Friday Fiction: Walter Mosley

--by Hanje Richards

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Walter Mosley was born in, Watts, Los Angeles, in 1952. He was an only child whose mother was a personnel clerk and whose father was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school. Mosley attended and then dropped out of one liberal arts college in Vermont and then earned a political science degree at another. Abandoning a doctorate in political theory, he started work in computers. While working for Mobil Oil, Mosley took a writing course at City College in Harlem. One of his tutors there, Edna O'Brien, became a mentor to him and encouraged him.

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Mosley started writing at 34 and has written every day since, penning more than 33 books in a variety of categories, including non-mystery fiction, Afro-futurist science fiction and non-fiction politics, often publishing two books a year. His work has been translated into 21 languages. His direct inspirations include the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, and Raymond Chandler. Mosley made publishing history in 1997 by foregoing an advance to give the manuscript of Gone Fishin' to a small, independent publisher, Black Classic Press in Baltimore, run by former Black Panther Paul Coates. Mosley's fame increased in 1992 when then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton, a fan of murder mysteries, named Mosley as one of his favorite authors.

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Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned - Socrates Fortlow has done his time: twenty-seven years for murder and rape, acts forged by his huge, rock-breaking hands. Now, he has come home to a new kind of prison: two battered rooms in an abandoned building in Watts. Working for the Bounty supermarket, and moving perilously close to invisibility, it is Socrates who throws a lifeline to a drowning man: young Darryl, whose shaky path is already bloodstained and fearsome. In a place of violence and hopelessness, Socrates offers up his own battle-scarred wisdom that can turn the world around.

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Bad Boy Brawly Brown - Easy Rawlins is out of the investigation business. But living around desperate men means life gets complicated sometimes. When an old friend gets in enough trouble to ask for Easy's help, he finds he can't refuse.

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Young Brawly Brown has traded in his family for The Clan of the First Men, a group rejecting white leadership, history, and laws – and they're dangerous. Brown's mom, Alva, needs to know her baby's okay, and Easy promises to find him. It takes everything Easy has just to stay alive as he explores a world filled with promises, betrayals, and predators like he never imagined.

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Black Betty - Mosley's distinctive black investigator, Easy Rawlins, has moved from Watts to West L.A. with his two adopted children, but trouble still follows him. Hired to locate a sultry female acquaintance from his early days in Houston, Easy searches for her gambler brother and questions her Beverly Hills employer, unwittingly provoking racist police harassment. Meanwhile, friend Raymond ("Mouse") has been released from prison and vows revenge on the snitch who put him there. Mosley, as usual, describes a historically correct ethos in deft, literate prose.

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Blonde Faith - Easy Rawlins comes home from work and finds more trouble on his doorstep in a day than most men encounter in a lifetime.

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A friend has left his daughter at Easy's house without so much as a note. Clearly this friend, Christmas Black, a veteran of Vietnam, fears for his life and his daughter's.

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Easy's closest friend, the man known as Mouse, has disappeared too – and his wife tells Easy that he is wanted for murder. Mouse has been a thorn in the police's side for so long that Easy is convinced that this time they will kill him as soon as they find him.

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Worst of all, Easy's longtime lover tells him that she plans to marry another man. In a world of hurt, Easy strikes out on his own to try to find one friend, save another, and save himself from the pain that is driving him out of his mind. On his path he meets drug dealers, corrupt officials, every manner of criminal and con – and a woman named Faith who may hold the key to more than one life.

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Cinnamon Kiss - It is the Summer of Love and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armored car. It's farther outside the law than Easy has ever traveled, but his daughter, Feather, needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend, Mouse, tells him it's a cinch. Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers him a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric, prominent attorney. An assistant, of sorts, the beautiful Cinnamon Cargill is gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told... Robert Lee, his new employer, is a suspect in the attorney's disappearance. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory, from the newfound hippie enclaves to a vicious plot that stretches back to the battlefields of Europe.

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Devil in a Blue Dress - Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs...

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Diablerie - Mosley probes the human condition through Ben Dibbuk, a black man whose name evokes the dybbuk of Jewish folklore. A 47-year-old computer programmer for a New York City bank, Dibbuk is married to Mona, the editor of a new cutting-edge magazine, Diablerie, which can mean either mischievous or evil. He has a daughter at NYU and a 21-year-old Russian mistress whose apartment and graduate school tuition he pays for. Then a woman he doesn't remember threatens to shatter the shell Dibbuk has built to protect himself from his troubled, alcoholic past. When Dibbuk discovers Mona is having him investigated, he realizes he risks being charged for a murder he can't remember but may have committed. As Dibbuk struggles to escape the emotional vacuum of his life, he may not be free to enjoy his reawakening.

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Fear Itself - Paris Minton doesn't want any trouble. He minds his used bookstore and his own business. But in 1950s Los Angeles, sometimes trouble finds him, no matter how hard he tries to avoid it. When the nephew of the wealthiest woman in L.A. is missing and wanted for murder, she has to get involved – no matter if she can't stand him. What will her church think? She hires Jefferson T. Hill, to track him down and prove his innocence. When Hill goes missing too, she tricks his friend Fearless Jones and Paris Minton into picking up the case. Paris steps inside the world of the black bourgeoisie, and it turns out to be filled with deceit and corruption.

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Fear of the Dark - When his cousin Ulysses S. Grant IV comes knocking, Paris Minton would rather keep the door shut, because "Useless" is a snake who brings bad luck wherever he goes. But trouble always finds an open window, and soon there's a man murdered on his bookshop floor, evidence of blackmail is discovered, and Useless has vanished. To get out of this mess, Paris turns to his solid-hearted but quick-fisted friend Fearless Jones. Traversing the complex landscape of 1950s Los Angeles, where a wrong look can get a black man killed, Paris and Fearless find desperate women, secret lives –and more than one dead body.

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Fearless Jones - Set in the deadly back alleys of 1950s L.A.... Bookshop owner Paris Minton is minding his own business when a brief encounter with a beautiful stranger gets him beaten, shot at, robbed, and then burned out of store and home. Paris needs help but his secret weapon – brave, reckless WWII hero Fearless Jones – is in jail. Vowing to dish out some heavy justice, Paris plots to get Jones back on the street. But when these two men come together, they'll find themselves trapped in a bewildering vortex of sex, money, and murder – and a dicey endgame that's littered with dangerous players...

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Fortunate Son - In spite of remarkable differences, Tommy and Eric are as close as brothers. Tommy, a delicate black boy, is cursed with health problems and drawn to trouble more often than not. Eric is a Nordic Adonis, graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune. When tragedy rips their makeshift family apart, the two boys are set on courses that diverge astonishingly. In a riveting tale of resilience and redemption that traces their parallel lives, Tommy and Eric ultimately reunite after years apart and draw on their childhood bond as they confront together the forces that threaten to destroy them.

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Gone Fishin’ - In the beginning... there was Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander – two young men setting out in life, hitting the road in a "borrowed" '36 Ford headed for Pariah, Texas. The volatile Mouse wants to retrieve money from his stepfather so he can marry his EttaMae. But on their steamy bayou excursion, Mouse will choose murder as a way out, while Easy's past liaison with EttaMae floats precariously in his memory. Easy and Mouse are coming of age – and everything they ever knew about friendship & about themselves is coming apart at the seams...

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Killing Johnny Fray: A Sexistential Novel - When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. He wants revenge, but also something more. Killing Johnny Fry is the story of Cordell’s dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. It will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for granted – and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when these rules are removed.

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Known to Evil - Leonid McGill is still fighting to stick to his reformed ways while the world around him pulls him in every other direction. He has split up with his girlfriend, Aura, because his new self won't let him leave his wife – but then Aura's new boyfriend starts angling to get Leonid kicked out of his prime, top-of-the-skyscraper office space. Meanwhile, one of his sons seems to have found true love – but the girl has a shady past that's all of sudden threatening the whole McGill family – and his other son, the charming rogue Twilliam, is doing nothing but enabling the crisis.

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Meanwhile, Alfonse Rinaldo, the mysterious power-behind- the-throne at City Hall, the fixer, has a problem that even he can't fix – and he's come to Leonid for help. It seems a young woman has disappeared, leaving murder in her wake, and it means everything to Rinaldo to track her down. But he won't tell McGill his motives, which doesn't quite square with the new company policy – but turning down Rinaldo is almost impossible to even contemplate.

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Little Yellow Dog - November 1963: Easy's settled into a steady gig as a school custodian. It's a quiet, simple existence – but a few moments of ecstasy with a sexy teacher will change all that. When the lady vanishes, Easy's stuck with a couple of corpses, the cops on his back, and a little yellow dog who's nobody's best friend. With his not-so-simple past snapping at his heels, and with enemies old and new looking to get even, Easy must kiss his careful little life good-bye – and step closer to the edge...

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Little Scarlet - At the height of the riots that cripple LA in the summer of 1965, a white man is pulled from his car by a mob and escapes into a nearby apartment building. Soon afterward, a red-headed woman known as Little Scarlet is found dead in that apartment building – and the fleeing man is the obvious suspect. The police ask Easy Rawlins to investigate. What he finds is a killer whose rage, like that which burned the city for weeks, is intrinsically woven around race and passion. Rawlins's hunt for the killer will reveal a new city emerging from the ashes – and a new life for Easy and his friends.

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The Long Fall - His name is etched on the door of his Manhattan office: LEONID McGILL, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. Ex-boxer, hard drinker, in a business that trades mostly in cash and favors: McGill’s an old-school P.I. working a city that’s gotten fancy all around him. But like the city itself, McGill is turning over a new leaf, “decided to go from crooked to slightly bent.”

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New York City in the twenty-first century is a city full of secrets – and still a place that reacts when you know where to poke and which string to pull. That’s exactly the kind of thing Leonid McGill knows how to do. As soon as The Long Fall begins, with McGill calling in old markers and greasing NYPD palms to unearth some seemingly harmless information for a high-paying client, he learns that even in this cleaned-up city, his commitment to the straight and narrow is going to be constantly tested.

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The Man In My Basement - Charles Blakey is a young black man who can't find a job, drinks too much, and, worst of all, stands to lose the beautiful home that has belonged to his family for generations. Charles's fortunes take an odd turn when a stranger offers nearly $50,000 to rent out Charles's basement – and soon, as the boarder transforms the basement into a prison cell, Charles finds himself drawn into circumstances almost unimaginably bizarre and profoundly unsettling.

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The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow - Living in south central L.A., Socrates Fortlow is a sixty-year-old ex-convict still strong enough to kill men with his bare hands. Filled with profound guilt about his own crimes and disheartened by the chaos of the streets, Socrates calls together local people of all races and social stations and begins to conduct a Thinkers’ Club, where all can discuss life’s unanswerable questions.
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Infiltrated by undercover cops and threatened by strain from within, the Thinkers’ Club doesn’t have it easy. But simply by debating racial authenticity, street justice, and the possibility of mutual understanding, Socrates and his unlikely crew actually begin to make a difference.

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RL’s Dream - Recounting his memories to a young white woman who is also a refugee from a painful Southern past, Soupspoon Wise, a dying blues performer, describes a brief encounter with a famous performer that still haunts him.

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This Year You Write Your Novel - No more excuses. "Let the lawn get shaggy and the paint peel from the walls," bestselling novelist Walter Mosley advises. Anyone can write a novel now, and in this essential book of tips, practical advice, and wisdom, Walter Mosley promises that the writer-in-waiting can finish it in one year. Mosley tells how to:

..- Create a daily writing regimen to fit any writer's needs – & stick to it

..- Determine the narrative voice that's right for every writer's style

..- Get past those first challenging sentences & into the heart of a story

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Walkin’ the Dog - Socrates Fortlow is a former jailbird doing his best to go straight in a seamy Los Angeles full of temptation, and the novel is an examination, as powerfully relaxed as Socrates himself, of how his life works. He lives in a tiny shack in a back alley in Watts, tries to stay out of the way of the ever-suspicious cops, does a little loving (the cheerful sensuality of Mosley's writing about sex strikes exactly the right note), unwittingly acts as a role model for an unhappy teenager, and eventually becomes a national symbol for his placard-wielding protest against police brutality. Where some writers would make this the pivot of their plot, it is no more than incidental to this tale, as Socrates continues to go on his quiet, unostentatious way until the fuss dies down.

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Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Contemplating Our Chains at the End of the Millenium - Slavery was outlawed in this country more than a century ago, but Americans still wear chains. Each one of us, black and white alike, is shackled by a system that values money over humanity, power over truth, conformity over creativity. Race has undeniably made the problem worse, but race is not the root of the problem. Indeed, as black novelist and activist Walter Mosley brilliantly argues in this impassioned call to arms, though the chains might be more recognizable in the lives of blacks, the same chains restrain us all. Only when we understand this truth can we begin, black and white together, to cast off the shackles.

I Just Listened To… Her Fearful Symmetry

--by Hanje Richards
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Although I enjoyed Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry on CD, the Copper Queen Library has it available both on CD and in hardcover. A bit surprising for one (me) who is usually all about the science and the logical, this was a ghost story that I appreciated. This novel was written by the author of Time Traveler’s Wife, another book that plays with supernatural themes, and another book that I liked a lot.
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When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt, only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and that Elspeth was her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers – with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.
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The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery in London. They come to know the building's other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Marjike, Martin's devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt's neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including – perhaps – their aunt, who can't seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.
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Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life – even after death.
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If this is not a complete contradiction in terms, if you are looking for a well written, literary ghost story, with lots of twists and turns, then this might be just what you are looking for.
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Remember, using the library is always a green choice.
Happy Earth Day – 40th Anniversary.

Spotlight On – The Isabell McGregor Durrenberger Memorial Collection (Part 3)

The Copper Queen Library recently added several titles related to birds and birding to our collections through the generous donations of the family and friends of Isabell McGregor Durrenberger, a long-time local resident with an abiding interest in birds and nature, and the additional assistance of the Friends of the Copper Queen Library.
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Two previous posts highlighted the audiobook, DVD, and children's titles acquired as part of this collection, as well as some of the titles purchased for adults. This post (featuring “Books for Adults, Part 2”) will showcase the remaining titles purchased for adult readers.

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BOOKS FOR ADULTS (Part 2)

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National Geographic Birding Essentials (Jonathan Alderfer)
Birding is the fastest growing wildlife-related outdoor activity in the US, with at least a million new birders a year estimated to join an already robust group some 80 million strong. For these beginning and intermediate enthusiasts, this book teaches readers how to begin and improve their birding... what to look and listen for... and how to make sense of what they see and hear. A unique visual component shows actual field guide pages and how to read them, while another compares the same bird in photography versus artwork and explains how to use both for species identification. National Geographic's quality photography is a major highlight of the book, supplemented by pencil drawings and full-color maps to give the novice and intermediate birder a full range of visual information.
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Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding (Scott Weidensaul)
Weidensaul, author of four other works of natural history, chronicles the origins of American birding. We meet Alexander Wilson, who came to the U.S. from Scotland in 1794 and published a book illustrating all the birds to be found in this country; John James Audubon, famous author of Birds of America; Spencer Fullerton Baird, who created the National Museum of Natural History; Florence Merriam, the author of Birds through an Opera Glass (1889); George Grinnell, who created the first Audubon Society in 1886; Mabel Osgood Wright, the author of best-selling books on birds and the founder of the Connecticut Audubon chapter; and David Sibley, who has written the most successful field guide since Roger Tory Peterson's.

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Peterson Field Guide to Birds of Western North America (4th ed.) (Roger Tory Peterson)
With all-new range maps, updated text, and 40 new paintings, this completely revised edition is sure to be a valuable addition to any birder's pocket or daypack. At a trim size of 5 x 8, it’s portable, but also beautifully illustrated. The photographs – while modern-looking and colorful – capture just one moment in time. The paintings, however, show all of a bird's key field marks and use the Peterson Identification System to make bird identification easier for beginning and intermediate bird watchers. A team of professional birders has updated the text, the maps, and the art, and expert birders also created 35 entertaining and easy-to-use video podcasts which are available to download to a computer desktop or MP3 player.
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Sibley Guide to Birds (David Allen Sibley)
The beautiful watercolor illustrations (6,600, covering 810 species in North America) and clear, descriptive text in the Sibley Guide place Sibley and his work squarely in the tradition of John James Audubon and Roger Tory Peterson; more than a birdwatcher and evangelizer, he is one of the foremost bird painters and authorities in the US. Along with the watercolors, this thick, attractive and data-packed color guide offers range maps and detailed descriptions of songs, calls and voices for all the birds North Americans might see. A typical page has two columns, with one species in each: that species gets a color-coded range map, a description of its voice, and four to eight illustrative paintings. These multiple images of single species are the guide's most attractive feature; they let Sibley show some birds in several poses, as well as important seasonal and regional, juvenile and mature, breeding and nonbreeding, or male and female versions of the same bird.
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Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Ted Floyd)
This new Smithsonian field guide, written by Birding magazine editor Floyd, is ideal for beginners, but also has formidable resources for experienced birders. What gives this guide the most value is the included CD-ROM, with 587 songs and calls (for 138 bird species) in MP3 format. Not only are they an immense improvement on written descriptions (frequently incomprehensible), they're field-ready - just download them onto your favorite MP3 player. The text is generally thorough, but the focus is on images; each bird's entry is accompanied by at least two photographs and often more, showing specimens in flight, variations in coloring, and differences among males, females and juveniles. Appropriate for even elementary-age readers, the book's excellent range maps are very clear, and the introduction to each group is readable and highly informative.
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To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime Obsession (Dan Koeppel)
Birding has become one of the most popular outdoor pursuits. What do you get when you combine birding with competition, obsession, and the sheer love of counting? You get a Big Lister, a person who aspires to see every bird species on Earth. The author's father is among the 12 or so birders to have seen 7,000 birds or more, and this is his story.
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Top 100 Birding Sites of the World (Dominic Couzens)
King penguins in Antarctica, cassowaries in Queensland, cocks-of-the rock in Peru, elegant trogons in the Chiricahuas – this gorgeous book describes the one hundred best bird-watching sites on the planet. Introductory sections give an overview of each continent or region, and then each site is listed and ranked on a country-by-country basis. The entries all include a full description, a list of key species, a map, and information on the best time of year to visit. Lavish color photographs capture rare and elusive species as well as some of the world's best avian spectacles, such as the snow goose blizzard at Bosque del Apache and the flocks of lesser flamingos on Africa's Rift Valley lakes. Many birding sites are included for their unique avifauna, endemics, and oddities – the Seychelles, Andasibe in Madagascar, Taveuni in Fiji, and the Alaka`i wilderness in Hawaii, among others. With its truly global coverage – of the huge flocks of wintering geese in Britain and the United States, the cranes in both Japan and France, the “river of raptors” passage at Veracruz in Mexico, and much more – this book will inform and inspire anyone who plans to visit, or who dreams of visiting, these extraordinary locations.
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The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology (Tim Birkhead)
This is a gorgeously rendered and comprehensive history of ornithology, from folklore to facts. Leading ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes readers on a journey through the wonderful world of birds: conception and egg, territory and song, breeding and migration. In the process, he reveals how birders have overcome centuries-old superstitions and untested truths to achieve a firmer understanding of birds. He also details when and how this knowledge was first acquired, detailing the various myths and misconceptions that were believed to be true throughout the ages and when they were finally corrected. Conceived for a general audience, and illustrated throughout with more than one hundred exquisite illustrations - many of them rarely if ever seen before - The Wisdom of Birds is a book full of stories, knowledge, and unexpected revelations.
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A Year on the Wing: Four Seasons in a Life with Birds (Tim Dee)
Distilled from one year of introspective observation, 40 years of attentive bird watching, and a variety of literary references, Dee’s memoir expresses a fascination with nature's migratory feathered marvels. A BBC radio producer and editor, Dee began his romance with birds at age three, enthralled by the sight of a swallow's nest. Far more than a recitation of rare birds sighted, Dee captures the poetry of what he sees and hears: a Zambian sprosser emits a “beautiful mud gurgle;” a flycatcher's silver notes are thrown “like meltwater;” thousands of starlings are “the condensing breath of the earth.” Page after page, this account articulates the author's fascination with the world's birds with airy, artful grace.

Spotlight On – The Isabell McGregor Durrenberger Memorial Collection (Part 2)

The Copper Queen Library recently added several titles related to birds and birding to our collections through the generous donations of the family and friends of Isabell McGregor Durrenberger, a long-time local resident with an abiding interest in birds and nature, and the additional assistance of the Friends of the Copper Queen Library.

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A previous post highlighted the audiobook, DVD, and children's titles acquired as part of this collection. This post (featuring “Books for Adults, Part 1”) and one more future post (“Books for Adults, Part 2”) will showcase titles purchased for adult readers.
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BOOKS FOR ADULTS (Part 1)
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All Things Reconsidered: My Birding Adventures (Roger Tory Peterson; edited by Bill Thompson III)
“All Things Reconsidered” was the title of Peterson’s monthly column in Bird Watcher’s Digest, which he wrote from 1984 until his death in 1996. Thompson, editor of the Digest, has chosen 40-odd columns and illustrated them with Peterson’s own photographs (the great naturalist was nearly as passionate about photography as he was about painting). These are the best of Peterson’s chatty columns, in which he shared his birding adventures — from the hot plains of the Serengeti, where he stabilized his long lens on “a cloth bag filled with rice,” to freezing water off the coast of Maine, where his boat capsized as he — then in his 80s — was filming a documentary.
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The Backyard Birdsong Guide: Western North America [with audio] (Donald Kroodsma)
Get to know birds by ear with this engaging, one-of-a-kind book. Discover 75 unique species from Western North America as you enjoy their sounds at the touch of a button - reproduced in high quality on the attached digital audio module - while reading vivid descriptions of their songs, calls, and related behaviors. Learn how to pick out the wavering songs of a young Bewick's Wren, or find out why many songbirds have dialects that vary from region to region. This book is complete with up-to-date range maps and more than 130 sounds provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's world-renowned Macaulay Library, as well as exquisite illustrations of each species.
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The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession (Mark Obmascik)
There is a well-known competition among birders called the Big Year, in which one abandons one's regular life for one whole year in order to see more species of birds in a geographic area than one's competitors. Environmental journalist Obmascik follows the 1998 Big Year's three main competitors – a New Jersey roofing contractor, a corporate executive, and a software engineer – as they crisscross the country in search of birds. Whether looking for flamingos in the Everglades, great grey owls in the frozen bogs near Duluth, or Asian rarities on the Aleutian island of Attu, these obsessed birders not only faced seasickness, insects, altitude sickness, and going into debt, they also faced each other. Their drive to win propelled all three past the rarified count of 700 species seen, and the winner saw an extraordinary 745 species – a number that will probably never be equaled. With a blend of humor and awe, Obmascik takes the reader into the heart of competitive birding, and in the process turns everyone into birders.
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The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live (Colin Tudge)
Following on the heels of The Tree (2006) Colin Tudge here looks fondly at “a superior class of creatures.” Dividing his book into four parts, he first examines the physical aspects of birds’ adaptations for flight and their evolution from dinosaurs. The second part explains scientific classification and provides a list of all the bird families of the world. Part three is the meat of the book, focusing on how birds conduct their lives: how they eat, migrate, court and raise their chicks, behave socially, and whether or not birds can be considered intelligent. Finally, the fourth part looks at birds and humans: specifically, at how we live with birds and impact their lives and their environment. Illustrated throughout with beautiful line drawings, this book is another fine example of Tudge’s ability to make even the most esoteric science approachable.
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Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song [with audio] (Les Beletsky)
Here are splendid color illustrations of 250 species of birds, some showing only the male and others showing both the male and female. Drawing from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the book is divided into four parts: seabirds, shorebirds, and water birds; forest birds; woodland birds; and open-country birds. With each illustration is a description of the bird's range in the US and Canada and its ecology and behavior. The profiles emphasize the birds' vocalizations – both songs and calls – which can be heard on an audio component that comes with the book. By using this digital audio technology, readers will be able to relate the songs and calls to the birds' appearances.
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Birds (Robert Bateman)
World renowned wildlife painter Bateman (Thinking Like a Mountain) describes this book as neither a field guide to birds nor a reference book. Rather it is aptly represented as an artist's “portfolio” and a “field diary.” Bateman not only depicts a worldwide range of avian species in startlingly lifelike paintings, he also captures a sense of place and motion (even when the subjects are still) within landscapes that could stand on their own. The artist's uncanny ability is no less displayed in the backgrounds and settings than in the portraits of the birds. Bateman paints a wading African blue crane with both bird and water in near photographic clarity. Likewise, he crafts a muted impressionistic Latin American rain forest, wherein brilliantly colored macaws perch, preen and dangle from the lush trees. A wonderful book for birders, wildlife enthusiasts and art lovers.
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Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (Jeremy Mynott)
Why do we expend so much effort to observe, catalog, describe, listen to and study birds? Citing a broad range of sources (Romantic poets, Japanese haiku masters, the Song of Solomon, Monty Python, Thoreau), Mynott ponders our perceptions of worth, our emotional responses to landscapes, and the process of vision itself. . . . Though Mynott provides ample references for further reading, this leisurely, thoughtful, generous book provides ample information and amusement all by itself.
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Extreme Birds: The World's Most Extraordinary and Bizarre Birds (Dominic Couzens)
A photographic showcase of 150 birds at the extremes of nature, Extreme Birds reveals nature's ingenuity and, sometimes, its sense of humor. The species showcased in this book are chosen for their extraordinary characteristics and for behaviors far beyond the typical. They are the biggest, the fastest, the meanest, the smartest. They build the most intricate nests, have the most peculiar mating rituals, and dive the deepest or fly the highest. These are the overachievers of the avian world.
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Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder (Kenn Kaufman)
As ornithologist Kenn Kaufman recounts in this lively memoir, he's managed to do what other birders only dream of doing: take a year and chase winged creatures from one end of the country to another. The year in question was 1973, when Kaufman was 19 years old, and a few dollars and an outstretched thumb could go a long way. Armed with binoculars, notebook, and the blessing of birder patron saint Roger Tory Peterson, Kaufman set out to capture the record for most species spotted in a single year. He came close, closing with 666 species sighted from Alaska to Florida and back again. More important, he racked up a lifetime's worth of adventures on the road. These stories form the heart of his book, a narrative in which spotted redshanks, white-eared hummingbirds, marbled murrelets, and black-capped gnatcatchers are among the chief supporting players.
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Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds (Olivia Gentile)
After her four kids were nearly grown and she was about to turn 50, Phoebe Snetsinger was told she had less than a year to live. A St. Louis housewife and avid backyard birder, she decided to spend that final year traveling the world in search of birds. As it turned out, her doctors were wrong. By the time she died 18 years later in a bus accident while birding in Madagascar at age 68, Phoebe was world renowned and had seen more species — 8,500 of the roughly 10,000 — than anyone in history. A fascinating portrait of a hobbyist whose obsession contributed to both her success and her demise, Life List brings Phoebe Snetsinger and the wild world of amateur ornithology to vivid life.

Spotlight On – The Isabell McGregor Durrenberger Memorial Collection (Part 1)

The Copper Queen Library recently added several titles related to birds and birding to our collections through the generous donations of the family and friends of Isabell McGregor Durrenberger, a long-time local resident with an abiding interest in birds and nature, and the additional assistance of the Friends of the Copper Queen Library.
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Here are some of those titles:
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AUDIO CDs
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Bird Songs of Southeastern Arizona & Sonora, Mexico (G.A. Keller)
This 2 CD set captures the voices of more than 200 birds in this diverse region. Learn the voices of Elegant Trogon, Rose-throated Becard, Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher, Red-faced Warbler, Olive Warbler, Painted Redstart, Five-striped Sparrow, and a dazzling array of hummingbirds and owls. Includes extended song sequences for virtually all specialty birds. Anyone traveling to the increasingly popular Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa will find the recordings of White-striped Woodcreeper, Pine Flycatcher, Spotted Wren and many others very helpful.
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Birding by Ear: Western North America (Richard K. Walton)
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Ever wonder what that trill in the backyard is? Or how to distinguish among all those similar warbler songs? Birding By Ear points out exactly what to listen for to tell one bird from another, grouping 91 common species into 19 intelligible learning groups by acoustic similarity -- "sing-songers," "trillers," "name-sayers," "warbling songsters," to name just a few.
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Field Guide to Western Bird Songs: Western North America (Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology)
Here is the western edition of A Field Guide to Bird Songs, the best-selling bird song collection ever recorded. This edition includes the songs and calls of 522 species -- all the most common and vocal birds found in western North America. Organized as a companion to Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds, this is the "birder's bible" of bird song.
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DVDs

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Hooked on Hummingbirds
This DVD features spectacular, close-up footage, including slow motion, stop motion, and real time aerobatics, including upside-down flight. See hummers flying, feeding, fighting, building their nests, feeding their chicks, defending their territories, and performing their roles as closet carnivores, nectar robbers, and housekeeping fuss-budgets. This award-winning program was shot in the U.S. and Costa Rica.
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Hummingbirds! Beauty and the Beast
This superb work by Tom Kaminski features all 16 species of hummingbirds that breed in the United States. The video is filled with a total of 57 hummer species in all – plus a bonus of 17 other bird species, including the 3-wattled Bellbird, Roseate Spoonbill, Crested Caracara, and White-tailed Kite. The enclosed species list shows both common and scientific names.
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Vanished Creatures: The Birds
Imagine a flightless bird weighing in at over 1,000 pounds. Envision another flightless bird standing taller than 13 feet. Visualize pigeons so numerous that a single flock darkened the skies of a major city for days on end. Then, see another pigeon twice the size of a turkey, and behaving more docile and tame than any pet could ever be. Each of these creatures flourished in our recent past, but have all now vanished into extinction. The single thread connecting each bird species is that they all fell victim to human cruelty and greed.
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BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
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Alphabet Bird Collection (Shelli Ogilvy)
In this book, each letter of the alphabet is assigned to a different bird, including Eagle, Kingfisher, Quetzal, Tern, and Varied Thrush. Each bird has its own spread, featuring an original painting from New Mexico artist Shelli Ogilvy. Also included in each bird's spread is a poetic couplet providing a caption to the painting, as well as fun facts. Adding to the appeal and look, a birdsong is represented, using phonetic sounds set within a musical staff. (Ages 4-8)

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Bateman's Backyard Birds (Robert Bateman)
Canadian wildlife artist Bateman offers an engaging introduction to birds and birding in a handsome, large-format book illustrated with his paintings. A typical spread includes one large illustration of one bird and a smaller one of the other identified species. The paintings show the birds in action, while captions and sidebars concisely convey facts about each featured bird's size, voice, food, range, and habitat. (Grades 4-7)

Friday Fiction: Mary Gordon, Irish American Writer

--by Hanje Richards
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Mary Catherine Gordon (born December 8, 1949) is an American writer and is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is best known for her novels, memoirs, and literary criticism. They constitute an important contribution to Irish-American literature.
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The Stories of Mary Gordon won The Story Prize in 2007. In March 2008, Governor Eliot Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New York State Author and gave her the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction.
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Circling My Mother - Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother – Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl – she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with surprising joie de vivre. Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her mother, Gordon gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship. Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.
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Company of Women - Raised by five intensely religious women and a charismatic, controversial priest, sheltered from the secular world, Felicitas Maria Taylor is intelligent, charming, and desperate for a taste of ordinary happiness. More freedom than she has ever imagined awaits her at Columbia University in the 1960s. There, Felicitas falls in love with the worst man for her – with shattering results. Now, she must turn again to the company of the women who love her as she struggles to embrace the future without betraying the past.
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Final Payments - When Isabel Moore's father dies, she finds herself, at the age of thirty, suddenly freed from eleven years of uninterrupted care for a helpless man. With all the patterns of her life suddenly rendered meaningless, she turns to childhood friends for support, gets a job, and becomes involved with two very different men. But, just as her future begins to emerge, her past throws up a daunting challenge. Final Payments is a timeless exploration of the nature of friendship, desire, guilt, and love.
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Pearl - On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics – nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?
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Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, she takes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.

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The Stories of Mary Gordon - These pieces encompass pre- and postwar Irish American family life, as well as a wealth of new fiction that brings her contemporary characters into middle age; it is their turn to face bodily decline, mortality, and the more complex anxieties of modern life. With their powerful insights into how we make do, both socially and privately, these stories are a treasure of American fiction.

I Just Listened To... The Help (Kathryn Stockett)

--by Hanje Richards

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Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

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Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy til Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

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Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

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Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

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Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

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In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women – mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends – view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.
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I resisted reading this book for a long time, not really understanding what it was about, or how it related to my life. I am so glad I listened to the audio version, as each woman’s voice is read by a different person, and it gave a level of personal connection with each of the characters that I found very powerful. As I listened to this book, which is set in the early 1960s, I kept reminding myself that the lives these women are living are actually being lived during my lifetime.

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Sound interesting? The Copper Queen Library owns both the hardcover edition and the audio version of The Help.

Second Nature - Birds/Biography - Life List

--by Hanje Richards

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Life List : A Woman's Quest For The World's Most Amazing Birds
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Last week, a patron asked me if I had read Life List. I had to admit that I had not (thinking to myself, "I am not really that into bird books") — but before I had completed the thought, she said, as if reading my mind, "You don’t even have to be into birds."

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It's a fascinating story, and if you are interested in bird books — or not — take a look.
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After her four kids were nearly grown and she was about to turn 50, Phoebe Snetsinger was told she had less than a year to live. A St. Louis housewife and avid backyard birder, she decided to spend that year traveling the world in search of birds.

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As it turned out, her doctors were wrong. But Phoebe's passion had been ignited, and she spent the next eighteen years crisscrossing the globe recklessly staking out her quarry. En route she contracted malaria in Zambia, nearly fell to her death in Zaire, and was kidnapped — and worse — on the outskirts of Port Moresby. Yet none of this curbed her enthusiasm. By the time she died in a bus accident while birding in Madagascar in 1999, Phoebe was world renowned and had seen more species — 8,500 of the roughly 10,000 — than anyone in history.

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A fascinating portrait of a hobbyist whose obsession contributed to both her success and her demise, Life List brings Phoebe Snetsinger and the wild world of amateur ornithology to vivid life.