Coming of Age in a Small Town

Robin Yocum http://robinyocum.com/books/ spoke at Thurber House http://thurberhouse.org/index.html (Columbus, OH) on July 6th, 2016 to a crowd of 200 fans. The weather was gorgeous and the temps just perfect for an outside picnic and book talk. Yocum spoke of his journalism career on the police desk at the Columbus (OH) Dispatch where he wrote about many local and state crimes. After a career in journalism, Yocum turned his hand to first true crime and then fiction.

Combine a coming of age book with a murder mystery, you get Robin Yocum's newest mystery "A Brilliant Death." Set in Brilliant,Ohio, it's the story of Travis Baron's search for how is mother died fifteen years earlier. Travis Baron and his friend Mitchell Malone seek out truth about her disappearance. Malone spins a tale of their friendship, their investigation, and the sad truth behind the death. 

Yocum is a wonderful wordsmith bringing characters to life one descriptive word at a time. Yocum's writing isn't over wordy but to the point, drawing the reader into the investigation, into life in small town Brilliant which is full of secrets just waiting to be uncovered. While Yocum says his current works feature teenagers who search for answers to mysteries in their lives, he writes for adults. 

Indeed, his stories are gritty, full of violence and heartbreak, and the trials of coming to age in dying towns in Ohio’s rust belt. A Brilliant Death is the perfect confluence of love, searching for the truth, and uncovering the past. Once you read Yocum’s newest book, you’ll wonder how you missed his earlier fiction, Favorite Sons and The Essay.

Messing with the Environment

Every year new books proclaim the ills of damaging the environment through pollution and mineral exploitation. Jennifer Haigh's 2016 book Heat & Light is the newest in a string of books about how man ravages the land and destroys mother nature. Heat & Light focuses on the fracking industry and its ills. The fracking salesmen from various companies, including Dark Elephant aka Darco Energy arrive in Bakerton PA, a depressed agricultural county. Some farmers sign right away on the dotted line, others hold out for more money. All see the leases as a way to add their savings, to make all the ends meet. 

By now we know that fracking isn't all it's cracked up to be (no pun intended). The residents of Bakerton discover that there aren't jobs for locals even if the bars are full and crime is up. More importantly, they were not ready for damage to the environment, polluted water, clear cut acres of land, traffic detours, damaged roads, light pollution, and ever-present noise. You’ll think twice about signing a lease, or living near a fracking (hydraulic fracturing) operation. 

I liked the characters who were well fleshed out with lots of back story. But the back stories broke up the chronology and the flow of the story. Missing were descriptions of investigation into corporate corruption, dumping and toxic waste, and the threatened lawsuits. Then again, Haigh was focused on the race to drill and not the aftermath. 

As I read Heat & Light, I kept thinking about other books and movies on the same topic. Promised Land with Matt Damon (2012) who plays a salesman for an oil & gas company bidding for fracking leases http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2091473/. The movie is full of the rhetoric of the oil & gas company and their drive to lease all the land in any given county. Of course, there's a surprise ending to this movie. 

Two quintessential titles on the topic of pollution by big corporation and investigating the damages are A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr (1996) which will drag you into the world of corporate corruption and hidden secrets just as the movie starring John Travolta the damages to humans damaged by toxic waste. And Erin Brockovich starring Julia Roberts (2000) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195685/ where the heroine investigates pollution and cancer digging into all types of records. 

Ohio author Carla Buckley's Invisible (2012) is about water pollution. Buckley is an environmental scientist and her books revolve around the environment going crazy.

One of  Kate Wilhelm’s early books is Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), a dystopian novel about pollution and toxic fall out from nuclear waste. Her Barbara Holloway series also grapples with environmental pollution.

What review of environmental hazards, toxicity, and waste is complete without the ground breaking book by Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962). More than fifty years old, the book still holds lessons for each generation. 

 Of course you could read more about fracking and oversight by the federal government and the EPA on their website https://www.epa.gov/hydraulicfracturing

Heart stopping drama in Mali and Timbuktu

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer is getting lots of publicity. The title is provocative and evocative of swashbuckling and fearsome fighting librarians as adventurers, think Noah Wiley’s movie and TV series “The Librarians.” The book takes readers on an adventure through the deserts of Saharan Africa, up and down the Niger River, and into the famed city of Timbuktu, all in the name of saving manuscripts, the cultural heritage of the Malian and Arab peoples.

Readers will be sucked into the mission of Abdel Kader Haidara, archivist and chief protector of Mali’s manuscripts written between 1100 and the present. Haidara first collects then rescues over 350,000 items from under the noses of fundamentalist Muslims in the Maghreb.  The jihad to destroy civilization in the name of Islam and Sharia law is chilling. The race to move manuscript and printed books over 300 miles from Timbuktu in the north to Bamako in the south is heart stopping. As the ‘bad-ass librarians’ move their precious heritage over the desert and down the Niger River they must evade fundamentalist forces who seek to eradicate all that does not conform to their narrow religious world view.

In dynamic contrast to the written book, the audio performance is unemotional and matter-of-fact. Listeners might expect a highly dramatic reading full of lilting African voices and flawless Arabic pronunciation. Alas, the reader is an American who pronounces the Arabic and African words without hesitation in an acceptable accent. The high drama is lacking and aural adventurers will pause to consider whether the book is appropriately titled.

For armchair travelers and aural adventurers alike, this book should be on everyone’s reading list. The drama is in the telling and the, as yet, unfinished saga of Mali’s manuscripts.

If you want to read more about the manuscripts in Mali and Timbuktu, check out:

• Hammer, Joshua. “Barbarians at the Gates: The Race to Save Mali’s Priceless Artifacts.” Smithsonian (Jan 2014): 64-74. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/Race-Save-Mali-Artifacts-180947965/
• Manuscripts from the libraries at Timbuktu at the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mali/ 
• “Timbuktu’s ‘Badass Librarians’: Checking Out Books Under Al-Qaida’s Nose.” NPR (April 23, 2016): http://www.npr.org/2016/04/23/475420855/timbuktus-badass-librarians-checking-out-books-under-al-qaidas-nose
• Interview with author in ALA (March 2016) https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/03/24/newsmaker-joshua-hammer/
• “The Brave Sage of Timbuktu: Abdel Kader Haidara.” National Geographic (April 2014): http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/innovators/2014/04/140421-haidara-timbuktu-manuscripts-mali-library-conservation/

Thrilling Adventures Take Listeners to New Heights and Sights

Most of us are excited about travel and exploration but seldom get to exotic places. In fact, many of the most exciting places to travel to are in the past. So how do we get there without leaving our cozy homes? One way is to read or listen to a travel adventure stories written by historian, journalists, and novelists, past and present. There are blogger at Cotopaxi who share their adventures and write about travel http://aventuras.cotopaxi.com/. Cotopaxi https://www.cotopaxi.com/ inspired me to write about authors who inspire that drive to explore and learn about the world around us. One author of many spine tingling adventures is G.A. Henty.

Born in England in 1832, Henty was the author of Victorian children’s adventure tales that rival Jules Verne, R.M. Ballantyne, and Rudyard Kipling. While Verne, Ballantyne, and Kipling are well known to readers and movie-goers alike, Henty falls in and out of fashion. Nevertheless, his stories are gaining in popularity as they are recorded with full casts, newly released on CD for children of all ages, and all subtitled “the extraordinary adventures of G.A. Henty.”

Henty wrote over 122 adventure stories that take readers and listeners across the globe, from India to Africa, and from the wars in England, battles between knights and knaves, the Crusades, and the American Civil War. The audiobooks are filled with sound effects, from sword fights to galloping horses, from blizzards to torrential rains, from ships at sea to railroads and wagons. These sound effects, along with music, enhance each book and add to the adventure, all described in exquisite detail and imagined dialogue. 

Lace up your hiking boots and strap on your knives, swords, and guns as Henty takes you on adventures of a lifetime through rocky climes and mountainous terrain, over the sea and across lakes. The adventures don’t stop until the very last word echoes through your ears or across the page.

Long out of copyright, Henty’s books have been reprinted by many publishers including Dover Publications, Inc. http://search.doverpublications.com/search?keywords=henty  A number of audiobook publishers, including LibriVox https://librivox.org/author/287, Audio Theater, and Heirloom Audio http://www.heirloomaudio.com/have released Henty’s titles for a new audience of listeners and adventurers.

For a recent review of “In Freedom’s Cause” about William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, see http://www.audiofilemagazine.com/reviews/read/110415/