The Map of My Dead Pilots: The Dangerous Game of Flying in Alaska
by Colleen Mondor
Lyons Press 2011, purchased copy
This book is simply the worst marketing campaign ever for arctic aviation. So you want to be an Alaskan pilot? Because it’s cold, lonely, boring, erratic, stressful, exhausting (very, very cold needs another mention), and you may die. Blending the adventure stories of plane trips both successful and unsuccessful with personal narratives, Colleen Mondor brings the reader into the last frozen frontier. With money at stake, planes fly in weather too cold, with cargo too heavy to be legal or safe. Everyone personally knows some pilot who died, yet the collected stories of deadly accidents don’t change the rules or risks. Published as adult nonfiction, there is crossover appeal for teens in the subject and — let’s be honest here — shorter page count then many nonfiction titles. There is some language throughout the book, but nothing that teens won’t have heard, read, and likely said before.
Personally, I read the book on a deadline, and now feel that it deserves a less rushed reader. Because when I could stop, I was able to process much more of the weight of what I had just read. For example, one anecdote detailed how the operations department was expected to lie on the official documentation for the flight — but in her job the author would write the correct weight on scrap paper, for only cargo and the pilot to see. Based on that
real number, they would make the decision whether to take the flight. In a way, that number was the only thing that had substance, reality — in that everything else was faked (like the numbers), uncertain (like the weather) or precarious (like the aging planes): all but that one scrap of paper that would get thrown away. That’s something to think about, right? And that’s this book.
My fellow book blogger and good friend
Colleen Mondor agreed to stop by to answer some questions about her book and new authorhood:
When did you start writing and/or seeing yourself as a writer?I really started thinking that I could write as part of who I intended to be (as opposed to writing all through school and being told it was “a nice hobby”) after I left graduate school and realized that all the research I had done for my thesis was too valuable to shelve. The thesis was the longest thing I had ever written (160+ pages) that made sense and had a real beginning and ending. Once I had it in my hands I believed I could be more than just someone who writes after I do my “real work” every day (as I had always been told growing up) and that’s when I got serious. (I should note that my thesis was on pilot error accidents among Alaskan bush commuters — so it played right into Map.)
Who inspires you personally or
In 2001 at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Peter Pronovost did a little experiment. You see, a number of patients would get infections from central lines put in to, you know, help them get better. But the infections would, of course, make the patients worse. So he came up with a five step checklist for putting in a central line with basic directives, which were as simple as washing hands with antibiotic soap.
Pronovost then asked nurses to observe doctors for a month and record how often they carried out each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one. After recording that explosive bit of data, for the next year the hospital asked and authorized the nurses to stop the doctors if they saw them skipping a step on the checklist.
The results were so dramatic that they weren't sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection went from 11 percent to zero... So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred in that entire period.
This remarkable story is from the book,
The Checkist Manifesto: How to get Things Right, by Atul Gawande. The author's theory is that many jobs - especially in the medical profession - have become so complicated, that training and intelligence aren't enough to achieve the best results. He offers a solution in the humble checklist.
The main comparisons he explores are two professions that have incredible amounts of potential scenarios, along with incredible consequences for failure - physicians and pilots. What he finds in his research is a huge difference in how each profession handles the problem, with implications for change for many industries. While doctors tend to bristle at being followed with a checklist - it's why the nurses had to be authorized to stop the doctors in the above example - pilots embrace their checklists, which are standard to the airlines. In fact, pilots are taught
not to go with their instinct as problems arise but to turn to the checklist first. That doesn't mean that instincts, training, and quick-thinking aren't valued for the pilots. Instead, the idea is to take the guesswork out of basic steps and protocols so that the pilots can do their jobs with more focus.
The author shares another story from the airline industry, about a plane that suffered a complete engine shut-down in January 2008. Luckily, the plane landed safely enough that the passengers were fine, but the industry was puzzled as to the cause. The possibilities were researched, a theory was proposed, and new guidelines were established for particular flights. A new checklist was distributed and within a month of the recommendations, pilots had it in hand and were using it. How do we know? Because in November 2008, the same situation presented itself and the pilots were able to use the new checklist to recover the engines.
While new procedures can take years to establish themselves in medicine, compare that to this scenario of identifying a problem, recommending a solution, and distributing the information within a year. The author also shows uses for the checklist in financial and legal industries, but all have shied away for the solution as being too simple.
Will this next generation of thinkers be able to get beyond that mindset? I hope so, and that's why I would recommend this book to high schoolers in hopes that they can change the way we approach problems in a society only growing in complexity.
Nonfiction Monday is hosted today at
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Helen Dunmore, who wrote The Tide Knot, a children's novel I liked, has a book on the Man Booker Longlist. The Betrayal.
I can't say I've been delighted with the Booker books I've read, but still. Huzzah!
Link from Blog of a Bookslut.
You might recall that not long ago I was raving about Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son. Couldn't wait to read the sequel.
Well.
Red Prophet has been on my nightstand for the better part of two weeks now, and I'm all the way up to...page 11. The thing is, I've been reading up on Native images and stereotypes in American culture -- mostly
here and
here -- and I must be starting to get it, because in less than a dozen pages the descriptions of the Indians in
Red Prophet are turning me right off. Given the setting, I can't say the white characters' racism is inappropriate. It's probably accurate, and it may even turn out to be an integral element of the story. But for me, right at this moment, it's not much fun to wade through.
Those of you who've read the series -- should I stick with this installment? Are there going to be other perspectives to counterbalance Hooch's attitude toward the Reds?
Check out the comments section after reading What 'To Kill a Mockingbird' Isn't in the Wall Street Journal. Jeezum Crow, people do not want anyone messin' with their Atticus.
To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the first adult books I read when in my early teens. I did not read it for school. This was before the schools got hold of TKAM, while it was still an adult book. I remember thinking it was quite an experience. When I reread it as an adult, years later, it seemed very much a father worship book to me.
I would really need to read it again before I'd describe it as a children's book. Do people get to take a vote and determine how already published books should be classified?
Again, this link came from ArtsJournal.
I haven't read a novel in three months. Really. Three months.
But yesterday I sat by Lake Huron and reveled in Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son. All the way to the end.
I don't read sequels.
But today I informed my library that I must have Red Prophet -- book #2 in the aforementioned Tales of Alvin Maker series.
That is all for now.
The Wizard of Karres by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint and Dave Freer.
I was awakened earlier than I'd hoped by a force of nature, aka my darling child, so got a few last licks in after all. This is an other-authors sequel to one of my favorites, The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz. I haven't gotten far enough in to have a real opinion yet; they've certainly done a decent job of imitating the style and seem to have a handle on the characters, but I'm not sure the places they're taking the story feel right. But I may be impossible to please on this point.
Will do my finish line post in a while, there's lots of housecleaning (literally and figuratively) to take care of.
23 pages (out of 313)
Reading: 33 minutes
Blogging: on my own time
Mozart and the Whale by Jerry and Mary Newport.
I think I read a non-fiction book about autism during every challenge. Not deliberately, there's just always at least one in my pile.
I didn't think much of the movie "Mozart and the Whale," but it did get me interested in reading the book, which is really not the same story. The real characters were much older when they met, for one thing, and already had a lot of life experiences behind them. This is not just their love story, but also their autobiographies.
I had some trouble getting into this book. One problem is that two different people are writing in turn and it's hard to tell when the points of view have changed (this was an ARC -- perhaps they made it clearer in the finished book.) The other problem was that the sections by Jerry Newport were so full of worn-out phrases. It was a nagging irritation.
But I persisted and wound up relating to a lot of what I read. And it was intriguing to read the points of view of two autistic adults, who share a lot in common yet also have many differences.
Like many autobiographies I read, this one sometimes felt too... elliptical, is the word that comes to mind. So much happened to them and they just drop little bits and pieces of it into the narrative, leaving me with tons of questions. How someone got from point A to point B is often a mystery. It reminds me of confusing autobiographies of children's book authors I read when I was younger.
Two bits of trivia
1)The "Mozart" of the title, Mary's costume at the Halloween party where they met, was not Wolfgang Amadeus -- it was his sister, the thwarted prodigy Nannerl. I find that very touching.
2) I can't find any verification of this, but I'm almost certain that the opening of the show "the Big Bang Theory" was inspired by a paragraph in this book. Or possibly, since both came out in 2007, the other way around?
261 pages
Reading: 129 minutes
Blogging: 31 minutes
Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourne
I am thoroughly YA'd out, so decided to finish this book, which I'd started before the challenge. Victorian historical mystery, a bit along the lines of the Amelia Peabody books, though without an archeological emphasis. It was fun, I'll probably read the rest of the series.
326 pages (out of 509)
Reading: 2 hours, 27 minutes
Blogging: 2 minutes
Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook had a very big impact at Chez Gauthier. I went to hear Trelease speak at our local elementary school when my oldest child was still a toddler. I brought his book home with me. His contention that boys model their behavior on their fathers and need to see their fathers (as well as other men) read, meant that the Gauthier boys had both parents reading to them (on alternating days) for years. They continued to read, themselves, into adolsecence, a point where conventional wisdom tells us that many males stop reading. And, surprise, today they tend to share their father's books and magazines rather than their mother's.
This makes me wonder what would have become of them if they hadn't had a reading father to model themselves upon or, even, a reading father who didn't know he needed to provide a model for his children. (This is what I call proactive parenting versus reactive parenting, by the way. But this isn't a parenting blog, so I won't say anymore about that.)
Just a few months ago I gave a young teaching family member a copy of The Read-Aloud Handbook for Christmas because I just can't let it go.
The book really has significance for me, so I'm happy to direct you to Jen Robinson's "reaction" to it.
You will enjoy Diary: Malcolm Gladwell a great deal more if you have listened to Gladwell reading his book Outliers. Which I have done. In fact, if you haven't at least read one of Gladwell's books, you might not enjoy this Vanity Fair piece at all.
Sorry. I just had to send this link to somebody.
as I was, once upon a time, I just started The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society and I suspect the authors are channeling her. Will be interesting to see where it goes.
(I see that Nancy Pearl sees more of a Helene Hanff thing going on. That's good too.)
A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING
by Bill Bryson
(Broadway Books)
The idea was to see if it isn't possible to understand and appreciate - marvel at, enjoy even - the wonder and accomplishments of science at a leve that isn't too technical or demanding, but isn't entirely superficial either.
Yes, it is eminently possible. If a self-proclaimed science-hater like me can whiz through nearly 500 pages from protons to hominids and like it, anybody can. The key: this is not a book rammed full of formulas, equations, and tedium. It's about people, and the brilliant, stumbling, sometimes accidental and/or lethal paths we've followed to in an attempt to educate ourselves about how we and the universe around us work. Bryson never forgets he's telling a story, not whacking you over the head with a parade of facts, and he's got a heckuva knack for putting numbers and concepts of cosmic proportions into language the average lunk can wrap his head around:
Our own attempts to penetrate toward the middle [of the Earth] have been modest indeed.... If the planet were an apple, we wouldn't yet have broken the skin.
I can't remember the last time I've been so simultaneously bemused and informed on such a vast scale. And now I can proudly proclaim, I have a clue. (Mrs. Morr would be so proud.)
*********************
Currently reading:
Love is the Higher Lawby David Levithan
STITCHES
by David Small
(W.W. Norton & Co.)
First I read the words, and I said, "Wow." Then I re-read the pictures, and...what was left to say?
As much as the story, the art is bleak and often disturbing, yet fascinating -- like David and his brother huddled over the forbidden images in their father's medical books, you can't look away. Perhaps because converting emotions into words is essentially a process of translation, while images (especially images like these) forge a much more direct connection between artist and audience. The emotion is laid plain in the brush strokes themselves, with little need for explanation or description.
We talk sometimes about getting inside a character's head, or reaching the heart of a story. Instead, Small's memoir goes straight to the gut, so that reading Stitches actually feels different from reading other books. With its economy of words, it forces the reader to process the images into language, leaving you momentarily speechless. And is there any more just reaction to the story of a boy who lost - and then found - his own voice?
Life in the “real” world is hazy, and it is piled full of superfluous things that have little bearing on survival. Modern conveniences equate with disposability. When things break, we throw them away. When friendships break, we throw them away. After all, there are so many people. We don't watch the weather; we change the thermostat. We don't take care of ourselves; we leave that to the doctors and the lawyers. We don't take care of the people around us; we pay taxes and expect the government to do the caretaking. We place our trust in our locks and alarm systems. People come and go at dizzying speeds, and most encounters are frustratingly superficial. When I remember to ask someone, "How are you?" I seldom slow my pace to listen to the response. Reality is sometimes difficult to find in the “real” world.
A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean, by Tori Murden McClure is an amazing story of endurance, strength, drive, tenacity, pride and humility. This book was recommended by a patron at my library, and by the time my hold came up, I had forgotten all about it. I almost put it back, because I couldn't imagine why I had wanted to read about the first woman to row across the ocean. I'm glad I gave it a try, because it was interesting and inspirational. An adult biography, it would be perfect for high schoolers as well.
In 1998, Tori McClure rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in a custom rowboat with a tiny cabin. She charted her journey in hours and miles rowed, in the lessons learned, and in the insights discovered. She rowed alongside whales and playful dolphins, through storms and rogue waves. When things broke, she fixed them. When things broke beyond repair, she did without - even when those things were considered essential.
She starts her story with a strong statement of will, "I felt proud not to be searching for life in the absent corners of weekends." She ends her story with a realization, "Our helplessness makes us human. Love is what makes our humanity bearable." And in between those two points, she shares the remarkable story of her life and ocean journey. Not to be missed.
Nonfiction Monday is hosted today at
All About Children's Books
While I was at that Margo Lanagan talk, I learned that Tender Morsels was published as an adult book in Australia. There will be a YA edition down under, but it isn't out yet. There are also adult and YA editions of the book in England.
England also did an adult and kid version of the Harry Potter books.
I think adult readers would be very interested in Tender Morsels. I think they'd be interested in Octavian Nothing, too. Same with The Book Thief. Fortunately, we live in a free country here in the U.S. of A., so they can read them if they want to.
But they'll never want to if they don't know about them. Sure these books are famous in kidlit circles. But most adult readers are not part of our circle. They have to know these books exist. I hate to say it, but they need to be marketed to.
I know I'm a lone voice on the subject of adults and picture books and will probably remain so. But, come on! They market YA to adults in other countries. I'm not suggesting something revolutionary.
Or do we Americans figure adults over here bought Harry Potter and Twilight without anyone having to make a special effort so we just aren't going to?
I am interested in writers who write for both children and adults. For instance, at some point I'd like to try reading one of Rick Riordan's adult novels.
So, yesterday, I'm at the library book sale. I'm feeling very fussy because one of my family members has been raising questions about why I keep taking out more books from the library when I already own a basket and two shelves full of unread books. I'm feeling a little wary about shopping for more books I know I might not read for years.
I'm also having a rather good time doing some meeting and greeting.
I stumble upon a lovely looking little book by someone named Helen Dunmore. I think, Hmmm. Is that the Helen Dunmore who wrote The Tide Knot? Because if it is, I might like to read it.
But I don't know. Spending two dollars on the thing and looking up the author afterward would not have broken the bank at Chez Gauthier. But I'd just finished reading a book from my book basket, and if I bought another right away, I wouldn't be any further ahead, would I? And to not be any further ahead and then find out that the author wasn't the Helen Dunmore I was thinking of would have been annoying to say the least. So I walk away and leave the book there.
Sure, enough, the Helen Dumore who wrote The Tide Knot, does write adult fiction. The book I passed on sounded like Your Blue-Eyed Boy, though I don't remember that cover.
The library will probably have bins of unsold books out for days to come, so I might still find it. Yeah, I should take time off from work tomorrow to go look for a two-dollar used book.
I'll let you know if I find it.
I recently finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. In it, a fourteen-year-old girl learns that she is, in fact, a boy. The book is a very wide-ranging story told by the adult Cal in which he talks a great deal about his very interesting ancestors but also of his childhood and early adolescence when he was Calliope. (A Greek family.)
As I was reading those sections of the book, I wondered if any YA novels deal with the same situation.
Some adults who have written for adults and for kids/YA say they prefer writing for younger readers because younger readers are more demanding and less tolerant of things like, say, indulgent padding on the part of writers. I kept thinking of that as I read The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley.
I sought out The Go-Between for one reason: Its prologue begins with the line "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." I've always loved the line, even though I didn't know where it came from. I can't say that I understand how it pertains to the book that follows it since (modest spoiler) the main character is carrying on at the end pretty much as he did fifty years before. So what is it that was done differently in the past?
You know how I've gone on and on about how I keep stumbling upon father books? Well, The Go-Between isn't one of them. It is, however, an adult book with a child main character, another type of novel I keep finding myself attracted to.
Leo, writing in the 1950s, is recalling the summer of 1900 when, for a few weeks just before he turned thirteen, he stayed with a well-to-do boarding school classmate and his family. He is very taken with his friend's older sister and when he ends up serving as a messenger between her and one of the local farmers, he doesn't realize that he's helping them carry on an illicit romantic relationship.
(Lady Chatterly's Lover meets Atonement. In fact, Ian McEwan provides one of the blurbs for the edition of The Go-Between that I read.)
This story's bones are marvelous. I've been trying to think of any YA novel has covered the same material but truly as YA, not as an adult book with an adult protagonist recalling the experience. And the writing is elegant.
There is just so much of it. Any scene that could be covered nicely in paragraphs goes on for pages. And pages. And a scene that needed a few pages went on forever.
I am willing to concede that maybe I'm just not up to this type of literary reading. But I would also like to consider the possibility that this is what those writers I was talking about in the first paragraph were referring to when they said that adult readers put up with a lot from their writers.
On a more positive note, I think The Go-Between has the best epilogue I've ever read. I usually don't like them. They seem like some little tack-on to make readers who can't give up their characters a look into a happy future. Someone has her dead lover's baby, so we can all feel good about that. Everyone grows up and marries the person they were attracted to at school, which is supposed to make us happy. You know what I mean. But this one actually adds to the story and even extends it. Very good.
Training Report: Two segments for the 365 Story Project, and I finally started an essay I've been thinking about for a while. While I am concerned that I haven't got the next few Project segments planned, which will almost certainly mean I won't be doing any writing over the weekend, I did do some research for background for one of the characters and his family. And since that background involves yoga, it is appropriate for me to refer you to Ogden: The Inappropriate Yoga Guy.
***We interrupt this blog hiatus to bring you the following review***
BEYOND THE MIRACLE WORKER:
The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy
and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller
by Kim E. Nielsen(Beacon Press)
Maybe it seems counter-intuitive to write a solo biography of Anne Sullivan Macy -- who would have heard of her if not for Helen Keller, right? Even for someone who's as nutzoid for Annie as I am, it's odd at first to read a biography in which Helen Keller gets so obviously sidelined. However, much as I value Joseph Lash's dual biography, Helen and Teacher, and as much as the two women's lives were intertwined, reading Nielsen's solo examination of Annie reveals just how much of a distraction keeping up with Helen Keller creates for those of us interested the intricacies of Annie Sullivan.
Without the focus constantly swinging toward the details of Helen's existence, vital elements like Annie's disabilities and mercurial personality virtually become characters in their own right. In fact, Nielsen shows that Annie's wavering eyesight, chronic pain, recurring illnesses, and lifelong bouts of melancholy were more debilitating than Helen's blindness and deafness -- though no one who spent 40-odd years standing next to a deaf-blind icon would dare draw attention to that fact. Not even saucy Annie Sullivan.
While many biographers tend to frame the hardships in Annie's early life as a rags-to-riches buildup to her successes as Helen Keller's famous teacher, Nielsen details the lingering effects of Annie's childhood traumas on her adult relationships and behavior. The truth of the matter is that Annie Sullivan was damaged goods, and even the salve of Helen's decades-long friendship never fully closed those wounds. No matter how much Helen loved and venerated her, Anne Sullivan Macy was not an easy woman to live with. Fortunately for the rest of us, all the extremes that made her such a trial and a delight make for a fascinating read under Nielsen's steady gaze.
***************
Addendum:
I am vicariously incensed with Publisher's Weekly for referring to this book as "lightly fictionalized autobiography." In fact, NONE of Nielsen's writing in this biography can be characterized in any way as fictionalized. On the contrary, Nielsen uses Anne Sullivan Macy's own lightly fictionalized autobiographical writings as a source for her work, but clearly indicates between documented facts and the autobiographical stories of 'Johannah [Annie] and Jimmie Dunnivan' culled from Macy's unpublished memoirs. *humpf*
I finished reading The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl last night. Pearl writes historical mysteries in which real historical figures appear--fictionally. In The Last Dickens he creates a mystery around the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, since its author, Charles Dickens, died before finishing it.
Dickens appears in the book during his final tour of the United States. According to the author's notes, a great deal of the detail included in the novel is historically accurate, including a stalker. Pearl describes lines for tickets, speculators (what we'd call scalpers), and "bookaneers," what might be described as mercenaries hired by publishers to steal manuscripts from England as they arrive in the United States by ship and transcribe public readings of authors' unpublished works. (I couldn't "bookaneer" on-line being used in that way.) Copyright laws appear to have been a bit iffy back then.
I guess when people talk about how publishing used to be a profession for gentlemen, they don't mean during the nineteenth century.
Even though Dickens died one hundred and thirty-eight years ago, I don't see how someone today can read about the frenzy around his American tour without thinking of J.K. Rowling. In 2145 will people still be talking about her appearance at Carnegie Hall? Will someone living in 2169 write a novel about a "lost" Harry Potter?
Have any writers between Dickens and Rowling received the kind of acclaim they did?
Today's Training Report: I know I said I finished that long bio yesterday, but, really, I finished it today. And I did just one story for the 365 Story Project.
I am frequently attracted to adult books with child and YA protagonists. I'm very interested in how books with those kinds of leads end up being published as adult lit versus kidlit or vice versa. I'm also interested in whether or not those adult books could be of interest to nonadult readers. I think it was at Read Roger that I once read that one of a YA librarian's responsibilities is to lead adolescent readers to adult books. I'm certainly not a YA librarian, but I do like the idea of books that will lead kids into the grown-up world. (Because the adult world is such a terrific place and everyone should want to be here, right?)
I recently read two fine adult books with child-ish characters. Oddly enough, they're both books that jump off from older works. (This isn't all that odd, because I like those kinds of books. It's a little bit odd that I happened to read one right after the other.)
In the first, The Dead Father's Club by Matt Haig, poor eleven-year-old Philip Noble is haunted by his dead dad who insists that Uncle Alan did him in because he wanted the pub and Philip's mum. In order to save dad from an afterlife with something called the Terrors, Philip needs to avenge his death by killing Uncle Alan. Very good book that I would have enjoyed much, much more if I knew more about Hamlet, upon which it is based. I'm not even sure I've ever read the original source material, though I did realize that Philip's fish being named Gertrude is a joke.
The second book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King, was recommended just a couple of weeks ago by Jen Robinson. The beekeeper of the title is Sherlock Holmes. His apprentice is Mary Russell, a young woman in her late teens with whom he develops an intense father/child relationship.
Both these books could be of interest to YAs, though maybe to older, more sophisticated readers--and not because young Philip is always going on about mum getting sex from Uncle Alan and the questions that are raised in The Beekeeper's Apprentice about Holmes' willingness to disguise himself in women's evening gowns and the content of the photograph of him at a Turkish bath. Voice, theme, point of view, and some other stuff I'm interested in discussing with a captive audience as well as some subjects I may not have thought of yet, should all be considered when determining which audience is most likely to go for a particular title.
So over the next few days, Gail is going to make like Mary Russell at Oxford and do a little study of these two books and how they could engage teen readers. You have been warned.
As I watched the Inauguration yesterday, an insight came to me of the one gift that we give our children as future leaders of this great nation.
Digital photography.
You see, when I was growing up - as when all of our current leaders were growing up - the cameras were crap. The pictures were often blurry or overexposed. Someone's elbow was in the shot. Or there wasn't enough light or too much flash. Or the pictures simply faded in their albums. Let's not even start on Polaroid.
It didn't really matter then if the photos weren't great, because these were our memories. Without digital cameras, parents took the picture and hoped for the best. With the cost of film and processing, people didn't take that many pictures. And it was fine.
Until you become President of the United States and Life writes a book about you and all the pictures covering your earliest years are not good.
During the slower parts of the Inaugural day, I skimmed through The American Journey of Barack Obama
. I won the book from Book Dads (Thanks guys!) and was really looking forward to spending time in the Obama world. But now I realize that I was mostly looking forward to the photography of a Life publication. What I didn't think about was that only a fraction of Obama's journey was photographed by the experts. A great deal of the book relies on the photographs from his family. Pretty much the same type blurry, overexposed, faded, poorly framed photos that I grew up with.
I still enjoyed the book and am looking forward to really reading it, including the essays at the end from some great writers. I can still highly recommend it for Obama fans. But personally, I may look around for a book that only chronicles the campaign with fantastic photography. I'll also look at my digital camera with new respect, knowing that if one of my daughters is ever leader of the free world, the biographers will have over five thousand pictures from which to choose.
Leaders of tomorrow, we give you digital photography. You're welcome.
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I'm dying to write a book using my family, but I feel certain that it would be considered unrealistic. Truth is often stranger than fiction.
I like the quote about truth and distortion. I'll have to keep that in mind...
I often will witness something in my family or in town or hear about something going on involving my husband's job and realize that if I used that situation or person in a book, no one would believe it could happen. With fiction you almost have to be realer than in real life.