Dream West is the story of John and Jessie Fremont. John Fremont was an explorer, military leader, and the first Republican candidate for President while Jessie Fremont was the great woman behind him, as well as the daughter of Missouri’s Senator Benton. It was Jessie’s idea to tell the tales of her husband’s exploits, and she wrote his biography to boost their bottom line when they hit financially hard times.

I enjoyed learning about John C. Fremont and American history in the 1800s. While most of the story is historically accurate, the dialog and thoughts of the characters stem from the author’s imagination, as he brings them to life. And the brilliance of Dream West is that it blends the history into the story for a seamless read, with both adventure, found when Fremont traveled through rapids on the Platte river, and romance, as seen in Fremont’s courtship of Jessie Benton. We meet famous people in the book, from Kit Carson to Abraham Lincoln, but throughout the book the focus is on John and Jessie Fremont’s relationship.

If you enjoy Dream West you will be happy to know that it is part of series of books about America in the 1800s, which also includes: 1812, Eagle’s Cry, Treason, and Meriweather. 1812 details the War of 1812 and the people involved. Eagle’s Cry tells the tale of Aaron Burr and the country after the death of Washington. Treason is also about Aaron Burr and his plot to steal the Louisiana Territory. And Meriweather is about Lewis and Clark, with concentration on Lewis’ dreams and death. All the books do a good job of blending story with fact to paint a picture of the United States in the 1800s, along with the people who made the country great.

Robert Bates – Glenwood Branch

I’m always on the look out for next year’s Newbery or Black Eyed Susan and right now, Rita Garcia-Williams has my vote.

Set in the summer of 1968, Delphine and her little sisters Vonetta and Fern travel from Brooklyn, where they live with their father and grandmother, to Oakland, California, the home of their estranged mother. They find their mother, Cecile, has renamed herself "Nzila," that she’s a poet printing on her own kitchen press, and that she has no interest in her kids. "No one told y’all to come out here, Cecile says. No one wants you out here making a mess, stopping my work."

It’s the summer after Black Panther founder Huey Newton was jailed and member Bobby Hutton was gunned down trying to surrender to the Oakland police, and there are men in berets shouting "Black Power" on the news. 

Nzila bars the children from her kitchen, sending them to a summer camp and soup kitchen run by the Black Panthers so that they do not interfere with her work. Plain-faced, plain-spoken, responsible, strong-willed Delphine narrates the events of this fateful summer, as each sister emerges as a distinct, memorable character, whose hard-won connections with their mother build to a glorious and hard-won conclusion. This novel sings as a story of family, as a story of place and period, and of a vibrant, turbulent time in our country’s history. Appropriate for readers from fourth grade up, readers of all ages will enjoy sharing One Crazy Summer.

For a good basic understanding of America in this period, I recommend Joy Hakim’s All the People or Michael Kronenwetter’s America in the 1960s.

Shirley ONeill – Administration Office

Years ago I read V. by Thomas Pynchon after I found out that my favorite band, Thrice, (check out Fire & Water and Air & Earth) used it as inspiration for their album Vheissu. V. is dense, mysterious, oblique, and in some rather indescribable ways felt more true to life than life itself. Since then, I’ve toyed with the idea of reading Pynchon’s other massive novels, but haven’t had time to invest the discipline required.

However, his latest release, Inherent Vice, emanated a more linear vibe from the outset. With a cover (and thickness) that would be right at home with any T. Jefferson Parker or James Patterson novel, I was surprised at its relative accessibility. It could be said that V.’s yarn was chopped up into three-inch segments, while in Inherent Vice the yarn is ten miles long, all jumbled up, and equally bizarre.

Set mainly in the all-pervasive drug haze of late 1960’s Los Angeles, Private Investigator Larry "Doc" Sportello is approached by his old flame and hired to locate her new flame, an iconic land developer who has vanished without a trace. With varying degrees of help from his couch-potato lawyer, an ARPAnet hacker, an overly-dramatic LAPD officer, and countless other one-or-two-page characters, Doc embarks on a virtually endless (and mindless) journey. In the process, Doc repeatedly encounters something called the Golden Fang. What is the Golden Fang? Is it a schooner? A person? A global drug-trafficking organization? A group of dentists? Or is it somehow all of the above?

The elusive identity of the Golden Fang brought to mind the unknown briefcase contents in Pulp Fiction, or the bird statue from Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled novel The Maltese Falcon. Both V. and Inherent Vice seem to be more about the search itself than the thing searched for. One of the more playful elements of this novel is Pynchon’s use of the music to set the tone, and even shed light on what’s happening in the plot — Amazon.com even offers a partial list of those songs. I was also amused by how the novel drifts in and out of semi-consciousness, and how the reclusive Pynchon presents Doc as anything but hard-boiled. Half-baked is more like it.

Dan Curry – Savage Branch

Do you ever catch yourself looking back in time and wondering how we got here? Stacy Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys provides part of the answer, at least in regard to skating. This documentary traces the impact of the Jeff Ho Zephyr team on the resurgence of skateboarding in the mid-1970s, and describes the ongoing impact of the team members in the world of extreme sports and in popular culture.

Thanks in part to the Dogtown articles (with photographs by Craig Stecyk) published in Skateboarding Magazine, the Z-Boys are credited with transforming the world of skating by incorporating an aggressive style and a surfing aesthetic. The Z-Boys’ contribution to skating is most noticeable in footage from the 1975 Del Mar Nationals. At Del Mar, their low fluid style was a marked contrast to the upright maneuvers of more traditional skaters, and they exploded prevailing ideas about what was possible in the sport. The innovative style of the Z-Boys is evident throughout the movie, in footage of them surfing Dogtown’s beaches, skating in the area’s steeply banked schoolyards, and of course most famously taking advantage of L.A.’s empty swimming pools to perfect vertical (and eventually aerial) skating.

Using archival footage showing members of the team in action, Stacy Peralta’s movie traces the beginnings of the Jeff Ho Zephyr Team, notes their impact, and discusses the fragmentation of the team as the individual members moved on to new opportunities both within and outside the sport. Within the disintegration of the Zephyr Team are the seeds of the modern extreme sports movement. Check out the birth of modern skating (and some really incredible pool skating) in Dogtown and Z-Boys.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Based on a true story, Bottle Shock is a fictionalized account of the 1976 Paris wine-tasting that put California’s vintners on the map. We first meet the movie version of Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) as a British ex-pat in Paris. In spite of his obvious interest in wine and his expertise, Rickman’s Spurrier is kept at arm’s length by the rarefied French wine establishment. In an effort to find a place for himself in the hierarchy, he decides to host a blind taste test comparing his selections of the finest French wines with selections drawn from vineyards in California. 

Enter the upstart Napa winemakers. The skeptical Spurrier travels to California to select the wines for the contest, and meets Jim & Bo Barrett of Chateau Montelena. Much of the humor in the movie derives from this up-tight European’s social inadequacies in laid-back California. Spurrier’s visit creates a buzz in the community; in spite of his abrasive nature, the opportunity presented by the taste test is embraced by Napa’s wine makers.

Bottle Shock takes these historical events, finds the humor in them, and tells us an engaging personal story in the process. Alongside Spurrier’s global quest, we encounter Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) following his dream of becoming a wine-maker, Bo Barrett (Chris Pine, Star Trek) struggling to stand on his own feet as an independent adult, and Gustavo Brambila (Freddy Rodriguez) looking for a way to express his deep personal connection to the land and direct his own efforts at wine production. Watch too for Rachael Taylor as intern Sam Fulton, and Eliza Dushku (Dollhouse) as local bar owner Joe. As we see the California wine industry mature and develop, these characters do the same, and events build toward a historic conclusion, the metaphoric Bottle Shock of the title. 

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

One summer, Octavia and her older sister Talitha (Tali) reluctantly travel cross-country from California to a family reunion in Alabama with their stylish, 80-something grandmother, a " skinny-cigarette-smoking-fake-finger-nail-wearing" eccentric, who prefers to be called Mare, like the French word mère for mother. Mare also drives a red car and wears stilettos. The sisters are at first repulsed by Mare’s very frank tales of growing up in a tiny southern town with her troubled mother and younger sister Josephine (Feen). When their mother sends Feen to live with an aunt in Philadelphia, Mare decides to run away and join the military, although she is only seventeen.

Mare’s War is craftily told in alternating chapters from three points of view, seamlessly switching back and forth between the war-filled 1930s to contemporary life. Sisters Octavia and Tali send cute, humorous postcards home to their parents and friends — allowing the reader to really feel their innermost thoughts. Author Tanita S. Davis fills her novel with keen insights on life, love, and true happiness. The story follows the lives of the young women who were members of the 6888th African American Battalion of the U. S. Women’s Army Corps during World War II.  

What a refreshing change from the typical young adult fare of vampires, school grudges, and mean girls! I actually learned quite a few revealing facts about the history of African American World War II WACs. Although I knew that many women served in the military during the "great war," I was surprised that black women were segregated from their white female colleagues, just as their male counterparts were separated from white military personnel.

I recommend Mare’s War to middle school girls, adults of all ages, and mother-daughter book clubs. If you enjoy Mare’s War, you may also like the author’s debut young adult fiction novel A La Carte, which features seventeen year old Lainey, who dreams of becoming a world famous chef.

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

Fleet Foxes’ eponymous first full-length CD is dynamite, and you won’t hear anything else like it unless you go back and dig through your vinyl collection. The Seattle-based band manages to synthesize a wide variety of influences into a collection that is folksy, a particular sort of rocky, evocative, and timeless. You’ll hear strains of nineteenth-century revival camp meetings, as well as re-imagined versions of a very particular California sound. Think Simon and Garfunkel meets the Beach Boys meets Crosby, Stills and Nash meets the Mamas and the Papas and you’ll be in the neighborhood, but still not quite on the doorstep. The only way to really get the picture is to play the CD. What’s so interesting is that the Fleet Foxes aren’t confined by genre or influence, and yet by ranging widely and pulling from many diverse sources, they’ve produced a remarkably consistent and exceptional collection of rock tunes that is a breath of fresh air for your stereo.

The themes in the music are universal and the world of these songs is small, emotional, and intense. Many of the Foxes’ tunes are conversations between lovers or friends, or are confessional in nature. There’s longing and heartache here, and the music is grounded by plenty of references to the natural world, reinforcing the timelessness of the songs. Layered vocals, even on the most up-beat of the tracks, suggest choral music and lend an almost spiritual quality to the tunes. Ragged Wood, Quiet Houses, and Blue Ridge Mountains are stand-out tracks, but the whole collection is exceptional.

This is a great one for the spring (starts tomorrow!), one to play loud with the windows open, and to listen to over and over again. If you want to check out a CD that takes particular musical influences in new and unexpected directions, listen to Fleet Foxes. I’d love to know what you think of the CD. Please add your reactions and recommendations for similar music to the comments.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

We gardeners devote a significant percentage of winter to planning the spring garden, scouring seed catalogs, reading great books about gardens, and daydreaming about possibilities while we wait for spring. Farm City by Novella Carpenter is the perfect book for this pursuit.  

Farm City documents Carpenter’s efforts to cultivate her "squat farm" on a dead-end street in the Ghost Town section of downtown Oakland, California. Her farm is far from the rural idyll that we often imagine when thinking about locally-grown food. There’s a speakeasy across the street, toughs on the corner, and one of her neighbors lives in an indeterminate number of abandoned cars. In an example of natural entropy that any gardener will understand (and perhaps even envy,) Carpenter’s farm quickly expands to match her ambition. Taking over the vacant and undeveloped lot next door, she and her partner install raised beds made from scrap lumber, and gradually construct habitats for their livestock, including bees, poultry, rabbits, and (eventually) pigs.

This is not a book about an over-sized vegetable garden. There’s an added dimension here, since Carpenter’s farm has fauna as well as flora, and she unabashedly raises her livestock for meat. This effort provides some of the highlights of the book as Carpenter endeavors to live off her produce exclusively for a month, struggles to find local scraps in bulk to feed the pigs, and bonds with the owner of a local restaurant as she learns to make salami and prosciutto.

This is an epic adventure undertaken on a local scale, and provides a remarkable lens through which to view our relationship with food in general and agricultural produce in particular. Brighten your winter with Farm City by Novella Carpenter.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck is my candidate for best opening line in a fiction book: “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.” The rest of the opening paragraph isn’t bad either, and provides a great orientation for Steinbeck’s exploration of the characters inhabiting this small part of Monterey, CA before the Second World War. Dropping in on Cannery Row, we meet Lee Chong, Dora, Mack, and Doc as we’re introduced to their community. Like much of Steinbeck’s short fiction, the chapters build upon each other in layers, and we see the characters interact with each other in different ways as they struggle to support one another, get ahead, and survive.

Rich details pull you into the book. Cannery Row is a place that Steinbeck knew well, and you can taste the spray coming in off the ocean as you read. The author was friendly with Ed Ricketts, who appears here as Doc, and he based the events of his novel on the real stories and culture of the Row. Steinbeck’s inspirations for the novel are detailed in Real Life on Cannery Row, a comprehensive collection of biographical and historical anecdotes collected by Al Lundy that vividly brings characters and locations to life by placing them in context. If you’re looking for a more visual experience, a 1982 movie starring Nick Nolte and Deborah Winger consolidates material from the novel and its sequel, Sweet Thursday.

You can’t beat the original novel though, and especially that first dynamite paragraph. For a close-up look at an interesting community, check out Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. You’ll be hooked by the end of the first page! Please leave a comment naming your candidate for best opening lines. I’ll be interested to see the list.

John Jewitt – Savage Branch

Teens getting killed. They have been making movies with that very premise for over 30 years. A main character (a female, usually being played by that actress you kind of recognize) and her group of friends (a jock, a nerd, a cheerleader, etc.) are picked off one at a time by a killer in a costume or mask who will reveal his or her identity and motive during the last 20 minutes of the film.

In all honesty, Scream’s plot really isn’t much different than all slasher film plots. The heroine this time is the damaged Sidney Prescot, played by Neve Campbell, whose mother was murdered one year prior to when the movie begins. And while she and her friends fit the typical slasher film archetypes, there is one difference between them and virtually every other character who has ever been written into a horror movie: they have seen horror movies. They know the cliches; they know what not to do; they know the "rules one must abide by in order to successfully survive a scary movie." Screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven cram so much wit, humor, and blood into this simple story that you are guaranteed to have a blast.

Scream was one of the defining movies of the 90s. It was a phenomenon reinventing a genre that hadn’t been marketable since the mid-80s. It spawned two sequels and endless rip-offs. An intelligent spoof on horror movies that is still extremely scary, Scream is one of my all time favorites.

Mike Dwyre – East Columbia Branch