poetry, it’s not going to be the expected compendium of slang that everyone else might do. Especially if said book is published by Oxford University Press.

So take those hints, and construct them into the book you might imagine Slang might be and you’re almost be there. First of all, there is no aspect of compendium to Slang. In some regards, it is an erudite love letter to a verbal form. With footnotes. And joy. Those things might sound separate -- footnotes, that is, and joy -- but Adams pulls it off. Early in the book, the author writes:

We enjoy slang (those of us who do enjoy it) just for its casual, vivid, racy, irreverent, and playful elements, and some combination of those elements is what alerts the ear to lexical trouble: slang rebels against the standard (whether mildly, wildly, or somewhere in between), and each synonym it supplies must add some social meaning to the standard alternative’s lexical meaning.

For me, this paragraph sums up, not only the content of Slang, but the context. Sometimes Adams is playful, sometimes he is verbose (“Whereas the impletive interposing with meaningful infix is a marginal variety of a marginal feature even of slang, let alone English at large, nonpletive infixings and interposings may be trendy.”), sometimes he is insightful (“Saying the wrong thing or saying the right thing in the wrong way, just generally lacking in social finesse, can mean social isolation.”) but there is never a moment when you think he got it wrong.

Slang will not make you laugh from end to end, but I’m quite sure that was not Adams’ intent. This is an intelligent book, executed with passion. Slang offers important comment and documentation on an aspect of our culture that is very often overlooked.

New This Week: The Masonic Myth and Occult America

During this time of economic turmoil, next week Da Vinci Code author, Dan Brown, is expected to pull a J.K. Rowling by single-handedly hauling the publishing industry out of the toilet. And, speaking of toilets, even though lots of reviewers will inevitably heap scorn on Brown’s latest offering, The Lost Symbol (Doubleday), a lot of bookstores are hoping history will repeat itself and that sometimes lazy book buyers will come thundering into their stores ready to buy the newest Brown... and perhaps something else.

It is this “something else” hope that fuels the onslaught of related and kinda-related books every time a new entry by a megaselling author hits the market. Obviously, The Lost Symbol, with its five million (five million!) hardcover first edition printing and massive promotional push will be no exception. A lot of more-or-less-removed-by-one type books are hitting the market even now. For this particular release, the top of these is The Masonic Myth (HarperOne), by inside man Jay Kinney. It’s important to note that Kinney didn’t conceive of The Masonic Myth as an also-ran. As Mokoto Rich pointed out in The New York Times a few days ago, Harper purchased the book two years ago and held it for publication this week, when interest in all things Masonic will reach an all-time high: if everything goes according to plan, that is. It’s kind of a shame, really, because The Masonic Myth ends up coming off looking like one of those cheesy books thrown together to take advantage of a fad and, really, nothing could be further from the truth.

Former Gnosis editor-in-chief Kinney knows his esoteric traditions. In The Masonic Myth he does a great job of sharing a whole lot of never-before-seen inside stuff in an easily understood way. There is a lightness to Kinney’s writing here, despite a topic that seems often to move towards the dark. He keeps things in perspective, even while he helps us do the same.

“Secretive brotherhoods can be excellent devices in suspense thrillers,” Kinney writes near the beginning of The Masonic Myth, “but novels are, by their very nature, fiction …. They say that truth is stranger than fiction. Let’s see if that’s true.”

Along the same lines but with a broader reach and more solid appeal (and -- perhaps not so mysteriously -- the same release date) is Occult America (Bantam) by Tarcher/Penguin editor-in-chief Mitch Horowitz.

As the title implies, Horowitz’ book looks at how the occult has impacted the development of the United States. (Hint: More than a little.) In fact, the book is subtitled The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation.

“Mysteries can be found wherever you look,” Horowitz tells us early on, “especially when you’re not sure what you’re looking for.” There is much in Occult America that is more grounded, less esoteric, but what could be more filled with poetic truth?

Occult America is fantastic: interesting, entertaining, enlightening, sometimes even moving. It’s Horowitz’ first book. I’m guessing it won’t be his last.

Art & Culture: Canada by Shelagh Rogers & Mike Grandmaison

Canada (Key Porter) takes my breath away. This is the book so many others have tried to make without this kind of success. A book that includes all of a vast and beautiful country and attempts to showcase it in a way that will have meaning for those who live in the country and those who admire it from afar.

Canada is a gorgeous book. Mike Grandmaison’s photos are -- without exception -- breathtaking as well as brilliantly reproduced. It’s so sad when the reproduction of a book is not as good as the material being printed. That is not the case here: Canada is a first class production from end to end. CBC personality Shelagh Rogers does justice to Grandmaison’s work:

I am having an affair with Canada. Every place I visit intoxicates in its own way. I form relationships with these places, even if they are not long term. They follow the usual pattern: a casual, if cautious, approach. Then a date for further exploration. Next, I get physical: climb its mountains, walk its paths, swim in its waters, depending on the geography, and at nigh, drink in its bars …. When I fall, I fall hard…until the next place comes along.

A coffee table book in format, for a gift, for sharing with your own family, or just to fill your senses with serene beauty, Canada is spectacular.

Art & Culture: Going Green edited by Laura Pritchett

Laura Pritchett’s bio tells us that, when she isn’t writing, “she’s Dumpster-diving to save what other people throw away.” So right away you know that Going Green: Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers and Dumpster Divers (University of Oklahoma Press) is not going to be an Eco Chic view of environmentalism.

In the preface, Pritchett explains the concept:

Gleaning junk from a beach leads to a discussion of the enormous amount of plastic waste in our oceans. Picking up a pair of pants from a gutter leads to a discussion of this country’s cotton industry. Finding a dead animal from the side of the road to eat leads to, well, raised eyebrows and a chuckle of admiration. Here are essays that not only explore the reusing but explore our culture at large.

I have no trouble admitting that my own ideas about environmentalism are probably closer to Eco Chic than Pritchett’s gleaning and I can’t imagine the set of circumstances that would have me diving into a Dumpster. Still, Pritchett’s collection manages to be thought-provoking. It’s yet another view of the green movement and the 24 voices here often seem raw and even primal: something remembered from wilder times (The 1970s, maybe?) when the world was less ordered and change wasn’t an option, it was a matter of course.

In the wonderful “Bin Diver” Christopher Buckley sums it all up:

Correct or incorrect as that might be, we have nonetheless, it seems clear, at least a responsibility to ourselves if not to those who follow us -- if not some perhaps spiritual obligation -- to recycle what little we can, to avoid wasting even the least bit given to us, in wealth or in relative poverty, to be resourceful stewards of the planet.