The Slap / by Christos Tsiolkas

An Australian author of Greek extraction, Christos Tsiolkas is a lifelong resident of Melbourne. He was the editor of his student newspaper in both high school and college and penned his first novel, Loaded, in 1995 at the

 age of 30. The novel was later made into the film Head On, a piece which won several AFI (Australian Film Institute) awards and gained international notoriety for both its controversial subject matter and riveting performances. In addition to his six full-length novels, Tsiolkas has written a number of plays and screenplays, many of which, like his fiction, have held worldwide acclaim. The Slap, his latest novel published in 2008, examines the conflict-driven sequence of events following a publicly controversial incident at a neighborhood barbecue.

"He bloody broke it. He should be punished."

At a family get together, an obnoxious three-year-old named Hugo acts aggressively toward another child without intervention. When the father of the victimized child sees nothing being done by the parents of the perpetrator, he slaps the kid across the face. Everyone is so horrified by the incident that, after a brief pause, the families disperse. A day later, the parents of the slapped child have the slapper arrested. The event is conflicted and complicated enough but their are deeper issues among the adult party-goers themselves. Hosts Hector and Aisha, a childless interracial couple, have their own private secrets just as they feel conflicted, caught in the middle as they are, about the incident. The slapper is Hector's hot-headed cousin, Harry, their original family having immigrated from Greece a generation previous. Harry defends his actions, feeling he was justified to discipline another couple's unruly offspring, and is defensive about the whole thing along along with Hector's mother and father who also witnessed the event. Hugo's parents are Rosie and Gary, a hippie-ish Anglo-saxon couple who say they never intervened because they believe in a more "naturalistic" resolution to matters of this sort, preferring to stand back and let any repercussions develop without a third party. Both Rosie and Gary--but especially Rosie--are simply outraged at Harry's act and are planning to press charges in full despite the uproar from the other side. As the trial approaches, furious Rosie and defensive Harry put more and more pressure on Aisha and Hector to testify on their behalf.

This book isn't really about child abuse or proper modes of discipline or anything like that. The slapping incident is really just a way to examine the dynamics of family and friendship connections, originally at the barbecue to look at how people of different backgrounds come together and then into a more privatized world of individual families and relationships. It's not an easy book to summarize. Tsiolkas uses his premise, a not uncommon everyday incident, to stabilize his larger structure. But his real talent is for exploring the inner lives of his eight primary characters, four women and four men, ranging in age from 18 to 70, all from different perspectives, family situations and ethnic origins. There are no stock characters in Tsiolkas' story. Each individual is a sharp observer with a particular personality, a personalized opinion. As things happen in the lives of the characters that have nothing to do with the case and are far more interesting, the audience is introduced to the truly idiosyncratic stations of all involved. No one is necessarily evil, no one deserves to be hit, or even judged negatively though all are distinctly flawed. Everyone means well, and everyone is doing the best he or she can; but then again, everyone is awfully angry. (FIC TSIOLKAS)

Do research from your phone

Do you have an Android smartphone? Then you can access our many Ebsco databases from it! Our databases are great for research purposes — perfect for students of all ages, from K-12 as well as college and grad students, plus anyone else who wants to know more about a topic. What you find in the databases has gone through a quality control process to ensure you're getting accurate, readable, authoritative information. They're also great sources for accessing journals, newspapers and magazine articles, including older, archived stories.

Here's how you do it:

1. Download Ebsco's free Android app to your phone.

2. Visit our Databases page. In the yellow box at the top, click on the appropriate link based on whether you're outside or inside the library.


3. On the next page that appears, click on any of the databases that are from Ebsco. (If you're outside the library, you'll be asked to enter your library card number, which is 14 digits long and should be entered without any spaces: PMML0000XXXXXX.) Since Ebsco's Academic Search Complete database is at the top, let's click that one for this example.


4. Once you're in that database, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the link that reads, "New: EBSCOhost iPhone and Android Applications."


5. In the box that appears, enter your email address and click [Send].


6. Then check your email on your Android smartphone; Ebsco will email you the authorization key to allow you to access our library databases from the app on your phone. Click on the link in the email to get authorized. Then start researching using the Android Ebsco app!

The Lafitte Project

Local news affiliate The Bay Area Observer has been chronicling updates on The Lafitte Project, a documentary undertaking on the life and legend of (in)famous privateer Jean Lafitte, the "Gentleman Pirate". An independent effort spearheaded by Charles and Cody Hix of Baytown, the film is still in production though updates and previews are regularly released on he website. It's an intriguing piece both for its tenacious undertaking of the privateer's actual travels and adventures as well as its investigation into Lafitte's indeterminate roots--much of he and brother Pierre's actual family history remains a mystery. It's worth noting that the integral role one of Texas City's pioneering founders, Capt. James Campbell, played during Lafitte's stay in Galveston, a factoid the documentary hasn't failed to elaborate on.

Publishing DIY

Self-publishing's quite the rage nowadays. Getting your own book into print without the backing of an agent or the sponsorship of a major publishing house is now a feasible undertaking. It's also a trend steadily morphing into an industry as innovations such as Print-on-Demand, online retailing and ebooks have helped spur the phenomenon. How's it done? Two websites which really have the know-how down pat are Amazon's Createspace and Author House. Both of them offer a wealth of information and virtual resources for what to do when you've written your novel, memoir or cookbook, but can't seem to find a way to package it. Some of the more noteworthy self-published books currently on offer in the library are The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (FIC REDFIELD) and What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles (331.128 BOLLES).

NPR talks to Joan Didion about Blue Nights

"When we talk about mortality, we're talking about our children."
 
NPR has a talk with the incomparable Joan Didion about her newest memoir, Blue Nights. In it Didion writes honestly and openly about her daughters sudden death and what it means to survive the pain of surviving past your family.  This is a seven minute interview, so it's a nice bite sized look at Didion's process and purpose for the book.  Listen to the interview by clicking here and find Blue Nights in our Biographies section at B DIDION.

A Good Fall: Stories / by Ha Jin

Chineses-American author Ha Jin was born Jin Xuefei in the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning in 1956. During his teen years, he volunteered with the People's Liberation Army, spending the majority of his time stationed along the Soviet border. Higher education was largely restricted during the Cultural Revolution (~1966-1976) and much of Jin's schooling during this period was informal, reading as much as he could and learning English through the country's fledgling institutional program. With the reopening of the Chinese colleges in 1977, he enrolled at Heilongjiang University and ultimately received a B.A. in English and thereafterwards an M.A. in American Literature. In 1985, he emigrated to America under a student visa where he studied at Brandeis University, eventually earning Ph.D. in English. With the culmination of events in China leading him to believe that his writing could never properly flourish in a country where both the language and the censorship regulations were obstacles to universal readership, he stayed in America where he began to publish poetry and short stories in English. He has since published two volumes of poetry, numerous short stories and several novels including one, Waiting, which won both the 1999 National Book Award and the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for best book. A Good Fall chronicles of the lives of Chinese immigrants in America doing their best to cope with disorientation and social unease.

A young recent Chinese immigrant can barely make ends meet and yet she's hounded by her younger sister back home about money to pay for a new car. A lonely, isolated musician takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet, a bird he later rescues to the surprise of everyone. Meanwhile in a contemporary Chinese-American family, young children decide to change their names so that they might sound more "American", largely ignorant to how their decision offsets generations of cultural heritage. At a small liberal arts college, an Asian professor of English, though of Chinese nationality, attempts to formally defect into the US with the reluctant aid of a student. And in the cramped quarters of an urban city dwelling, a young male sweatshop worker tries to get along with his three female roommates, all prostitutes.

Everyone struggles in Ha Jin's world. Some struggle with a desire to remain loyal to tradition and stave off the temptations to indulge in the more opportunistic freedom while others fight just to keep their newfound 'freedom' their own. Of course the ideas of tradition and liberty are themselves dubious constructs in Jin's world where freedom often implies abandonment and opportunity can just as easily mean hopelessness as it does aspiration. Jin's style is fairly minimalist, given to describing people and places with limited characterizations and without elaborative descriptions and his stories are sometimes more snapshot images or sparse vignettes of characters than scenarios with actual story-archs. His overarching premise is telling though. All his characters seem to exist in permanent disillusionment, not only from their difference in physical location but from their very sense of self and identity where their emotional universe has become as limited as their physical surroundings and their living conditions as disorienting as their inner conscious. (FIC JIN)

NaNoWriMo: One month, One Novel!

It's November, which means it's every closet novelist's favorite time of the year: National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: 50,000 words in 30 days. NaNoWriMo is all about quantity over quality in the belief that it will free you to simply be creative.

Looking for some books on writing to jump start your story? Check out the 808.3 nonfiction section for titles like "This Year You Write Your Novel" by Walter Mosley and Janet Evanovich's "How I Write."

www.nanowrimo.org 

A German Requiem by Philip Kerr

Named for the poem written by James Fenton about Germany after the Nazi era, this novel is the third in Philip Kerr’s ‘Berlin Noir’ trilogy. Bernie Gunther is the antihero, the ex-policeman who as part of the German police force worked for the SS but asked to become a soldier to avoid being involved in the crimes of the Third Reich. He was eventually captured by the Russians and sent to work in the mines. A year later, he was to be sent back to Germany, but was resourceful enough to jump the train and avoid the pitfalls of repatriation, especially as it was being carried out by the Russians.

The Fenton poem is cryptic and skirts its subject, glancing off and on what was done and what transpired. The poem’s structure seems to mimic our inability to absorb and to process such barbarities. As in Heidelberg, when I visited there: coming down a hill, seeing a small amphitheater sitting there on the grass, all deserted, with no identification, no plaque… “That was where they held the rallies”, my sister said, with all solemnity. Philip Kerr duly mentions throughout the book the horror of the world regarding Nazi atrocities. However, his main focus is to show how life went on in postwar Germany, with new players mingling with the old.

The time is 1947, and Gunther travels to Vienna to investigate a murder of an American officer by a German policeman, one with ties to the underworld. What you find with Kerr is that the “underworld” is almost everywhere. Whether it’s his wife Kristen carrying on in Berlin with an American officer for the material goods he can get for her, or the Allies deciding to work with ex-Nazis to go after the Communists, almost everyone has an agenda – to look after themselves. Gunther finds out the truth about everyone, so there isn’t much to say about anybody, unless it’s the poor girl with a lover who was silenced so that she gets killed almost as an afterthought.

Kerr knows his history, and the reader can be grateful by the end that at least somebody understands who was doing what and for whom. Kerr is clever enough to have some big spoils hinted at to keep us reading – no less than Hermann Goering, who Kerr suggests was never brought to justice, but is alive and well under a new identity, working with the Americans. This twist is just to help nail in the relentless view that Kerr wants us to acquiesce in…that villains may fall, but only new ones take their place.

The Other October 31st Holiday

Millions of people the world over know that the calendar date of October 31 is a chance to dress up, eat candy and throw parties. Halloween, derived from the former term 'All Hallows Eve' meant to imply the night before All Saints' Day, is actually one of those holidays loosely based on both pagan and Christian traditions but which has come to betoken a more secularized mode of celebration. Yet the date is significant for another reason, an event in history every bit as laudable and largely more important altogether than anything its more popular festival has to offer. Reformation Day commemorates the day in history, October 31, 1517, when a young German monk, Order of St. Augustine, named Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses On the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences to the door of the Church in Wittenberg in the region then known as the Holy Roman Empire (modern day Germany). Though officially intended as a scholarly dissertation on the Papacy's policy on indulgences (essentially the theory of buying your way out of purgatory and into heaven), the 95 points of disputation clearly held an undercurrent of challenge to the Roman church whose abuse of power and uncensored distortion of ecclesiastical principles had long preyed upon its subjects.

The date of the posting actually coincided with the Pope's "fundraiser", a sale of indulgences intended to raise money for a new Basilica in Rome and a scheme to which Luther effectively replied "Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest of the rich, build the basilica of Saint Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?" (Thes. 86). Luther would further denounce John Tietzel, one of the leading peddlers of such indulgences and other trinkets, by mocking his trade--"As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs"(Thes. 76). The 95 Theses posted to the church door were actually a copy of the same document Luther had disseminated among several of the more prominent princes in the Northern Germanic kingdoms, namely Frederik III of Saxony, an important political figure who would later play an implemental role in protecting Luther himself from angry papal legates. It was a day and an event which put in motion not merely another schism within the Roman church, but an entire breaking from papal authority and its precepts altogether. It was the Protestant Reformation, a movement which re-established salvation along Biblical lines and abolished the Pope's power in much of Europe, spreading first in Germany, then portions of the continental North, Scandinavia and finally Great Britain (It should be noted that King Henry VIII of England allied himself with Luther and his growing contemporaries (Calvin, Zwingli, Melancthon, etc.) out of mostly selfish ambition, his reasons for turning Protestant more out of a want to annul his marriage than break with the Pope. Though to be fair, Henry was at least marginally keen on the nature of religious dogma and had for some time been contemplating the reformers' theology.) Today Reformation Day is still celebrated on October 31st in the Lutheran Church as well as in other protestant circles. Further Reading on the Protestant Reformation and on Martin Luther can be found in the Dewey number 270.1 or in biographies under B LUTHER.

Gigantic / by Marc Nesbitt

A black laborer and his partner work are hired at the home of a wealthy white Southern businessman only to find out that their "job" is to pose as a human lawn ornament during an especially odd party. Things get even more strange when the man's daughter's sexual misadventures turn violent. Then a downtrodden mattress salesman in his thirties witnesses an especially gruesome car accident up close, a shocking event sending him spiraling toward a new revelation concerning his relationship with his father. A young man has kept his imaginary girlfriend from childhood throughout his life only to find out how unstable his "companion" becomes when he betrays her. When sanitation worker is summoned to pick up roadkill on an isolated highway only to endure a life-threatening incident which terrorizes him to his core.

Nesbitt's little collection of short stories, while very different, is as thoroughly engrossing as it is peculiar. His sentences, descriptions and metaphors, especially his metaphors, are something to behold. Or at least something to take note of. "We stand there watching the quiet between our faces." "Snow drops in bright white pieces like the stars are crumbling." 'Her hand jerks like a leather spider." "The train whispers something about distance." It's not hard to see why some of the literary world's more eclectic figures have praised the work immensely. It's an arresting worldview that Nesbitt imbues, an uncommonly vague yet poetically engendering place where troubled, bemused and disenfranchised young men dwell in a sort-of demented whirlpool of outcomes. And while nearly all of the protagonists are unnamed, you get the sense of that being the intended objective of the author: it's an everyman's kind of insane world. (FIC NESBITT)