Category: Books

It’s been almost a day since a small business owner came around the counter and put me in a martial arts hold, but we’ll come to that by an by.

I bought this book in December at the same time I bought Taekwondo Kyorugi. I don’t consider myself a martial artist, but here I am reading about martial arts whilst training in martial arts.

This book is a very high level overview of martial arts and training in them; although the author is a teacher of kung fu, he does not focus on that style. Instead, he talks at a high level about thinking about studying martial arts, choosing a style that’s right for you, choosing a school, getting your mind right, training, fighting on the street, competition sparring, and other things. But all of it is at a very high level.

Although the book said it should include things that appeal and apply to someone who is already taking martial arts, nothing in it inspired me or provided me with any new insight. I agreed with some things, but probably disagreed with more than I agreed with (because my school is a blended style and recommends practicing at home, both of which are tut-tutted in this book). Much of the content is abstract to the level of pablum. I actually got more ideas from Taekwondo Kyorugi.

And I could not for the life of me figure out what the man was doing to that nice young figure skater on the cover:

From the clenched fist, I thought it was some sort of punch defense and counter, although the open hand of the riposte with the thumb toward the ear. Which doesn’t make much sense. So I asked my kyoshi.

“It’s a kung fu arm bar,” he said, and he came out from behind the front desk of the martial arts school to put me into it. It’s not a punch defense at all, but rather a counter when someone grabs you and you want to immobilize them. The sifu is actually pressing the attackers elbow with his body and has his forearm against Elvis Stojko’s neck and is pressing back and up. Which makes a little more sense than a block and a counter strike. I don’t know if it makes for a compelling martial arts cover, but I guess the other photos were not as good.

At any rate, I finished the book. It might be helpful if you’re thinking about trying martial arts and don’t have kids in a program somewhere that also sucks in the parents like our school does. But the book reads more like a vanity project designed to elevate the author’s brand as a martial arts/fitness consultant to celebrities and sports figures in Canada around the turn of the century.

What better book to review on Super Bowl week than a book about Brady? Except I flipped through most of this last week, only finishing it this week, and the Brady in question is Matthew Brady, the mid-ninteenth century photographer, and not the football player. Other than that, it’s almost the same thing.

The book sat on my side table for flipping through during football games, but the paragraph-length text was a little too detailed for distracted browsing, and the coffee table book size made it unwieldy for the sofa. But now that I’m clearing the books from that table, I spent some dedicated time with it.

Historians spend a lot of time poring over these photos in detail, but I looked at them a little less studiously. Mostly marveling at the photographs that are 150+ years old.

I did spend a lot of time with the captions, though, more than the glances at the images themselves. As I always do when I review picture books from the Civil War, I realize how little I really know about the details of it. I could do better, as I inherited a decent collection from my beautiful wife’s uncle, and I did just buy a reading copy of Ulysses Grant’s memoirs. Perhaps I need to want to brush up enough to stack the books on a table and then, in a year or so, make it a project to read them all to get them off the table.

At any rate, back to this book: A good collection, and amazing, of course, that these are pictures. Of the Civil War.

This book is a chapbook of poetry written by an elderly woman in the twentieth century. The book itself is not dated, but one of the poems says now in ’91, and there’s a prose story that praises one of Lawson’s relatives that is dated 1998. I cannot find any information about the author or this book on the Internet, so you’ll have to trust me that it exists at all.

It’s a little like Leah Lathrom’s The Best of Wheat and a Little Chaff.

The poems are simple, faith-based lyrics with good rhythm and end rhymes. Many, if not most, of the poems end with a Bible verse that inspired the meditation. Pretty simple things, not great literature, but a pleasure to read. A couple focus on the gospel teaching of not worrying about tomorrow and being thankful for what you have today, which you know, gentle reader, is a theme I constantly try to embrace and embody, so I really enjoyed those poems the most. Also, note I enjoyed it more than the aforementioned Lathrom book.

I love buying the packets of chapbooks at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library for books like this.

It’s kind of funny: I read tourist guidebooks for places I have not visited (such as Chichen Itza), and I don’t have trouble counting them in my annual reading list. But when I read a book about a place I have been, especially when it’s the same sort of touristy guidebook but for a place that I’ve been or a tour I’ve taken, suddenly I feel guilty for counting it in my annual total. You would think, gentle reader, with all the trickery I use to pad my annual books read total, I would become inured to the pangs. Oh, but no.

Regardless, I counted this, and you get to read a bit about what I think on it.

I bought this book on our 2017 trip to Wisconsin. The book covers a boat tour of the upper Wisconsin Dells; that is, the side of the river north of the dam downtown (in 2015, I suffered the same pangs when I reviewed a guidebook for a Duck Boat tour of the lower Dells in Old Trails and Duck Tales).

As such, it recounts some of the history of the area along with some of the questionable stories told in the boat crew’s patter. It includes bits about moving lumber down the river (the last such trip was in 1890; in context, this was four years after the last Impressionist art exhibition in Paris which featured Mary Cassatt–these two events would seem to be from far different times, but they were contemporaneous), and Witch’s Glen, a narrow gorge where tourists land and walk through a very cool and very narrow canyon to a gift shop run by the boat tour company.

With many of these stories, one has to wonder how much of the history and stories are retconned to fit the places where the boat goes and how much is true. Probably most of it, but you have to take it with a grain of salt. Although I learned quite a bit about Ho Chunk history on the tour which this book refreshed. Okay, the “quite a bit” is just my saying, “That should be Ho Chunk now” when passing a Winnebago RV on the road. But still.

I’m pleased to have read this book(let) as it refreshed some memories from that trip and the stories I heard on the tour. Which makes it more resonant than some of the guidebooks/tour books I read.

This is the second of the two books I bought about Cassatt last fall (the other was entitled simply Mary Cassatt).

Of course, the book has the standard art book template: A bit of bio in the beginning and full color plates of samples of Cassatt’s work along with a couple paragraphs of text about each. It’s pleasant to revisit the works that I have most likely seen recently.

More importantly, or more notably, a couple bits from her biography stick out from this book, whether because it appears in this book and not the other I read or because I’ve new connections in knowledge that make the things stick out:

• The book plays up the relationship between Degas and Cassatt, wondering whether they had some romance that was stifled because her father did not like Degas.
• I mentioned in my book report on [John Singer] Sargent that he and Cassatt were contemporaries; this book says he got her a portrait commission on one of her trips to the United States (remember, gentle reader, this “middle class” young lady traveled and settled in Europe).
• I’ll quote the book directly:
  

  Cassatt completely rejected Matisse’s work. In a letter to Louisine Havemeyer in March 1913, she exclaimed, “If you could see his early work! Such a commonplace vision, such weak execution, he was intelligent enough to see he could never achieve fame, so shut himself up for years and evolved this and has achieved notoriety…. It is not alone in polities that anarchy reigns, it saddens me, of course it is in a certain measure our set [the Independents] which has made this [freedom] possible.

  I think the insertion of [freedom] instead of [excrement] is pro-Matisse commentary by this book’s author and not necessarily the intent of Cassatt. But I agree with her assessment (see also my report on the monograph Matisse. With this, though, Cassatt moves easily into a second-place tie with Manet in my list of favorite Impressionists.

Worth a browse, certainly, and worth the couple of bucks I paid for it at the autumn Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library Book Sale.

Side note: Interestingly, Cassatt, the nineteenth century artist died in 1926, just three years before The Iron Mask was released. They seem of two completely different eras, but history is ultimately seamless.

This is one of the two “art” books I bought for a buck last month in Osage Beach (I already read the other, Painted Treasures).

This book is not so much of a how-to project book, although there are a couple step-by-step picture sets, a couple materials lists, and text about considerations and planning, but mostly it’s photos to use as inspiration for your own mosaic projects. The book includes some client commissions that the author did, including a swimming pool that’s quite out of the reach of hobbyists, and many of the photos are variations on a theme (a sculpture flower is represented in various colors and sizes).

But it did make me want to try my hand again at mosaics. I say “again” as though I’ve ever done a serious mosaic project, but I haven’t; I did a couple in art class in school, and I did a construction paper and glue mosaic of a city skyline when doing art with my children once some years ago, but nothing serious.

Oh, and I learned from this book that they make epoxy glue guns, which I had not realized. I’ll have to get one sometime to see if it works well, or if it’s just like the syringe-like blenders that come with the blister packed epoxy at the hardware store.

At any rate, worth a browse if you’re into mosaics, especially if you can find it for a buck. Which you probably cannot, as I got the last one.

My first exposure to Baxter Black was a folksy column that ran weekly in the Republic Monitor, the weekly paper in the next town over, when I first moved to southwest Missouri. He talked about being a cowboy and humorous anecdotes about the same. However, the paper dropped the column some years ago, likely as a cost-saving move. Or perhaps Baxter retired.

Apparently, Black first became known as a cowboy poet in the 1980s, and this collection of poems and an anecdote/story or two comes from that era. They’re fun to read like Ogden Nash, but with less reliance on vernacular or funny spellings. It’s about being a cowboy and whatnot, but the topic matter doesn’t detract from the fun of it. Perhaps it adds a bit to it.

The book also features cartoonish illustrations by Don Gill and Bob Black that accompany the poems and illustrate the stories therein. They add to it.

I didn’t completely browse this book during football games because I came to a block of prose that looked like a short story, but it was really just a page of prose amid the lyrics. Still, it’s off my sofa-side table.

And if I run across more of Baxter Black in the future, I’ll be sure to pick it up.

I bought this book in October to browse during football games. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be: although this is a book of photography, it wouldn’t do for browsing during a football game because the paragraphs of captions and philosophizing about cacti are in a script typeface, which makes them hard to read. You have to follow along very carefully and can’t jump right back to a place after a football play.

And the photos include a few landscapes with cactus, but with camera and development effects/filters, especially underexposure to darken everything. But most of the photos are close-ups focusing on color and texture. Combined with the script font, this is a design book more than a photography book. Look at how pretty the book is except for the content.

So I was underwhelmed.

I was pleased with knowing who Pavlova is in this caption, though:

Rhythm, light, and balance, like Brancusi and Bach and Pavlova at once.

I know who Anna Pavlova was because I’m well read, and part of that reading is Neo.

So, meh. But it’s off the side table.

Well, those boys have done it to me again. Like Ron Burgandy finding a question mark on his teleprompter, if I find a book on the table beside the sofa, I must read it. Even if I have already read it. In this case, I read this book in 2011. The boys, you may remember, also did this when they shuffled You Can Tell You’re A Midwesterner When… into this same stack.

At any rate, the book hasn’t changed at all: It’s a collection of noteworthy news photos from the very first deguerreotype taken in Paris in 1839 to the highlights of the Carter administration. Many of the images will be familiar, as their iconic images that have generally swayed public opinion in the leftward direction.

This time through, though, perhaps because I now have little adhesive tabs for flagging things in books (I don’t write or highlight in books, much to the disappointment of my college professors who thought it important that I “dialog with the text” by writing in books that I would no longer be able to sell back to the college bookstore or to shelve and never review again unless my kids got it out and put it on my side table), I have highlit some things that are just wrong in the captions:

• In a caption to a photo of Winston Churchill, it says:
  

  England’s darkest hours were eased by Prime Minister Winstone Churchill, who promised the people “blood, sweat, and tears,” but ultimate victory.

  But Churchill did not “promise” “blood, sweat, and tears.” The actual phrase he used in his speech to the House of Commons was:

  I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

  He offered/promised his blood, toil, tears, and sweat–not the listeners’ or just generic bodily fluids.

• About Super Bowl III:
  

  The 1969 Super Bowl was “Broadway Joe’s” best year, and he played brilliantly–leading the Jets to a 16-7 victory over the Baltimore Colts. For the National Football League, it was their first Super Bowl win.

  Sweet Christmas, knowledgeable football fans, even those who have not read a book about that very Super Bowl in the last six months (Countdown to Super Bowl in August) know that the Jets are in the American Football Conference–then the American Football League, and it was that conference’s first Super Bowl victory since the Green Bay Packers won the first two.

When I read trivia books and run across a fact that I know is not true (often planted by the authors/publishers to spot people who use the questions in violation of copyright), I have to doubt everything I read in the book that I don’t already know.

Even in a collection of “news” photos published in 1980, I have to do the same.

This volume is part of a series called Visual Geography Series which includes a number of foreign countries and Alaska and Hawaii. It’s got a color cover, but the interior photographs and maps are in black and white. It’s the second printing, though, so someone bought them.

The book includes sections on the geography, history and government, the people, and industry. In 1966, the country was coming back from the beating it took in World War II, so the industry was relatively fresh, and the people were proud to be reclaiming land from the sea and terraforming their little corner of Europe.

Of course, in the 1960s, the Mackle brothers were doing something similar to Marco Island, Florida. I wonder if the Dutch ran into the same problems, or how Holland has changed in the interim. One expects that the chapter on The People would be very different in the 21st century, but perhaps the text would be the same although the truth might be different indeed.

You know, I would not have minded seeing this Holland. My mother-in-law worked up a geneological study on my Noggle line for Christmas the year before last, and she gave me a calendar of Holland photos as apparently I have deep Dutch roots. I’ve read books set in Holland, including The Fall and Vendetta in Venice (well, partly). So it would have been a nice place to visit.

Although news in recent years leads me to believe that it’s more likely that I’ll travel to Europe as part of an expeditionary force than for fun. But, I guess, time will tell.

Apparently, I already read this book in 2012. I will leave it for you to speculate, gentle reader, whether I bought a second copy of the book or if one of my children took it from my already-read shelves, browsed it, and left it on the side table where I leave books to browse while watching football. Either one would explain how I came to read this book again during a football game this weekend, but to resolve it truly would probably involve me organizing my read shelves which were briefly organized when I first moved to Nogglestead and had a lot of book shelf room relative to the books I owned, but that time has passed.

At any rate, to recap, again: It’s a collection of “Midwestern” sayings, sometimes in vernacular that isn’t necessarily this part of the Midwest or Wisconsin or Minnesota, accompanied by clip art. I said in 2012:

They skew a little northern Midwest than Missouri, and they’re about small town living more than big city quips. A couple of them ring true, with a deeper understanding and statement of small town America than others.

Still true, although perhaps even more true from my current perspective than they had been when I was young in those days, a mere pup of forty.

I mentioned I was reading this book, and now I have completed it.

As I said last week:

I hate to get ahead of my book report here, but it tells stories of famous people from the 1920s to the 1950s and where they are now (in the case of this, the second book, it’s 1968). I mean, these are mostly B and C celebrities from the era, movie and theater stars and athletes who had a brief run at the top. By 2019, one would ask “Who were these people in the first place?”

I find it very interesting because it’s showing that there’s nothing new under the sun. Many of these people have story arcs that match modern celebrities, with multiple divorces and different attempts to come back into the spotlight. But we in the twenty-frst century think we invented all of this stuff, and so many of these people have done it before.

I could stand pretty much on that as my book report, honestly. But the book was more compelling than that: it told me of a world, particularly an entertainment world, that one only glimpses sometimes in Lileks’ work. I recognized very few of the actors and actresses listed, and I recognized almost none of the movies or television programs they starred in. And I fancy myself something of a fan of old black-and-white films. So I’ve resolved to watch at the very least the ones I have in my catalog.

I learned a little more about stars from television programs I barely remember from my childhood (The Bowery Boys’ Leo Gorcey, Our Gang‘s Darla Hood) and the circumstances under which the shows were filmed. (Hey, did you realize that the new The Little Rascals film is twenty-five years old this year? Where are they now?)

I also want to postulate that the old studio system made the rags-to-riches-to-modest living storyline that appears over and over in this book possible, but that would be a facile assertion easily disproven by the A Different World star works at Trader Joe’s thing. So I guess it’s more human nature than anything else; the real story is that stars of our yesterday had more money to blow in their heydey before they came back down to earth (although maybe not Geoffrey Owens).

I also want to postulate that cable television (and now streaming outlets), the Internet, and reality television shows have made it so that actors and celebrities who don’t want to fade away or return to obscurity instead can just keep plugging along at substinence level (both monetarily and in ego gratification) almost indefinitely, and plastic surgery can ensure that they continue to look young or plastic until they die. But that’s a lot of thesis to defend based on 102 brief celebrity profiles from fifty(!) years ago and my own curmudgeonly nature.

So I’ll spare you the postulates.

At any rate, I hope I can remember some of the trivia that I’ve learned in this book (Morton Downey, Sr., was a singer and radio personality; the only man to win two Oscars for the same role was Harold Russell for his role in The Best Years of Our Lives). At the very least, I’ll get a couple blog posts out of it.

Apparently, this book is part of a series that ran for over a decade and ten or more volumes in those days before the Internet. If I come across them in the wild, I’ll surely pick them up, although I wouldn’t be eager to read a whole bunch of them in a row.

This book has all the hallmarks of a tourist pickup book: It’s thin but it’s large, which makes it a good size for pictures, and it has a narrow scope.

This particular book tells the story of man born in the 1870s in Kentucky who goes west when he comes of age, does a little prospecting in Death Valley, but really makes a name and a spectacle of himself when he gets people with a little money back east to give him cash for partnership in a mine that doesn’t exist. He then goes back to California and spends the money profligately, claiming he’s spending his wealth from the gold mine. He gets someone to stake him the money to rent a train from California to Chicago to set the time record for it, claiming that he has rented the train on a whim, and when the train does set the record, he lives off of the celebrity for a while before returning to California.

The book, and the tourist site it promotes, comes from a wealthy Chicago man who starts out as one of Scotty’s marks but comes to realize what Scotty is. The wealthy man continues to fund Scotty for his own amusement and travels to Death Valley to hike and ride with the colorful Death Valley Scotty. The wealthy patron starts to build a place to store his equipment when he travels back to Chicago, and starts to build a home for Scotty, but it morphs into a large undertaking not unlike Hearst Castle. Although The Castle or Scotty’s Castle (which Scotty, of course, told everyone he was building, while the patron played the part of his Chicago banker) was not completed before the Depression stripped the patron of his fun-in-Death-Valley money evaporated, it did grow into a tourist attraction.

An interesting story about a colorful, small-time con man who got into headlines. Too little to be found on a trivia night, but a nice quick read nevertheless.

I don’t really consider myself a martial artist, even though I have studied at a Satori martial arts school for five years and have considered trying out another martial art style “for fun.” I mean, some of the people who study with me are at the school three or four days a week, take teaching positions, and are really into it. I just show up from time to time and punch things.

The Satori school is based on tae kwon do (with additional focus on boxing and some elements from other martial arts styles like muy thai and hapkido), so I bought this book last month as part of my program of helping to reduce the difficulty of ABC Books’ annual inventory. As part of my “Man, The Count of Monte Cristo Is Long And Boring” program, I picked this book up pretty quickly as I expected it would be a pretty quick browse.

It was.

The book focuses on competitive tae kwon do sparring according to World Taekwondo Foundation rules, which I expect the Olympics uses as the book is written by an Olympian and has “Olympic” right in the subtitle. The book shows the strikes in tae kwon do, which is kick-focused, but it only identifies the strikes and does not give step-by-step directions that other guidebooks like the ones I checked out when I was a small, picked-upon kid in the 1980s, do.

It outlines a training program for the competitive sparrer, including basically bulleted lists of techniques and combinations to pracice, stretches and exercises to work on, and that sort of thing. The book talks a bit about strategy in sparring and includes the official procedures and rules for WTF (World Taekwondo Foundation, remember) tournaments, particularly international competitions.

It gave me a couple of ideas for combinations to try and the urge to work harder at home on my exercise, stretching, and practice. So it was certainly worth my time. And it makes it harder to deny some bit of being a martial artist in me if I insist upon reading books on martial arts (I’m not sure if Hagakure counts).