Savoring Great Books with a Dying Parent

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Longtime book world friend Will Schwalbe published a lovely Op-Ed on Mother’s Day, drawn from his forthcoming The End of Your Life Book Club. It opens with Will and his ailing mother in a medical office awaiting a chemotherapy appointment. He asks her what she’s reading–it’s Wallace Stegner’s aptly titled Crossing To Safety. “It was a book that I’d always pretended to have read, but never actually had. That day, I promised her I’d read it.” Soon, over the months of treatment and convalescence until her passing, they find mutual comfort in discussing the books they are reading in a kind personal book club all their own.

It’s touching story, and as I read the column I found myself in Will’s place, glad for the solace provided by these books and the opportunity for closeness shared reading offered them.

Having operated a family-owned bookstore–Undercover Books in Cleveland, Ohio–and later losing both my parents, Earl and Sylvia, and my brother Joel, I look back on all the books we shared and enjoyed over the years. I just have to look at my home library and dozens of memories and conversations come cascading forth, from the novels alone: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; Peter Rushforth’s, Kindergarten; Jack Finney’s Time and Again; Mary Tirone-Smith’s The Book of Phoebe; James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss; Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances; Philip Kerr’s March Violets; Ernest Hebert’s Dogs of March. This list could go on indefinitely.

Will’s new book will be out in the fall. I’m eager to read it.


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The Brooklyn Folk Festival, May 18-20

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There’s a terrific music festival coming up in downtown Brooklyn this weekend, the Brooklyn Folk Festival, and I’m planning to take in some of the festivities with my wife and son. Highlights include a special observance on Friday night marking the 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie; workshops on singing, banjo and mandolin; and performances by Peter Stampfel (ex- of the Holy Modal Rounders) and the Ether Frolic Mob, and by the Wretched Refuse String Band. It takes place Friday night, and begins at noon on Saturday and Sunday, stretching late into the nights. These two videos, with performances by Jerron Paxton and Clifton Hicks are highlights from last year’s program. This is going to be the fourth rendition of the festival, and every year they’ve had stellar line-ups. This year festival director Eli Smith has arranged for more than thirty acts over the three days, plus film screenings and appearances by authors of such books as Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. I hope to see you there.

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Results in for Goodreads Independent Book Blogger Awards

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I’m happy to announce that The Great Gray Bridge was in the end a finalist in Goodreads’ Independent Book Blogger Awards, in the Publishing Industry category. While this result is extremely gratifying, alas, it was not the winner. I want to thank the hundreds of readers who voted for this blog, and who helped make it a finalist, and after only six months of publication. Full results may be found here via this link on the Goodreads site, which includes the names of the winners in each of the four categories, and all fifteen finalists in each category who did not win. I’m grateful they held the contest and appreciative that I was able to enter my blog in it. I know it’s brought more readers to this site and I’m thankful for that.

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Imaginary Cities, Embarking on a US Tour

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Readers of this blog may recall how partial I am to Imaginary Cities, a great band from Winnipeg, Canada. They are a five-piece outfit with Marti Sabit providing soaring lead vocals, Rusty Matyas on tasty lead guitar and trumpet, David Landreth on a great thumping bass, Ryan Voth connecting on drums, and Alex Campbell sweetening things up on keyboard. In April I had gone to the release party for their album “Temporary Resident” and had a great talk that night with Marti and Rusty. They were back in town this week, at Mercury Lounge, and I went out to hear them. Again, they played a great show and seemed to really connect with the good-sized Tuesday night crowd. For a full review of their performance style and striving songs, you may read the post I put up after the release party, at this link. For today, here are details on their current US tour, which tonight, May 17, will have them in Washington, D.C. at a club called Black Cat, continuing to such venues as Maxwell’s in  Hoboken, near NYC on June 15, capping off at Lollapalooza in Chicago in August.  Info on the tour is at this link, and below is a chart showing the cities where they’re playing on this tour and photos from this week’s show. // click through to full post for full tour schedule and photos

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Horst Faas–Brave and Brilliant Photojournalist, 1933-2012

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Horst Faas, the great photojournalist who covered conflicts in Bangla Desh, the Congo, and most famously Vietnam, died last week at age 79. In the 1960s he was a colleague to David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, among other notable reporters and correspondents. Faas’s longtime Associated Press colleague Richard Pyle has written the AP’s obituary and a personal remembrance of his dear friend and colleague, both of which are posted on the New York Times‘s superb Lens blog. With warmth and affection Pyle calls this period of his life “The Story That Never Ends.” His personal essay includes an account of the final reporting trip the two friends made together, in 1998, searching for the remains of four  photographers–Larry Burrows of Life magazine, Kent Potter of United Press International, Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek, and Henri Huet of Associated Press–all of whom were aboard a helicopter over Laos that crashed in 1971. In 2004 as co-authors the two published, Lost in Laos: A True Story of Tragedy, Mystery, and Friendship, their book on this incident and its aftermath. All photos for this post are credited to Horst Faas and/or the AP, gratefully borrowed for reproduction here so my readers can see Faas’s genius and his empathy, before seeing even more of his work via the key links to Pyle’s obituary and his personal remembrance. Click through to full post for all photos / / more . . .

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Danger from NYC Trees, Part II

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May 16 Update: Turns out the NY Times article on Monday “Neglected, Rotting Trees Turn Deadly” was only the first of three this week on the dangers posed by inadequate maintenance of the city’s trees. The others are Ailing Trees Sound a Warning Before Falling and Suits Over Tree Injuries Show City’s Aggressive Legal Tactics. The first of these documents how the falling limbs and trees that have gravely injured people showed early signs of decay and arboreal ill health, while the second demonstrates that lawyers for the city don’t hesitate to play hardball in handling the legal cases of people for whom the city’s failure to tend to sick trees has led to grievous harm. Surveilling a woman who spent four months in the hospital after a hollow limb from a tree smashed into her? The city did it. This is appalling. We’d all be better off if this great wooded city spent its resources tending to our trees before they harm innocent New Yorkers.
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Readers may recall a recent post of mine about seeing tree pruners at work in my neighborhood and in nearby Riverside Park. I noticed and wrote about them, in part, because of incidents over the past couple years when a number of people have been seriously injured, even killed, by falling limbs. Today, the Times has a lengthy and disturbing article, Neglected, Rotting Trees Turn Deadly, on how slashed city budgets for tree care have led to more danger for pedestrians, cyclists, and people just trying to enjoy a bit of the pastoral amid all our urban activity. The pity is that there are known, empirical methods for establishing the health of city trees, but too often city and parks workers are not trained to detect them. The city ends up paying large awards to the injured and/or their survivors, with lives ruined or lost, and costing the city millions of dollars anyway. In one instance, parks workers were focused on trimming trees along the route of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, then four months off, only to fail in removing a Central Park tree that had already lost one limb in what turned out to be a tragic foreshadowing of the serious maiming of a New Yorker.

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My Parents in 1948, about a Year after their Wedding

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My now sadly gone parents–Earl Turner beaming and his pretty wife Sylvia Shiff Turner, with a gardenia in her hair. They were on a trip in June 1948 from Cleveland, to Niagara Falls and Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada, and to Detroit. The Turners liked Canada even then. Happy Mothers Day!

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Prizing Great Advocacy Journalism at the Hillman Awards

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“We want a better America.” These were the first words printed in the program of the 62nd annual Hillman Prizes. Reading them I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance, for only a few days earlier Mitt Romney had uttered something similar at a campaign rally: “A better America begins tonight.” However, the words in the program were spoken in 1946 by Sidney Hillman, a very different public figure than the presidential candidate, who had a very different public agenda than the quarter-billionaire politician. Hillman was President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and he spoke them a couple months before his untimely death at age 59. The foundation that was later started in his honor has been giving out prizes for the best in advocacy journalism since 1950. Winners in previous years have included Murray Kempton, Bill Moyers, Spike Lee, Maria Hinojosa, and Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer.

The latest rendition of the awards was held, fittingly, on May Day. I had been invited to attend by Tom Watson of causewired.com who asked more than a dozen bloggers to be part of a guest blogging contingent for this event at the New York Times Center. We were seated with a prime view of the presenters and recipients, with access to wifi so we could live tweet the proceedings. I emerged a few hours later, fired up and rededicated to the proposition that dedicated reporters, photographers, broadcasters, and authors really do make a difference in people’s lives.

The evening kicked off with remarks by Bruce Raynor, President of the Hillman Foundation, who observed that while New York Times columnist David Brooks has over the past few years been naming recipient of his “Sidney” awards, named in honor of conservative thinker Sidney Hook, the Hillmans have been giving out their “Sidney awards” for decades, and I promptly tweeted that we were at the “progressive Sidneys.” Here’s a rundown on the honorees, with takeaways from the speeches, and photos from the evening, reproduced here from notes and partial audio tape. Corrections welcome, please excuse any errors or omission; for further information, this link will take you directly to the Hillman Prize website. Click on this link to read about all the honorees and view lots more photos. // more. . .

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