Reader's Link

 SCPL Staff Picks...           

Thursday, March 18, 2010
Saluki hippies

Title: ...In the highlands since time immemorial
By: Joanna Ostrow

The drawback to reading and loving Joanna Ostrow’s lovely, quirky first novel is the letdown when you discover that this is all you’ll get. No, Ostrow didn’t die young or suffer a public meltdown; following the considerable success of ...In the highlands she talked about working on a second book, but never delivered it. By all accounts, she has led a perfectly fine life without publishing the second novel for which many readers (to say nothing of her publishers) yearned. But don’t let that stop you from relishing this unique treat

Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Simulacrums and Secret Agents

Title: Atmospheric Disturbances
By: Rivka Galchen

When psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein’s beloved wife, Rema, is replaced by a double, Leo sets off on a journey to find the real Rema. His search takes him to Buenos Aires, then Patagonia, as Leo considers all physical and metaphysical possibilities for her disappearance. In his desperation, Leo seeks the help of long-time psychiatric patient, Harvey, whose periodic disappearances are purportedly due to covert scientific missions, as well as the online guidance of Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, a scientist and secret agent of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, who is an expert in parallel universes. When Leo discovers that Gal-Chen may have died some years previous, he puzzles over Gal-Chen’s ability to communicate via email. Leo may be off his rocker, yet, there is something oddly compelling and familiar in Leo's attempts to set his life, and perceptions, straight.

This is an inventive first novel by a talented physician turned author, a graduate from the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, whose specialty was psychiatry. Interspersed with the text are the author's family photos--the author's father was, in real life, a meteorologist named Tzvi Galchen. I was taken with the quirky characters, including the lovely imposter-Rema, and heartily enjoyed participating in Leo's somewhat ludicrous flight through time and space in hopes of discovering the truth regarding Rema's whereabouts.

Monday, March 1, 2010
Gone But Not Forgotten

Title: Davenport Cement Centennial
By: Alverda Orlando & Robert Piwarzyk

Librarian Alverda Orlando has been an authoritative historian on Davenport, California for decades. This is the first time she has collaborated with Robert Piwarzyk, a limestone expert/engineer, to compile a complete history of Davenport Cement Plant, one of the few cement plants existing in California. It will be of even more significance in light of reports of the plant's permanent shutdown.

Unlike some books devoted to company history, Davenport Cement centennial is focused on a single and simple point: how events evolved as a continuing history. It narrates how the plant was conceived in 1903, as William Dingee, owner of the Standard Portland Cement Company, saw the potential of the significant limestone and shale deposits of Ben Lomond Mountains. Together with his partner Irving Buchman, he purchased a property 12 miles northwest of the city of Santa Cruz, to erect the second largest cement plant in the nation. Just a few months after the construction in 1905 of Santa Cruz Portland Cement Company plant and quarry, San Francisco was hit by earthquake and subsequent fire. This historical backdrop has predestined the fate of the Davenport plant ever since. To respond to the sudden overwhelming demand for cement and concrete, the construction of the Davenport plant was completed one year ahead of schedule. In late 1906, the plant started its limited operations. By 1910, its annual production rose from 560,000 barrels of cement to 1.4 million barrels, until World War II. With the years gone by, the importance of Davenport cement has by no means been diminished. On the contrary, its presence has been felt throughout the state of California, from San Francisco War Memorial Opera House (1932) to Golden Gate Bridge (1937), from Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to Oakland-Alameda Coliseum (1966), and from Stanford Medical Center to the expansion of San Francisco International Airport, not to mention countless private homes built in California's cities and suburbs which used Davenport cement for their foundations.

For specialized readers, Davenport Cement centennial is an interesting read. It narrates a century of cement innovation by showing how limestone was obtained from the quarry, what raw mill process was involved: homogenizing raw material, calcinations in the kiln and then finish mill, and finally transportation: how cement was shipped. However, the book does not dwell exclusively on technology, but also focuses on the community behind the plant: the people who made natural resources and technologies work, and their small but complete society. The Davenport residents and cement plant workers built St. Vincent de Paul's in 1915, Crocker Hospital in 1910, a one-cell prison, and the one-room Pacific School.

Monday, February 22, 2010
Carnaby Street crime

Title: Send a Fax to the Kasbah
By: Dorothy Dunnett

Read this before all of our Johnson Johnson mysteries disappear from our shelves -- and then hunt down the others. Better known for her bestselling historical fiction, Dunnett relaxed between sagas by producing seven witty mysteries that a perceptive reader characterized as "pure Carnaby Street." (Think Britain, Beatles, miniskirts...) Send a fax to the Kasbah (UK title: Moroccan traffic) is the final entry in the series, but a delicious entrée. See this Wikipedia article for a chronological list of the series, including both UK and US titles.

Sunday, February 14, 2010
This House of Sky

Title: This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
By: Ivan Doig

Doig captures a dramatic time in the history of his people settling the wilds of Montana, where growing up, he coped with the death of his mother and relied upon the hard-scrabble genius of his father. "My father had a humor unusual in a tense man, a casual gift of storying which paid no attention to the nerves twanging away in him. This may account for the way people sometimes have talked to me of him as if Charlie Doig were two separate men." The storyteller and the rancher were just two pieces of him. Doig saw his father so clearly that he and the world around him jump off the page, "...I somehow see my father in different sizes at once--the box-jawed man so far above me as a boy, the banty of a fellow beside me when I had grown." The relationships that grew here and the people that shaped the country and this author who grew up to teach and write are shaped with brilliant word pictures, so alive they beg to be sketched.

View previous staff picks >>