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Looking at my list of books read, I'm quite far behind on talking about books of interest. Here's a quicky update on some of them:

Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair was another excellent mystery. This one is about a country solicitor whose peaceful life is interrupted when he called in to help two local women who are accused of kidnapping a girl. The girl can describe the women and their house accurately, and her story appears to be without any holes, but the solicitor is convinced the local women are innocent. It didn’t press as many of my personal buttons as Brat Farrar but was still a great read where the central mystery was well mixed with descriptions of country life and a little romance.

As I’ve already told some of you, I took Sherwood Smith’s King’s Shield with my on my holidays and was dismayed by how the story sucked me in – I finished it far too quickly and had to scrabble around for new books! So I guess it’s obvious that I enjoyed it greatly. Less piratical activity but lots of battles and hints of interesting things ahead!

I’m giving up on Elizabeth Goudge’s adult romances. The middle window was so treacly sweet that I think I only finished due to its relatively short length (apologies, gauroth - although I think you liked this as a teen?). It’s amazing how heavy handed the sentimentality is in her adult books compared to her children’s ones.

By contrast, the final Elizabeth Enright Melendy book, A spiderweb for two was sweet but tempered with a good eye for realistic family relationships. This featured the two youngest Melendys, who are desolate at being left at home as their older siblings attend boarding school. But the year passes quickly after they receive a series of clues on a treasure hunt around their house, garden and local countryside. As with the other books in the series (a great find of this year) a comfortable, enjoyable read.

Andrew Smith, editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink has written a piece for us which helps us truly understand the origins of Thanksgiving. Despite its solemn origins we hope you have a truly wonderful (and apple pie filled) holiday.

Every American knows the story of the First Thanksgiving: Seeking religious freedom, the Pilgrims established a colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Native Americans taught them how to plant corn and hunt. When the crops were harvested, the Indians joined the Pilgrims at the First Thanksgiving by jointly gobbling up turkeys, saucing cranberries, mashing corn, and squashing pumpkins to make pies. It was such a memorable event that Americans have honored this day ever since, or so goes the story.

No one would be more surprised at this modern day story than would the Pilgrims. (more…)

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Andrew Smith, editor of the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, wants to make sure you know what you are getting into this Halloween. In the post below Smith helps us understand the history of the holiday which inspires both cute bunny and naughty nurse costumes.

On the evening of October 31, an estimated 41 million children aged 14 and under, dress in costumes, and go house-to-house yelling, “Trick or treat.” Halloween derived from a Celtic holiday called Samhain, which celebrated the end of summer. Christianity established November 1 as All Saints Day, and its “eve” was celebrated the night. Halloween traditions were brought to American by Irish immigrants in the mid to late nineteenth century. (more…)

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by Jon Scieszka illustrated by Lane Smith Viking 2007 Cowboy and Octopus are friends. Cowboy is a paper doll cut from a book. His clothing tabs occasionally show. Octopus was cut from a comic book. His bold colors and zip-a-tone dots give him a party dress appearance. "Do you like our book?" asks Cowboy. "Do you like our book?" asks Octopus. "Yes, I do. I like it very much," I say. "Do

By Kirsty OUP-UK

Yesterday you read an extract from Virginia Smith’s new book Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity. For today’s post she has kindly agreed to answer a few questions about her work.

OUP: How did you come to write a book on personal hygiene? (more…)

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I’m happy to confess here and now that I’m a girl who likes her mascara, and it’s a rare day that I appear in public without it. So, imagine my delight when our new book Clean came along. In it the author, Virginia Smith, explores the development of our obsession with personal hygiene, cosmetics, grooming, and purity. In the first of three posts, I’m happy to present the below short extract from the first chapter of the book.

Dirt is only matter out-of-place and is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’. Nature does not care what we think, or how we respond, to matter in all its forms. But as a species we do care, very deeply, about our own survival. A dense mass of human history clusters around the belief that dirt is ‘bad’, and that dirt-removal (cleansing) is always ‘good’. The old Anglo-Saxon word ‘clean’ was used in a wide variety of situations: it was often blatantly human-centred or self-serving in a way we might call ‘moral’; but it was also used more objectively as a technical term, to measure or judge material things relative to other things. It was thoroughly comprehensive, and unquestioned.

Preceding all human cultural history however – certainly before any human history of personal hygiene – were billions of years of wholly a-moral species development. The exact date one enters this endless time-line is almost irrelevant; what we are really looking for are the time-spans or periods when things speed up, which in the case of homo sapiens was somewhere between c.100,000-25,0000 BCE, followed by another burst of development after c.5000 BCE. Throughout this long period of animal species development, all of our persistent, over-riding, and highly demanding bio-physical needs were evolving and adapting, and providing the basic infrastructure for the later, very human-centred, psychology, technology and sociology of cleanliness.

It is difficult not to use ancient language when describing the egotistical processes of human physiology – routinely described as the ‘fight’ for life – and in particular, our endless battle against poisonous dirt. Much of this battle is carried out below the level of consciousness. Most of the time our old animal bodies are in a constant state of defence and renewal, but we feel or know nothing about it; and the processes are virtually unstoppable. We can no more stop evacuating than we can stop eating or breathing – stale breath, of course, is also an expellation of waste matter. Ancient scientists were strongly focussed on the detailed technology of these supposedly poisonous bodily ‘evacuations’; and modern science also uses similarly careful technical terminology when describing bodily ‘variation’, ‘elimination’, ‘toxicity’ or ‘waste products’. In either language, old or new, inner (and outer) bodily ‘cleansing’ is ultimately connected to the more profound principle of ‘wholesomeness’ within the general system of homeostasis that balances and sustains all bodily functions.

Further extracts from other chapters of Clean can be found on Virginia Smith’s website.

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James McCune Smith was one of the foremost black intellectuals in America, the first to receive a medical degree and the most educated African American before W. E. B. Du Bois. McCune Smith publicly advocated the use of “black” rather than “colored” as a self-description and he, like James Weldon Johnson and other successors, treated racial identities as social constructions and argued that American literature, music, and dance would be shaped and defined by blacks.

John Stauffer, the editor of The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, has organized McCune Smith’s writings around genre and chronology. Stauffer, along with three other distinguished historians will discuss Smith’s life, work, and legacy at The New York Historical Society on Wednesday, April 18th at 6:30 pm. Below is a video from The Historical Society’s current exhibition “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War.” The video is of letters written by McCune Smith read by the actor Danny Glover. (more…)

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There is a new interview online today with Dame Maggie Smith, where she briefly mentions her role in the Harry Potter films. In this feature from The Evening Standard, the Academy Award winning actress quipped that the role is "Miss... Read the rest of this post