In 1933, the quiet, scholarly history professor William E. Dodd accepted his first (and last) diplomatic post and became the United States Ambassador to Germany. His wife Mattie, son Bill, Jr. and daughter Martha accompanied him to Berlin. Dodd and his wife were ill-suited for the diplomatic lifestyle, leaving dinner parties early to go home so Dodd could have stewed peaches and a glass of milk and retire early. Dodd was essentially an academic, unaccustomed to social and political wranglings his new post retired, but as a student of history he saw the true danger that Hitler and his followers posed earlier than most of his colleagues, including his friend President Roosevelt. His daughter Martha, meanwhile, threw herself into the social life of Berlin, made many friends and even more lovers, including a high-ranking Nazi official and a Soviet spy.

It’s a fascinating story by a master of narrative nonfiction, but I found this book depressing and am relieved I finished it. It’s so hard to look at the actions of people in the early 1930s and not judge them too harshly with the wisdom of hindsight. I finished this book without much sympathy for any of the main characters. Martha was just awful. I rather liked her father for a while, but I lost all respect for him toward the end of the book when I read about his involvement in an automobile accident in his later years back in the United States.

It’s a great book and I’m glad I read it, but I’m also glad I borrowed the ebook from the library instead of buying it. I’m done with those people and never want to reread the book, discuss it in a book group, see the movie, or have anything more to do with them.

It’s about Comic-Con International, an annual event held in San Diego that celebrates comics, graphic novels, science fiction, fantasy, anime, mango, video games and popular culture “transmedia’ properties like Star Wars, Twilight, etc. How interested am I in this subject? A little more than magazine-article interested, but quite a bit less than whole-book interested, so this Kindle Single was perfect for me. There isn’t much history here, or social, cultural or literary analysis. It’s really like following author Douglas Wolk around the convention and having him reminisce a bit and point out things that interest him. Wolk is the author of the Eisner Award-winning “Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean” and he’s an amiable guide.

This book(?) is a good example of why I like the Kindle Singles. I love long, narrative nonfiction works by authors like Simon Winchester and Erik Larson, but there are some topics that suit me just fine as a single serving,

My Favorite Quotation About Dogs:

“Very, very early a dog learns that life is not as simple a matter to his master as it is to himself. There are times when he reads trouble, that he cannot help or understand, in the man’s eye and voice. Then he can only look his love and loyalty, wistfully, as if he felt his own shortcoming in the matter of speech. And if the trouble is so great that the master forgets to eat his dinner; forgets, also, the needs of his faithful little friend, it is the dog’s dear privilege to bear neglect and hunger without complaint.”

Greyfriars Bobby by Eleanor Atkinson, page 17

In July I spent a few days in Scotland traveling around some of the places where my mother’s parents once lived. I have memories and a collection of facts that I can fit together, but I want to know more, to have a better understanding of the family’s story.

While I was there I picked up a copy of the UK bestselling memoir Guard a Silver Sixpence to read on the train. Felicity Davis tells her own story of life in a complex, dysfunctional Yorkshire family, suffering abuse from her grandmother while her mother and grandfather seemed unwilling or unable to help. The book alternates chapters between Felicity’s life, and the story of her grandmother’s parents and grandparents, which were much more interesting to me, and explain to some extent how her grandmother became such a cruel, hard woman.

Felicity’s great great grandparents, John and Hannah Hinchcliffe, lived in Barnsley in Yorkshire, where John was a coal miner. In December, 1866, two underground explosions rocked the Oaks Colliery and killed 361 men and boys, including the two of the Hinchcliffe’s sons, Henry and Charles. This event was both an emotional and economic disaster for the Hinchcliffes and whole community. John and Hannah were left and six other children, a son and two daughters who were old enough to work and help support the family, and three little children, including six year old Emily and a younger brother and sister.

Little Emily, Felicity’s great grandmother, grew up in a respectable but poor family. She married William Swann, a glassblower with a drinking problem — glassblowing was apparently known as a thirsty trade. Emily and William both drank and had run-ins with the law, and the family sank into poverty and disgrace. At the age of 42, Emily and her lodger and apparent lover, John Gallagher were convicted of murdering William Swan after he had beaten Emily, and Emily and John were executed in a double hanging. Emily left behind eleven children, including four year old Elsie, who grew up to be Felicity’s grandmother.

Felicity Davis was fortunate, in a way, that her family grandmother’s family history revolves around these two well-documented incidents, a notorious mine disaster and a sensational murder case. In both cases, she quotes extensively from contemporaneous sources, with heartbreaking details that bring the story to life.

But what really interested me here is the social and economic history she shares. She doesn’t just tell us that the Hinchcliffes were miners and William Swann was a glassblower, she tells us what that meant at the time, both economically and socially, what the jobs were like, and how these occupations changed over time. Who was on their way up, and who was on their way down? How did families manage to make ends meet during hard times? Which young adults were able to marry and establish their own homes, and who needed to live at home, work, and help support their families? Many aspects of our lives are determined by the economic circumstances of the place and time where we’re born, come of age, and try to make a living and make a life for ourselves and our families. This is an area that I feel I have somewhat neglected in my own family history work, and this book made me want to learn more.

Links:

• Putting Pen to Paper — The author’s website
• Revealed: my family’s secret story of murder and misery — Article from the Yorkshire Post, June 23, 2011
• Heart-rending history lesson — Article from the Press, July 5, 2011

Some books work better for this than others. I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Ariely and all the Freakonomics-type books this way, but not fiction and narrative nonfiction like history, biographies and memoirs. Short stories, essays, and all those books of “fascinating facts” also work well on the phone. I don’t think this would be nearly as convenient if Amazon didn’t sync my collection among all my devices (the Kindle, desktop PC, netbook and phone) and keep track of my place.

But it’s not that I never read paper books anymore. I still borrow lots of library books, buy some books I know I want to own, and reread books from my home library. And while I bring the Kindle on business trips and find it very convenient for reading on the plane and in a hotel, I never bring it on vacations where I am going to be traveling around with a backpack, staying in random places where I feel it would be just one more thing to worry about keeping safe. For those trips, I bring one or two long but compact paperbacks, often old favorites that I want to reread. For example, when I went to Jamaica I brought my old Signet Classics copy of “Great Expectations,” bought for sixty cents when I was in high school. That’s a very cold, damp, wintery book which contrasted beautifully with the dazzling warmth and beauty of Jamaica in the spring.

Back when I bought that copy of “Great Expectations,” there were fewer reading options. Buy or borrow from the library, hardcover or paperback, that was about it. Now everything is much more complicated. Both paper books and ebooks can be bought or borrowed from the library, and ebooks can be read on any number of devices. It’s complicated, but as a reader, I appreciate having so many options.

Here’s my favorite holiday story, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, beautifully illustrated by Arthur Rackham and presented and preserved in several formats by the Internet Archive.

And if you’d rather listen to the book, I recommend the Librivox A Christmas Carol version 2, read by Glen Hallstrom, otherwise known as “Smokestack Jones.” You can download the files in many formats from the Librivox page for this audiobook, or download or listen online at its Internet Archive page. Librivox recordings are free audiobooks of public domain titles, read by volunteers.

A Christmas Carol, Illustrated by Arthur Rackham

Embedded from the Internet Archive

A Christmas Carol, Read by Glen Hallstrom

Embedded from the Internet Archive.

This is an old favorite of mine, but I haven’t read it in many years. I was almost afraid to read it again. I’ve been rereading a lot of favorite books lately, and many of them have been disappointing. The books simply aren’t as good as they used to be. Ribsy, however, seemed as sweet, fresh and funny as it was when I read it to my little brother over forty years ago.

Ribsy is a good-natured mutt who lives with his boy Henry Huggins. He certainly never intended to run away, but one rainy day he escapes from the parked car while his family is shopping to chase a little dog who has been barking at him, and finds himself lost and confused in the parking lot.

“Ribsy had a pretty good nose, but unfortunately he was no bloodhound. He had never tracked a lost child over mountains and through forests. He was just an ordinary city dog, trying to track his owner across an enormous parking lot that smelled of oil and exhaust.”

And so Ribsy’s adventures begin. He’s misses Henry and the familiar pattern of life at home, but he has no idea how to find his way home. He’s an optimistic and resourceful dog, and he makes some friends along the road. He doesn’t like the violet-scented bubble bath he receives from a group of rambunctious children in one home. He enjoys his time as the class mascot for a group of second-graders until the day someone brings their pet squirrel for show-and-tell. Lonely old Mrs. Frawley is kind, but Ribsy doesn’t really like wearing a coat, or posing for her friends wearing a straw hat and spectacles and clutching a corncob pipe between his teeth. When he disrupts the final play of the high school football game, he gets his photo in the newspaper, which ultimately helps Henry, who never gave up hope, to find him.

The wonderful thing about this book is the point of view, which is almost totally Ribsy’s. We see the world through the dog’s eyes…or more often, his nose. We understand how he thinks, what he wants and how he feels.

Although I still love this story, I couldn’t help but feel like the Huggins family are terribly irresponsible dog owners. They allow Ribsy to come and go as he pleases and roam freely through the neighborhood unleashed. In the opening chapter, they leave him alone outside when they go on their shopping expedition, and allow him to chase the car for several blocks through busy intersections, only stopping to let him in the car when Henry worries that he’s going to get run over. But when I was growing up, there were no leash laws and all of our dogs ran free. Lots of neighborhood dogs chased cars. And it was sad but not particularly unusual for dogs to run away and get lost, or to get hit by a car and be injured or killed.

I don’t think it’s fair to judge the Huggins family by today’s dog care standards, but I wonder how today’s kids, raised in a leash-law world, see this aspect of the book.

This slim volume from Arcadia’s Images of America series is a collection of old photographs, advertisements, articles, menus, matchbooks and other documents and memorabilia about The Worcester Lunch Car Company and some of the 651 diners they made during 55 years in business. Gutman, who is the author of American Diner Then and Now, interviewed some of the key personnel from the diner manufacturer before they died, and had access to the company archives preserved at the Worcester Historical Society, as well as his own collection of photographs from decades of road trips and research.

There’s an introduction and each chapter opens with a page of text, but the book is mostly a scrapbook of images, with meticulous descriptive captions to provide context. There are some fascinating photographs of diners under construction at the factory and diners being moved to their new locations, and there are pictures of diner people as well — factory employees, owners, cooks and customers.

My favorite page in the book shows one of artist John Baeder’s paintings of the late great Worcester diner, “Alice and the Hat.” I used to pass this all the time on the bus, and the name intrigued me. “Alice” I could certainly picture, but who or what was “the Hat”? The front of the diner shows the hat, one of those hats men are always wearing in old movies from the thirties and forties. Eventually I learned that Alice and the Hat were a couple — she ran the diner, and he was a sportswriter for the Worcester Telegram whose nickname was the Hat. I loved thinking about Alice and the Hat, and all the tales that must have been told in that diner! This book has an old photograph of the interior of Alice and the Hat, showing the Hat himself sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee and one of his newspaper pals. He doesn’t quite look the way I pictured him, which was as William Powell, but it’s still great to have this glimpse into the past. Sadly, the Alice and the Hat diner was bricked over and turned into a real estate office.

I am really enjoying this unique collection of diner images, and just wish I could see more!

Link

• Diners: Still Cookin’ in the 21st Century — “This exhibit celebrates a quintessentially American institution, the diner. From the diner’s origins in Providence, Rhode Island, as a horse-drawn lunch wagon, to the sprawling “retro” establishments of today, the “Blue Plate Special” remains the best deal in town. When Americans go out to eat, they still want home-cooked food, and that’s what’s on the menu in a diner.”

This is a slim volume of color photographs of classic diners, mostly in New York and New England, taken by German photographer Gerd Kittel. It’s a lovely book, in its way, and there are some interesting photographs here, including many interior shots, some including customers, waitstaff and cooks. Each photograph is only identified by name and place, and the book would have been much more useful to the diner-lover if it also included three other pieces of information: the diner’s manufacturer and and year of manufacture, and the year the photograph was taken. The book was originally published in 1990, and I bought the updated second edition from 1998, so all the photographs were taken at least nine years ago, but it would be helpful to know when.

I also really disliked the arrangement of the photographs. There may be some logic to it, but I can’t make out what it is. A book like this could be arranged geographically, chronologically by the age of the diner or the date of the photograph, or thematically to group exterior shots, interior shots, etc. This book just seems random. There are multiple pictures of some of the diners, including my local Salem Diner, but they are just scattered through the book, and there’s no index of any kind, when there really need to be at least two: one by diner name, and one by state.

I still really enjoyed looking through the photographs despite all of that, and Richard F. Snow’s introductory essay is interesting. I can’t help but think how much more exciting and valuable this book would have seemed to me ten or fifteen years ago. Today, however, while I enjoy looking through Kittel’s photographs, I’m aware of how many great diner photographs there on Flickr, free and searchable and mostly with more identifying photographs than are found in this book.

Overall, I’d have to say this is a nice little book and those interested in roadside culture will enjoy looking through it, but it’s not an essential purchase, or even a particularly valuable one.

This is a hefty book that’s over fifteen inches wide, and that weighs nearly six pounds, an inconvenient size for putting on a bookshelf, carrying around or reading in bed. But it’s a beauty, and the size is necessary to properly display the fascinating panoramic photographs taken by the Cirkut camera.

Although panoramic photographs existed before the Cirkut was introduced in 1905, this revolving camera with its “swinging lens and stationery film” was a great hit for Eastman Kodak, and caused what has been described as a “mania” in the 1910′s and 20′s for recording places, events and groups in panoramic format prints, often called yard-longs. The cameras were in commercial use through the mid-century, recording everything Presidential inaugurations, the aftermaths of natural disasters, parades, sporting events, workplace outings, conventions and other scenes of American life.

This book presents hundreds of these fascinating photographs. Here’s a list of some of my favorites:

• 1920 Bathing Girl Parade, Venice, California
• Arrival on Special Train, “Gypsy Love” Company, Denver, January 19, 1913 — glamorously-dressed thespians arriving to perform Franz Lehar’s operetta
• Camp Powwow, Boy Scouts, Amesbury, Mass., July 28, 1926 — The Boy Scouts are lined up behind several canoes placed end-to-end
• Entire Force of the Readville, Mass., Locomotive Shop, NY, NH & HRR, May 15, 1924 — Hundreds of works literally covering a train
• Japanese Language School, Tacoma, Washington, August 30, 1931 — It’s impossible to look at this and not think about the hardship that would come to these West Coast Japanese-American communities during World War II
• Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Drill Team and Band, July 4, 1924, at Jackson, Michigan — A shocking photograph, hundreds of proud men and women in their robes and hoods
• 12th Annual International Twins Convention, Grand Rapids, Michigan, August 31 – Sept. 1 & 2, 1946 — Twins of every age and size, nearly every pair dressed in matching outfits

I borrowed this book from the library, using it as a “tray” to carry out the pile of books I took the same day, and I have spent many hours with the book open flat on the table, just leafing through the pages. I probably need to return it soon, so I ordered myself a copy from Amazon

Links

• Panoramic Photographs : Taking the Long View, 1851-1991 — The Library of Congress has a great collection of panoramic photographs as part of the American Memory project. They also have three interesting articles : A Brief History of Panoramic Photography, Selected Photographers & Examples of Their Work and Shooting a Panoramic Photograph.